Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 941

Black lives don’t matter in the gun debate: America’s crisis is much bigger than mass murder

They had been invited by the Obama administration to talk about what the country should do to address gun violence. Vice President Joe Biden had been meeting with victims and advocates all day, and he arrived so late that some in the room wondered whether he would come at all. When he finally walked in, the clergy started sharing their advice, full of pain, some of it personal. “The incidents of Newtown are very tragic,” Michael McBride, a 37-year-old pastor from Berkeley, California, recalled telling Biden. “But any meaningful conversation about addressing gun violence has to include urban gun violence.”

McBride supported universal background checks. He supported an assault weapons ban. But he also wanted something else: a national push to save the lives of black men. In 2012, 90 people were killed in shootings like the ones in Newtown and Aurora, Colorado. That same year, nearly 6,000 black men were murdered with guns. 

Many people viewed inner-city shootings as an intractable problem. But for two years, McBride had been spreading awareness about Ceasefire, a nearly two-decades-old strategy that had upended how police departments dealt with gang violence Under Ceasefire, police teamed up with community leaders to identify the young men most at risk of shooting someone or being shot, talked to them directly about the risks they faced, offered them support, and promised a tough crackdown on the groups that continued shooting In Boston, the city that developed Ceasefire, the average monthly number of youth homicides dropped by 63 percent in the two years after it was launched. The U.S. Department of Justice’s “what works” website for crime policy had a green check mark next to Ceasefire, labeling it “effective”—the highest rating and one few programs received.

McBride wanted President Obama to make Ceasefire and similar programs part of his post-Newtown push to reduce gun violence. He had brought a short memo to give to White House staffers, outlining a plan to devote $500 million over five years to scaling such programs nationwide. His pitch to Biden that day was even simpler: Don’t ignore that black children are dying too. 

In response, the vice president agreed urban violence was very important, McBride said. But it was clear that “there was not a lot of appetite for that conversation by folks in the meeting,” McBride recalled.

Later, other ministers who worked with McBride would get an even blunter assessment from a White House staffer: There was no political will in the country to address inner-city violence.

When McBride spoke to administration staffers again about dramatically increasing money for programs like Ceasefire, he said, “People were kind of looking at me like, ‘Are you crazy?’ No, I’m not crazy. This is your own recommendation. You should do it!”

Mass shootings, unsurprisingly, drive the national debate on gun violence.  But as horrific as these massacres are, by most counts they represent less than 1 percent of all gun homicides. America’s high rate of gun murders isn’t caused by events like Sandy Hook or the shootings this fall at a community college in Oregon. It’s fueled by a relentless drumbeat of deaths of black men. 

Gun control advocates and politicians frequently cite the statistic that more than 30 Americans are murdered with guns every day. What’s rarely mentioned is that roughly 15 of the 30 are black men.

Avoiding that fact has consequences. Twenty years of government-funded research has shown there are several promising strategies to prevent murders of black men, including Ceasefire. They don’t require passing new gun laws, or an epic fight with the National Rifle Association. What they need—and often struggle to get—is political support and a bit of money.

A week after McBride and the other faith leaders met with Biden, Obama announced his national gun violence agenda. He called for universal background checks, which experts say could prevent some shootings. Other key elements of his plan—a ban on assault weapons and funding to put police officers in schools—were unlikely to save a significant number of lives.

At the press conference where Obama announced the plan, a diverse group of four children sat on the podium with him: two girls and two boys who had written letters begging the president to do something about gun violence. “Hinna, a third-grader—you can go ahead and wave, Hinna—that’s you—Hinna wrote, I feel terrible for the parents who lost their children. I love my country, and I want everybody to be happy and safe,” the president said.

Obama went over the litany of school shootings—Columbine, Virginia Tech, Newtown—and made a brief nod to the deaths of “kids on street corners in Chicago.” But his plan included no money for the urban violence strategies his Justice Department described as effective. His platform didn’t refer to them at all. 

McBride, who was in the audience, said he was not surprised. He supported the president’s other proposals, and, when it came to urban violence, he had “realistic expectations.” In his fight to save the lives of black men, McBride has kept running up against the same assumption: that “urban violence is a problem with black folk. It’s not a problem for this country to solve.”

Gun violence in America is largely a story of race and geography. Almost two-thirds of America’s more than 30,000 annual gun deaths are suicides, most of them committed by white men. In 2009, the gun homicide rate for white Americans was 2 per 100,000—about seven times as high as the rate for residents of Denmark, but a fraction of the rate for black Americans. In 2009, black Americans faced a gun homicide rate of nearly 15 per 100,000. That’s higher than the gun homicide rate in Mexico.

To liberals, gun violence among African-Americans is rooted in economic disadvantage and inequality, as well as America’s gun culture and lax gun laws. Conservatives, meanwhile, often focus on black “culture.”  “The problem is not our gun laws,” a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote last year about Chicago’s murder rate. “Nor is it our drug laws, or racist cops, prosecutors, and judges. The problem is black criminality, which is a function of black pathology, which ultimately stems from the breakdown of the black family.”

Lost in the debate is that even in high-crime cities, the risk of gun violence is mostly concentrated among a small number of men. In Oakland, for instance, crime experts working with the police department a few years ago found that about 1,000 active members of a few dozen street groups drove most homicides. That’s .3 percent of Oakland’s population. And even within this subgroup, risk fluctuated according to feuds and other beefs. In practical terms, the experts found that over a given stretch of several months only about 50 to 100 men are at the highest risk of shooting someone or getting shot.

Most of these men have criminal records. But it’s not drug deals or turf wars that drives most of the shootings.

Instead, the violence often starts with what seems to outsiders like trivial stuff—“a fight over a girlfriend, a couple of words, a dispute over a dice game,” said Vaughn Crandall, a senior strategist at the California Partnership for Safe Communities, which did the homicide analysis for Oakland. 

Somebody gets shot. These are men who do not trust the police to keep them safe, so “they take matters into their own hands,” he said. It’s long-running feuds, Crandall said, that drive most murders in Oakland.

Men involved in these conflicts may want a safer life, but it’s hard for them to put their guns down. “The challenge is that there is no graceful way to bow out of the game,” said Reygan Harmon, the director of Oakland Police Department’s violence reduction program.

These insights led a group of Boston police, black ministers and academics to try a new approach in 1996. Since group dynamics were driving the violence, they decided to hold the groups accountable. The plan was simple: Identify the small groups of young men most likely to shoot or be shot. Call them in to meet face-to-face with police brass, former gang members, clergy, and social workers. Explain to the invitees that they were at high risk of dying. Promise an immediate crackdown on every member of the next group that put a body on the ground—and immediate assistance for everyone who wanted help turning their lives around. Then follow up on those promises.

The results of Operation Ceasefire were dramatic. Soon after Boston held its first meeting—known as a call-in—on May 15, 1996, homicides of young men plummeted along with reports of shots fired.

The Reverend Jeff Brown, one of the ministers who worked on the project, remembers people were outside more, barbecuing in the park. At Halloween, kids were able to trick-or-treat on the streets again.

The team behind the effort quickly started getting calls from other cities—even other countries—about how to replicate what became known as the Boston Miracle. With the support of the Justice Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, many cities tried the strategy and some got dramatic results. Stockton saw a 42 percent reduction in monthly gun homicides over several years. Indianapolis experienced a 34 percent drop  in monthly homicides. Lowell, Massachusetts, saw gun assaults fall by 44 percent.

A 2012 review of the existing research evidence found that seven of eight cities that had rigorously implemented Ceasefire and similar strategies had seen reductions in violence.

Other cities have tried Ceasefire, or half-tried it, and then abandoned it. The strategy requires resources, political buy-in, and ongoing trust between unlikely partners. The effort in Boston had “black and Latin and Cape Verdean clergy working with white Irish Catholic cops in a city that had a history of race relations leading up to that point that was abysmal,” Brown said. “It was really a shift in behavior, in the way we did business.”

These partnerships can be fragile. Boston’s own Ceasefire effort fell apart in 2000, researchers said. There was infighting and the police official who led it got another assignment. In subsequent years, homicides of young men crept up again.

An endless number of variables can affect crime, making it hard to know how much a particular effort works. Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, noted that the current research only evaluates the short-term effects of the program, so it’s not known how well it works over the long term.

Still, Webster said if you’re interested in reducing shootings among young black men, the Boston Ceasefire model is one of the strategies that has shown “the most consistent positive response.”

Jim Bueerman—head of the Police Foundation, which focuses on crime research—said that while the evidence is only “highly suggestive,” Ceasefire is still worth doing.   

“It’s going to be a long time before you get the perfect evidence,” said Bueerman, a former police chief of Redlands, California. “When you come across a strategy like Ceasefire that appears to be working, you owe it to people to try it in your local community.”

Part of what seems to make Ceasefire effective is that it treats the men it targets as both dangerous and also in need of help. Such initiatives, however, fit into no political camp and thus have few powerful champions. 

“It has no natural constituency,” said Thomas Abt, a Harvard Kennedy School researcher who has worked on crime policy at the Justice Department. “To vastly oversimplify, progressives want more prevention and conservatives want more enforcement. Focused deterrence”—what academics call Ceasefire and similar approaches—“challenges the orthodoxy on both sides. It makes everybody uncomfortable.”

Ceasefire has often been greeted with skepticism in the neighborhoods it’s supposed to help, where residents have reason to distrust the police. To buy into Ceasefire, McBride had to weigh the data against his own experience. In 1999, as a college student studying theology, McBride was stopped as he drove home by two white San Jose police officers. He said they forced him to get out of his car, groped him, and made him lie on the ground while threatening him.

It didn’t matter that he was a youth pastor, that he was involved in local politics, that he had just helped to get San Jose’s new mayor elected. That night, he was just another black man lying on the ground. (The police chief at the time later told ProPublica that while the officers and McBride gave conflicting accounts, he decided to launch a study of racial profiling during traffic stops, one of the nation’s first.)

When McBride moved to Berkeley in 2005, fresh out of divinity school at Duke University, he thought he would focus his social justice work on education—mentoring young people struggling to graduate from high school.

Then a few of the young people he was mentoring were murdered. One was Larry Spencer, a charismatic 19-year-old—funny, popular, “someone that everyone just really loved,” McBride said. Spencer was shot to death outside a liquor store in nearby Oakland. It was the city’s 39th gun homicide in a year that left 110 dead. 

Hundreds of mourners attended Spencer’s funeral, McBride said. McBride asked the congregation how many had attended a funeral before. Everyone raised their hands. How many had been to two funerals? Three? Four? He continued to count upward. “I got as high as ten,” he recalled. “Half of the young people started to cry and still had their hands in the air.”

Oakland had tried Ceasefire on and off for years but struggled to make it work. “There wasn’t a true commitment to the strategy,” said Lieutenant LeRonne Armstrong, who managed the city’s program in the mid-2000s while working in the criminal investigations unit. “We did not have the political support.”

McBride and others pushed city leaders and pastors to embrace the strategy.

Many of them were skeptical, but McBride thought working with the police was crucial. “We realized that in order for us to do any of this work, we were going to have to be in some relation with the police department. We pay taxes. We’re paying for the police department, whether we like it or not,” he said.

In 2012, Oakland recommitted itself to Ceasefire. It hired a full-time manager for the program, using both city dollars and part of a 2013 Justice Department grant. The city also dedicated funds to work with a team of experts who had helped other cities implement Ceasefire. The experts  helped Oakland do a detailed data analysis homing in on the men who needed to be called in. There were only 20 guys at the first relaunched call-in—“but they were 20 of the right guys,” said Armstrong.

Murders dropped from 126 in 2012 to 90 in 2013, according to police department data. Last year, Oakland had 80 murders.

McBride traveled across the country as part of a national campaign to reduce urban violence using Ceasefire. Every city had its own challenges. Money was one of them. Ceasefire was not particularly expensive, but hiring outreach workers and providing social services to the men involved required a little support, as did hiring outside consultants. Outside funding also made it easier for city leaders to move ahead with a different approach to gun violence.

The Obama administration has several grant programs aimed at helping urban neighborhoods reduce violence, but the demand for grants far outstrips funding. For one 2012 grant, the Justice Department received over 140 applications and had money for just 15.

“It is a brutal process to apply for these grants. Most of them don’t get funded, and I think that’s a bit of a tragedy,” said Bueerman, the head of the Police Foundation. “You have agencies that are highly willing to do the work. You don’t have to sell them on the efficacy of the strategy. You just have to empower it through a relatively small amount of money to help them get the program started.”

The Obama administration has consistently asked for more money than Congress has authorized. In 2012, the White House requested $74 million for five grants for Ceasefire and similar programs. It got $30 million.

Advocates of Ceasefire have tried to press Congress for more money. Some legislators “really like these programs,” one former Hill staffer said, but not enough to take on an uphill battle for additional funding. “I think the one sort of antidote to that was if you had massive political pressure from some organization or group that felt really strongly about something and could get people riled up about it,” the staffer said. “Honestly speaking, if we are talking about urban violence, there is less of that.”

The national groups that spend the most money and do the most advocacy related to gun violence have concentrated almost exclusively on passing stricter gun control laws. Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said he’s “very supportive” of strategies like Ceasefire, but “it’s not our lane.”

A spokeswoman for Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety said much the same. “We’re focused on what we know, which is how to improve the laws,” said Erika Soto Lamb.

Declines in violent crime over the last two decades have made it harder to galvanize support for gun violence prevention. The number of Americans murdered by guns peaked in 1993, then dropped sharply until 2000 for reasons that are still not fully understood. Since then, the number of Americans killed in gun homicides has remained remarkably consistent, about 11,000 to 12,000 a year.

Another constant: About half of those killed this way are black men, though they make up just 6 percent of the U.S. population. In 2001, when George W. Bush took office, 5,279 black men were murdered with firearms, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2012, it was 5,947.

These deaths are concentrated in poor, segregated neighborhoods that have little political clout.

“I think that people in those communities are perceived as not sufficiently important because they don’t vote, they don’t have economic power,” said Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney who has spent much of his career focused on urban violence. “I think there’s some racism involved. I don’t think we care about African-American lives as much as we care about white lives.”

The few congressional efforts to advance gun legislation in recent years have been prompted by mass shootings, violence that is seemingly random and thus where everyone can feel at risk.

“Congress has only moved in response to galvanizing tragedy, and galvanizing tragedy tends to not involve urban, run-of-the-mill murder,” said Matt Bennett, a gun policy expert at Third Way, a centrist think-tank. “The narrative about the need for gun violence prevention generally is driven by these black swan events, and those often involve white people,” he added. “It is horrific and tragic, but that’s the fact.”

When Adam Lanza shot his way into the Sandy Hook Elementary School with a military-style rifle and handguns in December 2012, it wasn’t clear if any laws would have stopped him. Lanza had taken the guns from his mother, who had purchased them legally.

The package of proposed legislation and policy initiatives recommended by the Obama administration in the aftermath of Sandy Hook centered on closing loopholes in background checks and renewing the federal ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004. The president also called for increased spending on mental health, crackdowns on the trafficking networks that sell illegal guns, and more than $150 million for a new program to put more cops and psychologists in schools.

Obama and gun control advocates made universal background checks the focus of their push. It wasn’t a policy that was relevant to Newtown, but they saw it as the most likely way to reduce everyday gun violence and save lives. Most researchers agree that a better background check system could help curtail both urban gun violence and mass shootings, though there’s no hard data to indicate how much.

There was less evidence proving that the other elements of the president’s plan would reduce gun violence. Though the public quickly focused on one weapon Lanza used, a Bushmaster XM15-E2S, experts knew the assault weapons ban hadn’t saved many lives. The effects of a renewed ban “are likely be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement,” a reportfunded by the Justice Department concluded.

A former senior White House official agreed. While a ban on high capacity magazines could help some, the official told ProPublica, the assault weapons ban “does nothing.” Though Obama endorsed it as part of the post-Newtown package, “we did the bare minimum,” the official said. “We would have pushed a lot harder if we had believed in it.”

Some gun control advocates who worked with the administration on gun legislation said they saw the endorsement of  the assault weapons ban as a bargaining chip. “It’s all a dance, it’s a kabuki thing, and right from the beginning the White House understood that they weren’t going to get a ban done,” said Bennett, the gun policy expert. “They had to talk about it. It would have been insane not to. Every news report after Sandy Hook had this horrible looking AR-15, and noted that it had been a banned weapon that now wasn’t.”

Adding police at schools has popular appeal, but classroom homicides are exceedingly rare.

“Any given school can expect to experience a student homicide about once every 6,000 years,” said Dewey Cornell, a University of Virginia professor who studies who studies school safety. “Children are in far more danger outside of schools than in schools. If we had to take officers out of the community to put them in schools, then actually children will be less safe rather than more safe.”

Two former administration staffers who worked on the gun violence platform said the $150 million proposal for cops and counselors in schools—which “may have been a bit outsized,” one said—was driven by Vice President Biden’s history of championing federal grants for hiring cops.

It also seemed like “something that people might be willing to, you know, give us money for,” a former senior White House official said.  

The staffers said they could not remember why funding to support strategies like Ceasefire was not included in the plan. “Look, if it was some deliberate conversation not to do it, I would remember,” the former senior official said.

Though Justice Department grants for community violence prevention weren’t part of the post-Sandy Hook platform, a staffer said “we were watching the fiscal year 2014 budget process and making sure we were continuing to push for those resources at DOJ.” Bruce Reed, Biden’s chief of staff at the time, said budget concerns likely kept funding for innovative local efforts out of the package.

“We didn’t want to turn this into an appropriations bill, because that would be … ” he said, shrugging. “That would cost us whatever Republicans we had hoped for.”

“The appropriations climate was, if possible, more divisive than the gun debate,” Reed added later. “We were always between shutdowns.”

Webster, the Johns Hopkins gun violence researcher, said that it would have been “more justifiable” to devote federal dollars to supporting Ceasefire and similar programs than it was to put the money toward school security. “I don’t know of any evidence that putting police in schools makes them safe, and I do know of evidence that having police in schools leads to more kids being arrested,” he said.

Two weeks after Obama unveiled his plan, McBride and dozens of other clergy members, many of them from cities struggling with high rates of gun violence, met again with staffers from Vice President Biden’s task force.

The mood at the January 29 meeting was tense. Many of the attendees, including McBride, felt the president’s agenda had left out black Americans.

“The policy people working for Biden worked with the reality of Congress,” said Teny Gross, one of the original Boston Miracle outreach workers who now leads the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago. “What they were proposing to us was very limited and was not going to help the inner city.”

Gross said he “blew a gasket.” The clergy members in the room were pleading for help. “We bury hundreds of kids every year in the inner city,” Gross recalled them telling the administration representative. “Some of the solutions need to apply to us.”

A staffer said that the political will of the country was not focused on urban violence, several ministers who attended the meeting recalled.

