Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 923
December 14, 2015
“Star Trek Beyond” looks like a corny, frantic mess: This is supposed to distract us from “Star Wars” mania?
It’s hard to think of another minute-and-a half that could set the Internet on fire like this. But in what looks like a naked attempt to keep the hype around “Star Wars” from blasting everything else out of the heavens, Paramount has released the first trailer from “Star Trek Beyond.” And while it’s always hard to get a full sense of a movie from these brief, chopped-up excerpts, it seems likely that – even by the standards of summer sci-fi blockbusters -- this one is aimed squarely at amped-up teenage boys. This is the third film since J.J. Abrams rebooted what seemed like a tired franchise, bringing in Chris Pine as James T. Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock, and Zoe Saldana as Nyota Uhura. Abrams directed the first two – “Star Trek,” from 2009, and “Star Trek Into Darkness,” from 2013. This time, his hands full with “Star Wars,” he’s back as producer; Justin Lin directs. So what can we tell from the trailer? The main plot point shows Kirk stranded on a planet with neither crew nor ship, trying to figure out his way back. Besides that, it looks like there will be lots of dumb, smug humor pegged to explosions and other special effects. It all plays out over the Beastie Boys song “Sabotage,” which made an appearance in the 2009 “Star Trek” and which Spike Jonze’s immortal video turned into a ‘70s cop-show complete with bad mustaches. Nothing in the new “Star Trek” improves on those: This just looks like generic junk. (Iris Elba, who plays a villain, doesn’t show up in the trailer, sadly.) What little we see of the dialogue comes mostly from the hall of action-movie clichés: “Well played!” one character offers. (Isn’t it time to retire that phrase yet?) When Pine’s Kirk falls abruptly onto a the floor of the ship, he breathes, “Okay, let’s never do that again.” As a character commences a fight scene: “Let’s hope this doesn’t get messy.” All that’s missing is a character yelling – after an abduction or similar catastrophe – “This isn’t my day!” We’ve known for months now that Justin Lin – who helmed the last few “Fast and Furious” sequels -- would be directing. He has a following: The team behind “True Detective” brought him in to direct two episodes of the messy and misfired season two. But he still comes across like a hack who blows things up when he’s not sure where else to go. Trailers obviously compress action and everything else into a small, tight space. So maybe the ensuing film will be a model of toleration and scientific speculation like the ‘60s television series. Some viewers are pleased with what they’re seeing here. “The Trailer for Star Trek Beyond Promises a Return to the Spirit of 2009’s Star Trek,” says Slate’s Laura Bradley. Abrams and his crew certainly brought some pop culture mojo and a quicker pace to “Star Trek” with their first film. But that 2009 trailer, like the film itself, is largely about responsibility and making peace with the past: It hinges on Kirk committing to the tradition of his father – enrolling at Starfleet Academy, becoming less reckless, eventually taking over command of the Enterprise. Looking at it now, it seems a bit portentous and a little close to the journey Luke Skywalker took toward the good side of the Force. But it gave that movie some emotional reference points and a larger mythic structure. The trailer for the new one, by contrast, shows very little at stake except a series of one-liners. Maybe the movie will be gripping, but this one has us wondering what else is opening in July — or if it’s not too late to drag Abrams back to direct the next one.It’s hard to think of another minute-and-a half that could set the Internet on fire like this. But in what looks like a naked attempt to keep the hype around “Star Wars” from blasting everything else out of the heavens, Paramount has released the first trailer from “Star Trek Beyond.” And while it’s always hard to get a full sense of a movie from these brief, chopped-up excerpts, it seems likely that – even by the standards of summer sci-fi blockbusters -- this one is aimed squarely at amped-up teenage boys. This is the third film since J.J. Abrams rebooted what seemed like a tired franchise, bringing in Chris Pine as James T. Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock, and Zoe Saldana as Nyota Uhura. Abrams directed the first two – “Star Trek,” from 2009, and “Star Trek Into Darkness,” from 2013. This time, his hands full with “Star Wars,” he’s back as producer; Justin Lin directs. So what can we tell from the trailer? The main plot point shows Kirk stranded on a planet with neither crew nor ship, trying to figure out his way back. Besides that, it looks like there will be lots of dumb, smug humor pegged to explosions and other special effects. It all plays out over the Beastie Boys song “Sabotage,” which made an appearance in the 2009 “Star Trek” and which Spike Jonze’s immortal video turned into a ‘70s cop-show complete with bad mustaches. Nothing in the new “Star Trek” improves on those: This just looks like generic junk. (Iris Elba, who plays a villain, doesn’t show up in the trailer, sadly.) What little we see of the dialogue comes mostly from the hall of action-movie clichés: “Well played!” one character offers. (Isn’t it time to retire that phrase yet?) When Pine’s Kirk falls abruptly onto a the floor of the ship, he breathes, “Okay, let’s never do that again.” As a character commences a fight scene: “Let’s hope this doesn’t get messy.” All that’s missing is a character yelling – after an abduction or similar catastrophe – “This isn’t my day!” We’ve known for months now that Justin Lin – who helmed the last few “Fast and Furious” sequels -- would be directing. He has a following: The team behind “True Detective” brought him in to direct two episodes of the messy and misfired season two. But he still comes across like a hack who blows things up when he’s not sure where else to go. Trailers obviously compress action and everything else into a small, tight space. So maybe the ensuing film will be a model of toleration and scientific speculation like the ‘60s television series. Some viewers are pleased with what they’re seeing here. “The Trailer for Star Trek Beyond Promises a Return to the Spirit of 2009’s Star Trek,” says Slate’s Laura Bradley. Abrams and his crew certainly brought some pop culture mojo and a quicker pace to “Star Trek” with their first film. But that 2009 trailer, like the film itself, is largely about responsibility and making peace with the past: It hinges on Kirk committing to the tradition of his father – enrolling at Starfleet Academy, becoming less reckless, eventually taking over command of the Enterprise. Looking at it now, it seems a bit portentous and a little close to the journey Luke Skywalker took toward the good side of the Force. But it gave that movie some emotional reference points and a larger mythic structure. The trailer for the new one, by contrast, shows very little at stake except a series of one-liners. Maybe the movie will be gripping, but this one has us wondering what else is opening in July — or if it’s not too late to drag Abrams back to direct the next one.
The most disturbing revelations from International Business Times’ new Sean Hannity profile
In a profile for International Business Times, Brendan James sketched a portrait of Sean Hannity decidedly at odds with his combative public persona, and yet somehow just as hypocritical. No matter how heated the conversations are on-set, for example, "I was friends with Alan Colmes. I’m friends with Geraldo [Rivera]. Tamara Holder [a liberal Fox contributor] is a friend of mine. I think they’re wrong, and when we’re debating, we’re debating." He spoke candidly about losing his time slot to Megyn Kelly, claiming that it "was the best thing that ever happened. I was lucky because I was able to get some more flexibility with my schedule" -- a "flexibility" that includes a studio Fox built for him near his home in Long Island. He's clearly not on the ropes with the channel that made him a star, but he's also no longer its golden boy. While Kelly is praised for asking questions tough questions, both in the GOP debates and when they appear on "The Kelly File," Hannity remains committed to lobbing softballs at establishment Republicans. As one GOP operative put it, "[i]f you’re a Republican and you wanna talk to the conservative base, you go on his show." "He wants to be able to get the guests he wants, when he wants them," the operative said. "He wants to have exclusives." Hannity said as much to James, telling him that "I am a conservative, but I consider myself a talk show host. If you ask me, am I a journalist? No. Advocacy journalist, you could say that, but I consider myself a talk show host. And I wear many hats. Sometimes I do straight interviews. Sometimes I do debate. Sometimes I just give monologues on radio that go on for an hour. Y’know, it’s all-encompassing under that banner, meaning a talk show host." He is also an online entrepreneur, who established his "Hannidate" dating service for forlorn conservatives in 2006. While that site has since gone under, Hannity told James that he was willing to resurrect it for the Tinder generatoin. As for how successful it was, he claimed that "many people got married," though he admitted he didn't "know the whole number." Making self-important claims without "know[ing] the whole number" is, in fact, Hannity's modus operandi. He said that on his speaking and book tours, he often pressures couples into getting married. "I’m like, ‘How long you been dating?’ ... ‘OK, why haven’t you asked her?’ And I put him under the gun. Then I say, ‘why don’t you do it now?'" "'Don’t you think he should do it now?’" he asks the crowd, which according to him, "gets into it. I have a success rate of about 90 percent." When James asked how he know that, Hannity said, "I don't know, but it doesn't matter." Unfortunately, he plays similarly fast-and-loose with the facts on "Hannity," frequently citing "a Washington Post poll [that shows] sixty percent of Republicans feel betrayed by Washington Republicans." When James contacted Fox News and requested a link for that poll, James noted parenthically, "[i]t turned out to be an in-house Fox News poll." 
In a profile for International Business Times, Brendan James sketched a portrait of Sean Hannity decidedly at odds with his combative public persona, and yet somehow just as hypocritical. No matter how heated the conversations are on-set, for example, "I was friends with Alan Colmes. I’m friends with Geraldo [Rivera]. Tamara Holder [a liberal Fox contributor] is a friend of mine. I think they’re wrong, and when we’re debating, we’re debating." He spoke candidly about losing his time slot to Megyn Kelly, claiming that it "was the best thing that ever happened. I was lucky because I was able to get some more flexibility with my schedule" -- a "flexibility" that includes a studio Fox built for him near his home in Long Island. He's clearly not on the ropes with the channel that made him a star, but he's also no longer its golden boy. While Kelly is praised for asking questions tough questions, both in the GOP debates and when they appear on "The Kelly File," Hannity remains committed to lobbing softballs at establishment Republicans. As one GOP operative put it, "[i]f you’re a Republican and you wanna talk to the conservative base, you go on his show." "He wants to be able to get the guests he wants, when he wants them," the operative said. "He wants to have exclusives." Hannity said as much to James, telling him that "I am a conservative, but I consider myself a talk show host. If you ask me, am I a journalist? No. Advocacy journalist, you could say that, but I consider myself a talk show host. And I wear many hats. Sometimes I do straight interviews. Sometimes I do debate. Sometimes I just give monologues on radio that go on for an hour. Y’know, it’s all-encompassing under that banner, meaning a talk show host." He is also an online entrepreneur, who established his "Hannidate" dating service for forlorn conservatives in 2006. While that site has since gone under, Hannity told James that he was willing to resurrect it for the Tinder generatoin. As for how successful it was, he claimed that "many people got married," though he admitted he didn't "know the whole number." Making self-important claims without "know[ing] the whole number" is, in fact, Hannity's modus operandi. He said that on his speaking and book tours, he often pressures couples into getting married. "I’m like, ‘How long you been dating?’ ... ‘OK, why haven’t you asked her?’ And I put him under the gun. Then I say, ‘why don’t you do it now?'" "'Don’t you think he should do it now?’" he asks the crowd, which according to him, "gets into it. I have a success rate of about 90 percent." When James asked how he know that, Hannity said, "I don't know, but it doesn't matter." Unfortunately, he plays similarly fast-and-loose with the facts on "Hannity," frequently citing "a Washington Post poll [that shows] sixty percent of Republicans feel betrayed by Washington Republicans." When James contacted Fox News and requested a link for that poll, James noted parenthically, "[i]t turned out to be an in-house Fox News poll."
In a profile for International Business Times, Brendan James sketched a portrait of Sean Hannity decidedly at odds with his combative public persona, and yet somehow just as hypocritical. No matter how heated the conversations are on-set, for example, "I was friends with Alan Colmes. I’m friends with Geraldo [Rivera]. Tamara Holder [a liberal Fox contributor] is a friend of mine. I think they’re wrong, and when we’re debating, we’re debating." He spoke candidly about losing his time slot to Megyn Kelly, claiming that it "was the best thing that ever happened. I was lucky because I was able to get some more flexibility with my schedule" -- a "flexibility" that includes a studio Fox built for him near his home in Long Island. He's clearly not on the ropes with the channel that made him a star, but he's also no longer its golden boy. While Kelly is praised for asking questions tough questions, both in the GOP debates and when they appear on "The Kelly File," Hannity remains committed to lobbing softballs at establishment Republicans. As one GOP operative put it, "[i]f you’re a Republican and you wanna talk to the conservative base, you go on his show." "He wants to be able to get the guests he wants, when he wants them," the operative said. "He wants to have exclusives." Hannity said as much to James, telling him that "I am a conservative, but I consider myself a talk show host. If you ask me, am I a journalist? No. Advocacy journalist, you could say that, but I consider myself a talk show host. And I wear many hats. Sometimes I do straight interviews. Sometimes I do debate. Sometimes I just give monologues on radio that go on for an hour. Y’know, it’s all-encompassing under that banner, meaning a talk show host." He is also an online entrepreneur, who established his "Hannidate" dating service for forlorn conservatives in 2006. While that site has since gone under, Hannity told James that he was willing to resurrect it for the Tinder generatoin. As for how successful it was, he claimed that "many people got married," though he admitted he didn't "know the whole number." Making self-important claims without "know[ing] the whole number" is, in fact, Hannity's modus operandi. He said that on his speaking and book tours, he often pressures couples into getting married. "I’m like, ‘How long you been dating?’ ... ‘OK, why haven’t you asked her?’ And I put him under the gun. Then I say, ‘why don’t you do it now?'" "'Don’t you think he should do it now?’" he asks the crowd, which according to him, "gets into it. I have a success rate of about 90 percent." When James asked how he know that, Hannity said, "I don't know, but it doesn't matter." Unfortunately, he plays similarly fast-and-loose with the facts on "Hannity," frequently citing "a Washington Post poll [that shows] sixty percent of Republicans feel betrayed by Washington Republicans." When James contacted Fox News and requested a link for that poll, James noted parenthically, "[i]t turned out to be an in-house Fox News poll."
The masters of the GOP universe: How Trump & Cruz have seized the Republican primary by the throat
Another weekend, another series of Donald Trump interviews in which he runs circles around anchors who are simply flummoxed by the candidate, unable to get him to respond to questions like a normal person. Not that you can blame them. He's one slippery guy. And it has to be tough to keep your concentration when trying to talk to someone who is wearing such an odd color of make-up. So, for the most part, Trump was Trump and they were stumped. But one question did elicit some real news. When asked about Ted Cruz's comments to some donors last week in which he called Trump's qualifications to be Commander in Chief into question, for the first time Trump went on the attack against his little buddy: 
Another weekend, another series of Donald Trump interviews in which he runs circles around anchors who are simply flummoxed by the candidate, unable to get him to respond to questions like a normal person. Not that you can blame them. He's one slippery guy. And it has to be tough to keep your concentration when trying to talk to someone who is wearing such an odd color of make-up. So, for the most part, Trump was Trump and they were stumped. But one question did elicit some real news. When asked about Ted Cruz's comments to some donors last week in which he called Trump's qualifications to be Commander in Chief into question, for the first time Trump went on the attack against his little buddy:
"You look like the way he's dealt with the Senate, where he goes in there like -- frankly like a little bit of a maniac. You're never going to get things done that way. You can't walk into the Senate and scream and call people liars and not be able to cajole and get along with people. He'll never be able to get anything done, and that's the problem with Ted."It's unnecessary at this point to even point out how ridiculous that sounds coming from Donald Trump, the man who has insulted literally millions of his fellow Americans and most of the world, as well as the entire Republican leadership. But that's him. He's the only presidential candidate in history who actually believes he is the Green Lantern, and will, therefore, be able to rule not by fiat, but by the sheer force of his supernatural abilities to "get things done." All of this comes on the heels of polling that show a big Cruz surge, not just in Iowa, where he's overtaken Trump by a "yuuuge" margin but nationally as well. Cruz is no longer one of the fringe guys. He's for real. Some of us predicted this a while back -- he is a smart politician and he's been positioning himself to take the anti-establishment vote from one or both of the early frontrunners from the beginning. Carson lost altitude when it became obvious that his experience as a neurosurgeon did not prepare him for the rough and tumble world of presidential politics and Cruz was there to catch his followers as they fell. Now he and The Donald are fighting it out for the 50 percent of the party that thinks the biggest problem for the GOP is that it just isn't crazy enough. So Cruz tweeted a rather sweet and gentle response to Trump's taunts, indicating that he is not going to take the bait, but it's pretty clear that Trump is going to go into this week's debate loaded for bear. He does not like being in second place. Meanwhile, the putative "establishment frontrunner," Marco Rubio, whose polling remains mired in the teens at best, made an appearance on "Meet The Press" and demonstrated why that is. When asked about Trump's proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country, instead of explaining that it's both immoral and counterproductive, he chose to emulate a bucket of lukewarm water and said:
"Obviously I don’t agree with everything he says … but we can’t ignore that’s touched on some issues that people are concerned about."If he's trying to make Jeb Bush look tough by comparison, that's a good way to do it. (Indeed, one might assume at this point that any candidate on the so-called establishment track should be showing they are willing to do battle with Trump. If there's one thing that cuts across all the GOP lines, it's a deep and abiding yearning for a manly man to be a man and man-up. If you can't stand up to Trump, how are you going to stand up to all those nannies and busboys lining up at the border to destroy our way of life? How will you be able to assuage the fears of the millions of armed Republicans who eagerly face the dangerous risk of 30,000 gun deaths a year but are cowering in their boots over the prospect of being shot by a Muslim? These are the challenges any establishment Republican has to face in this election and Rubio simply isn't getting the job done. Instead, he seems to be trying to compete on the wingnut track for some reason. Last week he went on the Christian Broadcasting Network and said that he would dispose of all of President Obama's executive orders pertaining to non-discrimination against gay people and work to reverse marriage equality. Chuck Todd pressed him to explain how he would do this asking if he would endorse a constitutional amendment:
MARCO RUBIO: As I’ve said, that would be conceding that the current Constitution is somehow wrong and needs to be fixed.I don’t think the current Constitution gives the federal government the power to regulate marriage. That belongs at the state and local level. And that’s why if you want to change the definition of marriage, which is what this argument is about. It’s not about discrimination. It is about the definition of a very specific, traditional, and age-old institution. If you want to change it, you have a right to petition your state legislature and your elected representatives to do it. What is wrong is that the Supreme Court has found this hidden constitutional right that 200 years of jurisprudence had not discovered and basically overturn the will of voters in Florida where over 60% passed a constitutional amendment that defined marriage in the state constitution as the union of one man and one woman. CHUCK TODD: So are you accepting the idea of same sex marriage in perpetuity? MARCO RUBIO: It is the current law. I don’t believe any case law is settled law. Any future Supreme Court can change it. And ultimately, I will appoint Supreme Court justices that will interpret the Constitution as originally constructed.That's a pretty telling statement. It's true that the Supreme Court does reverse itself sometimes, but this is considered a rare thing that requires a great deal of deliberation. He makes it sound as if stare decisis, the legal principle that says future courts will generally treat decisions of their predecessors as "settled law" unless something very substantial has changed in society, is not something he respects. That has not traditionally been the "establishment" line what with their alleged respect for tradition and all that rot. But then Rubio doesn't seem to know that. Perhaps Rubio thinks the social conservatives will all come his way if he waves his hand at gay marriage and takes the position that all abortion should be banned in all circumstances unless the life of the mother hangs in the balance (a position that used to only be held by the most zealous of anti-abortion activists). But if he thinks he can out-Christian Ted Cruz, he has another thing coming. Cruz is the real thing down to his bones. Rubio doesn't stand a chance with that crowd unless all the others drop out, including Cruz and Trump. Perhaps the most interesting news about Rubio didn't come from either his campaign or any other Republican. Politico reported that John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, said that he believed Ted Cruz was the likeliest GOP nominee, followed by Trump and then Rubio. This sentiment was echoed by Clinton supporter David Brock who said something similar. He thinks Cruz is going to win the nomination:
He’s where the id of the conservative base is, I believe strongly. He’s got a lot of money, he’s a big super PAC, he’s also got low-dollar donors. He’s playing a very long game organizationally on the ground,” Brock said. “He’s going to win Iowa, I believe, maybe not New Hampshire, but then South Carolina,” Brock said, adding that the party rules that allow for winner-take-all primaries come March will ensure a Cruz victory. Brock said he doesn't dismiss what he characterized as an outside chance that Donald Trump could win his party’s nomination — “You never discount a demagogue” — but said he is not prepared to pour resources into planning for the rise of Sen. Marco Rubio. “I just don’t see it,” he said of the young Florida senator. “He has some critical weaknesses, his absenteeism, weird listlessness on the campaign trail, all the mess with his personal finances — there’s a lot. He hasn’t been vetted.”Matthew Yglesias at Vox was confused by this and laid out a number of reasons why he thinks someone like Brock would say such a thing, ranging from a straightforward belief that Rubio is simply too weak to win to the rumors about some dirt on Rubio they know they're going to unleash that will knock him out of the race. (Maybe it's even some kind of ten dimensional chess move that Brock's playing to mess with Rubio's head.) But the most logical answer is really the simplest: Rubio is a terrible candidate. If you couldn't tell by just watching him, this article by Yglesias's colleague Andrew Prokop fills in the blanks:
Unlike most recent presidential nomination winners, who have invested serious time and effort into campaigning and building organizations in at least one of either Iowa or New Hampshire, Rubio has taken a positively relaxed approach to both. He doesn't show up very often, doesn't do much campaigning when he is around, and doesn't seem to be building very impressive field operations. And it's raising eyebrows. James Pindell of the Boston Globe wrote last week that Rubio's New Hampshire surge was "riddled with doubts," and that GOP insiders are bemoaning his "lack of staff" and "activity." National Review's Tim Alberta and Eliana Johnson reported Wednesday that Rubio's "weak ground game" was angering Iowa Republicans. And the New Hampshire Union Leader wrote an editorial headlined, "Marco? Marco? Where's Rubio?"He isn't in the Senate doing the work he's being paid for, we know that. But he isn't in Iowa or New Hampshire either. The reason for this seems to be that Rubio believes that his big ad spending and face time on Fox is all that's needed to win.
"More people in Iowa see Marco on ‘Fox and Friends’ than see Marco when he is in Iowa," Rubio's campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, told the New York Times. And Alberta and Johnson report that Rubio's team believes "a sprawling operation weighs down a campaign and wastes precious resources that could be spent on TV ads that reach more voters." (Presumably, Rubio isn't making more campaign trips to the early states so he can spend more time raising money that can fund these crucial ads.)Or maybe he's just lazy and thinks he can win by being charming. But then he would have to actually be charming, which he is not. As we get closer to voters actually voting, the parameters of the race are starting to change and nobody really knows where it's going. But if we were to guess right now, we would have a three-way race between Trump, Cruz and an establishment player to be named later. Rubio has always seemed like a good bet on paper but he's underperformed at everything he's done since being the anointed the GOP's answer to Barack Obama. So, there's still a space for Christie or Bush or maybe even Kasich to make a move. One thing we know, however, is that as long as the establishment dithers and is unable to coalesce around somebody, the Trump-Cruz faction gains strength and legitimacy. This whole thing may just come down to the two of them at which point the "establishment" will have to make a choice between the wingnut and the demagogue. You can decide which is which.