“What was said to us by the White House was, there’s really no support nationally to address the issue of urban violence,” said Reverend Charles Harrison, a pastor from Indianapolis. “The support was to address the issue of gun violence that affected suburban areas—schools where white kids were killed.”

The Reverend Jeff Brown, from Boston, was angered by the administration’s calculated approach. “When you say something like that and you represent the president of the United States, and the first African-American president of the United States, you know, that’s hugely disappointing,” he said.

Former administration officials said they thought it was tragic that the everyday killings of black children did not get more political attention. “I totally agree with their frustrations,” a former official said. “At the same time, when the nation listens, you’ve got to speak, and you don’t get to pick when the nation listens.”

It would turn out there was little political will to realize the administration’s gun-violence proposals either. Measures to expand background checks and ban assault weapons died on April 17, 2013, when they couldn’t muster the votes necessary to advance in the Senate.

In his 2014 budget recommendations around the same time, Obama again asked for more money for local grant programs to combat urban gun violence. He recommended tripling the funding for a Justice Department grant that helped cities adopt Ceasefire from $8 million to $25 million. Overall, he requested $79 million for grants to support similar initiatives. Obama had asked for almost twice that much to put more cops and psychologists in schools. 

Congress slashed Obama’s requests across the board. Instead of approving $150 million to help schools hire cops and psychologists, it created a $75 million school safety research program.

It also rejected his proposed increases for Ceasefire and similar programs. Instead, Congress took many of the small grants and made them even smaller. One program was cut from $8 million to $5.5 million. Another shrank from $2 million to $1 million.

In all, Congress spent $31 million on five urban violence-related grants—less than half of what it approved for research on how to make schools safer.

There have been increasing concerns about rising murder rates over the past year in cities across the country.  Some have blamed the increases on the “Ferguson Effect”—the theory that increased scrutiny of cops has made them reluctant to do their jobs—although there is “no data” to support this claim, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said recently. It’s not clear how much murders have increased nationwide. Each city has its own trend. Some have seen an uptick only in comparison to the historic lows they had last year. In other cities, violence is truly spiking. Baltimore  recently recorded its 300th homicide this year, the most since 1999.

In Indianapolis, where homicides are set to increase for the third straight year, more federal funding might have made a difference. In early 2012, Indianapolis applied for a Justice Department grant to help implement Ceasefire, requesting $1.5 million over three years. But just four of more than roughly 60 cities that applied received funding. Indianapolis was not among them.

“Absolutely, there’s no doubt in my mind, if we had been awarded the grant we would have had the financial carryover to move the program forward,” said Shoshanna Spector, the executive director of IndyCAN, a local faith-based advocacy group that pushed for Ceasefire.

Douglas Hairston, who works on private-public partnerships at the Indianapolis mayor’s office, said the city is currently doing “60 to 70 percent” of the Ceasefire strategy.

“Federal funds would have helped,” he said. “We know that we could do more, and we’re striving to find ways to do it.”

Earlier this year, Indianapolis Police Chief Rick Hite said the city was doing the strategy “with modifications” and that the city is always using the “tenets of Ceasefire.”

There have been 133 murders so far this year in Indianapolis, according to police department data, up from 97 in 2012.

In Baltimore, Ceasefire appears to have struggled. The program’s manager resigned in March, the Baltimore Sun reported. Webster, the researcher evaluating the effort, told the paper he questioned whether the rollout of Ceasefire in the Western District was “being done on the cheap and being done in a way that is not even resembling the program model.” 

Other cities have seen more success. New Orleans and Kansas City both saw drops in violence that researchers have credited to their new Ceasefire programs. Chicago has been rolling out call-ins to an increasing number of police districts. Gary, Indiana, and Birmingham, Alabama, both launched new Ceasefire programs this year. Cities have often paid for the programs using money from a variety of sources: federal dollars, local governments, and, increasingly, local foundations.

Obama has launched an initiative to support young men and boys of color. One of its stated goals of My Brother’s Keeper, which kicked off last year, is reducing violence. The initiative is backed by more than $500 million in corporate and philanthropic commitments. But most of that money has been devoted to mentoring and education programs.

Organizers said they would reduce violence, too, albeit indirectly. “I would challenge this notion that violence reduction resources or targeting is only to be looked at through the lens of reducing violence per se,” Broderick Johnson, the chair of the My Brother’s Keeper Task Force, told ProPublica. “It is just as important to look at it in terms of opportunities for young people to stay in school or get jobs or to get second chances.”

Last year, the Justice Department also launched a modest effort called the Violence Reduction Network, which provides cities with training and advice from former police chiefs and other crime-fighting experts. Many of the needs the network meets are basic: It helped Wilmington, Delaware, police create a homicide unit. Wilmington, with 70,000 mostly black residents, has a higher murder rate than Chicago.

Running the network is inexpensive. It costs about $250,000 per city annually. But once again, it’s not meeting the greater need. The program is targeted at the roughly four dozen cities with highest violent crime rates in the nation. The government is only working with 10 of them.

The White House did not comment on questions about the administration’s overall response to urban violence. The Justice Department offered the following statement: “In addition to focusing on violent crime reduction in cities, the department also responded to one of the worst mass shootings in our nation’s history in Newtown by identifying funding for school resource officers to help keep kids safe in schools and to assist the many victims of this heinous crime.” (See the full statement)

Biden’s office also offered a statement: “Whether it’s by banning assault weapons, incentivizing local police to create better relationships with residents of America’s cities, or finding alternatives to jail, including diversionary programs like drug courts, the vice president has worked to support any viable solutions to reduce gun violence in our cities.”

When Jeff Brown was at the White House recently for an initiative on extremism, he ran into Biden. 

“The vice president walked up to me and said, ‘Reverend Brown, good to see you,’” Brown said. Biden said he remembered meeting Brown back in the ‘90s, when he visited Boston to hear more about Operation Ceasefire and the Boston Miracle.

“I hope we can bring back some of what we did in Boston,” Brown said he told the vice president.

“I hope so, too,” Biden replied.

Brown laughed at the memory. “You’re the vice president—can’t you do something about it?”

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Our #blacklivesmatter Thanksgiving: Race, terror, Trump and political correctness collide at Thanksgiving

Public holidays are a type of ritual. They are a means by which individuals learn lessons about politics, identity, family and community. Holidays are also a type of habit. They're part of a cultural routine, one that is usually followed without much reflection, contemplation or introspection. Thanksgiving is a holiday ritual that celebrates family and community. In recounting one of the country’s founding legends—in which Europeans fled religious persecution, escaped to the “New World,” and then were helped by friendly “Indians”—the American people are supposed to reflect upon their blessings, fortunes and good luck. Like most national holidays, Thanksgiving is a myth. It does the powerful political work of encouraging American Exceptionalism: a belief that the United States was preordained by “God” for a special place among all others; and that it is a “shining city on the hill.” In reality, the arrival of the Mayflower (and other European explorers and colonists in the “New World”) would help to set into motion two of the greatest crimes in human history: the genocide of First Nations peoples and the enslavement and mass murder of black Americans. Stolen land and stolen labor are the twin bedrocks of American empire. Their influence was (and remains) so profoundly deep that it would take a civil war (what was really a second American Revolution) and then 100 years of additional struggle to strike down white supremacy as the formal public policy of the United States. First Nations peoples can never be made whole for the land (and lives) that was stolen from them. Black Americans will never receive their reparations, be it 40 acres and a mule, or redistributive justice because of the material harm done to them by white supremacy from Jim and Jane Crow and in the present. These inequalities are now fixtures in American social and political life. There is no holiday that can repair those harms. (One should not overlook how Thanksgiving was a source of political controversy during the American slaveocracy. The South refused to celebrate Thanksgiving because it was viewed as a way for “Abolitionists” and “Yankees” to undermine the institution of white on black chattel slavery. Thanksgiving would be fully embraced as an “American” holiday after the end of the Civil War when apartheid was reinstated across the South after the fall of Reconstruction. White America could celebrate Thanksgiving as one nation only when black American citizens were denied their equal rights.) In many ways, Thanksgiving is a celebration of gluttony, sports, nationalism, militarism and waste. While some of the poor and homeless may be fed for a day, the institutions and structures that create income inequality and joblessness remain untouched. The day after Thanksgiving is called “Black Friday.” It is a festival of consumerist excess and greed. It is one of many moments throughout their lives when the American people are told the lie that “freedom,” “capitalism” and “democracy” are interchangeable. In reality, the gangster and casino capitalism of late 20th and early 20th century America is incompatible with a true “We the People” democracy.

* * *

This year’s Thanksgiving comes during the midst of a national debate about America’s national character. Young people and others are protesting for progressive social change at America’s colleges and universities, participating in Black Lives Matter, and standing up against police thuggery and violence in cities like Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland. The Confederate Flag, what is more accurately described as the American swastika, has been removed from some government buildings in the old Confederate South. Buildings, streets and roads that bear the names of white supremacists are being renamed. Conservatives and other reactionaries have resisted. History and social change work is a story of “push and pull” factors, thesis and antithesis. Right-wingers in Texas and across the country are rewriting school textbooks with the goal of quite literally “whitewashing” American history, where any facts that undermine their lies about American Exceptionalism, and the many distortions needed to maintain the illusion, are removed. Authoritarianism has increased among the American people. The Republican Party is actively using the courts to roll back the gains of the civil rights and women’s rights movements. The extreme rightward shift of the Republican Party, as signaled by the rise of Donald Trump and his overt racism and Know-nothing nativism, is a symptom of a white working and middle class that is terrified of demographic change and losing any of the unearned advantages that have historically come with being “white” in America. This second group consists of those people most likely to be angry at any criticism or truth-telling about the lies and myths of Thanksgiving, to claim “Gun, God, and the Flag” as their life mantra or bumper sticker, and to tremble with a mix of rage and fear at the thought of either Syrian refugees or Hispanic immigrants coming to “their Christian country” — or God forbid, a black man being elected president of the United States twice. These reactions, most often from conservatives and right-wing authoritarians, but shared by other Americans too, those crippled by nostalgia, or who view American Exceptionalism as religion, are driven by fear. Human beings have finite lives. Because they are not immortal, their identities and sense of self seeks out crutches and fixed points of support to compensate for a fear of death. Because religion, nationalism and public rituals have existed for millennia and centuries, far longer than the life of a given person, they provide some defense against those anxieties. Thus, when conservatives talk about politics, values and history, they are desperately trying to both “conserve” their own imagined material resources and power against some perceived threat, as well as working to “conserve” the symbolism and memory of the past because it sustains their own sense of self in the present.

* * *

This year’s Thanksgiving also takes place in the shadow of terrorism by ISIS, creeping authoritarianism and fascism from the Republican Party, environmental catastrophe, an economy that remains stagnant, mass shootings, right-wing domestic terrorism, and police who treat America’s poor and working-class black and brown communities like battlefields, and its residents as enemy combatants. This is the culture of cruelty and the neoliberal nightmare as a quotidian state of affairs. Maintaining one’s mental health is something to be grateful for in these times. But change will not come without radical dreaming (and action) about the potential for a better life and a more humane, just and democratic American society. In America’s current state of political disorientation, where millions of its citizens are barely surviving, and the vast remainder are experiencing vastly diminished life chances, income and opportunities as compared to the generations that preceded them, perhaps being “thankful” is actually a condition of surrender and learned helplessness. Ultimately, the 1 percent and the plutocrats want “thankful citizens” because they are compliant and obedient. On Thanksgiving, the American people should, instead of being thankful for what they have--and by doing so playing along with a tired mythology of American genocide and slavery--should inaugurate a day of political activism and resistance. Instead of gorging on unhealthy food and watching football, it would be a truly meaningful Thanksgiving holiday if people stopped being thankful, got really angry, confronted power, and then fought and struggled to remedy the injustices in American society.Public holidays are a type of ritual. They are a means by which individuals learn lessons about politics, identity, family and community. Holidays are also a type of habit. They're part of a cultural routine, one that is usually followed without much reflection, contemplation or introspection. Thanksgiving is a holiday ritual that celebrates family and community. In recounting one of the country’s founding legends—in which Europeans fled religious persecution, escaped to the “New World,” and then were helped by friendly “Indians”—the American people are supposed to reflect upon their blessings, fortunes and good luck. Like most national holidays, Thanksgiving is a myth. It does the powerful political work of encouraging American Exceptionalism: a belief that the United States was preordained by “God” for a special place among all others; and that it is a “shining city on the hill.” In reality, the arrival of the Mayflower (and other European explorers and colonists in the “New World”) would help to set into motion two of the greatest crimes in human history: the genocide of First Nations peoples and the enslavement and mass murder of black Americans. Stolen land and stolen labor are the twin bedrocks of American empire. Their influence was (and remains) so profoundly deep that it would take a civil war (what was really a second American Revolution) and then 100 years of additional struggle to strike down white supremacy as the formal public policy of the United States. First Nations peoples can never be made whole for the land (and lives) that was stolen from them. Black Americans will never receive their reparations, be it 40 acres and a mule, or redistributive justice because of the material harm done to them by white supremacy from Jim and Jane Crow and in the present. These inequalities are now fixtures in American social and political life. There is no holiday that can repair those harms. (One should not overlook how Thanksgiving was a source of political controversy during the American slaveocracy. The South refused to celebrate Thanksgiving because it was viewed as a way for “Abolitionists” and “Yankees” to undermine the institution of white on black chattel slavery. Thanksgiving would be fully embraced as an “American” holiday after the end of the Civil War when apartheid was reinstated across the South after the fall of Reconstruction. White America could celebrate Thanksgiving as one nation only when black American citizens were denied their equal rights.) In many ways, Thanksgiving is a celebration of gluttony, sports, nationalism, militarism and waste. While some of the poor and homeless may be fed for a day, the institutions and structures that create income inequality and joblessness remain untouched. The day after Thanksgiving is called “Black Friday.” It is a festival of consumerist excess and greed. It is one of many moments throughout their lives when the American people are told the lie that “freedom,” “capitalism” and “democracy” are interchangeable. In reality, the gangster and casino capitalism of late 20th and early 20th century America is incompatible with a true “We the People” democracy.

* * *

This year’s Thanksgiving comes during the midst of a national debate about America’s national character. Young people and others are protesting for progressive social change at America’s colleges and universities, participating in Black Lives Matter, and standing up against police thuggery and violence in cities like Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland. The Confederate Flag, what is more accurately described as the American swastika, has been removed from some government buildings in the old Confederate South. Buildings, streets and roads that bear the names of white supremacists are being renamed. Conservatives and other reactionaries have resisted. History and social change work is a story of “push and pull” factors, thesis and antithesis. Right-wingers in Texas and across the country are rewriting school textbooks with the goal of quite literally “whitewashing” American history, where any facts that undermine their lies about American Exceptionalism, and the many distortions needed to maintain the illusion, are removed. Authoritarianism has increased among the American people. The Republican Party is actively using the courts to roll back the gains of the civil rights and women’s rights movements. The extreme rightward shift of the Republican Party, as signaled by the rise of Donald Trump and his overt racism and Know-nothing nativism, is a symptom of a white working and middle class that is terrified of demographic change and losing any of the unearned advantages that have historically come with being “white” in America. This second group consists of those people most likely to be angry at any criticism or truth-telling about the lies and myths of Thanksgiving, to claim “Gun, God, and the Flag” as their life mantra or bumper sticker, and to tremble with a mix of rage and fear at the thought of either Syrian refugees or Hispanic immigrants coming to “their Christian country” — or God forbid, a black man being elected president of the United States twice. These reactions, most often from conservatives and right-wing authoritarians, but shared by other Americans too, those crippled by nostalgia, or who view American Exceptionalism as religion, are driven by fear. Human beings have finite lives. Because they are not immortal, their identities and sense of self seeks out crutches and fixed points of support to compensate for a fear of death. Because religion, nationalism and public rituals have existed for millennia and centuries, far longer than the life of a given person, they provide some defense against those anxieties. Thus, when conservatives talk about politics, values and history, they are desperately trying to both “conserve” their own imagined material resources and power against some perceived threat, as well as working to “conserve” the symbolism and memory of the past because it sustains their own sense of self in the present.

* * *

This year’s Thanksgiving also takes place in the shadow of terrorism by ISIS, creeping authoritarianism and fascism from the Republican Party, environmental catastrophe, an economy that remains stagnant, mass shootings, right-wing domestic terrorism, and police who treat America’s poor and working-class black and brown communities like battlefields, and its residents as enemy combatants. This is the culture of cruelty and the neoliberal nightmare as a quotidian state of affairs. Maintaining one’s mental health is something to be grateful for in these times. But change will not come without radical dreaming (and action) about the potential for a better life and a more humane, just and democratic American society. In America’s current state of political disorientation, where millions of its citizens are barely surviving, and the vast remainder are experiencing vastly diminished life chances, income and opportunities as compared to the generations that preceded them, perhaps being “thankful” is actually a condition of surrender and learned helplessness. Ultimately, the 1 percent and the plutocrats want “thankful citizens” because they are compliant and obedient. On Thanksgiving, the American people should, instead of being thankful for what they have--and by doing so playing along with a tired mythology of American genocide and slavery--should inaugurate a day of political activism and resistance. Instead of gorging on unhealthy food and watching football, it would be a truly meaningful Thanksgiving holiday if people stopped being thankful, got really angry, confronted power, and then fought and struggled to remedy the injustices in American society.Public holidays are a type of ritual. They are a means by which individuals learn lessons about politics, identity, family and community. Holidays are also a type of habit. They're part of a cultural routine, one that is usually followed without much reflection, contemplation or introspection. Thanksgiving is a holiday ritual that celebrates family and community. In recounting one of the country’s founding legends—in which Europeans fled religious persecution, escaped to the “New World,” and then were helped by friendly “Indians”—the American people are supposed to reflect upon their blessings, fortunes and good luck. Like most national holidays, Thanksgiving is a myth. It does the powerful political work of encouraging American Exceptionalism: a belief that the United States was preordained by “God” for a special place among all others; and that it is a “shining city on the hill.” In reality, the arrival of the Mayflower (and other European explorers and colonists in the “New World”) would help to set into motion two of the greatest crimes in human history: the genocide of First Nations peoples and the enslavement and mass murder of black Americans. Stolen land and stolen labor are the twin bedrocks of American empire. Their influence was (and remains) so profoundly deep that it would take a civil war (what was really a second American Revolution) and then 100 years of additional struggle to strike down white supremacy as the formal public policy of the United States. First Nations peoples can never be made whole for the land (and lives) that was stolen from them. Black Americans will never receive their reparations, be it 40 acres and a mule, or redistributive justice because of the material harm done to them by white supremacy from Jim and Jane Crow and in the present. These inequalities are now fixtures in American social and political life. There is no holiday that can repair those harms. (One should not overlook how Thanksgiving was a source of political controversy during the American slaveocracy. The South refused to celebrate Thanksgiving because it was viewed as a way for “Abolitionists” and “Yankees” to undermine the institution of white on black chattel slavery. Thanksgiving would be fully embraced as an “American” holiday after the end of the Civil War when apartheid was reinstated across the South after the fall of Reconstruction. White America could celebrate Thanksgiving as one nation only when black American citizens were denied their equal rights.) In many ways, Thanksgiving is a celebration of gluttony, sports, nationalism, militarism and waste. While some of the poor and homeless may be fed for a day, the institutions and structures that create income inequality and joblessness remain untouched. The day after Thanksgiving is called “Black Friday.” It is a festival of consumerist excess and greed. It is one of many moments throughout their lives when the American people are told the lie that “freedom,” “capitalism” and “democracy” are interchangeable. In reality, the gangster and casino capitalism of late 20th and early 20th century America is incompatible with a true “We the People” democracy.

* * *

This year’s Thanksgiving comes during the midst of a national debate about America’s national character. Young people and others are protesting for progressive social change at America’s colleges and universities, participating in Black Lives Matter, and standing up against police thuggery and violence in cities like Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland. The Confederate Flag, what is more accurately described as the American swastika, has been removed from some government buildings in the old Confederate South. Buildings, streets and roads that bear the names of white supremacists are being renamed. Conservatives and other reactionaries have resisted. History and social change work is a story of “push and pull” factors, thesis and antithesis. Right-wingers in Texas and across the country are rewriting school textbooks with the goal of quite literally “whitewashing” American history, where any facts that undermine their lies about American Exceptionalism, and the many distortions needed to maintain the illusion, are removed. Authoritarianism has increased among the American people. The Republican Party is actively using the courts to roll back the gains of the civil rights and women’s rights movements. The extreme rightward shift of the Republican Party, as signaled by the rise of Donald Trump and his overt racism and Know-nothing nativism, is a symptom of a white working and middle class that is terrified of demographic change and losing any of the unearned advantages that have historically come with being “white” in America. This second group consists of those people most likely to be angry at any criticism or truth-telling about the lies and myths of Thanksgiving, to claim “Gun, God, and the Flag” as their life mantra or bumper sticker, and to tremble with a mix of rage and fear at the thought of either Syrian refugees or Hispanic immigrants coming to “their Christian country” — or God forbid, a black man being elected president of the United States twice. These reactions, most often from conservatives and right-wing authoritarians, but shared by other Americans too, those crippled by nostalgia, or who view American Exceptionalism as religion, are driven by fear. Human beings have finite lives. Because they are not immortal, their identities and sense of self seeks out crutches and fixed points of support to compensate for a fear of death. Because religion, nationalism and public rituals have existed for millennia and centuries, far longer than the life of a given person, they provide some defense against those anxieties. Thus, when conservatives talk about politics, values and history, they are desperately trying to both “conserve” their own imagined material resources and power against some perceived threat, as well as working to “conserve” the symbolism and memory of the past because it sustains their own sense of self in the present.

* * *

This year’s Thanksgiving also takes place in the shadow of terrorism by ISIS, creeping authoritarianism and fascism from the Republican Party, environmental catastrophe, an economy that remains stagnant, mass shootings, right-wing domestic terrorism, and police who treat America’s poor and working-class black and brown communities like battlefields, and its residents as enemy combatants. This is the culture of cruelty and the neoliberal nightmare as a quotidian state of affairs. Maintaining one’s mental health is something to be grateful for in these times. But change will not come without radical dreaming (and action) about the potential for a better life and a more humane, just and democratic American society. In America’s current state of political disorientation, where millions of its citizens are barely surviving, and the vast remainder are experiencing vastly diminished life chances, income and opportunities as compared to the generations that preceded them, perhaps being “thankful” is actually a condition of surrender and learned helplessness. Ultimately, the 1 percent and the plutocrats want “thankful citizens” because they are compliant and obedient. On Thanksgiving, the American people should, instead of being thankful for what they have--and by doing so playing along with a tired mythology of American genocide and slavery--should inaugurate a day of political activism and resistance. Instead of gorging on unhealthy food and watching football, it would be a truly meaningful Thanksgiving holiday if people stopped being thankful, got really angry, confronted power, and then fought and struggled to remedy the injustices in American society.

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Our Thanksgiving hatred is getting out of hand: How to survive a holiday that has become a war zone

If you glanced at any website in the past few days, you'd come away thinking that the world's biggest war zone is the American table at Thanksgiving. It seems as though no publication's holiday schedule is complete without a guide on how to handle your atrocious relatives. The Democratic Party has even gotten in on the act, creating a whole site called "Your Republican Uncle" with helpful facts to counteract the aforementioned conservative gentleman. (I'd love to see a conversation where the uncle starts praising Donald Trump and the nephew looks down at his phone and recites, "He certainly does say what he means, and most of the time, it's xenophobic, or sexist, or out of touch, or totally irresponsible," just like the DNC wrote out for him.)

Seriously: Does nobody actually like Thanksgiving? Are the nation's homes truly such minefields of barely suppressed rage and misery? Are there really no addresses where everyone sits down and one person doesn't immediately launch into a diatribe about ISIS?

America's content creators surely know that, for every family filled with awkward culture clashes, there is another family where everyone likes each other just fine. The media fixation on turkey-based horror says more about the media than it does about what's necessarily going on at every gathering in the country. It's not just the natural inclination toward conflict that leads to so much content based on the idea that all families loathe each other. It's also the hackneyed notion of smart, educated—and, usually, white—people returning to flyover country from their coastal bastions of reason to deal with the boorish, uninformed souls who raised them. Hey, I know some educated white people who live on the coasts and may be projecting their own experiences on the world at large!

Still, you do have to feel bad for anyone whose Thanksgiving even roughly resembles the bloodbath our media seems to think we all go through. For them, I offer some handy advice:

It doesn't actually have to be that way.

Seriously, there is no rule that says you have to do Thanksgiving in any way that you don't want to do it. You know that, don't you? If there's any problem with the holiday—besides the fact that it's basically celebrating the genocide of Native Americans, or am I just reliving that one anti-Thanksgiving essay I wrote in the 6th grade?—it's that it exerts the passive tyranny of all holidays. We all know the feeling: Thanksgiving is coming around, I guess I have to make pie, right? But you really don't! Turkey is not mandatory. You will not get shot for choosing to dispense with stuffing. You are a human being with free will. If you hate being around your family so much, DON'T GO. You'll probably be seeing them in like three weeks anyway. If you love your family but would rather eat chicken, maybe suggest that?

The world is a terrible enough place already. Sometimes the convergence of terribleness is so acute that it can feel like we are an irredeemable species. There is no reason for anyone to add to that by needlessly subjecting themselves to things they can't stand. Let us liberate ourselves from the shackles of expectation! Let's make ourselves happy! Let's show each other that there is some hope on the planet!

Of course, by the time you read this, it will already be Thanksgiving, so I suppose this is all advice for next year.

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Thanksgiving, medieval style: Give thanks that “Red Deer testicles” and “living eels in roasted pig” aren’t on the menu today

Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday, blessedly devoid of spirituality and denominational religion, just piles of food, family and football (followed by napping). But if the idea of another turkey, flanked by cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie, sounds ho-hum, consider what constituted the feasts of yore. Our ancestors used to eat some pretty crazy shit. It’s only a matter of time before a renegade chef opens a pop-up medieval food truck. But whether hipster consumers of wagyu and kale tacos are ready for Roasted Swan Legs, Deer Antler Soup and Porpoise in Aspic is a fair question. What are the socio-political repercussions of eating Grilled Womb (which is unlikely to appear on menus in red states, at least not in the months leading up to an election)? Even a passionate carnivore like Anthony Bourdain might have some moral qualms about dipping into a plate of Living Eels in a Roasted Pig. If you’ve got leftover deer testicles in the back of your fridge, then maybe it’s time to inject a bit of the Middle Ages into your Thanksgiving menu. Yes, some six centuries ago, these dishes were considered delicacies worth preserving in medieval cookbooks. Doubtless grandmothers, huddled around their soot-blackened kitchens, perhaps cackling maniacally out of their whisker-strewn maws, would lovingly instruct their granddaughters in the finer methods of preparing Roast Cat, or a cauldron full of boiling Garbage (the evocative appellation for chicken gizzard stew). Curious as to what was on the menu during those pesky Bubonic Plague epidemics, I began to research medieval and Renaissance cooking. It all began with a nice little book review assignment. I was to review "The Medieval Cookbook" by Maggie Black (Getty Publications, 2012) for the academic journal Gastronomica. The book takes authentic medieval recipes and updates them for the modern kitchen. The book is a fine one, but it did not satisfy my curiosity. To be frank, it was too normal. OK, even Getty Publications can’t expect Mary Jane from Minnesota to prepare Roasted Peacock. And so, the book contains recipes that are as close to what we, today, consider normal as possible. Sure, there are pottages (the old-fashioned word for a thick soup), buknades (an even thicker pottage, more like a stew), piment (spiced, sweetened wine), and civey (uh…also a stew). Some dishes and spice combos from the Middle Ages would be most welcome in the modern kitchen, and their preparation will almost certainly not result in incarceration (the same cannot be said for some of our other examples—I’m looking at you, Grilled Womb). Saffron and ginger play a far more central role in spicing medieval savory dishes than we would consider today, outside of Asian cuisine. Much of this was down to masking the taste of not-so-fresh meat, necessary before the invention of the Frigidaire. Likewise mace, cardamom, cinnamon and sugar were common additions to savory main courses, sweetness being broadly valued over other flavors. But two medieval staple spice mixes would find a home in any creative kitchen. Powder Forte is a mixture of ground cumin, black pepper and ginger, while Powder Douce combines ground coriander, cinnamon and brown sugar. Aside from unusual terms for things, many of the recipes from "The Medieval Cookbook" sound, well, normal. I mean, I can’t get too excited about cheese lasagna and roast pork, both of which are featured. I’m sure they are perfectly good, but when dipping into the foods of an exotic age, and in looking for historically accurate ways to spice up my Thanksgiving, I was hoping for more shock value. Beware what you wish for. My further research uncovered all manner of dishes that are either unadvisable, or in some cases illegal, to prepare today. Hold onto your dormouse stew… Before we begin, a word about diet in the pre-modern period. There was a widely accepted belief in pre-modern Europe that you had to eat according to the social class into which you were born. Eating above (or below) your station would make you ill, or even kill you. Aristocrats consumed creatures and vegetables associated with the air, the sky, lightness and whiteness. Their preferred proteins were fowl and white-fleshed fish. Nobles drank white wine, ate white bread and tree-growing fruit, chose veggies that grew aboveground, avoided root vegetables. Peasants, by contrast, ate things that were dark in color and associated with the earth: black bread (the old term for rye), black wine (the old term for red), root vegetables, beans, red meat, shellfish, porridges and stews thickened with grains. I’d take the peasant menu any day. While there is, of course, no genetic reason why Count von Frupingstein should only eat roasted swan legs and figs, while Fritz the Goat-Herd must dine on roast potatoes and mutton, there may have been a biological reason why the nobility stuck to its airy, white diet. If generations ate only within their dictated confines, then the aristocrats might have lost their enzymes to break down red meat, and therefore might well have felt ill, if they consumed what they were not used to. For the peasants, the question would be less about illness and more about cost. White wine was far more expensive than red, pure white bread more expensive than rye, and nice white fish pricier than lobster, mussels and eel. Eel, in fact, appears in medieval cooking with a frequency alarming to us moderns, because it was an inexpensive source of good protein. As a stock fish, eel could be farmed, and was often used in stews or other dishes in place of beef, which was pricey and harder to come by. Eel can be delicious when properly prepared (for example, in my favorite Japanese dish, unagi), but how about a platter of Living Eels in a Roast Pig? I’m not sure if that would be more traumatic for the diner or the eels, but either way, I’d steer clear of it. Unsurprisingly, it was the dishes of the aristocracy that were the most bizarre and fanciful, part nourishment and part entertainment. Medieval banquets were long-form affairs (the predecessors of the Slow Food Movement), often hours long. You would be given a number of courses relative to your social status, and might have to sit and watch the king eat his 13th exotic plate, while you’d only be given two. While writing a book on the great Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, I learned that van Eyck was responsible for the design of banquets at the 15th century court of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, creating dishes that were first thought of in terms of drama and aesthetics, with taste being a secondary concern. On the other hand, peasant food, which inevitably sounds far more appetizing, was about making the most of what was available, without the least concern for presentation. Peasants were satisfied with soups and stews, often thickened with grain and including whatever was available, from vegetables to scraps of meat: one-pot dishes that could gently bubble in a cauldron for hours on end, while a family went about their daily labors. Aristocrats, on the other hand, employed full-time cooks as well as occasional artists, like van Eyck, who would collaborate in the design of elaborate feasts to awe and delight important guests. Exotic ingredients and a heavy hand with spices were signs of wealth and erudition. Minimalist cooking it ain’t. If you could use 10 spices, why, that was five times better than using two. Ostentatious displays of wealth seem to have been prized over deliciousness. This makes reading about medieval cooking a good deal more fun than eating it. For many, the thought of medieval dining recalls “four and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie,” from the popular 18th century English nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” Fowl baked in a pie (with their feathers removed, but not deboned) was indeed a common banquet recipe. But according to the nursery rhyme, “When the pie was opened/The birds began to sing/Wasn’t that a dainty dish/To set before a king?” This, too, is on the money. Jan van Eyck was responsible for the design of a pie that housed a compartment for a live dove to hole up, so that the dove would fly out when the pie was (carefully) sliced open. The nursery rhyme describes a real recipe. You can imagine the macabre fun at medieval dinner parties, when live birds escape from their lightly browned crusty coffins, just before you slice the cooked portion of the pie and serve the birds’ less-fortunate cousins. In fact, the word “coffin” appears in medieval recipes as a synonym for pie crust. As Gervase Markham wrote in "The English Hous-wife" (1615): “that it may stand well for rising, your coffin must ever be deep.” That could mean so many things … This morbid undertone may be found throughout medieval cookery. Consider that the original lyrics for “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” in the 1740 first edition, read: “Sing a Song of Sixpence/A bagful of Rye/Four and twenty Naughty Boys/Baked in a Pye.” Hmm. There’s nothing quite so creepy as a traditional nursery rhyme, the lyrics of which we sing to sleepy babies, without stopping to think what we are saying. I mean, “Rock-a-bye baby on a tree top/When the wind blows the cradle will rock/When the bough breaks the cradle will fall/And down will come baby, cradle and all.” Huh? WTF?! Alas, the juxtaposition of cooked and living critters was considered enormously diverting by our ancestors. One book in particular rides the thin line between magic tricks and dinner (as well as nourishment and horrible taste). Giambattista della Porta’s 1660 tome, "Magia Naturalis (The Secrets of Nature)" contains a number of highly disconcerting recipes that, we can only hope, were largely theoretical. I quote from his description under the heading “To Cook a Live Goose” (skip this paragraph if you are faint of heart, or a member of the ASPCA):

Take the goose, pull off the feathers, make a fire about her, not too close for smoke to choke her, or burn her too soon, not too far off so she may escape. Put small cups of water with salt and honey ... also dishes of apple sauce. Baste goose with butter. She will drink water to relieve thirst, eat apples to cleanse and empty her of dung. Keep her head and heart wet with a sponge. When she gets giddy from running and begins to stumble, she is roasted enough. Take her up, set her before the guests; she will cry as you cut off any part and will be almost eaten before she is dead ... It is mighty pleasant to behold.

I think that old Giambattista and I have rather different opinions of what is “mighty pleasant to behold,” but reproduce his dish and you’re guaranteed to throw a Thanksgiving feast that your guests will remember forever. Perhaps waking up to the thought in a cold sweat, or rocking slowly back and forth on a therapist’s couch while recalling it. And to think of the fuss folks make these days about foie gras … Giambattista was also fond of illusionism, and offers us a recipe for a Roasted Peacock that looks alive (he’s assuming that this is somehow a bonus), and also appears to breathe fire. Kill a peacock, either by thrusting a quill into his brain from above, or else cut his throat, as you do for young kids [author’s note: I’m hoping that Giambattista meant baby goats], that the blood may come forth. Then cut his skin gently from his throat unto his tail and, being cut, pull it off with his feathers from his whole body to his head. Cut off that with the skin and legs, and keep it. Roast the peacock on a spit. His body being stuffed with spices and sweet herbs, sticking first cloves on his breast, and wrapping his neck in a white linen cloth. Wet it always with water, that it may never dry. When the peacock is roasted, and taken from the spit, put him into his own skin again, and that he may seem to stand upon his feet, you shall thrust small iron wires, made on purpose, through his legs, and set fast on a board, that they may not be discerned, and through his body to his head and tail. Some put camphire [a fragrant wood from which henna is derived] in his mouth, and when he is set upon the table, they cast in fire. Platina shows that the same may be done with pheasants, geese, capons, and other birds. And we observe these things among our guests. I also found a reference to the aforementioned Living Eels in a Roasted Pig (in a 1598 book by presumed mental patient Frantz de Rontzier), but have not located the recipe…as you may be relieved to hear. One thing you’ll find about reading medieval cookbooks is that our ancestors were without spell-check. Some of the recipes read as if someone decided against typing, and instead just banged his head on the keyboard. “Hagws of a schepe” is sheep stomach pudding—this becomes clearer if you sound out the words (“haggis of a sheep”). As spelling was not codified until after the 18th century, it’s a good bet to read medieval texts aloud, in order to understand what the heck they’re talking about. Another mouthful of a recipe, the preparation of which is certainly illegal and likely against the Geneva Convention, is “Purpays yn galanteyn.” That’s right, “porpoise in aspic.” If you read this aloud, you just might be able to follow it:

Take purpays: do away the skyn; cutt hit yn smal lechys no more then a fynger, or les. Take bred drawen wyth red wyne; put therto powder of canell, powdyr of pepyr. Boil hit; seson hit up with powder of gynger, venegre, & salt.

The recipes are Spartan, to say the least, and require much imagination to see how they come together, although they do tend to be explicit about how to kill the main ingredient. Take this one, for Jungen hirs horn, or Deer Antler Soup:

If you wish to prepare a good meal, take the antlers of a young stag, singe them until they are clean, boil them, chop them up, and add wine, honey, and gingerbread, and boil all the ingredients. Only the antler extract is important, and that is good.

Julia Child, eat your heart out. I’m also particularly partial to the last line of this recipe. From the original medieval German, I can’t tell if “that is good” is in praise of the dish, or a sigh of relief for the fact that “only the antler extract is important.” Another dish I found, but without a recipe, comes from a 1370 book called Viandier of Taillevent: Red Deer Testicles in Hunting Season. Were you to try to prepare this at home, delicious as it sounds, I’m not sure where I’d suggest you shop for ingredients. Does Trader Joe’s have a testicles aisle? Finally, there are also recipes that, while they may not involve hard-to-come-by ingredients, we might wish that they were harder to come by. Take Rupert de Nola’s 1529 recipe, from "Libro de Cozina," for…oh dear, I can’t believe I’m writing this… Roasted Cat.