Another weekend, another series of Donald Trump interviews in which he runs circles around anchors who are simply flummoxed by the candidate, unable to get him to respond to questions like a normal person. Not that you can blame them. He's one slippery guy. And it has to be tough to keep your concentration when trying to talk to someone who is wearing such an odd color of make-up. So, for the most part, Trump was Trump and they were stumped. But one question did elicit some real news. When asked about Ted Cruz's comments to some donors last week in which he called Trump's qualifications to be Commander in Chief into question, for the first time Trump went on the attack against his little buddy: "You look like the way he's dealt with the Senate, where he goes in there like -- frankly like a little bit of a maniac. You're never going to get things done that way. You can't walk into the Senate and scream and call people liars and not be able to cajole and get along with people. He'll never be able to get anything done, and that's the problem with Ted."It's unnecessary at this point to even point out how ridiculous that sounds coming from Donald Trump, the man who has insulted literally millions of his fellow Americans and most of the world, as well as the entire Republican leadership. But that's him. He's the only presidential candidate in history who actually believes he is the Green Lantern, and will, therefore, be able to rule not by fiat, but by the sheer force of his supernatural abilities to "get things done." All of this comes on the heels of polling that show a big Cruz surge, not just in Iowa, where he's overtaken Trump by a "yuuuge" margin but nationally as well. Cruz is no longer one of the fringe guys. He's for real. Some of us predicted this a while back -- he is a smart politician and he's been positioning himself to take the anti-establishment vote from one or both of the early frontrunners from the beginning. Carson lost altitude when it became obvious that his experience as a neurosurgeon did not prepare him for the rough and tumble world of presidential politics and Cruz was there to catch his followers as they fell. Now he and The Donald are fighting it out for the 50 percent of the party that thinks the biggest problem for the GOP is that it just isn't crazy enough. So Cruz tweeted a rather sweet and gentle response to Trump's taunts, indicating that he is not going to take the bait, but it's pretty clear that Trump is going to go into this week's debate loaded for bear. He does not like being in second place. Meanwhile, the putative "establishment frontrunner," Marco Rubio, whose polling remains mired in the teens at best, made an appearance on "Meet The Press" and demonstrated why that is. When asked about Trump's proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country, instead of explaining that it's both immoral and counterproductive, he chose to emulate a bucket of lukewarm water and said:
"Obviously I don’t agree with everything he says … but we can’t ignore that’s touched on some issues that people are concerned about."If he's trying to make Jeb Bush look tough by comparison, that's a good way to do it. (Indeed, one might assume at this point that any candidate on the so-called establishment track should be showing they are willing to do battle with Trump. If there's one thing that cuts across all the GOP lines, it's a deep and abiding yearning for a manly man to be a man and man-up. If you can't stand up to Trump, how are you going to stand up to all those nannies and busboys lining up at the border to destroy our way of life? How will you be able to assuage the fears of the millions of armed Republicans who eagerly face the dangerous risk of 30,000 gun deaths a year but are cowering in their boots over the prospect of being shot by a Muslim? These are the challenges any establishment Republican has to face in this election and Rubio simply isn't getting the job done. Instead, he seems to be trying to compete on the wingnut track for some reason. Last week he went on the Christian Broadcasting Network and said that he would dispose of all of President Obama's executive orders pertaining to non-discrimination against gay people and work to reverse marriage equality. Chuck Todd pressed him to explain how he would do this asking if he would endorse a constitutional amendment:
MARCO RUBIO: As I’ve said, that would be conceding that the current Constitution is somehow wrong and needs to be fixed.I don’t think the current Constitution gives the federal government the power to regulate marriage. That belongs at the state and local level. And that’s why if you want to change the definition of marriage, which is what this argument is about. It’s not about discrimination. It is about the definition of a very specific, traditional, and age-old institution. If you want to change it, you have a right to petition your state legislature and your elected representatives to do it. What is wrong is that the Supreme Court has found this hidden constitutional right that 200 years of jurisprudence had not discovered and basically overturn the will of voters in Florida where over 60% passed a constitutional amendment that defined marriage in the state constitution as the union of one man and one woman. CHUCK TODD: So are you accepting the idea of same sex marriage in perpetuity? MARCO RUBIO: It is the current law. I don’t believe any case law is settled law. Any future Supreme Court can change it. And ultimately, I will appoint Supreme Court justices that will interpret the Constitution as originally constructed.That's a pretty telling statement. It's true that the Supreme Court does reverse itself sometimes, but this is considered a rare thing that requires a great deal of deliberation. He makes it sound as if stare decisis, the legal principle that says future courts will generally treat decisions of their predecessors as "settled law" unless something very substantial has changed in society, is not something he respects. That has not traditionally been the "establishment" line what with their alleged respect for tradition and all that rot. But then Rubio doesn't seem to know that. Perhaps Rubio thinks the social conservatives will all come his way if he waves his hand at gay marriage and takes the position that all abortion should be banned in all circumstances unless the life of the mother hangs in the balance (a position that used to only be held by the most zealous of anti-abortion activists). But if he thinks he can out-Christian Ted Cruz, he has another thing coming. Cruz is the real thing down to his bones. Rubio doesn't stand a chance with that crowd unless all the others drop out, including Cruz and Trump. Perhaps the most interesting news about Rubio didn't come from either his campaign or any other Republican. Politico reported that John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, said that he believed Ted Cruz was the likeliest GOP nominee, followed by Trump and then Rubio. This sentiment was echoed by Clinton supporter David Brock who said something similar. He thinks Cruz is going to win the nomination:
He’s where the id of the conservative base is, I believe strongly. He’s got a lot of money, he’s a big super PAC, he’s also got low-dollar donors. He’s playing a very long game organizationally on the ground,” Brock said. “He’s going to win Iowa, I believe, maybe not New Hampshire, but then South Carolina,” Brock said, adding that the party rules that allow for winner-take-all primaries come March will ensure a Cruz victory. Brock said he doesn't dismiss what he characterized as an outside chance that Donald Trump could win his party’s nomination — “You never discount a demagogue” — but said he is not prepared to pour resources into planning for the rise of Sen. Marco Rubio. “I just don’t see it,” he said of the young Florida senator. “He has some critical weaknesses, his absenteeism, weird listlessness on the campaign trail, all the mess with his personal finances — there’s a lot. He hasn’t been vetted.”Matthew Yglesias at Vox was confused by this and laid out a number of reasons why he thinks someone like Brock would say such a thing, ranging from a straightforward belief that Rubio is simply too weak to win to the rumors about some dirt on Rubio they know they're going to unleash that will knock him out of the race. (Maybe it's even some kind of ten dimensional chess move that Brock's playing to mess with Rubio's head.) But the most logical answer is really the simplest: Rubio is a terrible candidate. If you couldn't tell by just watching him, this article by Yglesias's colleague Andrew Prokop fills in the blanks:
Unlike most recent presidential nomination winners, who have invested serious time and effort into campaigning and building organizations in at least one of either Iowa or New Hampshire, Rubio has taken a positively relaxed approach to both. He doesn't show up very often, doesn't do much campaigning when he is around, and doesn't seem to be building very impressive field operations. And it's raising eyebrows. James Pindell of the Boston Globe wrote last week that Rubio's New Hampshire surge was "riddled with doubts," and that GOP insiders are bemoaning his "lack of staff" and "activity." National Review's Tim Alberta and Eliana Johnson reported Wednesday that Rubio's "weak ground game" was angering Iowa Republicans. And the New Hampshire Union Leader wrote an editorial headlined, "Marco? Marco? Where's Rubio?"He isn't in the Senate doing the work he's being paid for, we know that. But he isn't in Iowa or New Hampshire either. The reason for this seems to be that Rubio believes that his big ad spending and face time on Fox is all that's needed to win.
"More people in Iowa see Marco on ‘Fox and Friends’ than see Marco when he is in Iowa," Rubio's campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, told the New York Times. And Alberta and Johnson report that Rubio's team believes "a sprawling operation weighs down a campaign and wastes precious resources that could be spent on TV ads that reach more voters." (Presumably, Rubio isn't making more campaign trips to the early states so he can spend more time raising money that can fund these crucial ads.)Or maybe he's just lazy and thinks he can win by being charming. But then he would have to actually be charming, which he is not. As we get closer to voters actually voting, the parameters of the race are starting to change and nobody really knows where it's going. But if we were to guess right now, we would have a three-way race between Trump, Cruz and an establishment player to be named later. Rubio has always seemed like a good bet on paper but he's underperformed at everything he's done since being the anointed the GOP's answer to Barack Obama. So, there's still a space for Christie or Bush or maybe even Kasich to make a move. One thing we know, however, is that as long as the establishment dithers and is unable to coalesce around somebody, the Trump-Cruz faction gains strength and legitimacy. This whole thing may just come down to the two of them at which point the "establishment" will have to make a choice between the wingnut and the demagogue. You can decide which is which.
Serena Williams earned this: It is 2015, and some people would still rather see a horse named Sportsperson of the Year than a human woman
Serena Williams is one of the greatest athletes of all time. Period. She needs no qualifiers: male, female, human… horse. How is this even a question? And yet, when Sports Illustrated named Williams its 2015 Sportsperson of the Year, the pick was greeted in some circles with howls and neighs of protest. On Sunday, SI announced that American Pharoah had won its online reader poll, "as the one who embodied the spirit of sportsmanship and achievement this year." There's no question the 3-year-old colt achieved a tremendous amount this year, winning the Triple Crown for the first time since Affirmed in 1978. He then scored an unprecedented further victory by taking the Breeders' Cup Classic. Comparatively speaking, perhaps Serena Williams had a relatively so-so year. Sure, she won at the French Open and at Wimbledon — for her sixth time in 13 years -- but big whoop, she lost at the US Open. Yet as SI explained, when it named her and not American Pharoah its Sportsperson of the Year, "Williams, 34, won three major titles, went 53–3 and provided at least one new measure of her tyrannical three-year reign at No. 1. For six weeks this summer — and for the first time in the 40-year history of the WTA rankings — Williams amassed twice as many ranking points as the world No. 2." She also returned to Indian Wells for the first time since she received a famously hostile reception from the crowd there in 2001, explaining, "I needed to go back there and speak out against racism." Williams has, as SI notes, spent this year using her power and platform for social change, guest editing the October issue of Wired and urging, "To those of you involved in equality movements like Black Lives Matter. I say this: Keep it up. Don’t let those trolls stop you." And she certainly knows all about trolls of all stripes. In July, the New York Times profiled her with the damning observation she has "large biceps and a mold-breaking muscular frame, which packs the power and athleticism that have dominated women’s tennis for years. Her rivals could try to emulate her physique, but most of them choose not to." Yet she refuses to be defined by critics who flinch at her power. Last month, she was revealed as one of the models for the 2016 Pirelli calendar, looking stunning and strong. Sports Illustrated has only named a solo woman its Sportsperson of the Year twice before — the last time was Mary Decker in 1983. The magazine rarely puts women on the cover at all — at least actual athletes, not bikini models— and even more rarely spotlights women of color. A 2013 study from the International Review for the Sociology of Sport found that over an 11-year span, women appeared on only 4.9 percent of the magazine's covers — and many of them were "minimized by sharing covers with male counterparts, featuring anonymous women not related directly to sports participation, sexually objectifying female athletes, and promoting women in more socially acceptable gender-neutral or feminine sports." In naming Williams — who sits on the cover perched authoritatively on a throne like the boss she is — the magazine is acknowledging a bona fide sports legend who has been winning major titles since the '90s. But it has also incited those who dispute that it was American Pharoah who had the truly banger year. Horse Racing Nation groused on Monday that "But … American Pharoah won the Grand Slam, and Serena Williams did not." The LA Times, meanwhile, invited readers to reply, "Serena Williams or American Pharoah: Who's the real sportsperson of 2015?" (Hot take: The one who's a person.) It all feels strangely familiar — six years ago when Williams edged out the thoroughbred Zenyatta for AP Female Athlete of the Year, Bleacher Report complained that "Angry nag edges horse," calling Williams a "big-boned diva" in the process. Charming! Nothing against American Pharoah, who has been put out to stud now, but give the queen her due. The colt had a great year. Williams has had 16 of them. As Andy Roddick explained as he made the case for her, "We can’t penalize Serena because she’s been winning everything for so long. Someone shouldn’t be punished because we’ve grown to expect it from them."Serena Williams is one of the greatest athletes of all time. Period. She needs no qualifiers: male, female, human… horse. How is this even a question? And yet, when Sports Illustrated named Williams its 2015 Sportsperson of the Year, the pick was greeted in some circles with howls and neighs of protest. On Sunday, SI announced that American Pharoah had won its online reader poll, "as the one who embodied the spirit of sportsmanship and achievement this year." There's no question the 3-year-old colt achieved a tremendous amount this year, winning the Triple Crown for the first time since Affirmed in 1978. He then scored an unprecedented further victory by taking the Breeders' Cup Classic. Comparatively speaking, perhaps Serena Williams had a relatively so-so year. Sure, she won at the French Open and at Wimbledon — for her sixth time in 13 years -- but big whoop, she lost at the US Open. Yet as SI explained, when it named her and not American Pharoah its Sportsperson of the Year, "Williams, 34, won three major titles, went 53–3 and provided at least one new measure of her tyrannical three-year reign at No. 1. For six weeks this summer — and for the first time in the 40-year history of the WTA rankings — Williams amassed twice as many ranking points as the world No. 2." She also returned to Indian Wells for the first time since she received a famously hostile reception from the crowd there in 2001, explaining, "I needed to go back there and speak out against racism." Williams has, as SI notes, spent this year using her power and platform for social change, guest editing the October issue of Wired and urging, "To those of you involved in equality movements like Black Lives Matter. I say this: Keep it up. Don’t let those trolls stop you." And she certainly knows all about trolls of all stripes. In July, the New York Times profiled her with the damning observation she has "large biceps and a mold-breaking muscular frame, which packs the power and athleticism that have dominated women’s tennis for years. Her rivals could try to emulate her physique, but most of them choose not to." Yet she refuses to be defined by critics who flinch at her power. Last month, she was revealed as one of the models for the 2016 Pirelli calendar, looking stunning and strong. Sports Illustrated has only named a solo woman its Sportsperson of the Year twice before — the last time was Mary Decker in 1983. The magazine rarely puts women on the cover at all — at least actual athletes, not bikini models— and even more rarely spotlights women of color. A 2013 study from the International Review for the Sociology of Sport found that over an 11-year span, women appeared on only 4.9 percent of the magazine's covers — and many of them were "minimized by sharing covers with male counterparts, featuring anonymous women not related directly to sports participation, sexually objectifying female athletes, and promoting women in more socially acceptable gender-neutral or feminine sports." In naming Williams — who sits on the cover perched authoritatively on a throne like the boss she is — the magazine is acknowledging a bona fide sports legend who has been winning major titles since the '90s. But it has also incited those who dispute that it was American Pharoah who had the truly banger year. Horse Racing Nation groused on Monday that "But … American Pharoah won the Grand Slam, and Serena Williams did not." The LA Times, meanwhile, invited readers to reply, "Serena Williams or American Pharoah: Who's the real sportsperson of 2015?" (Hot take: The one who's a person.) It all feels strangely familiar — six years ago when Williams edged out the thoroughbred Zenyatta for AP Female Athlete of the Year, Bleacher Report complained that "Angry nag edges horse," calling Williams a "big-boned diva" in the process. Charming! Nothing against American Pharoah, who has been put out to stud now, but give the queen her due. The colt had a great year. Williams has had 16 of them. As Andy Roddick explained as he made the case for her, "We can’t penalize Serena because she’s been winning everything for so long. Someone shouldn’t be punished because we’ve grown to expect it from them."
If you have a “black-sounding” name you are less likely to get a room on Airbnb
A recent Harvard Business School study has concluded that people with "black-sounding" names were 16% less likely to be accepted as guests when compared to people with "white-sounding" names. The study looked into Airbnb rentals throughout Baltimore, Dallas, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Washington. The findings were consistent across the board whether the host was black or white, male or female, and across all economic spectrums of rentals. This study, entitled "Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy" was released on December 9th from Harvard Business School and is a follow-up to a 2014 study which concluded that white hosts charge 12% more than black hosts.
Marco Rubio’s desperate move to catch Ted Cruz: Grasping for evangelical votes by vowing to demolish gay rights
On “Meet the Press” this past Sunday, Marco Rubio made clear that he, as president, would see to it that gay Americans would lose their newly won constitutional right to marriage. Asked by Chuck Todd on whether he would accept equal marriage rights for gay couples as a permanent fixture of American law, Rubio said no. “I don’t believe any case law is settled law,” he said. “Any future Supreme Court can change it. And ultimately, I will appoint Supreme Court justices that will interpret the Constitution as originally constructed.” So Marco Rubio, self-described candidate of the future, will roll back the advance of individual rights because that’s what our long-dead founders would have wanted, probably. This fits into a larger pattern of increasingly direct appeals to Christian conservatives and evangelicals by Rubio. Late last month he went on the Christian Broadcast Network and, when asked about same-sex marriage, began talking up the superiority of God’s rule over civil authorities. And now Rubio has a brand new ad out aimed at people with “traditional values” who “feel out of place in our own country.” What you’re seeing here is the Rubio response to Ted Cruz’s surge in national and Iowa polling. Just like Rubio’s ridiculously hawkish posturing goaded Cruz into taking a more aggressive stance on national security, Cruz’s success with Christian conservatives is forcing Rubio to pander harder to the religious right. He’s stoking the resentments of people who feel that the expansion of gay rights represents an abrogation of their own religious liberty. He’s still not as far to the right as Cruz, whose reaction to the Supreme Court’s legalization of gay marriage was to argue that states are not bound by the decision, but it’s pretty clear that Rubio is looking to bite into his rival’s base of support. It’s a bit much, though, for Rubio to stare solemnly into the camera lens and commiserate with his fellow Christians about “feel[ing] out of place in our own country.” I get that Christian conservatives have grievances when it comes to government recognition of same-sex marriage rights, but this is defining alienation down. The number of self-identified Christians in the U.S. may be declining, but they still represent a robust 70 percent of the country. And despite that commanding presence, Christians are still wildly overrepresented in government. Being a Christian in America means being part of a comfortable, empowered majority. Your interests, broadly speaking, are looked out for. However, while Rubio is complaining that Christians feel like outsiders in their own nation, he’s also defiantly insisting that there’s no evidence of any sort of broad discrimination against Muslim Americans in the U.S. That flies in the face of what we’ve seen in the aftermath of the Paris and San Bernardino terrorist attacks, with strident anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from leading politicians, and threats and acts of violence aimed at Muslim Americans. A 2010 Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Muslims in America had experienced some sort of racial or religious discrimination – far more than any other religious group surveyed. While hate crimes in general are on the decline, hate crimes against Muslims are on the rise. The discrimination is real, but Rubio refuses to even acknowledge it, which is itself an expression of that discrimination. But sympathy for the rights of gay couples or the injustices Muslims face won’t help him to hold off the Cruz insurgency. Instead he’s ignoring anti-Muslim discrimination and promising to strip gays of their rights so he can make inroads with narrow slices of an entitled majority that very much want to believe they are outsiders in their own land. 
December 13, 2015
This is what the female gaze looks like: “Transparent” returns for a thrilling second season
[Note: This review includes plot details for the entire season of “Transparent,” now streaming on Amazon Prime.] In 2014, Jill Soloway told Ms. Magazine that female showrunners like herself were “essentially inventing the female gaze right now.” This summer, while presenting a lineup of film shorts directed by women, she elaborated:
The male gaze is a privilege perpetuator. … a product of growing up other, of growing up as not the subject. You think there’s something wrong with your voice all the time. … Women are shamed for having desire for anything — for food, for sex, for anything. We’re asked to only be the object for other people’s desire. There’s nothing that directing is about more than desire. It’s like, “I want to see this. I want to see it with this person. I want to change it. I want to change it again.”Soloway’s creation, the Golden Globe and Emmy-winning “Transparent,” is a gorgeous exploration of gender, family and sexuality, hinging around the story of the Pfefferman family, in Los Angeles. The second season of “Transparent,” which was released en masse at midnight Thursday night, is easily one of the best shows of the year. But more than that, it is also a five-hour experiment in the female gaze, that visionary perspective that barely exists at all. For all that the phrase is used as the theoretical opposite of the male gaze, it’s not clear what it would really look like. Melissa Silverstein (who quotes the same speech from Soloway that I just did) at Indiewire posits, “ I don't feel that the female gaze is simply the reverse of the male gaze,” adding, “The female gaze to me is not about pleasure or even power; it is about presence. The female gaze is about women storytellers planting their feet down and shouting with a camera: I AM HERE. I AM PRESENT. I MATTER.” There is furthermore a question of equality. Jenna Wortham, in the New York Times, finds artists who challenge the accepted “inoffensive” norms of platforms like Instagram, with either arty nude photo shoots or stains from menstrual blood. And as actress Kat Dennings memorably observed in W Magazine, the MPAA rates films as more “obscene” if they depict a woman orgasming. What is particularly thrilling about “Transparent’s" second season is how it serves as a canvas for Soloway’s broadest imaginings on a feminist and/or progressive process of filmmaking—from casting to script, from breaking stories to cinematography—while also being incredibly, beautifully well done. Ideology and creative vision do not always create brilliant results, when mixed. In Soloway’s hands, the ideology and the vision inform and enhance each other. “Transparent” is not didactic, but it does not pander, either; relatedly, it is both about the most intimate dealings between humans and also the grand ideas that move them. “Transparent’s" second season is a technical tour de force, and one that begins to forge what a cinematic female gaze would look and feel like. The result is not quite as purely id as something like “Magic Mike XXL” (which in addition to being over-the-top is also heteronormative), and not quite as inaccessible as a Marina Abramović show (which are generally in just one art gallery at a time). It’s about more than just flipping the camera around, and about more than including female voices, stories and characters. As Ariel Levy writes in the New Yorker, Soloway recruited writers from well outside the Hollywood industrial-complex for Season 2, and gave them a scriptwriting bootcamp to put them in shape. She called at least some of this mission “transfirmative action,” in an attempt to incorporate a “trans-feminine perspective.” It’s brought the show its first trans writer, Our Lady J, and another trans actor, Hari Nef. Only one writer has worked on a show before, besides Soloway herself, and that’s Bridget Bedard, previously of “Mad Men.” In the terrifically mechanized world of television writing, especially for comedy—especially for a network’s flagship show, as “Transparent” has become—this is unheard of; it’s even more out there than the auteur model adopted frequently by HBO, where one writer churns out every script, because at least that has a basis in film. And Soloway’s process for working with her crew is similarly idiosyncratic. Levy writes:
“We’re taught that the camera is male,” she said, turning to walk uphill, backward, to tone a different part of her legs. “But I’m not forcing everybody to fulfill something in my head and ‘Get it right—now get it more right.’ ” Directing with “the female gaze,” she asserted, is about creating the conditions for inspiration to flourish, and then “discerning-receiving.”Emmy winner Jeffrey Tambor affirmed this sentiment to Levy. “I have never experienced such freedom as an actor before in my life. Often, an actor will walk on a set and do the correct take, the expected take. Then sometimes the director will say, O.K., do one for yourself. That last take, that’s our starting point.” Beyond process, “Transparent” also advances a type of storytelling that doesn’t quite follow narrative convention. The second season offers a circularity that confounds the basic narrative arc, that thing that generally tracks from problem to climax to resolution. Primarily, this is through the show’s sudden, brilliant, historical framing—a semi-real, semi-imagined layer of history that the main characters never quite see clearly, but one that sits on top of and at times even infiltrates the present day. “Kina Hora,” the premiere, and “Man on the Land,” episode 9, are both standout moments of the year in television for me, and it’s because the characters in this bubble of 1933 Berlin somehow leach into Ali Pfefferman (Gaby Hoffman)’s lived experience. Michaela Watkins, who plays the disapproving mother, shuffles past Ali and stares suspiciously after her; then Ali looks down and sees ugly shoes with bells on her own feet, shoes that she read might have been used by some societies to stigmatize and oppress Jewish women, in particular. It’s extraordinarily moving; Soloway uses the same music cue for the end of both episodes, suggesting a circularity of not just the time in the show but even the season we’re watching. In the finale, Maura visits her mother for the first time since her transition, and we are brought back to her painful birth, where her father was convinced they’d have a girl, and the doctors saw it differently. If you hadn’t put it together before, you will by the final scene—the innocent young girl in 1933, whose brother transitioned into a sister, becomes the silent, embittered woman in 2015, who can barely keep her attention on her surroundings. Things come full circle, but also, things are a circle. Soloway told the New Yorker that “the untrustworthy vagina” is “discerning-receiving”; in “Transparent,” time is, too. This circularity comes to play with the arc of Season 2, as well, because nothing exactly happens. There are some shifts and resettlings, but as was the case in Season 1, much of the story of “Transparent” is of a family engaged in the slow process of becoming whatever they already were. It ends somewhat as it begins—a point in the middle of a process—and favors the excavation of moments to the mapping of arcs. Characters revisit old territory and break new ground, but ultimately exist in about the same plot of land—the Pfefferman homestead, as it were. And in that space, certain moments become indelible. Instead of leveraging the action forward, they weave into the fabric of the place—become bricks in the mythos of the Pfefferman family. In a sense, the experience envelops the family, and this enveloping is another distinctly feminine one. The thinker Douglas Rushkoff, just earlier this month, used language to describe the Internet that would work just as well for “Transparent”:
Archetypally speaking, the Internet is a feminine space. The Internet is something you enter into, that you're enveloped by. … The Internet works through a series of connections. There is no ending. There is no finale. There is no climax and sleep, there's just another connection, another connection, another connection and the more and more you connect, the more potentially euphoric it becomes, the more empathic it becomes, the more connected we all are, the more intimate it all is.Indeed, the opposition between male narratives and female narratives are the subject of Camille Paglia’s “Sexual Personae,” including the much-mocked line: “Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.” The Pfeffermans are mucking up their own ground again and again, but as is demonstrated, it’s not “merely” anything. Even the show’s interest in Judaism is caught up in a female perspective; Soloway cited Andrea Dworkin to Ms. Magazine, observing that “anti-Semitism is really just hatred of the feminine: They’re both rooted in a fear of questions. Womanhood and Jewishness are both experiences that are centered around questions, and we live in a world dominated by perspectives—in terms of both religion and gender—that are overwhelmingly answer-oriented.” “Transparent” is almost intimidatingly well-versed in its feminist theory—but what I appreciate about this season is that it’s not beholden to it. Instead, through storytelling, it is embracing radical acts, and then presenting them—discerning-receiving—to the audience. It boils down to not just how beautifully filmed the season is (or isn’t), or how radically inclusive the cast is (or isn’t), but instead on what Soloway and her team has chosen to focus on. The female gaze of “Transparent” is obvious in what “Transparent” has chosen to be about, and how it has gone about doing those things. There is a welcome transparency here, to a wholly different experience of humanity that still regularly struggles for a place in the spotlight. It feels like the blinds have finally been rolled up, so we can see the world beyond the glass.[Note: This review includes plot details for the entire season of “Transparent,” now streaming on Amazon Prime.] In 2014, Jill Soloway told Ms. Magazine that female showrunners like herself were “essentially inventing the female gaze right now.” This summer, while presenting a lineup of film shorts directed by women, she elaborated:
The male gaze is a privilege perpetuator. … a product of growing up other, of growing up as not the subject. You think there’s something wrong with your voice all the time. … Women are shamed for having desire for anything — for food, for sex, for anything. We’re asked to only be the object for other people’s desire. There’s nothing that directing is about more than desire. It’s like, “I want to see this. I want to see it with this person. I want to change it. I want to change it again.”Soloway’s creation, the Golden Globe and Emmy-winning “Transparent,” is a gorgeous exploration of gender, family and sexuality, hinging around the story of the Pfefferman family, in Los Angeles. The second season of “Transparent,” which was released en masse at midnight Thursday night, is easily one of the best shows of the year. But more than that, it is also a five-hour experiment in the female gaze, that visionary perspective that barely exists at all. For all that the phrase is used as the theoretical opposite of the male gaze, it’s not clear what it would really look like. Melissa Silverstein (who quotes the same speech from Soloway that I just did) at Indiewire posits, “ I don't feel that the female gaze is simply the reverse of the male gaze,” adding, “The female gaze to me is not about pleasure or even power; it is about presence. The female gaze is about women storytellers planting their feet down and shouting with a camera: I AM HERE. I AM PRESENT. I MATTER.” There is furthermore a question of equality. Jenna Wortham, in the New York Times, finds artists who challenge the accepted “inoffensive” norms of platforms like Instagram, with either arty nude photo shoots or stains from menstrual blood. And as actress Kat Dennings memorably observed in W Magazine, the MPAA rates films as more “obscene” if they depict a woman orgasming. What is particularly thrilling about “Transparent’s" second season is how it serves as a canvas for Soloway’s broadest imaginings on a feminist and/or progressive process of filmmaking—from casting to script, from breaking stories to cinematography—while also being incredibly, beautifully well done. Ideology and creative vision do not always create brilliant results, when mixed. In Soloway’s hands, the ideology and the vision inform and enhance each other. “Transparent” is not didactic, but it does not pander, either; relatedly, it is both about the most intimate dealings between humans and also the grand ideas that move them. “Transparent’s" second season is a technical tour de force, and one that begins to forge what a cinematic female gaze would look and feel like. The result is not quite as purely id as something like “Magic Mike XXL” (which in addition to being over-the-top is also heteronormative), and not quite as inaccessible as a Marina Abramović show (which are generally in just one art gallery at a time). It’s about more than just flipping the camera around, and about more than including female voices, stories and characters. As Ariel Levy writes in the New Yorker, Soloway recruited writers from well outside the Hollywood industrial-complex for Season 2, and gave them a scriptwriting bootcamp to put them in shape. She called at least some of this mission “transfirmative action,” in an attempt to incorporate a “trans-feminine perspective.” It’s brought the show its first trans writer, Our Lady J, and another trans actor, Hari Nef. Only one writer has worked on a show before, besides Soloway herself, and that’s Bridget Bedard, previously of “Mad Men.” In the terrifically mechanized world of television writing, especially for comedy—especially for a network’s flagship show, as “Transparent” has become—this is unheard of; it’s even more out there than the auteur model adopted frequently by HBO, where one writer churns out every script, because at least that has a basis in film. And Soloway’s process for working with her crew is similarly idiosyncratic. Levy writes:
“We’re taught that the camera is male,” she said, turning to walk uphill, backward, to tone a different part of her legs. “But I’m not forcing everybody to fulfill something in my head and ‘Get it right—now get it more right.’ ” Directing with “the female gaze,” she asserted, is about creating the conditions for inspiration to flourish, and then “discerning-receiving.”Emmy winner Jeffrey Tambor affirmed this sentiment to Levy. “I have never experienced such freedom as an actor before in my life. Often, an actor will walk on a set and do the correct take, the expected take. Then sometimes the director will say, O.K., do one for yourself. That last take, that’s our starting point.” Beyond process, “Transparent” also advances a type of storytelling that doesn’t quite follow narrative convention. The second season offers a circularity that confounds the basic narrative arc, that thing that generally tracks from problem to climax to resolution. Primarily, this is through the show’s sudden, brilliant, historical framing—a semi-real, semi-imagined layer of history that the main characters never quite see clearly, but one that sits on top of and at times even infiltrates the present day. “Kina Hora,” the premiere, and “Man on the Land,” episode 9, are both standout moments of the year in television for me, and it’s because the characters in this bubble of 1933 Berlin somehow leach into Ali Pfefferman (Gaby Hoffman)’s lived experience. Michaela Watkins, who plays the disapproving mother, shuffles past Ali and stares suspiciously after her; then Ali looks down and sees ugly shoes with bells on her own feet, shoes that she read might have been used by some societies to stigmatize and oppress Jewish women, in particular. It’s extraordinarily moving; Soloway uses the same music cue for the end of both episodes, suggesting a circularity of not just the time in the show but even the season we’re watching. In the finale, Maura visits her mother for the first time since her transition, and we are brought back to her painful birth, where her father was convinced they’d have a girl, and the doctors saw it differently. If you hadn’t put it together before, you will by the final scene—the innocent young girl in 1933, whose brother transitioned into a sister, becomes the silent, embittered woman in 2015, who can barely keep her attention on her surroundings. Things come full circle, but also, things are a circle. Soloway told the New Yorker that “the untrustworthy vagina” is “discerning-receiving”; in “Transparent,” time is, too. This circularity comes to play with the arc of Season 2, as well, because nothing exactly happens. There are some shifts and resettlings, but as was the case in Season 1, much of the story of “Transparent” is of a family engaged in the slow process of becoming whatever they already were. It ends somewhat as it begins—a point in the middle of a process—and favors the excavation of moments to the mapping of arcs. Characters revisit old territory and break new ground, but ultimately exist in about the same plot of land—the Pfefferman homestead, as it were. And in that space, certain moments become indelible. Instead of leveraging the action forward, they weave into the fabric of the place—become bricks in the mythos of the Pfefferman family. In a sense, the experience envelops the family, and this enveloping is another distinctly feminine one. The thinker Douglas Rushkoff, just earlier this month, used language to describe the Internet that would work just as well for “Transparent”:
Archetypally speaking, the Internet is a feminine space. The Internet is something you enter into, that you're enveloped by. … The Internet works through a series of connections. There is no ending. There is no finale. There is no climax and sleep, there's just another connection, another connection, another connection and the more and more you connect, the more potentially euphoric it becomes, the more empathic it becomes, the more connected we all are, the more intimate it all is.Indeed, the opposition between male narratives and female narratives are the subject of Camille Paglia’s “Sexual Personae,” including the much-mocked line: “Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.” The Pfeffermans are mucking up their own ground again and again, but as is demonstrated, it’s not “merely” anything. Even the show’s interest in Judaism is caught up in a female perspective; Soloway cited Andrea Dworkin to Ms. Magazine, observing that “anti-Semitism is really just hatred of the feminine: They’re both rooted in a fear of questions. Womanhood and Jewishness are both experiences that are centered around questions, and we live in a world dominated by perspectives—in terms of both religion and gender—that are overwhelmingly answer-oriented.” “Transparent” is almost intimidatingly well-versed in its feminist theory—but what I appreciate about this season is that it’s not beholden to it. Instead, through storytelling, it is embracing radical acts, and then presenting them—discerning-receiving—to the audience. It boils down to not just how beautifully filmed the season is (or isn’t), or how radically inclusive the cast is (or isn’t), but instead on what Soloway and her team has chosen to focus on. The female gaze of “Transparent” is obvious in what “Transparent” has chosen to be about, and how it has gone about doing those things. There is a welcome transparency here, to a wholly different experience of humanity that still regularly struggles for a place in the spotlight. It feels like the blinds have finally been rolled up, so we can see the world beyond the glass.[Note: This review includes plot details for the entire season of “Transparent,” now streaming on Amazon Prime.] In 2014, Jill Soloway told Ms. Magazine that female showrunners like herself were “essentially inventing the female gaze right now.” This summer, while presenting a lineup of film shorts directed by women, she elaborated:
The male gaze is a privilege perpetuator. … a product of growing up other, of growing up as not the subject. You think there’s something wrong with your voice all the time. … Women are shamed for having desire for anything — for food, for sex, for anything. We’re asked to only be the object for other people’s desire. There’s nothing that directing is about more than desire. It’s like, “I want to see this. I want to see it with this person. I want to change it. I want to change it again.”Soloway’s creation, the Golden Globe and Emmy-winning “Transparent,” is a gorgeous exploration of gender, family and sexuality, hinging around the story of the Pfefferman family, in Los Angeles. The second season of “Transparent,” which was released en masse at midnight Thursday night, is easily one of the best shows of the year. But more than that, it is also a five-hour experiment in the female gaze, that visionary perspective that barely exists at all. For all that the phrase is used as the theoretical opposite of the male gaze, it’s not clear what it would really look like. Melissa Silverstein (who quotes the same speech from Soloway that I just did) at Indiewire posits, “ I don't feel that the female gaze is simply the reverse of the male gaze,” adding, “The female gaze to me is not about pleasure or even power; it is about presence. The female gaze is about women storytellers planting their feet down and shouting with a camera: I AM HERE. I AM PRESENT. I MATTER.” There is furthermore a question of equality. Jenna Wortham, in the New York Times, finds artists who challenge the accepted “inoffensive” norms of platforms like Instagram, with either arty nude photo shoots or stains from menstrual blood. And as actress Kat Dennings memorably observed in W Magazine, the MPAA rates films as more “obscene” if they depict a woman orgasming. What is particularly thrilling about “Transparent’s" second season is how it serves as a canvas for Soloway’s broadest imaginings on a feminist and/or progressive process of filmmaking—from casting to script, from breaking stories to cinematography—while also being incredibly, beautifully well done. Ideology and creative vision do not always create brilliant results, when mixed. In Soloway’s hands, the ideology and the vision inform and enhance each other. “Transparent” is not didactic, but it does not pander, either; relatedly, it is both about the most intimate dealings between humans and also the grand ideas that move them. “Transparent’s" second season is a technical tour de force, and one that begins to forge what a cinematic female gaze would look and feel like. The result is not quite as purely id as something like “Magic Mike XXL” (which in addition to being over-the-top is also heteronormative), and not quite as inaccessible as a Marina Abramović show (which are generally in just one art gallery at a time). It’s about more than just flipping the camera around, and about more than including female voices, stories and characters. As Ariel Levy writes in the New Yorker, Soloway recruited writers from well outside the Hollywood industrial-complex for Season 2, and gave them a scriptwriting bootcamp to put them in shape. She called at least some of this mission “transfirmative action,” in an attempt to incorporate a “trans-feminine perspective.” It’s brought the show its first trans writer, Our Lady J, and another trans actor, Hari Nef. Only one writer has worked on a show before, besides Soloway herself, and that’s Bridget Bedard, previously of “Mad Men.” In the terrifically mechanized world of television writing, especially for comedy—especially for a network’s flagship show, as “Transparent” has become—this is unheard of; it’s even more out there than the auteur model adopted frequently by HBO, where one writer churns out every script, because at least that has a basis in film. And Soloway’s process for working with her crew is similarly idiosyncratic. Levy writes:
“We’re taught that the camera is male,” she said, turning to walk uphill, backward, to tone a different part of her legs. “But I’m not forcing everybody to fulfill something in my head and ‘Get it right—now get it more right.’ ” Directing with “the female gaze,” she asserted, is about creating the conditions for inspiration to flourish, and then “discerning-receiving.”Emmy winner Jeffrey Tambor affirmed this sentiment to Levy. “I have never experienced such freedom as an actor before in my life. Often, an actor will walk on a set and do the correct take, the expected take. Then sometimes the director will say, O.K., do one for yourself. That last take, that’s our starting point.” Beyond process, “Transparent” also advances a type of storytelling that doesn’t quite follow narrative convention. The second season offers a circularity that confounds the basic narrative arc, that thing that generally tracks from problem to climax to resolution. Primarily, this is through the show’s sudden, brilliant, historical framing—a semi-real, semi-imagined layer of history that the main characters never quite see clearly, but one that sits on top of and at times even infiltrates the present day. “Kina Hora,” the premiere, and “Man on the Land,” episode 9, are both standout moments of the year in television for me, and it’s because the characters in this bubble of 1933 Berlin somehow leach into Ali Pfefferman (Gaby Hoffman)’s lived experience. Michaela Watkins, who plays the disapproving mother, shuffles past Ali and stares suspiciously after her; then Ali looks down and sees ugly shoes with bells on her own feet, shoes that she read might have been used by some societies to stigmatize and oppress Jewish women, in particular. It’s extraordinarily moving; Soloway uses the same music cue for the end of both episodes, suggesting a circularity of not just the time in the show but even the season we’re watching. In the finale, Maura visits her mother for the first time since her transition, and we are brought back to her painful birth, where her father was convinced they’d have a girl, and the doctors saw it differently. If you hadn’t put it together before, you will by the final scene—the innocent young girl in 1933, whose brother transitioned into a sister, becomes the silent, embittered woman in 2015, who can barely keep her attention on her surroundings. Things come full circle, but also, things are a circle. Soloway told the New Yorker that “the untrustworthy vagina” is “discerning-receiving”; in “Transparent,” time is, too. This circularity comes to play with the arc of Season 2, as well, because nothing exactly happens. There are some shifts and resettlings, but as was the case in Season 1, much of the story of “Transparent” is of a family engaged in the slow process of becoming whatever they already were. It ends somewhat as it begins—a point in the middle of a process—and favors the excavation of moments to the mapping of arcs. Characters revisit old territory and break new ground, but ultimately exist in about the same plot of land—the Pfefferman homestead, as it were. And in that space, certain moments become indelible. Instead of leveraging the action forward, they weave into the fabric of the place—become bricks in the mythos of the Pfefferman family. In a sense, the experience envelops the family, and this enveloping is another distinctly feminine one. The thinker Douglas Rushkoff, just earlier this month, used language to describe the Internet that would work just as well for “Transparent”:
Archetypally speaking, the Internet is a feminine space. The Internet is something you enter into, that you're enveloped by. … The Internet works through a series of connections. There is no ending. There is no finale. There is no climax and sleep, there's just another connection, another connection, another connection and the more and more you connect, the more potentially euphoric it becomes, the more empathic it becomes, the more connected we all are, the more intimate it all is.Indeed, the opposition between male narratives and female narratives are the subject of Camille Paglia’s “Sexual Personae,” including the much-mocked line: “Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.” The Pfeffermans are mucking up their own ground again and again, but as is demonstrated, it’s not “merely” anything. Even the show’s interest in Judaism is caught up in a female perspective; Soloway cited Andrea Dworkin to Ms. Magazine, observing that “anti-Semitism is really just hatred of the feminine: They’re both rooted in a fear of questions. Womanhood and Jewishness are both experiences that are centered around questions, and we live in a world dominated by perspectives—in terms of both religion and gender—that are overwhelmingly answer-oriented.” “Transparent” is almost intimidatingly well-versed in its feminist theory—but what I appreciate about this season is that it’s not beholden to it. Instead, through storytelling, it is embracing radical acts, and then presenting them—discerning-receiving—to the audience. It boils down to not just how beautifully filmed the season is (or isn’t), or how radically inclusive the cast is (or isn’t), but instead on what Soloway and her team has chosen to focus on. The female gaze of “Transparent” is obvious in what “Transparent” has chosen to be about, and how it has gone about doing those things. There is a welcome transparency here, to a wholly different experience of humanity that still regularly struggles for a place in the spotlight. It feels like the blinds have finally been rolled up, so we can see the world beyond the glass.
An open letter to Justice Scalia
Dear Justice Scalia,
On Wednesday, as you heard arguments in the affirmative action case Fisher v. University of Texas, you suggested that black students should enroll at “slower-track school[s],” rather than study alongside white students at the university. “I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible,” you said. Your words reinforced a panoply of false stereotypes about the intellectual abilities of African Americans and underscored what many Americans fear: that our institutions of higher learning are somehow overrun with minorities who have “taken” white students’ rightful spots. You ignored the fact that the University of Texas’s holistic admissions program isn’t about “admit[ting] as many blacks as possible;” that it’s a tailored procedure designed to ensure diversity in each freshman class, and it follows guidelines endorsed by the Supreme Court in 2003. But your choice of wording telegraphs a message that many Americans are all too willing to believe: that black people can’t compete in academically rigorous environments. This is a message to which I, as an artist and educator of color, feel compelled to respond.
In 1994, I was a high school freshman when a book called The Bell Curve was published to extensive attention. The treatise, authored by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, argued that human intelligence is heritable and that various ethnic groups have measurably different levels of intelligence. In a series of now-debunked statistical analyses, the Bell Curve authors suggested that African Americans have lower intelligence (as measured by IQ) than whites or Asians, a factor that supposedly predestines us for a host of social misfortunes, like poverty and teen pregnancy. The book’s conclusions weren’t closely examined prior to publication, but that didn’t stop The Bell Curve from selling 400,000 copies in hardcover or spending fifteen weeks on the New York Times best seller list. Thousands of people were willing to hand over good money to buy into this book’s awful premise.
As a result, I entered high school knowing precisely how low an opinion many Americans had of black students like me. I already knew I’d have to work hard to achieve success, but the praise for that book—author interviews, pundit commentary—made me see what I was up against. While I was lucky to find supportive teachers and friends throughout my education, my mixed-race heritage baffled many of the other adults around me. I recall family friends congratulating me on my academic successes by implying that I “must have gotten that from Dad,” while my singing talent was ascribed to my African American mother. I responded to most of these statements with a healthy eyeroll, but I understood that my achievements continually would be “surprising” to certain observers, and that I’d have to keep proving that I deserved to be exactly where I was. This never ends, by the way.
When I was accepted to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a friend who’d applied to the same program asked, pointedly, whether the fellowship I’d won was “something for African Americans.” In the moment, I understood his anxiety; he was still waiting for an acceptance letter. But this friend had never talked to me that way before; we’d never drawn asterisks beside each other’s achievements. As it happened, my fellowship from Iowa was for underrepresented students, but of course, you had to meet the highly selective requirements of your program first, and show exceptional talent. No “slower-track” needed, thanks. Even now, as a teacher, my color confounds. A colleague at one of my first teaching jobs once looked me up and down, and asked, “which half of you is black?” as if my body were divided by a secret equator, or dipped in invisible ink. At another moment in my early teaching career, a student who was unhappy with her grade surreptitiously snapped a photo of me at my lectern and tweeted that my afro made it impossible to take me seriously as a professor.
Justice Scalia, I want to remind you that we share this country together. I’m descended from free and enslaved people. Some of them were black Virginians who worked hard to attain literacy and economic mobility in a nation that continually excluded them from the body politic. In fact, I hold a BA from the University of Virginia, where you spent four years as a Professor of Law, and an MA from the University of Chicago, another institution where you taught. And we share more than academics. My European ancestors arrived in America as Italian immigrants, just as yours did. You must know that the privileges of “whiteness” were not automatically bestowed on Italians. It wasn’t that long ago that Creuzé de Lesser wrote, “Europe ends at Naples, and ends badly. Calabria, Sicily, and all the rest belong to Africa.” At the height of the immigration wave, Italian Americans were subject to discrimination and violence, to negative stereotypes and offensive caricatures. In public schools, Italian children were discouraged from speaking their native language, even at home, while in the workplace, their parents often were barred from all but the lowest-paying manual labor jobs. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 was authorized, in large part, to curtail immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Today, we recognize how unfair all of this was, and we celebrate the contributions of Italian Americans in every sector of public life.