Take a cat that should be plump and cut its throat, and once it is dead cut off its head, and throw it away, for this is not to be eaten; for it is said that he who eats the brains will lose his own sense and judgment. Then skin it very cleanly, and open it and clean it well, and then wrap it in a clean linen cloth and bury it in the earth, where it should remain for a day and a night. Then take it out and put it on a spit and roast it over the fire, and when beginning to roast, baste it with good garlic and oil, and when you are finished basting it, beat it well with a green branch; and this should be done until it is well roasted, basting and beating. And when it is roasted, carve it as if it were rabbit or kid [author’s note: once more, I’m hoping that Rupert de Nola refers to a baby goat not…well, you know…] and put it on a large plate. Take the garlic with oil mixed with good broth, so that it is coarse, and pour it over the cat, and you can eat it, for it is a good dish.

I like how it is dis-recommended to eat the cat’s head, but the rest makes for fine dining, particularly after it’s been buried underground for 24 hours. (Is that for flavor?) How about beating the roast with a green branch? I don’t remember any mention of that in "Jacques Pepin’s Cooking Techniques." I suppose we can’t blame our ancestors for eating what was available, when a quick trip to Whole Foods was not an option. Whether these recipes-by-necessity tasted good is another matter. Logic and morality have kept me from testing the majority of them. I have tried out some medieval recipes, those that did not involve cats, living eels or swan legs. They tend to be too sweet for modern tastes, and too muddled: that habit of throwing in more spices for the sake of show means that the main ingredients of a dish are hardly discernible. But of those I’ve tried, the peasant foods are the best, and the simplest: braised meat, stews, beans, potatoes, rye bread and red wine. The aristocracy can keep their recipes, like To Make a Chicken Sing When It is Dead and Roasted—a recipe that involves mercury, by the way, which is not part of the Food Pyramid. Maybe turkey and cranberry sauce is for the best, after all … Selected Bibliography Apicius "The Roman Cookery Book" (6th century) Black, Maggie "The Medieval Cookbook" Getty Publications, 2012 De Nola, Ruperto "Libro de Cozina" (1529) Markham, Gervase "The English Hous-wife" (1615) Scully, Terence "The Vivendier" (Devon: Prospect Books, 1997) Porta, Giambattista and Alessio Piemontese, "Magia Naturalis (Secrets of Nature," 1660) "The Viandier of Taillevent" (1370) "The Ambras Recipe" (Collection of Cod. Vind. 5486) ("Harleian MS 279," 15th century) ("MS Beinecke 163," 15th century) ("Curye on Inglysch," 14th century) http://www.katjaorlova.com/weird.htm http://www.godecookery.com/incrd/incrd.htmThanksgiving is a wonderful holiday, blessedly devoid of spirituality and denominational religion, just piles of food, family and football (followed by napping). But if the idea of another turkey, flanked by cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie, sounds ho-hum, consider what constituted the feasts of yore. Our ancestors used to eat some pretty crazy shit. It’s only a matter of time before a renegade chef opens a pop-up medieval food truck. But whether hipster consumers of wagyu and kale tacos are ready for Roasted Swan Legs, Deer Antler Soup and Porpoise in Aspic is a fair question. What are the socio-political repercussions of eating Grilled Womb (which is unlikely to appear on menus in red states, at least not in the months leading up to an election)? Even a passionate carnivore like Anthony Bourdain might have some moral qualms about dipping into a plate of Living Eels in a Roasted Pig. If you’ve got leftover deer testicles in the back of your fridge, then maybe it’s time to inject a bit of the Middle Ages into your Thanksgiving menu. Yes, some six centuries ago, these dishes were considered delicacies worth preserving in medieval cookbooks. Doubtless grandmothers, huddled around their soot-blackened kitchens, perhaps cackling maniacally out of their whisker-strewn maws, would lovingly instruct their granddaughters in the finer methods of preparing Roast Cat, or a cauldron full of boiling Garbage (the evocative appellation for chicken gizzard stew). Curious as to what was on the menu during those pesky Bubonic Plague epidemics, I began to research medieval and Renaissance cooking. It all began with a nice little book review assignment. I was to review "The Medieval Cookbook" by Maggie Black (Getty Publications, 2012) for the academic journal Gastronomica. The book takes authentic medieval recipes and updates them for the modern kitchen. The book is a fine one, but it did not satisfy my curiosity. To be frank, it was too normal. OK, even Getty Publications can’t expect Mary Jane from Minnesota to prepare Roasted Peacock. And so, the book contains recipes that are as close to what we, today, consider normal as possible. Sure, there are pottages (the old-fashioned word for a thick soup), buknades (an even thicker pottage, more like a stew), piment (spiced, sweetened wine), and civey (uh…also a stew). Some dishes and spice combos from the Middle Ages would be most welcome in the modern kitchen, and their preparation will almost certainly not result in incarceration (the same cannot be said for some of our other examples—I’m looking at you, Grilled Womb). Saffron and ginger play a far more central role in spicing medieval savory dishes than we would consider today, outside of Asian cuisine. Much of this was down to masking the taste of not-so-fresh meat, necessary before the invention of the Frigidaire. Likewise mace, cardamom, cinnamon and sugar were common additions to savory main courses, sweetness being broadly valued over other flavors. But two medieval staple spice mixes would find a home in any creative kitchen. Powder Forte is a mixture of ground cumin, black pepper and ginger, while Powder Douce combines ground coriander, cinnamon and brown sugar. Aside from unusual terms for things, many of the recipes from "The Medieval Cookbook" sound, well, normal. I mean, I can’t get too excited about cheese lasagna and roast pork, both of which are featured. I’m sure they are perfectly good, but when dipping into the foods of an exotic age, and in looking for historically accurate ways to spice up my Thanksgiving, I was hoping for more shock value. Beware what you wish for. My further research uncovered all manner of dishes that are either unadvisable, or in some cases illegal, to prepare today. Hold onto your dormouse stew… Before we begin, a word about diet in the pre-modern period. There was a widely accepted belief in pre-modern Europe that you had to eat according to the social class into which you were born. Eating above (or below) your station would make you ill, or even kill you. Aristocrats consumed creatures and vegetables associated with the air, the sky, lightness and whiteness. Their preferred proteins were fowl and white-fleshed fish. Nobles drank white wine, ate white bread and tree-growing fruit, chose veggies that grew aboveground, avoided root vegetables. Peasants, by contrast, ate things that were dark in color and associated with the earth: black bread (the old term for rye), black wine (the old term for red), root vegetables, beans, red meat, shellfish, porridges and stews thickened with grains. I’d take the peasant menu any day. While there is, of course, no genetic reason why Count von Frupingstein should only eat roasted swan legs and figs, while Fritz the Goat-Herd must dine on roast potatoes and mutton, there may have been a biological reason why the nobility stuck to its airy, white diet. If generations ate only within their dictated confines, then the aristocrats might have lost their enzymes to break down red meat, and therefore might well have felt ill, if they consumed what they were not used to. For the peasants, the question would be less about illness and more about cost. White wine was far more expensive than red, pure white bread more expensive than rye, and nice white fish pricier than lobster, mussels and eel. Eel, in fact, appears in medieval cooking with a frequency alarming to us moderns, because it was an inexpensive source of good protein. As a stock fish, eel could be farmed, and was often used in stews or other dishes in place of beef, which was pricey and harder to come by. Eel can be delicious when properly prepared (for example, in my favorite Japanese dish, unagi), but how about a platter of Living Eels in a Roast Pig? I’m not sure if that would be more traumatic for the diner or the eels, but either way, I’d steer clear of it. Unsurprisingly, it was the dishes of the aristocracy that were the most bizarre and fanciful, part nourishment and part entertainment. Medieval banquets were long-form affairs (the predecessors of the Slow Food Movement), often hours long. You would be given a number of courses relative to your social status, and might have to sit and watch the king eat his 13th exotic plate, while you’d only be given two. While writing a book on the great Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, I learned that van Eyck was responsible for the design of banquets at the 15th century court of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, creating dishes that were first thought of in terms of drama and aesthetics, with taste being a secondary concern. On the other hand, peasant food, which inevitably sounds far more appetizing, was about making the most of what was available, without the least concern for presentation. Peasants were satisfied with soups and stews, often thickened with grain and including whatever was available, from vegetables to scraps of meat: one-pot dishes that could gently bubble in a cauldron for hours on end, while a family went about their daily labors. Aristocrats, on the other hand, employed full-time cooks as well as occasional artists, like van Eyck, who would collaborate in the design of elaborate feasts to awe and delight important guests. Exotic ingredients and a heavy hand with spices were signs of wealth and erudition. Minimalist cooking it ain’t. If you could use 10 spices, why, that was five times better than using two. Ostentatious displays of wealth seem to have been prized over deliciousness. This makes reading about medieval cooking a good deal more fun than eating it. For many, the thought of medieval dining recalls “four and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie,” from the popular 18th century English nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” Fowl baked in a pie (with their feathers removed, but not deboned) was indeed a common banquet recipe. But according to the nursery rhyme, “When the pie was opened/The birds began to sing/Wasn’t that a dainty dish/To set before a king?” This, too, is on the money. Jan van Eyck was responsible for the design of a pie that housed a compartment for a live dove to hole up, so that the dove would fly out when the pie was (carefully) sliced open. The nursery rhyme describes a real recipe. You can imagine the macabre fun at medieval dinner parties, when live birds escape from their lightly browned crusty coffins, just before you slice the cooked portion of the pie and serve the birds’ less-fortunate cousins. In fact, the word “coffin” appears in medieval recipes as a synonym for pie crust. As Gervase Markham wrote in "The English Hous-wife" (1615): “that it may stand well for rising, your coffin must ever be deep.” That could mean so many things … This morbid undertone may be found throughout medieval cookery. Consider that the original lyrics for “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” in the 1740 first edition, read: “Sing a Song of Sixpence/A bagful of Rye/Four and twenty Naughty Boys/Baked in a Pye.” Hmm. There’s nothing quite so creepy as a traditional nursery rhyme, the lyrics of which we sing to sleepy babies, without stopping to think what we are saying. I mean, “Rock-a-bye baby on a tree top/When the wind blows the cradle will rock/When the bough breaks the cradle will fall/And down will come baby, cradle and all.” Huh? WTF?! Alas, the juxtaposition of cooked and living critters was considered enormously diverting by our ancestors. One book in particular rides the thin line between magic tricks and dinner (as well as nourishment and horrible taste). Giambattista della Porta’s 1660 tome, "Magia Naturalis (The Secrets of Nature)" contains a number of highly disconcerting recipes that, we can only hope, were largely theoretical. I quote from his description under the heading “To Cook a Live Goose” (skip this paragraph if you are faint of heart, or a member of the ASPCA):

Take the goose, pull off the feathers, make a fire about her, not too close for smoke to choke her, or burn her too soon, not too far off so she may escape. Put small cups of water with salt and honey ... also dishes of apple sauce. Baste goose with butter. She will drink water to relieve thirst, eat apples to cleanse and empty her of dung. Keep her head and heart wet with a sponge. When she gets giddy from running and begins to stumble, she is roasted enough. Take her up, set her before the guests; she will cry as you cut off any part and will be almost eaten before she is dead ... It is mighty pleasant to behold.

I think that old Giambattista and I have rather different opinions of what is “mighty pleasant to behold,” but reproduce his dish and you’re guaranteed to throw a Thanksgiving feast that your guests will remember forever. Perhaps waking up to the thought in a cold sweat, or rocking slowly back and forth on a therapist’s couch while recalling it. And to think of the fuss folks make these days about foie gras … Giambattista was also fond of illusionism, and offers us a recipe for a Roasted Peacock that looks alive (he’s assuming that this is somehow a bonus), and also appears to breathe fire. Kill a peacock, either by thrusting a quill into his brain from above, or else cut his throat, as you do for young kids [author’s note: I’m hoping that Giambattista meant baby goats], that the blood may come forth. Then cut his skin gently from his throat unto his tail and, being cut, pull it off with his feathers from his whole body to his head. Cut off that with the skin and legs, and keep it. Roast the peacock on a spit. His body being stuffed with spices and sweet herbs, sticking first cloves on his breast, and wrapping his neck in a white linen cloth. Wet it always with water, that it may never dry. When the peacock is roasted, and taken from the spit, put him into his own skin again, and that he may seem to stand upon his feet, you shall thrust small iron wires, made on purpose, through his legs, and set fast on a board, that they may not be discerned, and through his body to his head and tail. Some put camphire [a fragrant wood from which henna is derived] in his mouth, and when he is set upon the table, they cast in fire. Platina shows that the same may be done with pheasants, geese, capons, and other birds. And we observe these things among our guests. I also found a reference to the aforementioned Living Eels in a Roasted Pig (in a 1598 book by presumed mental patient Frantz de Rontzier), but have not located the recipe…as you may be relieved to hear. One thing you’ll find about reading medieval cookbooks is that our ancestors were without spell-check. Some of the recipes read as if someone decided against typing, and instead just banged his head on the keyboard. “Hagws of a schepe” is sheep stomach pudding—this becomes clearer if you sound out the words (“haggis of a sheep”). As spelling was not codified until after the 18th century, it’s a good bet to read medieval texts aloud, in order to understand what the heck they’re talking about. Another mouthful of a recipe, the preparation of which is certainly illegal and likely against the Geneva Convention, is “Purpays yn galanteyn.” That’s right, “porpoise in aspic.” If you read this aloud, you just might be able to follow it:

Take purpays: do away the skyn; cutt hit yn smal lechys no more then a fynger, or les. Take bred drawen wyth red wyne; put therto powder of canell, powdyr of pepyr. Boil hit; seson hit up with powder of gynger, venegre, & salt.

The recipes are Spartan, to say the least, and require much imagination to see how they come together, although they do tend to be explicit about how to kill the main ingredient. Take this one, for Jungen hirs horn, or Deer Antler Soup:

If you wish to prepare a good meal, take the antlers of a young stag, singe them until they are clean, boil them, chop them up, and add wine, honey, and gingerbread, and boil all the ingredients. Only the antler extract is important, and that is good.

Julia Child, eat your heart out. I’m also particularly partial to the last line of this recipe. From the original medieval German, I can’t tell if “that is good” is in praise of the dish, or a sigh of relief for the fact that “only the antler extract is important.” Another dish I found, but without a recipe, comes from a 1370 book called Viandier of Taillevent: Red Deer Testicles in Hunting Season. Were you to try to prepare this at home, delicious as it sounds, I’m not sure where I’d suggest you shop for ingredients. Does Trader Joe’s have a testicles aisle? Finally, there are also recipes that, while they may not involve hard-to-come-by ingredients, we might wish that they were harder to come by. Take Rupert de Nola’s 1529 recipe, from "Libro de Cozina," for…oh dear, I can’t believe I’m writing this… Roasted Cat.

Take a cat that should be plump and cut its throat, and once it is dead cut off its head, and throw it away, for this is not to be eaten; for it is said that he who eats the brains will lose his own sense and judgment. Then skin it very cleanly, and open it and clean it well, and then wrap it in a clean linen cloth and bury it in the earth, where it should remain for a day and a night. Then take it out and put it on a spit and roast it over the fire, and when beginning to roast, baste it with good garlic and oil, and when you are finished basting it, beat it well with a green branch; and this should be done until it is well roasted, basting and beating. And when it is roasted, carve it as if it were rabbit or kid [author’s note: once more, I’m hoping that Rupert de Nola refers to a baby goat not…well, you know…] and put it on a large plate. Take the garlic with oil mixed with good broth, so that it is coarse, and pour it over the cat, and you can eat it, for it is a good dish.

I like how it is dis-recommended to eat the cat’s head, but the rest makes for fine dining, particularly after it’s been buried underground for 24 hours. (Is that for flavor?) How about beating the roast with a green branch? I don’t remember any mention of that in "Jacques Pepin’s Cooking Techniques." I suppose we can’t blame our ancestors for eating what was available, when a quick trip to Whole Foods was not an option. Whether these recipes-by-necessity tasted good is another matter. Logic and morality have kept me from testing the majority of them. I have tried out some medieval recipes, those that did not involve cats, living eels or swan legs. They tend to be too sweet for modern tastes, and too muddled: that habit of throwing in more spices for the sake of show means that the main ingredients of a dish are hardly discernible. But of those I’ve tried, the peasant foods are the best, and the simplest: braised meat, stews, beans, potatoes, rye bread and red wine. The aristocracy can keep their recipes, like To Make a Chicken Sing When It is Dead and Roasted—a recipe that involves mercury, by the way, which is not part of the Food Pyramid. Maybe turkey and cranberry sauce is for the best, after all … Selected Bibliography Apicius "The Roman Cookery Book" (6th century) Black, Maggie "The Medieval Cookbook" Getty Publications, 2012 De Nola, Ruperto "Libro de Cozina" (1529) Markham, Gervase "The English Hous-wife" (1615) Scully, Terence "The Vivendier" (Devon: Prospect Books, 1997) Porta, Giambattista and Alessio Piemontese, "Magia Naturalis (Secrets of Nature," 1660) "The Viandier of Taillevent" (1370) "The Ambras Recipe" (Collection of Cod. Vind. 5486) ("Harleian MS 279," 15th century) ("MS Beinecke 163," 15th century) ("Curye on Inglysch," 14th century) http://www.katjaorlova.com/weird.htm http://www.godecookery.com/incrd/incrd.htm

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I f*cked a Republican on Thanksgiving

I met the man who would become by husband in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election. If I were more susceptible to omens, I might have looked at the timing as foreboding. We were -- and remain -- committed Democrats. We went on canvassing dates, waking up before dawn to drive the short distance across the border from the solid blue state where we attended graduate school to the decidedly undecided state next door whose electoral votes looked like they could be the difference between a continuation of the nightmare of the Bush administration and the installation of John Kerry, who seemed to us a worldly, experienced, honorable man.

My future husband was -- and is -- a kind and gentle person. He was studying Comparative Literature. My field at the time was European History. We met early in the semester and made each other feel deeply at ease. As the autumn wore on and the election grew closer we’d go canvassing or drinking with fellow-traveler friends and stagger back to my apartment for tired but affectionate sex. He was eager and lively and seemed to be enraptured by my body. It was all somewhat strange. I was coming off a series of punishing relationships and pseudo-relationships, loveless fuckfests with scholars of different fields, stripes, marital statuses. These relationships, if you could call them that, were volatile, often demoralizing, sometimes fun. I wasn’t a masochist, exactly, but there was something enlivening about low-level psychic pain. Genuine warmth, by contrast, left me bored and restless.

D., my future husband, worked hard to make me come in those early months, but often failed. He held me and I wrapped myself around him, feeling his disappointment, his self-reproach, his yawning sense of inadequacy. I promised again and again it wasn’t him or us but me. And in fact it wasn’t really me, per se. There were all sorts of proper nouns conspiring against him. There was Lexapro. Yasmin. And also, there was Dubya.