But as Republican presidential candidates call for sealing our borders to Muslim immigrants, and as increasing numbers of Americans react to world events with fearful xenophobia, your words feed into a stream of ugly “othering” that must end. I think you know that skin color is no predictor of intellectual acuity or future success in school. Students who are admitted to colleges and universities have the right to a rewarding education full of discoveries and challenges. This is the blessing of equal protection in public education. The Court must uphold it. Your comments this week show that you prefer to think of your fellow Americans, and especially African Americans, as points on a graph. But that approach reflects the exact type of one-size-fits-all thinking that you claim to oppose in affirmative action policy. Even worse, because you make no room in your comments for the health of the campus communities that admissions policies are designed to serve. Diversity benefits the whole campus. Every day, I’m thankful for the students I’m privileged to teach. They come from rural and urban areas, they practice Christian and non-Christian religions, they’re young parents and returning veterans and hopeful poets. We need them all.
Allow me to describe something for you: in the mountains of Fumin County, in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, there’s a slender village road that twists through a landscape of clouds and red earth. At the center of town is a Christian church where young people, dressed in colorful robes, gather to sing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah in crystalline harmony. They do this each evening, after completing their farm work. The choir is famous. The singers know hundreds of songs and can sing in multiple languages. If you go there, as I did several years ago, they will sing for you. Afterwards, they’ll invite you to ask as many questions as you wish about their culture (the Miao people) and it’s only polite to return their invitation. What would you like to know about my country? You’ll ask. But the singers of Xiaoshuijing will have just one question: Tell us about your choirs.
Justice Scalia, I wish to imagine America as a great chorus of unfolding voices, a massive instrument. When I think of the Xiaoshuijing singers, of the mystery that moved through their question so beautifully asked, I’m nearly undone. But I’m a professor of poetry; I live for beautiful questions. As a Supreme Court Justice, you move in the realm of answers, interpretations, solutions. Sometimes I wonder whose voice you hear. What’s it like to hear the law speaking with a singular voice, immutable from the moment of ratification? Over the years, you’ve sparred with Justice Breyer and others about how the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision was reached. It seems that this vital ruling doesn’t square as neatly as you’d like with your originalist approach to constitutional interpretation. You’ve had to return to the issue in public comments, and you’ve consistently voted to weaken laws and policies, like affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act, designed to remedy the damage caused by our nation’s ongoing romance with structural racism.
Where should black students study? What schools are best for them? These questions already have been settled as a matter of constitutional law and they are not before you in the current case. The problem we must resolve as a society is not where to send students of color, but how to acknowledge the humanity of every American and how to ensure an educated populace for future generations. When I left my hometown for college, I was a black student. So? What else? I was a woman, an Italian American, a singer, a writer, an intellectual. I made good decisions to attend UVA, Chicago, and Iowa, and those institutions made good decisions by accepting me. Just like any other student, it was my responsibility to seek success for myself, to find mentors, to compete in the academic environments where I found myself, and to try to leave the place a little better than I found it. Who were you when you left for college, Your Honor? I’m sure the answer would not fit comfortably into a single sentence, a solitary line of prose. Remember there are 350 million Americans who are just as complex as you are. Imagine the sound we could make with all of our voices.
We’re not beating ISIS like this: America has no easy solution to its Middle Eastern crisis — and maybe none at all
In the many strategies proposed to defeat the Islamic State (IS) by presidential candidates, policymakers, and media pundits alike across the American political spectrum, one common element stands out: someone else should really do it. The United States will send in planes, advisers, and special ops guys, but it would be best -- and this varies depending on which pseudo-strategist you cite -- if the Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Sunnis, and/or Shias would please step in soon and get America off the hook. The idea of seeing other-than-American boots on the ground, like Washington’s recently deep-sixed scheme to create some “moderate” Syrian rebels out of whole cloth, is attractive on paper. Let someone else fight America's wars for American goals. Put an Arab face on the conflict, or if not that at least a Kurdish one (since, though they may not be Arabs, they’re close enough in an American calculus). Let the U.S. focus on its “bloodless” use of air power and covert ops. Somebody else, Washington’s top brains repeatedly suggest, should put their feet on the embattled, contested ground of Syria and Iraq. Why, the U.S. might even gift them with nice, new boots as a thank-you. Is this, however, a realistic strategy for winning America’s war(s) in the Middle East? The Great Champions of the Grand Strategy Recently, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton openly called for the U.S. to round up some Arab allies, Kurds, and Iraqi Sunnis to drive the Islamic State’s fighters out of Iraq and Syria. On the same day that Clinton made her proposal, Bernie Sanders called for “destroying” the Islamic State, but suggested that it “must be done primarily by Muslim nations.” It’s doubtful he meant Indonesia or Malaysia. Among the Republican contenders, Marco Rubio proposed that the U.S. “provide arms directly to Sunni tribal and Kurdish forces.” Ted Cruz threw his support behind arming the Kurds, while Donald Trump appeared to favor more violence in the region by whoever might be willing to jump in. The Pentagon has long been in favor of arming both the Kurds and whatever Sunni tribal groups it could round up in Iraq or Syria. Various pundits across the political spectrum say much the same. They may all mean well, but their plans are guaranteed to fail. Here’s why, group by group. The Gulf Arabs Much of what the candidates demand is based one premise: that “the Arabs” see the Islamic State as the same sort of threat Washington does. It’s a position that, at first glance, would seem to make obvious sense. After all, while American politicians are fretting about whether patient IS assault teams can wind their way through this country’s two-year refugee screening process, countries like Saudi Arabia have them at their doorstep. Why wouldn’t they jump at the chance to lend a helping hand, including some planes and soldiers, to the task of destroying that outfit? “The Arabs,” by which the U.S. generally means a handful of Persian Gulf states and Jordan, should logically be demanding the chance to be deeply engaged in the fight. That was certainly one of the early themes the Obama administration promoted after it kicked off its bombing campaigns in Syria and Iraq back in 2014. In reality, the Arab contribution to that “coalition” effort to date has been stunningly limited. Actual numbers can be slippery, but we know that American warplanes have carried out something like 90% of the air strikes against IS. Of those strikes that are not all-American, parsing out how many have been from Arab nations is beyond even Google search's ability. The answer clearly seems to be not many. Keep in mind as well that the realities of the region seldom seem to play much of a part in Washington’s thinking. For the Gulf Arabs, all predominantly Sunni nations, the Islamic State and its al-Qaeda-linked Sunni ilk are little more than a distraction from what they fear most, the rise of Shia power in places like Iraq and the growing regional strength of Iran. In this context, imagining such Arab nations as a significant future anti-IS force is absurd. In fact, Sunni terror groups like IS and al-Qaeda have in part been funded by states like Saudi Arabia or at least rich supporters living in them. Direct funding links are often difficult to prove, particularly if the United States chooses not to publicly prove them. This is especially so because the money that flows into such terror outfits often comes from individual donors, not directly from national treasuries, or may even be routed through legitimate charitable organizations and front companies. However, one person concerned in an off-the-record way with such Saudi funding for terror groups was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton back in 2009. In a classified warning message (now posted on WikiLeaks), she suggested in blunt terms that donors in Saudi Arabia were the “most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” One who thinks the Saudis and other Gulf countries may be funding rather than fighting IS and is ready to say so is Russian President Vladimir Putin. At the recent G20 meeting, he announced that he had shared intelligence information revealing that 40 countries, including some belonging to the G20 itself, finance the majority of the Islamic State’s activities. Though Putin’s list of supposed funders was not made public, on the G20 side Saudi Arabia and Turkey are more likely candidates than South Korea and Japan. Most recently, the German vice chancellor has explicitly accused the Saudis of funding Sunni radical groups. Expecting the Gulf Arab states to fight IS also ignores the complex political relationship between those nations and Islamic fundamentalism generally. The situation is clearest in Saudi Arabia, where the secular royal family holds power only with the shadowy permission of Wahhabist religious leaders. The latter provide the former with legitimacy at the price of promoting Islamic fundamentalism abroad. From the royals' point of view, abroad is the best place for it to be, as they fear an Islamic revolution at home. In a very real way, Saudi Arabia is supporting an ideology that threatens its own survival. The Kurds At the top of the list of groups included in the American dream of someone else fighting IS are the Kurds. And indeed, the peshmerga, the Kurdish militia, are actually on the battlefields of northern Iraq and Syria, using American-supplied weapons and supported by American air power and advisers in their efforts to kill Islamic State fighters. But looks can be deceiving. While a Venn diagram would show an overlap between some U.S. and Kurdish aims, it’s important not to ignore the rest of the picture. The Kurds are fighting primarily for a homeland, parts of which are, for the time being, full of Islamic State fighters in need of killing. The Kurds may indeed destroy them, but only within the boundaries of what they imagine to be a future Kurdistan, not in the heartlands of the Syrian and Iraqi regions that IS now controls. Not only will the Kurds not fight America’s battles in parts of the region, no matter how we arm and advise them, but it seems unlikely that, once in control of extended swaths of northern Iraq and parts of Syria, they will simply abandon their designs on territory that is now a part of Turkey. It’s a dangerous American illusion to imagine that Washington can turn Kurdish nationalism on and off as needed. The Kurds, now well armed and battle-tested, are just one of the genies Washington released from that Middle Eastern bottle in 2003 when it invaded Iraq. Now, whatever hopes the U.S. might still have for future stability in the region shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Using the Kurds to fight IS is a devil's bargain. The Turks And talking about devil’s bargains, don’t forget about Turkey. The Obama administration reached a deal to fly combat missions in its intensifying air war against the Islamic State from two bases in Turkey. In return, Washington essentially looked the other way while Turkish President Recep Erdogan re-launched a war against internal Kurdish rebels at least in part to rally nationalistic supporters and win an election. Similarly, the U.S. has supported Turkey's recent shoot-down of a Russian aircraft. When it comes to the Islamic State, though, don’t hold your breath waiting for the Turks to lend a serious military hand. That country’s government has, at the very least, probably been turning a blind eye to the smuggling of arms into Syria for IS, and is clearly a conduit for smuggling its oil out onto world markets. American politicians seem to feel that, for now, it’s best to leave the Turks off to the side and simply be grateful to them for slapping the Russians down and opening their air space to American aircraft. That gratitude may be misplaced. Some 150 Turkish troops, supported by 20 to 25 tanks, have recently entered northern Iraq, prompting one Iraqi parliamentarian to label the action “switching out alien (IS) rule for other alien rule.” The Turks claim that they have had military trainers in the area for some time and that they are working with local Kurds to fight IS. It may also be that the Turks are simply taking a bite from a splintering Iraq. As with so many situations in the region, the details are murky, but the bottom line is the same: the Turks' aims are their own and they are likely to contribute little either to regional stability or American war aims. The Sunnis Of the many sub-strategies proposed to deal with the Islamic State, the idea of recruiting and arming “the Sunnis” is among the most fantastical. It offers a striking illustration of the curious, somewhat delusional mindset that Washington policymakers, including undoubtedly the next president, live in. As a start, the thought that the U.S. can effectively fulfill its own goals by recruiting local Sunnis to take up arms against IS is based on a myth: that “the surge” during America's previous Iraq War brought us a victory later squandered by the locals. With this goes a belief, demonstrably false, in the shallowness of the relationship between many Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis and the Islamic State. According to the Washington mythology that has grown up around that so-called surge of 2007-2008, the U.S. military used money, weapons, and clever persuasion to convince Iraq’s Sunni tribes to break with Iraq’s local al-Qaeda organization. The Sunnis were then energized to join the coalition