Sometimes, as we lay in bed in the increasingly chilly nights, we role-played our apocalyptic fantasies of what life would be like in a second Bush administration. My husband favored a scenario where a casus belli to declare war on Iran was dug up, leading to a wholesale destabilization of the Middle East and a series of increasingly painful terrorist attacks on the U.S.

I was more focused on life in Canada. Or Panama. Or New Zealand. Any other country that would have us -- tucked-tail liberals fearing a future of endless war and Judeo-Christian-fueled repression. A small city, I imagined, nothing so big as to attract terrorist attacks. He dwelled on the damage and I talked about our little house beyond the fallout zone. Grim as it may sound, it was actually very romantic. We understood a crucial bleakness in one another, the way others might bond over a sport or Russian cinema. We had a common relationship with doom that felt right.

There’s no need to rehash how the first Tuesday of that November turned out. We met at the house of a friend’s thesis adviser, someone who had once been a minor figure in the Carter administration, full of hope we both knew was hollow and false and had been swiftboated into oblivion before we even plopped down on the couch. D. and I left after Florida was called for Bush, a little before midnight. Did we really believe that our future, the country’s future, the future of the planet, had been plunged into desperate doubt by this one vote? Or were we indulging in a negative fantasy? 

The next morning we had perhaps the most vigorous sex we’ve ever had. He was angry, he was desperate, he fucked like he was looking for an answer inside of me for what had happened last night. He wasn't just aggressive, he was interrogating my body, which, without any solace to offer him, was only good for more punitive searching. I didn’t tell him to stop. He missed the class he TA’d. 

For the next few days, our couplings continued in this vein. He was more aggressive and adventurous than he’d ever been, and the fact that I played along only encouraged him, though I felt more defeated than aroused. When he was inside me, I was still thinking of Canada, imagining a flat in Montreal or a cottage on the Pacific coast of British Columbia. I began to think the relationship was doomed.

I told him spending Thanksgiving together, with either of our families, felt a little rushed, and he agreed. He went back to the East Coast to be with his parents. I, too broke to visit mine and, unwilling to hit them up for plane fare, got on a bus headed for the Chicago suburbs, where an aunt and uncle on my mom’s side had invited me for their big annual Thanksgiving gathering.

It’s an easy target for mocking, the Thanksgiving dinner. The ethically stunted, the politically abhorrent, the morally perplexing individuals we find ourselves sharing this meal with feel almost obligated to play their part. It’s odd that we’ve codified this behavior, turned it into a part of the ritual just like football and trampling strangers to death before dawn the next day for a cheap DVD player. At any dinner there is always someone who is going to offer an unsolicited opinion on what the country really needs, just between you and me. One year, Uncle So-and-So dropping n-bombs before we even reached the table. Another year, Dad’s Coworker X openly wishing “Monica [Lewinsky] had taken a big chomping bite.” As far as I knew these were people who, on a regular day, were garden variety Republicans. But the turkey and the assembling of bodies and the beginning of the seasonal cold activated something vicious in them.

My initial reaction to the buffoonery, by the time I was old enough to know what it was, was often disgust, and I can remember slinking away from the table as quickly as I could. Once I was in high school and began helping myself to a glass of wine like the grownups (it grew bigger each year), I found myself joining in the fray because why not. It was pointless debating but pointlessness seemed to be the point. Rebutting the stranger with a combover who believed that every Palestinian wanted to bomb Israel into the sea was more fun than sitting in my room alone, waiting for my friends to finish their dinners so we could smoke weak joints in the Target parking lot. I glared, they smirked. I rolled my eyes, they tut-tutted. And so on and so on. 

In a way, it was the reverse of the playacting I did later with the men I slept with and pretended to admire, men who might have been selfish douchebags or insensitive pricks, but who were at least progressive, enlightened, academy-educated insensitive pricks. They didn’t think twice about asking to come on my face but would call me a reactionary if I put on mascara. An English doctoral candidate whose dissertation was about Virginia Woolf and early postcolonial theory, a man who called himself a feminist whenever he got the chance, confided to me that he received blow jobs from about 80 different women per calendar year. His true passion, though, was to fuck redheads in the ass. The sociologist who talked me into a threesome with his best friend used an argument that included lots of hash and a discussion of communitarianism.

I was pulled toward these left-leaning dudes. We spoke a common language, shared a belief system, and, maybe most importantly, hated the same people for the same reasons. Nobody wants anything more from a romantic engagement than a reminder that she isn’t the only one who sees the world in a particular way.

But it was during the 2004 presidential campaign, just as I’d finally met the man who  would break my marathon of infatuations with lefty man-children, that one of my darkest, most deeply hidden secrets began making itself known to me. I’d see G.W. Bush on the campaign trail, smiling his witless smile, spouting unfiltered hollowness in his affected twang, looking halfway between a goon who wanted to see your tits outside a football game and the inquisitor who’d light the pyre at your auto da fe, and I knew… or, I knew without knowing. There was a dim, muted part of my brain that wanted to fuck him, that was tired of the skinny academics I took to bed. My fantasy was to fuck a Republican.

The conservative contingent at my aunt and uncle’s was smug on arrival and they wasted no time in expressing relief over the electoral disaster they had recently avoided. My mom’s sister could offer me little more solace and than an exaggerated eye roll and a quick, generous refill of my wine glass. Her sympathies were liberal but her passions were domestic. Her husband to this day openly questions our current president’s birthplace. I was very much on my own.

I drank, thought briefly about D., drank some more, noshed on almonds, tried to imagine what it would be like to engage in the kind of postgame congratulating the Dubya fans were going on with. They struck up an odd refrain. “There hasn’t been another 9/11.” They said it sincerely, repeatedly, with variants and personalizations. “He’s kept us safe from another 9/11.” “We will not have another 9/11 because he won and you can bank on it.” This statement or ones like it went on for so long that I began to wonder if they were actually commercials during the football game on TV.

It was an untruth that bred a communal euphoria. If you looked in at them from the outside, gathered on couches, repeating each other, growing glassy-eyed, you might have thought they were all on acid. I became deeply jealous and despondent.

At dinner I sat beside the only person remotely close to me in age, the son of some family friend or another who worked investment banking in New York but was in Chicago on business. His father, or his father’s friend, I couldn’t quite be sure, introduced him -- as though he were a 6-year-old incapable of performing the social motions on his own -- as Alex.

“Alexander, actually,” Alex-now-Alexander said.

“Alexander,” I said, shaking his hand. “Very formal. Very classical. I’m Penelope.” I tossed some spiced almonds into my mouth, tried to figure out which glass of Pinot Grigio on the table belonged to me, waited for a smile from Alexander that never came.

“Penelope,” he repeated flatly. “Nice to meet you.”

“So,” I said, “what are your feelings on the lack of another 9/11?” I hated that phrase, all hollow and devoid. Of course I was goading him but I couldn’t deny a small hope that a cogent – not a logical, not an undercutting, not a shared but just a cogent -- response might emerge.

He wouldn’t, or didn’t know how to, take the bait.

“Kerry was weak on national security. He was weak on foreign policy. He was weak on a lot of things.” He picked up his glass of wine and drank half of it down in a single gulp. “I think he was just weak.”

His hair was exactly the color of the liquid through the crystal. He had a dimple in his chin, wore a watch that if pawned could have probably fed me for a semester, and had a throat-clearing habit that grew less annoying as the minutes wore on. Though the room was warm with gas forced heat and the energy of my aunt’s high-end range, he was wearing what I believe is called a sports coat. When he sat, he sat with a straight back, elbows knocking at the boundaries of his place setting; he had a square jaw and wide shoulders and when he stood, he stood as though the sole point of standing were to take up space.

He held the carving board and asked if I’d like light meat or dark.

“Sorry,” I said. “Don’t eat meat.”

“Of course you don’t,” he said, and gave me just the slightest fraction of a smile. Looking back, it was the smile that did it, the boyish arrogance of it, the pulse of entitlement in his eyes.

I really hate this person, I thought, and yet once the bird had moved on I raised my glass and asked him to refill it.

For the next 75 minutes, we engaged in the sort of politely hostile, oddly revealing chatter that I imagine goes on between war criminals awaiting trial in The Hague. He was originally from San Diego but lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was engaged to a girl named Holly, a law student from Atlanta. He owned a condo and drove an Audi. His cultural apex was high-stakes poker games with other bankers with more money who lived on higher floors of nicer buildings than his. I told him about D. and about my research and he asked a few barbed but facile questions about the liberalization of the academy and the questionable market value of the humanities. I confided that a few people in my department had drifted a little too far to the left to be useful anymore, and that some of D.’s work was just confusing. I didn’t really mean any of it; it was all a mixture of exaggeration and lies. I was drunk. I realized I was saying things I knew Alexander wanted to hear. I kept up the self-denigration act, the total inverse of the Thanksgiving debates I’d had when I was younger, ceding my own points, my own beliefs, looking into Alexander’s cleanly shaven, lightly flushed face, bashing myself for his benefit. Would there ever be a better opportunity to so thoroughly exorcise my demon, to compromise myself so completely? As pie was passed around the table, he said something with just the right proportions of flirtation and snark: “You’re kind of cute for a hippie.” He put half a slice of pie in his mouth in a single bite, chewed, almost winked. “We should exchange email addresses or something.”

“I have a better idea,” I told him. “Why don’t you take me back to your hotel.”

I’ve never told anyone about the night that followed. Playing out a fantasy is a bit like trying to describe a dream. We were both drunk but the Chicago highways were empty on the holiday night. Alex was staying at a massive hotel on Michigan Avenue. He led me up to his room with a practiced assurance; it was very clear he had done this before.

If it had been D. I was with we would have reached the room, fallen together on the bed, inched and touched and kissed gradually toward sex. With Alexander that wasn’t how it would be. Before he could unlock the door I flattened myself against the hallway wall. He stood motionless for a second, then smiled slyly again. He shoved both of my shoulders against the wall and rammed his lips against mine. He forced his tongue into my mouth and I could taste the goopy, gelatinous residue of the turkey and gravy. So much the better. I spread my legs so he could finger me in the hallway. I thought I heard footsteps. Maybe the room next to his, maybe coming down the hall. I didn’t care.

Once in the room he gave me light but not-so-playful shove onto the bed, which I received without a fight. He stood over me, undoing his belt, pulling down his pants. The smile had faded into something more urgent. That was a bit of a disappointment. He asked if I had a condom.

“Don’t you?” I said.

He didn’t.

“Fuck it,” I said. God knew what frat house-incubated viruses were swimming around in him but at least I was on the pill. I pulled down his boxers. He was smaller than D. but I feigned surprise at his size. I turned around and lifted my ass into the air. I was giving myself to him. I was literally presenting. This was it. This was my chance to be fucked by everything vile and soulless and cruel that I’d built a life out of despising. The country was going to die, the world was going to burn, so why not let one of the apocalypse’s shock troops bang the shit out of me while the flames spread. He lifted up my skirt and yanked aside my panties. With one hand he pushed my face into the bed, with the other he guided himself in. I didn’t need to apologize to anyone, not D., not myself, not my ideals. All I wanted was to feel this current of consuming disgust. It swirled through my head, behind my eyes, between my legs. He thrust and I gasped.

The swirling died down. Everything did.

Reader, he came.

The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than 15 seconds. He mumbled something I couldn’t make out and scurried to the bathroom.

The demon that was exorcised that night turned out to be an insubstantial one, because he never returned. I think I’d imagined and feared that giving myself to such a man might unleash some awful darkness inside me, that I’d start throwing my face under the boot of every fascist I could find. But it didn’t. I realized that the face I’d been staring at that night at dinner wasn’t evil incarnate. It was just the face of a dude, a regular, flawed, entitled-as-hell but probably well-meaning dude whose worldview I happened to find gross. How did I think that fucking one person could expel all my feelings of disgust and rage and impotence, my feelings of helplessness living in a crazy fucking country that elected a man (twice) to its highest office, basically because it liked the way he looked in a cowboy hat? If I was going to expel those feelings, I was going to have to do a lot more than feel sorry for myself and fuck a Republican in a fit of self-pity.

Four years later, D. and I watched a genuinely decent (and quite hot) man celebrating his ascension to the White House with a fussy, gassy infant swaddled between us. A warmth spread over us, the three of us, a warmth that hasn't abated since -- though it has been spindled, balled up, cursed, thrown up on, screamed at, put in time-out, stormed out of the room, wept, needed hugs, needed conciliatory lollipops, conciliatory blow jobs -- a warmth that burns far hotter than any dark desire for something I hated. And I am thankful.

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The family that binge-watches together stays entertained together: 10 shows you can devour with the whole family this holiday weekend

Maybe you’ve got a house full of people of all ages, a food coma to nap off and a hankering for something other than football. Or, you’re binge-watching to avoid your family this holiday season, but you want to make sure you’re watching something that isn’t going to shock a 5- or 75-year-old who happens to wander into the room. Either way, the holidays are a good time to stock up on family-friendly programming. Here are 10 shows that are addictive, easy to find on streaming platforms and don’t require a “mature content” warning. “Bob’s Burgers” With four seasons in the bank and a fifth season currently airing, the animated Fox comedy “Bob’s Burgers” provides plenty of material to settle into. The show follows the Belcher family—mom, dad and three kids—as they attempt to keep their modest burger joint afloat and have some fun in the meantime. It’s a cartoon, but it’s not juvenile; “Bob’s Burgers” is one of the most sincere, funny and knowing comedies on television right now, complete with thoughtful family dynamics, pop-culture references and extremely funny one-off gags. It’s well worth your time—and it’s so bright and happy, you’ll want to watch episode after episode. Available on: Netflix has the first four seasons; Hulu has five episodes of the fifth. “Great British Baking Show” This smash hit is called “Great British Bake Off” in the United Kingdom, but because of a trademark run-in with Pillsbury, it’s rebranded stateside. Season one, as it’s available in the states, is actually the fifth year of the UK run—it looks like the show didn’t get acquired by American platforms until the sixth series, which just concluded, was so popular with British audiences that enthusiasm was leaking across the pond. Still, the 10 episodes of the only season available to us Americans are still incredibly addictive, as 12 bakers compete in an extremely polite and technical way to create an array of incredible baked goods—such as three tiers of savory pies, tiered sponge cakes, 36 identical mini-cakes and “self-saucing puddings,” a uniquely British form of torture. Available on: Netflix and Amazon Prime. “The X-Files” There’s never been a better time to get acquainted with “The X-Files,” with a new event series just around the corner. Though it has elements that might be too scary for very young kids, its aggressively ’90s special effects serve to make the monsters of the week more campy than terrifying. Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny are still marvelous as the two FBI agents trying to work through a cosmic puzzle or two, and their never-quite-resolved sexual tension means it’s engrossing without ever crossing into NSFW territory. With nine seasons in the bag, too, it’ll take quite a while to run out of new material. Available on: Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu. “I Love Lucy” It might be black-and-white, but “I Love Lucy,” starring comedy titan Lucille Ball in the title role, is timeless. There are 102 episodes of the classic sitcom to get through, and Ball’s facial expressions, opposite Desi Arnaz’s trilled “Luuucy,” are enough to stop any familial political dispute in its tracks. Available on: Hulu and Amazon Prime. “Steven Universe” Rebecca Sugar’s—formerly of “Adventure Time”—latest creation for Cartoon Network might seem like a kids’ show, but the program, with its 15-minute bursts of joy, is just as enjoyable for adults. “Steven Universe” is a colorful, musical affair—but underneath is a surprisingly moving emotional drama about a boy whose mother gave her life for him, and the makeshift family that has formed around him since. Because it is has such short episode lengths, it’s one of the most bingeable shows out there; but don’t worry, there's a solid 52 installments in just the first season. Available on: Hulu has season one. (But heads-up: It’s way more fun to watch with Hulu’s ad-free plan; the episodes are so short that a commercial on each end is almost as long as the episode itself.) “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” This comedy comes from the creators of “Parks And Recreation” and “The Office,” meaning it has some predictable delights and some entirely new ones. It has the same style—an ensemble workplace comedy with slapstick and charm—but with the exception of season two of “The Office,” it demonstrates more consistency and confidence than either. Lead actors Andy Samberg and Andre Braugher play off of each other brilliantly, and the ensemble quickly fills out to be a fun array of personalities, each with their own quirks and hang-ups. Very easy to watch, and very easy to watch a lot of, too. Available on: Hulu. “MasterChef Junior” Similar to my earlier recommendation, “Great British Baking Show,” one of the reasons “MasterChef Junior” is so fun to watch is because it’s completely unlike any other competition cooking show—your “Top Chefs," your “Hell’s Kitchens," your “Choppeds." With “MasterChef Junior,” the difference is that the contestants are all from the ages of 8 to 13, and as a result, the competition takes on a completely different flavor. Eleven-year-olds ice multi-tiered cakes and 9-year-olds construct beef Wellingtons, with a side of broccolini and mashed potatoes. It makes for kind of astounding viewing. Added to that, Gordon Ramsay—normally a tyrant with his adult contestants—is a pussycat around the kids, helping them with their work and giving them measured words of encouragement. Plus, as the seasons are quite short—two kids are eliminated each episode, so as to not keep kids cooped up in a weird competition environment for too long—the episodes just fly by. Available on: Seasons two and three are available on Hulu. “The Flash” This superpowered show from the CW has a distinctly teenage vibe, as almost all of its leads are high schoolers with various degrees of romantic interest in each other. But this imagining of Barry Allen’s origin story to become the fastest man on earth, the Flash, is a high school show with a dollop of the supernatural—“Buffy: The Vampire Slayer,” except not quite so snarky and dark. Instead of crucifixes, “The Flash” leans on the charm of its lead, Grant Gustin, who brings a seemingly inextinguishable smile and an earnest tilt of the head to every lightning-fast plot twist in Central City. “The Flash” requires some willing suspension of disbelief, but it has a lot of heart—and glorious, orange-red special effects. Available on: Season one is on Netflix; new episodes from season two are on Hulu. “Last Tango in Halifax” This British import is about a late-in-life romance between two long-estranged childhood sweethearts, both widowed, who find each other again on the Internet. It’s sweet for how simply and honestly the two—played by Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid—fall in love with each other, and fascinating for how their middle-aged daughters and extended families end up creating all sorts of problems for them. If you’re watching TV with older relatives, this could hit the jackpot—a little tea-cozy drama about family, aging, and reconnection, with a touch of wit thrown in, too. Available on: Netflix. “Raising Hope” This sitcom was easy to overlook when it was on the air, but the charming comedy about a dysfunctional family trying to raise an unexpected newborn has its own brand of slightly inappropriate humor. Not exactly bawdy; more like a propensity for poop jokes. In an era of a lot of great cutting-edge comedies, “Raising Hope” was aiming to be an offbeat family comedy; the leads, including Martha Plimpton, Garret Dillahunt, and Cloris Leachman, often were keyed to hillbilly comic relief. With its baby and grandma and great-grandma humor, though, it’s an all-inclusive sitcom for the holidays. Available on: NetflixMaybe you’ve got a house full of people of all ages, a food coma to nap off and a hankering for something other than football. Or, you’re binge-watching to avoid your family this holiday season, but you want to make sure you’re watching something that isn’t going to shock a 5- or 75-year-old who happens to wander into the room. Either way, the holidays are a good time to stock up on family-friendly programming. Here are 10 shows that are addictive, easy to find on streaming platforms and don’t require a “mature content” warning. “Bob’s Burgers” With four seasons in the bank and a fifth season currently airing, the animated Fox comedy “Bob’s Burgers” provides plenty of material to settle into. The show follows the Belcher family—mom, dad and three kids—as they attempt to keep their modest burger joint afloat and have some fun in the meantime. It’s a cartoon, but it’s not juvenile; “Bob’s Burgers” is one of the most sincere, funny and knowing comedies on television right now, complete with thoughtful family dynamics, pop-culture references and extremely funny one-off gags. It’s well worth your time—and it’s so bright and happy, you’ll want to watch episode after episode. Available on: Netflix has the first four seasons; Hulu has five episodes of the fifth. “Great British Baking Show” This smash hit is called “Great British Bake Off” in the United Kingdom, but because of a trademark run-in with Pillsbury, it’s rebranded stateside. Season one, as it’s available in the states, is actually the fifth year of the UK run—it looks like the show didn’t get acquired by American platforms until the sixth series, which just concluded, was so popular with British audiences that enthusiasm was leaking across the pond. Still, the 10 episodes of the only season available to us Americans are still incredibly addictive, as 12 bakers compete in an extremely polite and technical way to create an array of incredible baked goods—such as three tiers of savory pies, tiered sponge cakes, 36 identical mini-cakes and “self-saucing puddings,” a uniquely British form of torture. Available on: Netflix and Amazon Prime. “The X-Files” There’s never been a better time to get acquainted with “The X-Files,” with a new event series just around the corner. Though it has elements that might be too scary for very young kids, its aggressively ’90s special effects serve to make the monsters of the week more campy than terrifying. Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny are still marvelous as the two FBI agents trying to work through a cosmic puzzle or two, and their never-quite-resolved sexual tension means it’s engrossing without ever crossing into NSFW territory. With nine seasons in the bag, too, it’ll take quite a while to run out of new material. Available on: Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu. “I Love Lucy” It might be black-and-white, but “I Love Lucy,” starring comedy titan Lucille Ball in the title role, is timeless. There are 102 episodes of the classic sitcom to get through, and Ball’s facial expressions, opposite Desi Arnaz’s trilled “Luuucy,” are enough to stop any familial political dispute in its tracks. Available on: Hulu and Amazon Prime. “Steven Universe” Rebecca Sugar’s—formerly of “Adventure Time”—latest creation for Cartoon Network might seem like a kids’ show, but the program, with its 15-minute bursts of joy, is just as enjoyable for adults. “Steven Universe” is a colorful, musical affair—but underneath is a surprisingly moving emotional drama about a boy whose mother gave her life for him, and the makeshift family that has formed around him since. Because it is has such short episode lengths, it’s one of the most bingeable shows out there; but don’t worry, there's a solid 52 installments in just the first season. Available on: Hulu has season one. (But heads-up: It’s way more fun to watch with Hulu’s ad-free plan; the episodes are so short that a commercial on each end is almost as long as the episode itself.) “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” This comedy comes from the creators of “Parks And Recreation” and “The Office,” meaning it has some predictable delights and some entirely new ones. It has the same style—an ensemble workplace comedy with slapstick and charm—but with the exception of season two of “The Office,” it demonstrates more consistency and confidence than either. Lead actors Andy Samberg and Andre Braugher play off of each other brilliantly, and the ensemble quickly fills out to be a fun array of personalities, each with their own quirks and hang-ups. Very easy to watch, and very easy to watch a lot of, too. Available on: Hulu. “MasterChef Junior” Similar to my earlier recommendation, “Great British Baking Show,” one of the reasons “MasterChef Junior” is so fun to watch is because it’s completely unlike any other competition cooking show—your “Top Chefs," your “Hell’s Kitchens," your “Choppeds." With “MasterChef Junior,” the difference is that the contestants are all from the ages of 8 to 13, and as a result, the competition takes on a completely different flavor. Eleven-year-olds ice multi-tiered cakes and 9-year-olds construct beef Wellingtons, with a side of broccolini and mashed potatoes. It makes for kind of astounding viewing. Added to that, Gordon Ramsay—normally a tyrant with his adult contestants—is a pussycat around the kids, helping them with their work and giving them measured words of encouragement. Plus, as the seasons are quite short—two kids are eliminated each episode, so as to not keep kids cooped up in a weird competition environment for too long—the episodes just fly by. Available on: Seasons two and three are available on Hulu. “The Flash” This superpowered show from the CW has a distinctly teenage vibe, as almost all of its leads are high schoolers with various degrees of romantic interest in each other. But this imagining of Barry Allen’s origin story to become the fastest man on earth, the Flash, is a high school show with a dollop of the supernatural—“Buffy: The Vampire Slayer,” except not quite so snarky and dark. Instead of crucifixes, “The Flash” leans on the charm of its lead, Grant Gustin, who brings a seemingly inextinguishable smile and an earnest tilt of the head to every lightning-fast plot twist in Central City. “The Flash” requires some willing suspension of disbelief, but it has a lot of heart—and glorious, orange-red special effects. Available on: Season one is on Netflix; new episodes from season two are on Hulu. “Last Tango in Halifax” This British import is about a late-in-life romance between two long-estranged childhood sweethearts, both widowed, who find each other again on the Internet. It’s sweet for how simply and honestly the two—played by Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid—fall in love with each other, and fascinating for how their middle-aged daughters and extended families end up creating all sorts of problems for them. If you’re watching TV with older relatives, this could hit the jackpot—a little tea-cozy drama about family, aging, and reconnection, with a touch of wit thrown in, too. Available on: Netflix. “Raising Hope” This sitcom was easy to overlook when it was on the air, but the charming comedy about a dysfunctional family trying to raise an unexpected newborn has its own brand of slightly inappropriate humor. Not exactly bawdy; more like a propensity for poop jokes. In an era of a lot of great cutting-edge comedies, “Raising Hope” was aiming to be an offbeat family comedy; the leads, including Martha Plimpton, Garret Dillahunt, and Cloris Leachman, often were keyed to hillbilly comic relief. With its baby and grandma and great-grandma humor, though, it’s an all-inclusive sitcom for the holidays. Available on: Netflix

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“Carol” isn’t just a “lesbian movie”: Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara’s ’50s love story is a classic American screen romance

From its opening shots of the autumnal, rain-swept streets of New York sometime in the middle of the last century, director Todd Haynes’ magnificent new film “Carol” establishes a mood of mournful romance, half nostalgic and half ominous, that never lets go. We move out of the streets and into an upscale hotel bar, following a young man who turns out to be such an insignificant character we never learn his name. We observe the scene partly from his point of view as he orders a drink, buys one from the bartender and then sees a girl he knows across the room. If he has a tiny flicker of intuition or understanding about the nature of the liaison between his friend, Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), and her cocktail companion, Mrs. Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), it never gets all the way to his conscious mind. We know what that guy doesn’t, of course, since everyone who sees “Carol” will understand that it’s a story about a lesbian love affair in an era when such things were shameful and scandalous. But Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy (adapting Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Price of Salt”) are fully in control, manipulating what we know and think we know and what we notice, including the way Carol leaves her hand on Therese’s shoulder a half-second too long when she says goodbye. When we see the same scene again, later in the film (in a completely different sequence of shots), we will understand that we were nearly as much in the dark as Mr. Clueless Cheerful. We were congratulating ourselves for our attitude of tolerance and our clear perception, but in fact we had no idea what was going on in that meeting between Carol and Therese, or what had precipitated it or how it would change the rest of their lives. “Carol” is such a moving film and such a beautiful film, which demonstrates in a thousand ways why cinema (however moribund or irrelevant it may appear) is not television, that I am reluctant to privilege any particular element of its construction. Maybe I can start by saying that this the masterpiece Todd Haynes has been working toward, after a series of admirably crafted films that have all felt a touch too mannered or detached. But that’s not nearly enough, given Haynes’ reputation as an ultra-indie auteur or special-interest LGBT artist. So let’s try this: “Carol” is one of the greatest American screen romances of any era, period – and perhaps that serves as the ultimate vindication of Haynes’ outspoken commitment to “queer cinema.” Of course it’s not irrelevant that the protagonists in this love affair are two women, and of course there are political and social issues at stake here. But “Carol” does not work by engaging your tolerance or your compassion or your political sympathies. It works by seducing you and enrapturing you and enraging you and sweeping you away, as do “Romeo and Juliet” or “Casablanca” or “Before Sunrise.” (Despite its period setting, “Carol” is not overloaded with film-school references, but there were moments when I could feel the undertow of “Roman Holiday” and David Lean’s “Brief Encounter” and Martin Scorsese’s underappreciated “The Age of Innocence.”) If you feel the need to discuss this movie in terms of its representational politics, or its depiction of both social and internalized homophobia – well, what can I say? Those issues are in there, and those discussions are inevitable. I guess I’ll just play the role of the guy wearing an old cardigan with leather patches on the sleeves, who pisses you off by suggesting that you’re missing the point. If there is an overriding technical quality I perceive in “Carol,” beyond the dazzling yet restrained performances of Blanchett and Mara, and the fact that it is gorgeous beyond description and will break your heart, that would be its quality of attentiveness. Haynes and his production team pay attention to the smallest details: the construction and lettering of internal department-store signage circa 1952 (those free-standing steel frames!), or the tyrannical but frustrated demeanor of a floor manager in that era of full employment, or even over-employment. I especially like the guy whose job is to hand out Santa hats to Therese and her fellow employees as they enter the fictional B-plus store that isn’t quite Macy’s or Gimbels (it might be Wanamaker’s or the May Co. or Abraham & Straus), while muttering “Season's greetings, compliments of the management” in a Bronxian monotone. I won’t insult Blanchett’s eye-popping wardrobe, in her role as a rich suburban housewife and barely closeted lesbian, as a minor detail; Carol’s oversized mink coat and painstakingly sculpted suits are more like characters unto themselves, or powerful natural forces shaping the future of the world. It would have been incredibly easy for Haynes or Nagy to overplay the imprisoning quality of Carol’s life in New Jersey horse country, or to make her cuckolded husband into a cartoon 1950s villain. But Carol always sees herself as a woman in charge of her own life (even if she’s not always right about that), and her husband, blessed with the unlikely but perfect name of Harge (Kyle Chandler), is angry and confused but not entirely hateful. We can feel Harge’s pain, up to a point: He played football at Yale or Princeton, pulls down the big bucks on Wall Street, and rather enjoyed marrying a free spirit who made his old-money parents uneasy. At least until the precise nature of her free spirit became clear. I’ve seen “Carol” twice now, and there are a few shot sequences – Carol and Therese’s first meeting, amid the Christmas retail rush, or the beginning of the road trip they take together – that I could watch a dozen times through. Cinematographer Edward Lachman, who has been making movies for 40 years while somehow avoiding widespread recognition as one of the living masters of his craft, outdoes himself here with one spectacular image after another. Working in what I believe is old-school Super 16 film (with Haynes and editor Affonso Gonçalves guiding and shaping the results), Lachman captures the luminous love affair between the faintly predatory rich lady and the virginal shopgirl with an almost religious intensity, painting in space and backward and forward in time. As in Haynes’ 2003 interracial romance “Far from Heaven” – an obvious companion piece to this movie, and the source of Lachman’s only Oscar nomination – there are hints of European-style experimentation, but never enough to pull us out of the story. You will notice by now that I’ve circled around the obvious focal points of “Carol.” All I can really say about Blanchett and Mara in this movie is that they both destroyed me in completely different ways, and that as memorable as they have been in other roles, I didn’t know either of them could do what they do here. If Carol is in some respects a mannered and exaggerated character – a beautiful woman playing the role of a beautiful woman, to calculated effect – she is vastly more convincing and more controlled than the Blanche DuBois nightmare that won Blanchett an Oscar in “Blue Jasmine.” As Carol observes several times, Therese is like a creature from another planet, an innocent trying things out with little understanding of what human society considers right or wrong. She orders whatever Carol orders in restaurants, like someone who has never seen a menu or cannot read one. Therese fails to see why falling in love with Carol should be categorically distinct from falling in love with a boy; if her upright posture, trans-Atlantic diction and newly hatched quality suggest Audrey Hepburn’s renegade princess in “Roman Holiday,” that may not be accidental. I don’t want to spoil all the moments of delicate wit in Nagy’s screenplay, when Therese and Carol circle toward each other gradually, each knowing what she wants but not quite knowing how to get there. Their dialogue often or always carries multiple layers of meaning, as the conversations of people strongly attracted to each other often do: In discussing music or photography or family, they move ever closer to the central subject. Indeed, “Carol” works that way in general, acting simultaneously on the brain, the heart, the eyes and the ears. I haven’t yet mentioned Carter Burwell’s haunting score, which sets the mood by bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Schubert, Duke Ellington and Philip Glass. Or the perfectly pitched supporting performance by Sarah Paulson as Carol’s slightly embittered ex-lover. There are quite a few longer and more overtly ambitious releases still to come in the overcrowded ritual of Oscar season, and if I had to guess I would say that the artistic restraint and period setting of “Carol” will operate against it. (“Spotlight” remains the leading best-picture candidate, and no one outside the movie biz has yet seen David O. Russell’s “Joy” or Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “The Revenant” or Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight.”) Much as I would love to see Haynes, Nagy, Blanchett, Mara and Lachman showered with awards for this amazing combination of classic Hollywood romance and 21st-century artistic sensibility, that’s ultimately not the point. “Carol” is a landmark in American movie history, and will endure, I suspect, after most or all of those movies have faded away.

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12 best dinner table scenes on film: From the Griswolds to the Deetzes, here are Hollywood’s most memorable meals