government the U.S. had created. In this way, so the story goes, the U.S. arrived at a true “mission accomplished” moment in Iraq. Politicians on both sides of the aisle in Washington still believe that the surge, led by General David Petraeus, swept to success by promoting and arming a “Sunni Awakening Movement,” only to see American plans thwarted by a too-speedy Obama administration withdrawal from the country and the intra-Iraqi squabbling that followed. So the question now is: why not “awaken” the Sunnis again? In reality, the surge involved almost 200,000 American soldiers, who put themselves temporarily between Sunni and Shia militias. It also involved untold millions of dollars of “payments” -- what in another situation would be called bribes -- that brought about temporary alliances between the U.S. and the Sunnis. The Shia-dominated Iraqi central government never signed onto the deal, which began to fall apart well before the American occupation ended. The replacement of al-Qaeda in Iraq by a newly birthed Islamic State movement was, of course, part and parcel of that falling-apart process. After the Iraqi government stopped making the payments to Sunni tribal groups first instituted by the Americans, those tribes felt betrayed. Still occupying Iraq, those Americans did nothing to help the Sunnis. History suggests that much of Sunni thinking in the region since then has been built around the motto of "won't get fooled again." So it is unlikely in the extreme that local Sunnis will buy into basically the same deal that gave them so little of lasting value the previous time around. This is especially so since there will be no new massive U.S. force to act as a buffer against resurgent Shia militias. Add to this mix a deep Sunni conviction that American commitments are never for the long term, at least when it comes to them. What, then, would be in it for the Sunnis if they were to again throw in their lot with the Americans? Another chance to be part of a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad that seeks to marginalize or destroy them, a government now strengthened by Iranian support, or a Syria whose chaos could easily yield a leadership with similar aims? In addition, a program to rally Sunnis to take up arms against the Islamic State presumes that significant numbers of them don’t support that movement, especially given their need for protection from the depredations of Shia militias. Add in religious and ethnic sentiments, anti-western feelings, tribal affiliations, and economic advantage -- it is believed that IS kicks back a share of its oil revenues to compliant Sunni tribal leaders -- and what exactly would motivate a large-scale Sunni transformation into an effective anti-Islamic State boots-on-the-ground force? Shias Not that they get mentioned all that often, being closely associated with acts of brutality against Sunnis and heavily supported by Iran, but Iraq's Shia militias are quietly seen by some in Washington as a potent anti-IS force. They have, in Washington’s mindset, picked up the slack left after the Iraqi Army abandoned its equipment and fled the Islamic State’s fighters in northern Iraq in June 2014, and again in the Sunni city of Ramadi in May 2015. Yet even the militia strategy seems to be coming undone. Several powerful Shia militias recently announced, for instance, their opposition to any further deployment of U.S. forces to their country. This was after the U.S. Secretary of Defense unilaterally announced that an elite special operations unit would be sent to Iraq to combat the Islamic State. The militias just don't trust Washington to have their long-term interests at heart (and in this they are in good company in the region). "We will chase and fight any American force deployed in Iraq," said one militia spokesman. "We fought them before and we are ready to resume fighting." Refusing to Recognize Reality The Obama/Clinton/Sanders/Cruz/Rubio/Pentagon/et al. solution -- let someone else fight the ground war against IS -- is based on what can only be called a delusion: that regional forces there believe in American goals (some variant of secular rule, disposing of evil dictators, perhaps some enduring U.S. military presence) enough to ignore their own varied, conflicting, aggrandizing, and often fluid interests. In this way, Washington continues to convince itself that local political goals are not in conflict with America's strategic goals. This is a delusion. In fact, Washington’s goals in this whole process are unnervingly far-fetched. Overblown fears about the supposedly dire threats of the Islamic State to “the homeland” aside, the American solution to radical Islam is an ongoing disaster. It is based on the attempted revitalization of the collapsed or collapsing nation-state system at the heart of that region. The stark reality is that no one there -- not the Gulf states, not the Kurds, not the Turks, not the Sunnis, nor even the Shia -- is fighting for Iraq and Syria as the U.S. remembers them. Unworkable national boundaries were drawn up after World War I without regard for ethnic, sectarian, or tribal realities and dictatorships were then imposed or supported past their due dates. The Western answer that only secular governments are acceptable makes sad light of the power of Islam in a region that often sees little or no separation between church and state. Secretary of State John Kerry can join the calls for the use of “indigenous forces” as often as he wants, but the reality is clear: Washington’s policy in Syria and Iraq is bound to fail, no matter who does the fighting.
Age of the Fabricating Faker: All the Republican candidates embody this condition — but none so much as Donald Trump
We live in a time of dramatic make-believe. Almost half the voting population in the United States is at best skeptical about well-established scientific evidence, at worst in utter denial, when the evidence runs counter to their ideological beliefs. Corporations brand products more or less divorced from the outcomes they credibly are able to effect. Individuals increasingly advance their own interests by fabricating résumés and memoirs partially if not completely at odds with their actual biographical achievements. And politicians and political interests increasingly make up claims about the world, other candidates and themselves so at odds with any semblance of reality it should take a nanosecond of fact-checking to refute. And yet significant swaths of the electorate and of publics more generally are not merely convinced by the claims but seemingly have their base beliefs reinforced by such representations. The bandwidth of this now increasingly proliferated phenomenon is sufficiently broad to suggest it has become a defining condition of our time. I will call our moment one of make-believe. Make-believe here is not just fantasy, a making up, with the intention to deceive. There may well be a heartfelt commitment to the claim embedded in the fabrication. But it is more than deceit. The fabrication is a function of a social fabric of woven tales about the world, one meant at once to reinforce a social vision with the view to a certain sort of end-oriented action (or inaction, as the case may be). The reinforcement itself is usually shored up by recourse to force or its threat, to cutting off (hence the political currency today of walls and closing borders), to physical violence (from bomb-dropping to roughing up at political gatherings). It follows that the “make” in make-believe is not just a making up, a cosmetic veneer to make oneself or one’s cause look good. The making signals also a compulsion, the forcefulness of the making in the make-believe, the compelling of belief on both sides of the utterance. An "or else" sits implicitly in the disposition of “you better believe,” suggestive of the threat. Implicit in the threat is the insinuation that ultimately the world constituted in and through the sustaining fabrication would unravel were the belief to evaporate. Of course, pretty much all politicians make things up to secure interest and ultimately votes. Politicians, as the Sophists were among the first to see, are concerned foremost with the rhetorical arts of securing the belief of followers, if need be window-dressed as -- or more extremely at the expense of any relation to -- truth-telling. But there seems something larger, deeper, more prolific at work in the turn we have taken over the last 30 years. The “Big Lie” of the fascist 1930s gave way in the 1980s to narration of the “Great Communicator.” But now, I am suggesting, we have come to inhabit the age of the “Fabricating Faker,” the “Monster Make-Believer.” Most, if not all, the Republican candidates for president represent this turn, to more constrained or unbridled degree. All deny the science of climate change, pretty much all the way down. All deny a widespread problem with police racial profiling, with deadly consequence, despite almost daily evidence. All at least insinuate, if not simply declare, that terrorists are crossing the southern border from Mexico, along with “illegal” migrants, even if they can point to no actual instance. All seem to think the largest threat to homeland security are Syrian refugees, despite almost weekly evidence that the danger is far more readily from violent, gun-toting alienated white men at home. All seem to think that robust deregulation and tax reduction for the wealthy principally will ignite an endless economic boom despite repeated evidence of cycles of boom and bust that have left larger and larger segments of the population impoverished (they are perhaps right about the “ignite” and “boom” part). Some seem to think that America can close its borders, cut itself off increasingly from the interconnected world we inhabit and live out our lives in perpetuated bubble cultures that will never burst, until they pop repeatedly and violently in our collective faces. All seem to think that repealing the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with some version of a voucher system will magically provide healthcare to the deinsured. Some remain “birthers,” and “truthers,” where the “evidence” in each instance is out and out fantasy, at best, “compulsion” at worst. All the Republican presidential candidates embody this condition of make-believe more or less without reservation. Yet the two candidates that have led the nomination process much of the way to date are those who best represent the condition. Donald Trump and Ben Carson have been willing to make things up more or less from whole cloth to a greater degree than the others. Carson has circulated a completely debunked theory about the Egyptian pyramids being built to store grain. And he has insisted that he was offered a full scholarship at West Point officer academy as he was completing high school though he never applied, while claiming he threatened to kill his mother as a young teenager though no one recalls him expressing violence in any outward way. Trump, for his part, long denied President Obama’s U.S. citizenship in the face of reams of counter-evidence. And he has emphasized repeatedly that Muslims in New Jersey were cheering the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11 though no one can point to any evidence bearing this out, and plenty to the contrary. When both have been called out on their fabrications, their recourse has been to deny they are fabricating, to reassert the claim as though repeating it often enough will render it true, and to deny their denials. By erasing the traces of their make-believe they reinforce the respective claims as if their content must be true. Any skeptic is rendered the problem child, in denial of “common sense.” Believers are turned into truth-bearers, witnesses to the gospel; non-believers are made maniacal, in denial of the make-believe any “ordinary” person can easily “see.” Trumpeting — the bellowing of any made-up claim to political purpose — is a strategy of trumping one’s political opponents, drowning them out both in the making of the claim and especially in the calculated media frenzy prompted in its wake. It is the technique of outplaying the less agile by sidestepping the charge and deftly turning the thrust against the critic. And the moment of trumping is loudly proclaimed, trumpeted from the political stage, further drowning out critics and skeptics. In his seminal lectures on the history of neoliberalism, the French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that “homo economicus” — Economic Man — of classical liberalism was replaced by neoliberalism’s Man of Enterprise. Homo economicus is defined in terms of economic agents rationally pursuing their self-interest to optimize self-identified preferred outcomes for themselves. By contrast, Enterprising Man emphasizes social fabrication for the sake of leveraging social and political networks, securing self-advantage, closing the deal and satisfying passing desires. He is one who competes and invents, makes things up, saying the damnedest things for the sake ultimately of nothing but self-advantage, self-possibility, self-profit. He makes things happen by inventiveness and self-invention. Fabrication and self-making, creation and re-creation serve as his presiding sensibilities, reflective of those of our moment. Looking good and acting awesome, he is self-minded in flaunting prowess and profit. But he also projects braggadocio and whatever he can get away with. He looks to be in total control even while bordering on being out of control. And he networks only with those who think and look like him. He is "Mad Men" reprised, "American Psycho" revived. The Trumpet Man, the Donald, is the pitch-perfect embodiment of the Man of Enterprise. As such, he represents the optimal political candidacy to suit the increasingly troubling times we have come to inhabit. Nothing is beyond the phantasmic molding: History is bent to self-profit, endorsements are spun out of mere agreements to meet with him to discuss concerns notably with his candidacy, people — especially people of color — are reduced to props in the political maneuvering. Mexicans are to be sent “home” no matter their having lived much of their lives or been born in the USA, Muslims are to be prevented from entering or re-entering the “homeland” no matter their being American citizens or the constitutional violation. Persons in the concrete are exploited for his political advantage, only to be told by Trumpeting Trump how much he loves “their kind” in the abstract — and how much those abstractions love him! Even excludable Muslims supposedly now love him in his fantasy life-world. It’s less now that the emperor has no clothes than that he has made them from whole cloth. Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, the axis of totalizing make-believe nativisms today. The Mussolinis of our moment. Donald the Trumpeter for president. We get, alas, the trickster we bargain for. The basement bargain sale has begun.