When my family gets together for Thanksgiving, my twin and I always race to quote our favorite line from “Night Shift”: “Turkey’s almost dead!” It’s as much a ritual as carving the bird. As families gather around the table this holiday season, films that depict dinner scenes always come to mind. Sure there are some great dysfunctional family Thanksgiving comedies, from “Pieces of April” to “Home for the Holidays,” but even non-holiday-meal films are invoked. Consider in the awkward social comedy “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” or the broader farce, “Meet the Parents,” about meeting one’s partner’s parents for the first time. Many films use dinner table scenes to inform audiences of the relationships between characters—note how the table in “Citizen Kane” gets longer as the couple gets more estranged, or how truly unsettling the meal is in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Here (in alphabetical order) are a dozen classic cinematic dinner table scenes featuring various celebrations. Oh, and another word of advice from my twin and me and a classic comedy: Don’t be late to dinner or we’ll quote Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman) from “High Anxiety,” who insists, “Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup!” “American Beauty” Sam Mendes’ film may not deserve the Oscar it won for Best Picture, but it does feature a fantastic dinner table scene. Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey in an Oscar-winning performance) announces to his daughter Jane (Thora Birch) that he quit his job. His wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) gets riled up by this news, and the burden of having to be the family’s sole breadwinner. But her rage is nothing compared to Lester’s delicious outburst when he simply wants someone to please pass him the fucking asparagus. And don’t interrupt Lester, either. “Annie Hall” Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) visits his titular girlfriend’s family for Easter dinner in this classic Best Picture-winning comedy. From the "dynamite ham" served to Grammy Hall, looking at Alvy as if he were a Hasidim, Alvy is in disbelief. He even stops the meal to directly address the audience and illustrate the differences between the Singer family and the Halls. It’s a hilarious split screen comparison: her family’s table talk concerns swap meets; his parents boisterously discuss diabetes. “Annie Hall” is the ne plus ultra of gefilte-fish-out-of-water dinners. “Avalon” Barry Levinson’s knowing drama about a Polish-Jewish family in Baltimore features a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner scene. At one point, a young boy being served his meal complains about the food touching on the plate. It is a scene out of every household during the holidays. But the real drama begins when Gabriel Krichinsky (Lou Jacobi) arrives late to dinner and storms out screaming, “You cut the turkey without me!” While others acknowledge Gabriel does this routine every year, the scene shows just how high-strung families can get. Levinson actually goes this scene one better later in “Avalon,” as when a camera pan shows the family eating in front of the TV rather than congregating in the living room, a sign of how detached families have becomes over the years. “Babette’s Feast” The exquisite feast served in this exquisite Danish film (which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) consists of turtle soup, stuffed quail in puff pastry (“cailles en sarcophage”), and other delicacies. The food is washed down with Clos de Vougeot 1845 and Vueve Cliquot 1860. Babette (Stéphane Audran) spends 10,000 francs she won in a lottery on “a real French dinner,” recreating a meal fro 12 from the Cafí Anglais. But the irony is that her cooking is only truly appreciated by one guest, General Löwenhielm (Jarle Kulle). While the meal does have a transformative effect on all of the diners, it also shows the sacrifice Babette makes to please the Danish sisters who took her in, and ultimately, Babette’s joy in serving such a unique and fabulous meal. “Beetlejuice” If you are going to have a dinner party, you'd better makes sure there are no ghosts in the house making mischief. When host Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara) unexpectedly interrupts her meal to break out into a spirited version of “The Banana Boat Song,” everyone eventually joins in. One guest even uses the ice bucket as a bongo. While their singing at the table may be what causes the food in “Beetlejuice” to act out and attack the dinner guests, if there are ghosts in the house, rebellious food is likely the lesser problem. “The Celebration” While most family celebrations are happy occasions, this lacerating Danish film, shot in the Dogme style, about Helge’s (Henning Moritzen) 60th birthday party, shows just how unhappy families can be. Eldest son Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) delivers a doozy of a toast, full of “home truths,” that shocks everyone. Sure, the anecdote about how he and his late sister Linda would put things in people’s food without their noticing is amusing, but the bit about dad taking baths and then taking Linda and Christain into his study to sexually abuse and rape them might just put folks off their meal. “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover” Peter Greenaway delivers the ultimate “theme” restaurant as the characters’ clothes in this visually opulent film change to match the color of the room they are in. (Red in the dining room, white in the bathroom, etc.) The story of adultery, murder, gluttony and revenge concerns a nasty gangster, Albert Spica (Michael Gambon), his cheating wife Georgina (Helen Mirren), her unfortunate lover Michael (Alan Howard), and the cook, Richard (Richard Bohringer) who prepares their meal(s). The film famously ends with—and perhaps earned its NC-17 rating for—a scene in which Richard serves Albert Michael’s dead body, and Georgina encourages him to eat the corpse’s cooked cock. Getting his just desserts, Albert is called a cannibal. “Eat Drink Man Woman” Ang Lee’s mouth-watering opening scene of a meal being prepared sets the appropriate tone for this poignant film about Master Chef Chu (Sihung Lung) and his three grown daughters. The family gathers around the table for dinner every Sunday. Whenever they get together, however, someone always seems to have an announcement that causes everyone else to go into a tailspin. In one of the film’s most ironic scenes, Chu, whose taste buds are failing, prepares a gorgeous meal that everyone refuses to eat. “Eraserhead” The chicken dinner in David Lynch’s deadpan debut is truly memorable. There is a strange conversation about a numb arm, and the chicken’s animated response to being cut up is that cooked birds fidget and bleed. The bizarre behavior by one of the other guests at the table prompts the comment, “She’ll be alright in a minute.” But will she, really? Lynch prepares a real surreal meal. “Like Water for Chocolate” Proving the magic properties of food, this romantic Mexican film uses magical realism and a dish of quail with rose petals to cause Pedro (Marco Leonardi) and Tita (Lumi Cavazos) to fall passionately in love. The alchemical phenomenon of Tita’s blood that permeates the sauce “invades” Pedro’s body in a sensual way. “The nectar of the gods!” Pedro exclaims at dinner, feeling passionate. However, Tita’s disapproving mother (Regina Torné) thinks the dish is much too salty. “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” It’s a sure thing that things will go badly for the Griswolds, but the film’s Christmas dinner table scene is pretty funny. Not only does Aunt Bethany (Mae Questel) have an interesting interpretation of saying grace, but the turkey is so dry it deflates. (The extended family politely chokes it down anyway.) There are other awkward moments involving Uncle Eddie (Randy Quaid) or the family pets, which are either really amusing or really disgusting, depending on one’s taste. “Tom Jones” This adaptation of Henry Fielding’s picaresque novel features one of the most famous eating scenes in all of movie history. When Tom (Albert Finney) and Mrs. Waters (Joyce Redman) share a meal, they practically seduce each other at the table. Director Tony Richardson conveys all the erotic properties of food as Finney looks lustily at both his meal and his dining companion while they ravish a chicken leg and each other. “Tom Jones” proves that slurping an oyster is ideal foreplay. The characters don’t say a word to one another, but their body language and their hungry tongues express it all.When my family gets together for Thanksgiving, my twin and I always race to quote our favorite line from “Night Shift”: “Turkey’s almost dead!” It’s as much a ritual as carving the bird. As families gather around the table this holiday season, films that depict dinner scenes always come to mind. Sure there are some great dysfunctional family Thanksgiving comedies, from “Pieces of April” to “Home for the Holidays,” but even non-holiday-meal films are invoked. Consider in the awkward social comedy “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” or the broader farce, “Meet the Parents,” about meeting one’s partner’s parents for the first time. Many films use dinner table scenes to inform audiences of the relationships between characters—note how the table in “Citizen Kane” gets longer as the couple gets more estranged, or how truly unsettling the meal is in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Here (in alphabetical order) are a dozen classic cinematic dinner table scenes featuring various celebrations. Oh, and another word of advice from my twin and me and a classic comedy: Don’t be late to dinner or we’ll quote Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman) from “High Anxiety,” who insists, “Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup!” “American Beauty” Sam Mendes’ film may not deserve the Oscar it won for Best Picture, but it does feature a fantastic dinner table scene. Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey in an Oscar-winning performance) announces to his daughter Jane (Thora Birch) that he quit his job. His wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) gets riled up by this news, and the burden of having to be the family’s sole breadwinner. But her rage is nothing compared to Lester’s delicious outburst when he simply wants someone to please pass him the fucking asparagus. And don’t interrupt Lester, either. “Annie Hall” Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) visits his titular girlfriend’s family for Easter dinner in this classic Best Picture-winning comedy. From the "dynamite ham" served to Grammy Hall, looking at Alvy as if he were a Hasidim, Alvy is in disbelief. He even stops the meal to directly address the audience and illustrate the differences between the Singer family and the Halls. It’s a hilarious split screen comparison: her family’s table talk concerns swap meets; his parents boisterously discuss diabetes. “Annie Hall” is the ne plus ultra of gefilte-fish-out-of-water dinners. “Avalon” Barry Levinson’s knowing drama about a Polish-Jewish family in Baltimore features a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner scene. At one point, a young boy being served his meal complains about the food touching on the plate. It is a scene out of every household during the holidays. But the real drama begins when Gabriel Krichinsky (Lou Jacobi) arrives late to dinner and storms out screaming, “You cut the turkey without me!” While others acknowledge Gabriel does this routine every year, the scene shows just how high-strung families can get. Levinson actually goes this scene one better later in “Avalon,” as when a camera pan shows the family eating in front of the TV rather than congregating in the living room, a sign of how detached families have becomes over the years. “Babette’s Feast” The exquisite feast served in this exquisite Danish film (which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) consists of turtle soup, stuffed quail in puff pastry (“cailles en sarcophage”), and other delicacies. The food is washed down with Clos de Vougeot 1845 and Vueve Cliquot 1860. Babette (Stéphane Audran) spends 10,000 francs she won in a lottery on “a real French dinner,” recreating a meal fro 12 from the Cafí Anglais. But the irony is that her cooking is only truly appreciated by one guest, General Löwenhielm (Jarle Kulle). While the meal does have a transformative effect on all of the diners, it also shows the sacrifice Babette makes to please the Danish sisters who took her in, and ultimately, Babette’s joy in serving such a unique and fabulous meal. “Beetlejuice” If you are going to have a dinner party, you'd better makes sure there are no ghosts in the house making mischief. When host Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara) unexpectedly interrupts her meal to break out into a spirited version of “The Banana Boat Song,” everyone eventually joins in. One guest even uses the ice bucket as a bongo. While their singing at the table may be what causes the food in “Beetlejuice” to act out and attack the dinner guests, if there are ghosts in the house, rebellious food is likely the lesser problem. “The Celebration” While most family celebrations are happy occasions, this lacerating Danish film, shot in the Dogme style, about Helge’s (Henning Moritzen) 60th birthday party, shows just how unhappy families can be. Eldest son Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) delivers a doozy of a toast, full of “home truths,” that shocks everyone. Sure, the anecdote about how he and his late sister Linda would put things in people’s food without their noticing is amusing, but the bit about dad taking baths and then taking Linda and Christain into his study to sexually abuse and rape them might just put folks off their meal. “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover” Peter Greenaway delivers the ultimate “theme” restaurant as the characters’ clothes in this visually opulent film change to match the color of the room they are in. (Red in the dining room, white in the bathroom, etc.) The story of adultery, murder, gluttony and revenge concerns a nasty gangster, Albert Spica (Michael Gambon), his cheating wife Georgina (Helen Mirren), her unfortunate lover Michael (Alan Howard), and the cook, Richard (Richard Bohringer) who prepares their meal(s). The film famously ends with—and perhaps earned its NC-17 rating for—a scene in which Richard serves Albert Michael’s dead body, and Georgina encourages him to eat the corpse’s cooked cock. Getting his just desserts, Albert is called a cannibal. “Eat Drink Man Woman” Ang Lee’s mouth-watering opening scene of a meal being prepared sets the appropriate tone for this poignant film about Master Chef Chu (Sihung Lung) and his three grown daughters. The family gathers around the table for dinner every Sunday. Whenever they get together, however, someone always seems to have an announcement that causes everyone else to go into a tailspin. In one of the film’s most ironic scenes, Chu, whose taste buds are failing, prepares a gorgeous meal that everyone refuses to eat. “Eraserhead” The chicken dinner in David Lynch’s deadpan debut is truly memorable. There is a strange conversation about a numb arm, and the chicken’s animated response to being cut up is that cooked birds fidget and bleed. The bizarre behavior by one of the other guests at the table prompts the comment, “She’ll be alright in a minute.” But will she, really? Lynch prepares a real surreal meal. “Like Water for Chocolate” Proving the magic properties of food, this romantic Mexican film uses magical realism and a dish of quail with rose petals to cause Pedro (Marco Leonardi) and Tita (Lumi Cavazos) to fall passionately in love. The alchemical phenomenon of Tita’s blood that permeates the sauce “invades” Pedro’s body in a sensual way. “The nectar of the gods!” Pedro exclaims at dinner, feeling passionate. However, Tita’s disapproving mother (Regina Torné) thinks the dish is much too salty. “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” It’s a sure thing that things will go badly for the Griswolds, but the film’s Christmas dinner table scene is pretty funny. Not only does Aunt Bethany (Mae Questel) have an interesting interpretation of saying grace, but the turkey is so dry it deflates. (The extended family politely chokes it down anyway.) There are other awkward moments involving Uncle Eddie (Randy Quaid) or the family pets, which are either really amusing or really disgusting, depending on one’s taste. “Tom Jones” This adaptation of Henry Fielding’s picaresque novel features one of the most famous eating scenes in all of movie history. When Tom (Albert Finney) and Mrs. Waters (Joyce Redman) share a meal, they practically seduce each other at the table. Director Tony Richardson conveys all the erotic properties of food as Finney looks lustily at both his meal and his dining companion while they ravish a chicken leg and each other. “Tom Jones” proves that slurping an oyster is ideal foreplay. The characters don’t say a word to one another, but their body language and their hungry tongues express it all.When my family gets together for Thanksgiving, my twin and I always race to quote our favorite line from “Night Shift”: “Turkey’s almost dead!” It’s as much a ritual as carving the bird. As families gather around the table this holiday season, films that depict dinner scenes always come to mind. Sure there are some great dysfunctional family Thanksgiving comedies, from “Pieces of April” to “Home for the Holidays,” but even non-holiday-meal films are invoked. Consider in the awkward social comedy “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” or the broader farce, “Meet the Parents,” about meeting one’s partner’s parents for the first time. Many films use dinner table scenes to inform audiences of the relationships between characters—note how the table in “Citizen Kane” gets longer as the couple gets more estranged, or how truly unsettling the meal is in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Here (in alphabetical order) are a dozen classic cinematic dinner table scenes featuring various celebrations. Oh, and another word of advice from my twin and me and a classic comedy: Don’t be late to dinner or we’ll quote Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman) from “High Anxiety,” who insists, “Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup!” “American Beauty” Sam Mendes’ film may not deserve the Oscar it won for Best Picture, but it does feature a fantastic dinner table scene. Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey in an Oscar-winning performance) announces to his daughter Jane (Thora Birch) that he quit his job. His wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) gets riled up by this news, and the burden of having to be the family’s sole breadwinner. But her rage is nothing compared to Lester’s delicious outburst when he simply wants someone to please pass him the fucking asparagus. And don’t interrupt Lester, either. “Annie Hall” Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) visits his titular girlfriend’s family for Easter dinner in this classic Best Picture-winning comedy. From the "dynamite ham" served to Grammy Hall, looking at Alvy as if he were a Hasidim, Alvy is in disbelief. He even stops the meal to directly address the audience and illustrate the differences between the Singer family and the Halls. It’s a hilarious split screen comparison: her family’s table talk concerns swap meets; his parents boisterously discuss diabetes. “Annie Hall” is the ne plus ultra of gefilte-fish-out-of-water dinners. “Avalon” Barry Levinson’s knowing drama about a Polish-Jewish family in Baltimore features a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner scene. At one point, a young boy being served his meal complains about the food touching on the plate. It is a scene out of every household during the holidays. But the real drama begins when Gabriel Krichinsky (Lou Jacobi) arrives late to dinner and storms out screaming, “You cut the turkey without me!” While others acknowledge Gabriel does this routine every year, the scene shows just how high-strung families can get. Levinson actually goes this scene one better later in “Avalon,” as when a camera pan shows the family eating in front of the TV rather than congregating in the living room, a sign of how detached families have becomes over the years. “Babette’s Feast” The exquisite feast served in this exquisite Danish film (which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) consists of turtle soup, stuffed quail in puff pastry (“cailles en sarcophage”), and other delicacies. The food is washed down with Clos de Vougeot 1845 and Vueve Cliquot 1860. Babette (Stéphane Audran) spends 10,000 francs she won in a lottery on “a real French dinner,” recreating a meal fro 12 from the Cafí Anglais. But the irony is that her cooking is only truly appreciated by one guest, General Löwenhielm (Jarle Kulle). While the meal does have a transformative effect on all of the diners, it also shows the sacrifice Babette makes to please the Danish sisters who took her in, and ultimately, Babette’s joy in serving such a unique and fabulous meal. “Beetlejuice” If you are going to have a dinner party, you'd better makes sure there are no ghosts in the house making mischief. When host Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara) unexpectedly interrupts her meal to break out into a spirited version of “The Banana Boat Song,” everyone eventually joins in. One guest even uses the ice bucket as a bongo. While their singing at the table may be what causes the food in “Beetlejuice” to act out and attack the dinner guests, if there are ghosts in the house, rebellious food is likely the lesser problem. “The Celebration” While most family celebrations are happy occasions, this lacerating Danish film, shot in the Dogme style, about Helge’s (Henning Moritzen) 60th birthday party, shows just how unhappy families can be. Eldest son Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) delivers a doozy of a toast, full of “home truths,” that shocks everyone. Sure, the anecdote about how he and his late sister Linda would put things in people’s food without their noticing is amusing, but the bit about dad taking baths and then taking Linda and Christain into his study to sexually abuse and rape them might just put folks off their meal. “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover” Peter Greenaway delivers the ultimate “theme” restaurant as the characters’ clothes in this visually opulent film change to match the color of the room they are in. (Red in the dining room, white in the bathroom, etc.) The story of adultery, murder, gluttony and revenge concerns a nasty gangster, Albert Spica (Michael Gambon), his cheating wife Georgina (Helen Mirren), her unfortunate lover Michael (Alan Howard), and the cook, Richard (Richard Bohringer) who prepares their meal(s). The film famously ends with—and perhaps earned its NC-17 rating for—a scene in which Richard serves Albert Michael’s dead body, and Georgina encourages him to eat the corpse’s cooked cock. Getting his just desserts, Albert is called a cannibal. “Eat Drink Man Woman” Ang Lee’s mouth-watering opening scene of a meal being prepared sets the appropriate tone for this poignant film about Master Chef Chu (Sihung Lung) and his three grown daughters. The family gathers around the table for dinner every Sunday. Whenever they get together, however, someone always seems to have an announcement that causes everyone else to go into a tailspin. In one of the film’s most ironic scenes, Chu, whose taste buds are failing, prepares a gorgeous meal that everyone refuses to eat. “Eraserhead” The chicken dinner in David Lynch’s deadpan debut is truly memorable. There is a strange conversation about a numb arm, and the chicken’s animated response to being cut up is that cooked birds fidget and bleed. The bizarre behavior by one of the other guests at the table prompts the comment, “She’ll be alright in a minute.” But will she, really? Lynch prepares a real surreal meal. “Like Water for Chocolate” Proving the magic properties of food, this romantic Mexican film uses magical realism and a dish of quail with rose petals to cause Pedro (Marco Leonardi) and Tita (Lumi Cavazos) to fall passionately in love. The alchemical phenomenon of Tita’s blood that permeates the sauce “invades” Pedro’s body in a sensual way. “The nectar of the gods!” Pedro exclaims at dinner, feeling passionate. However, Tita’s disapproving mother (Regina Torné) thinks the dish is much too salty. “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” It’s a sure thing that things will go badly for the Griswolds, but the film’s Christmas dinner table scene is pretty funny. Not only does Aunt Bethany (Mae Questel) have an interesting interpretation of saying grace, but the turkey is so dry it deflates. (The extended family politely chokes it down anyway.) There are other awkward moments involving Uncle Eddie (Randy Quaid) or the family pets, which are either really amusing or really disgusting, depending on one’s taste. “Tom Jones” This adaptation of Henry Fielding’s picaresque novel features one of the most famous eating scenes in all of movie history. When Tom (Albert Finney) and Mrs. Waters (Joyce Redman) share a meal, they practically seduce each other at the table. Director Tony Richardson conveys all the erotic properties of food as Finney looks lustily at both his meal and his dining companion while they ravish a chicken leg and each other. “Tom Jones” proves that slurping an oyster is ideal foreplay. The characters don’t say a word to one another, but their body language and their hungry tongues express it all.

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The unprecedented nightmare of Donald Trump’s campaign: We’ve openly begun using the F-word in American politics

Over the past week or so, something unusual has happened in American politics: political figures, mainstream scholars and commentators are describing a leading contender for president of the United States as a fascist. Sure, people on barstools around the country have done this forever but it's unprecedented to see such a thing on national television and in the pages of major newspapers. For instance, take a look at this piece by MJ Lee at CNN:

[I]t it was after Trump started calling for stronger surveillance of Muslim-Americans in the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks that a handful of conservatives ventured to call Trump's rhetoric something much more dangerous: fascism. [...] "Trump is a fascist. And that's not a term I use loosely or often. But he's earned it," tweeted Max Boot, a conservative fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is advising Marco Rubio. "Forced federal registration of US citizens, based on religious identity, is fascism. Period. Nothing else to call it," Jeb Bush national security adviser John Noonan wrote on Twitter. Conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace, who has endorsed Ted Cruz, also used the "F" word last week: "If Obama proposed the same religion registry as Trump every conservative in the country would call it what it is -- creeping fascism."

Yes, this is a hard fought primary campaign with insults flying in every direction. But ask yourself when was the last time you heard Republicans using the "F" word against someone running in their own party? I can't remember it happening in decades. It's possible that some members of the GOP establishment called Barry Goldwater a fascist in 1964 (Democrats did, for sure) but that was half a century ago. In recent years this just has not been considered politically correct on left or right. The CNN story goes on to interview various scholars who all say that to one degree or another Trump is, indeed, fascistic if not what we used to call "a total fascist." Historian Rick Perlstein was the first to venture there when he wrote this piece some months back, It's hard to understand why this has been so difficult to see. On the day he announced his campaign, Trump openly said he believed that undocumented workers are not just criminals (that's a common refrain among the anti-immigrant right which fatuously chants "they broke the law by coming here") but violent rapists, killers and gang members. He said he wants to deport millions of people, including American citizens. In fact, he wants to restrict American citizenship to people whose parents are citizens, and thus are guaranteed citizenship by the 14th amendment. For months Trump has been saying that we cannot allow Syrian refugees into the country and promising to send the ones who are already here back. He has indicated a willingness to require American Muslims to register with the government and thinks they should be put under surveillance. He condemns every other country on earth as an enemy, whether economic, military or both, and promises to beat them to "make America great again." Despite the fact that the U.S. is the world's only superpower, he says he will make it so strong that "nobody will ever mess with us again" so that it was "highly, highly, highly, unlikely" that he would have to use nuclear weapons. And he said quite clearly that he believes,

“we’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule… And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago…"

Does that add up to fascism? Yeah, pretty much. In his book, "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" David Neiwert explained that the dictionary definition of the word often leaves out the most important characteristics of the philosophy, which are "its claims to represent the "true character" of the respective national identities among which it arises; and its mythic core of national rebirth -- not to mention its corporatist component, its anti-liberalism, its glorification of violence and its contempt for weakness." If that's not Donald Trump I don't know what is. But if that doesn't convince you, surely this quote from Monday in Ohio will:

"This morning they asked me a question. 'Would you approve waterboarding" Would I approve waterboarding? Yeah. And let me ask you a question? I said, on the other side, they chop off our young people's heads and they put 'em on a stick. On the other side they build these iron cages and they'll put 20 people in them and they drop 'em in the ocean for 15 minutes and pull 'em up 15 minutes later. Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I'd approve it, you bet your ass — in a heartbeat. And I would approve more than that. Don't kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn't work.They'll say, 'oh it has no value', well I know people, very, very important people and they want to be politically correct and I see some people taking on television, 'well I don't know if it works' and they tell me later on, 'it works, it works, believe me, it works'. And you know what? If it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway for what they're doing to us."

Now it's true that Trump isn't the first important political figure to publicly endorse waterboarding. Former Vice President Dick Cheney recently said he'd do it again "in a heartbeat" and falsely claimed that "it works." But even he kept up the fiction that it was rarely employed and only then for interrogation purposes. I don't know that any top political figure has openly endorsed torture to exact revenge. But then Trump doesn't take his cues from political figures. He channels the ethos of talk radio and emulates the king, Rush Limbaugh, who famously described the torture at Abu Ghraib this way:

"This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?" [...] "There's only one thing to do here, folks, and that's achieve victory over people who have targeted us for loooong, long time, well over 15, 20 years. It's the only way to deal with this, and that's why obsessing about a single incident or two of so-called abuse in a prison is nothing more than a giant distraction and could up being something that will really tie our hands and handcuffs us in what the real objective is here, which is the preservation of our way of life and our country."

Donald Trump endorses torture as a method of exacting revenge on people simply because of their nationality or religion. And he gets huge cheers when he talks about that as well as deportations and military invasions and torture and revenge. He may be the first openly fascistic frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination but the ground was prepared and the seeds of his success sowed over the course of many years. We've had fascism flowing through the American political bloodstream for quite some time.

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Bernie Sanders’s Refreshingly Sane Foreign Policy

Bernie Sanders’s economic populism and domestic agenda receive a lot attention, and they should - he’s a unique and important voice on these fronts. But Bernie’s refreshing sanity on foreign policy gets overlooked far too often. This is especially problematic given the most recent Paris attacks and the renewed emphasis on national security. Sanders gave a major speech last week at Georgetown University, the central theme of which was democratic socialism. Understandably, much of the coverage focused on Sanders’s efforts to situate his brand of socialism in the broader American tradition. However, Sanders also used his speech to talk about our foreign policy dilemma in the Middle East. His remarks were what we’ve come to expect from Sanders: honest. Because he doesn’t spin the way other politicians do, Sanders brings a kind of clarity to this conversation, a clarity that’s desperately needed in our current climate. Conservatives will likely dismiss Sanders as a dovish liberal who doesn’t understand foreign policy, but that’s because they don’t want to hear what he has to say. In the speech, Sanders makes clear that he both understands the crisis and the complicated political realities on the ground. “The United States must pursue policies to destroy the brutal and barbaric ISIS regime,” Sanders said, and we must “create conditions that prevent fanatical extremist ideologies from flourishing. But we cannot – and should not – do it alone.” [Emphasis mine]. The part about not doing it alone is critical. To begin with, unlike most candidates, Sanders concedes that we’ve being going it alone for decades now, with disastrous results.

“Our response must begin with an understanding of past mistakes and missteps in our previous approaches to foreign policy. It begins with the acknowledgement that unilateral military action should be a last resort…and that ill-conceived military decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, can wreak far-reaching devastation and destabilize entire regions for decades. It begins with the reflection that the failed policy decisions of the past – rushing to war, regime change in Iraq, or toppling Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, or Guatemalan President Arbenz in 1954, Brazilian President Goulart in 1964, Chilean President Allende in 1973. These are the sort of policies that do not work, do not make us safer, and must not be repeated.”

It’s astonishing how many candidates on the Right in particular simply refuse to acknowledge that our previous encroachments around the world have done more harm than good (For example, our invasion of Iraq created the vacuum into which ISIS inserted itself). Reminding Americans of our history is necessary, however. It’s a good way to avoid repeating mistakes. This has to be part of the conversation about ISIS. Everyone agrees that ISIS is a threat, and that something has to be done about it. But this isn’t a problem that American can or should solve on its own. Sanders explains why:

“But let’s be very clear. While the U.S. and other western nations have the strength of our militaries and political systems, the fight against ISIS is a struggle for the soul of Islam, and countering violent extremism and destroying ISIS must be done primarily by Muslim nations – with the strong support of their global partners…What does this mean? Well, it means that, in many cases, we must ask more from those in the region. While Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and Lebanon have accepted their responsibilities for taking in Syrian refugees, other countries in the region have nothing or very little.”

We’ve wasted too much money and spilled too much blood fighting a war on terror that clearly isn’t working. We’re in a war, and we have to fight it, but we can’t win it alone. “Muslims must lead the fight,” Sanders declared, because “it is incumbent on Muslim nations and communities to confront those who seek to hijack their societies and generations with intolerance and violent ideology.” Countries in the region have arguably a much bigger stake in this fight than we do. As Sanders points out, Saudi Arabia (our chief ally in the region and a prolific fount of extremist ideology), Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and others are “countries of enormous wealth and resources” who “have contributed far too little in the fight against ISIS. That must change.” For too long these countries have sat idle while America has done the heavy lifting – this isn’t sustainable and it’s not working in any case. And yet Republicans insist that America has to play a larger role, that we have to shoulder more of the burden, and that we have to fight the tactic of terrorism without addressing its ideological fountainhead. Indeed, the majority of Republicans – not all, to be fair, but most – refuse to see the connection between the Iraq War and the present destabilization of the region, without which ISIS would not exist. Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, for instance, are calling for more troops on the ground without any discernible plan to deal with the more fundamental causes of terrorism. Worse still, they want America to “lead the way” which means allowing the countries closest to and most invested in this fight to allow us to counterproductively wage it on their behalf. We’ve tried this strategy. It failed. It’s time to let the region police itself. That doesn’t mean America doesn’t have a role to play – surely we do. But unless we accept that this isn’t merely an American fight, we’ll continue to create more problems than we solve.Bernie Sanders’s economic populism and domestic agenda receive a lot attention, and they should - he’s a unique and important voice on these fronts. But Bernie’s refreshing sanity on foreign policy gets overlooked far too often. This is especially problematic given the most recent Paris attacks and the renewed emphasis on national security. Sanders gave a major speech last week at Georgetown University, the central theme of which was democratic socialism. Understandably, much of the coverage focused on Sanders’s efforts to situate his brand of socialism in the broader American tradition. However, Sanders also used his speech to talk about our foreign policy dilemma in the Middle East. His remarks were what we’ve come to expect from Sanders: honest. Because he doesn’t spin the way other politicians do, Sanders brings a kind of clarity to this conversation, a clarity that’s desperately needed in our current climate. Conservatives will likely dismiss Sanders as a dovish liberal who doesn’t understand foreign policy, but that’s because they don’t want to hear what he has to say. In the speech, Sanders makes clear that he both understands the crisis and the complicated political realities on the ground. “The United States must pursue policies to destroy the brutal and barbaric ISIS regime,” Sanders said, and we must “create conditions that prevent fanatical extremist ideologies from flourishing. But we cannot – and should not – do it alone.” [Emphasis mine]. The part about not doing it alone is critical. To begin with, unlike most candidates, Sanders concedes that we’ve being going it alone for decades now, with disastrous results.

“Our response must begin with an understanding of past mistakes and missteps in our previous approaches to foreign policy. It begins with the acknowledgement that unilateral military action should be a last resort…and that ill-conceived military decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, can wreak far-reaching devastation and destabilize entire regions for decades. It begins with the reflection that the failed policy decisions of the past – rushing to war, regime change in Iraq, or toppling Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, or Guatemalan President Arbenz in 1954, Brazilian President Goulart in 1964, Chilean President Allende in 1973. These are the sort of policies that do not work, do not make us safer, and must not be repeated.”

It’s astonishing how many candidates on the Right in particular simply refuse to acknowledge that our previous encroachments around the world have done more harm than good (For example, our invasion of Iraq created the vacuum into which ISIS inserted itself). Reminding Americans of our history is necessary, however. It’s a good way to avoid repeating mistakes. This has to be part of the conversation about ISIS. Everyone agrees that ISIS is a threat, and that something has to be done about it. But this isn’t a problem that American can or should solve on its own. Sanders explains why:

“But let’s be very clear. While the U.S. and other western nations have the strength of our militaries and political systems, the fight against ISIS is a struggle for the soul of Islam, and countering violent extremism and destroying ISIS must be done primarily by Muslim nations – with the strong support of their global partners…What does this mean? Well, it means that, in many cases, we must ask more from those in the region. While Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and Lebanon have accepted their responsibilities for taking in Syrian refugees, other countries in the region have nothing or very little.”

We’ve wasted too much money and spilled too much blood fighting a war on terror that clearly isn’t working. We’re in a war, and we have to fight it, but we can’t win it alone. “Muslims must lead the fight,” Sanders declared, because “it is incumbent on Muslim nations and communities to confront those who seek to hijack their societies and generations with intolerance and violent ideology.” Countries in the region have arguably a much bigger stake in this fight than we do. As Sanders points out, Saudi Arabia (our chief ally in the region and a prolific fount of extremist ideology), Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and others are “countries of enormous wealth and resources” who “have contributed far too little in the fight against ISIS. That must change.” For too long these countries have sat idle while America has done the heavy lifting – this isn’t sustainable and it’s not working in any case. And yet Republicans insist that America has to play a larger role, that we have to shoulder more of the burden, and that we have to fight the tactic of terrorism without addressing its ideological fountainhead. Indeed, the majority of Republicans – not all, to be fair, but most – refuse to see the connection between the Iraq War and the present destabilization of the region, without which ISIS would not exist. Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, for instance, are calling for more troops on the ground without any discernible plan to deal with the more fundamental causes of terrorism. Worse still, they want America to “lead the way” which means allowing the countries closest to and most invested in this fight to allow us to counterproductively wage it on their behalf. We’ve tried this strategy. It failed. It’s time to let the region police itself. That doesn’t mean America doesn’t have a role to play – surely we do. But unless we accept that this isn’t merely an American fight, we’ll continue to create more problems than we solve.Bernie Sanders’s economic populism and domestic agenda receive a lot attention, and they should - he’s a unique and important voice on these fronts. But Bernie’s refreshing sanity on foreign policy gets overlooked far too often. This is especially problematic given the most recent Paris attacks and the renewed emphasis on national security. Sanders gave a major speech last week at Georgetown University, the central theme of which was democratic socialism. Understandably, much of the coverage focused on Sanders’s efforts to situate his brand of socialism in the broader American tradition. However, Sanders also used his speech to talk about our foreign policy dilemma in the Middle East. His remarks were what we’ve come to expect from Sanders: honest. Because he doesn’t spin the way other politicians do, Sanders brings a kind of clarity to this conversation, a clarity that’s desperately needed in our current climate. Conservatives will likely dismiss Sanders as a dovish liberal who doesn’t understand foreign policy, but that’s because they don’t want to hear what he has to say. In the speech, Sanders makes clear that he both understands the crisis and the complicated political realities on the ground. “The United States must pursue policies to destroy the brutal and barbaric ISIS regime,” Sanders said, and we must “create conditions that prevent fanatical extremist ideologies from flourishing. But we cannot – and should not – do it alone.” [Emphasis mine]. The part about not doing it alone is critical. To begin with, unlike most candidates, Sanders concedes that we’ve being going it alone for decades now, with disastrous results.

“Our response must begin with an understanding of past mistakes and missteps in our previous approaches to foreign policy. It begins with the acknowledgement that unilateral military action should be a last resort…and that ill-conceived military decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, can wreak far-reaching devastation and destabilize entire regions for decades. It begins with the reflection that the failed policy decisions of the past – rushing to war, regime change in Iraq, or toppling Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, or Guatemalan President Arbenz in 1954, Brazilian President Goulart in 1964, Chilean President Allende in 1973. These are the sort of policies that do not work, do not make us safer, and must not be repeated.”

It’s astonishing how many candidates on the Right in particular simply refuse to acknowledge that our previous encroachments around the world have done more harm than good (For example, our invasion of Iraq created the vacuum into which ISIS inserted itself). Reminding Americans of our history is necessary, however. It’s a good way to avoid repeating mistakes. This has to be part of the conversation about ISIS. Everyone agrees that ISIS is a threat, and that something has to be done about it. But this isn’t a problem that American can or should solve on its own. Sanders explains why:

“But let’s be very clear. While the U.S. and other western nations have the strength of our militaries and political systems, the fight against ISIS is a struggle for the soul of Islam, and countering violent extremism and destroying ISIS must be done primarily by Muslim nations – with the strong support of their global partners…What does this mean? Well, it means that, in many cases, we must ask more from those in the region. While Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and Lebanon have accepted their responsibilities for taking in Syrian refugees, other countries in the region have nothing or very little.”

We’ve wasted too much money and spilled too much blood fighting a war on terror that clearly isn’t working. We’re in a war, and we have to fight it, but we can’t win it alone. “Muslims must lead the fight,” Sanders declared, because “it is incumbent on Muslim nations and communities to confront those who seek to hijack their societies and generations with intolerance and violent ideology.” Countries in the region have arguably a much bigger stake in this fight than we do. As Sanders points out, Saudi Arabia (our chief ally in the region and a prolific fount of extremist ideology), Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and others are “countries of enormous wealth and resources” who “have contributed far too little in the fight against ISIS. That must change.” For too long these countries have sat idle while America has done the heavy lifting – this isn’t sustainable and it’s not working in any case. And yet Republicans insist that America has to play a larger role, that we have to shoulder more of the burden, and that we have to fight the tactic of terrorism without addressing its ideological fountainhead. Indeed, the majority of Republicans – not all, to be fair, but most – refuse to see the connection between the Iraq War and the present destabilization of the region, without which ISIS would not exist. Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, for instance, are calling for more troops on the ground without any discernible plan to deal with the more fundamental causes of terrorism. Worse still, they want America to “lead the way” which means allowing the countries closest to and most invested in this fight to allow us to counterproductively wage it on their behalf. We’ve tried this strategy. It failed. It’s time to let the region police itself. That doesn’t mean America doesn’t have a role to play – surely we do. But unless we accept that this isn’t merely an American fight, we’ll continue to create more problems than we solve.Bernie Sanders’s economic populism and domestic agenda receive a lot attention, and they should - he’s a unique and important voice on these fronts. But Bernie’s refreshing sanity on foreign policy gets overlooked far too often. This is especially problematic given the most recent Paris attacks and the renewed emphasis on national security. Sanders gave a major speech last week at Georgetown University, the central theme of which was democratic socialism. Understandably, much of the coverage focused on Sanders’s efforts to situate his brand of socialism in the broader American tradition. However, Sanders also used his speech to talk about our foreign policy dilemma in the Middle East. His remarks were what we’ve come to expect from Sanders: honest. Because he doesn’t spin the way other politicians do, Sanders brings a kind of clarity to this conversation, a clarity that’s desperately needed in our current climate. Conservatives will likely dismiss Sanders as a dovish liberal who doesn’t understand foreign policy, but that’s because they don’t want to hear what he has to say. In the speech, Sanders makes clear that he both understands the crisis and the complicated political realities on the ground. “The United States must pursue policies to destroy the brutal and barbaric ISIS regime,” Sanders said, and we must “create conditions that prevent fanatical extremist ideologies from flourishing. But we cannot – and should not – do it alone.” [Emphasis mine]. The part about not doing it alone is critical. To begin with, unlike most candidates, Sanders concedes that we’ve being going it alone for decades now, with disastrous results.

“Our response must begin with an understanding of past mistakes and missteps in our previous approaches to foreign policy. It begins with the acknowledgement that unilateral military action should be a last resort…and that ill-conceived military decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, can wreak far-reaching devastation and destabilize entire regions for decades. It begins with the reflection that the failed policy decisions of the past – rushing to war, regime change in Iraq, or toppling Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, or Guatemalan President Arbenz in 1954, Brazilian President Goulart in 1964, Chilean President Allende in 1973. These are the sort of policies that do not work, do not make us safer, and must not be repeated.”

It’s astonishing how many candidates on the Right in particular simply refuse to acknowledge that our previous encroachments around the world have done more harm than good (For example, our invasion of Iraq created the vacuum into which ISIS inserted itself). Reminding Americans of our history is necessary, however. It’s a good way to avoid repeating mistakes. This has to be part of the conversation about ISIS. Everyone agrees that ISIS is a threat, and that something has to be done about it. But this isn’t a problem that American can or should solve on its own. Sanders explains why:

“But let’s be very clear. While the U.S. and other western nations have the strength of our militaries and political systems, the fight against ISIS is a struggle for the soul of Islam, and countering violent extremism and destroying ISIS must be done primarily by Muslim nations – with the strong support of their global partners…What does this mean? Well, it means that, in many cases, we must ask more from those in the region. While Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and Lebanon have accepted their responsibilities for taking in Syrian refugees, other countries in the region have nothing or very little.”

We’ve wasted too much money and spilled too much blood fighting a war on terror that clearly isn’t working. We’re in a war, and we have to fight it, but we can’t win it alone. “Muslims must lead the fight,” Sanders declared, because “it is incumbent on Muslim nations and communities to confront those who seek to hijack their societies and generations with intolerance and violent ideology.” Countries in the region have arguably a much bigger stake in this fight than we do. As Sanders points out, Saudi Arabia (our chief ally in the region and a prolific fount of extremist ideology), Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and others are “countries of enormous wealth and resources” who “have contributed far too little in the fight against ISIS. That must change.” For too long these countries have sat idle while America has done the heavy lifting – this isn’t sustainable and it’s not working in any case. And yet Republicans insist that America has to play a larger role, that we have to shoulder more of the burden, and that we have to fight the tactic of terrorism without addressing its ideological fountainhead. Indeed, the majority of Republicans – not all, to be fair, but most – refuse to see the connection between the Iraq War and the present destabilization of the region, without which ISIS would not exist. Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, for instance, are calling for more troops on the ground without any discernible plan to deal with the more fundamental causes of terrorism. Worse still, they want America to “lead the way” which means allowing the countries closest to and most invested in this fight to allow us to counterproductively wage it on their behalf. We’ve tried this strategy. It failed. It’s time to let the region police itself. That doesn’t mean America doesn’t have a role to play – surely we do. But unless we accept that this isn’t merely an American fight, we’ll continue to create more problems than we solve.

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