Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 947

Fox News brings back Obama birther lies: Donald Trump, Dennis Miller and the revolting post-Paris sliming of the president

Most conspiracy theories rarely die, so much as slumber, ready to be woken fresh anew when political or social circumstances arouse the paranoid. So it is with birtherism, the theory that holds that President Obama is lying about his native-born citizenship. Or that he's secretly Muslim and just pretending to be Christian. Or maybe he's not actually Muslim, but still secretly has a big, loving heart for terrorist organizations pushing radical Islamic ideas. Or some combination of the above. Conspiracy theories work like that, with many branches and offshoots and every theorist combining the disparate ideas into their own puzzle of how it all works. But while birtherism is a complex beast, all theories have in common two elements: Obama has a secret identity. This gives him the desire to destroy the United States from the inside, usually so it can fall into the hands of whatever group, real or imaginary, the conspiracy theorists fears most -- anarchists, ISIS, Jeremiah Wright, Saul Alinsky. While most mainstream conservatives know they aren't supposed to be out-and-out birthers in the public square, where people will laugh at them and ask if they also believe in lizard people, the attacks in Paris have created a surge of right-wing pundits winking at the birthers in their audience, indulging the widespread conservative paranoia that Obama is secretly out to get them. In 2015, the typical birther move is to push some variation on this line: "I'm not saying he's a secret Muslim born in Kenya for the purpose of installing him in government for a radical Islamic takeover, but...[imply that's exactly what he is]." Dennis Miller on Fox News Wednesday: "Listen, I think it's fair to say at this point, you know, people always let him off the hook when they say he was born somewhere else or think he's a Muslim. I'm not saying any of that, but it is entirely fair to say he has Islamic sympathies." Bonus points, Dennis, for implying that the birther theories are concocted by liberals trying to cover for him. Adds a nice extra layer of paranoia to the proceedings. Kimberly Guilfoyle on Fox News on Wednesday: "Literally it's so disconcerting to me, Greg, that we have a president that is really, not only not rising up to the Winston Churchill moment, but he's really almost helping the other side because he's not doing anything to help our team." Could it be that he's Satan?! Nah, just a secret Muslim who wants ISIS to execute a global takeover, wink wink. Ben Stein on Newsmax on Tuesday: "“I think the question is why is he so angry at America? I don’t think there’s much question that he does not wish America well. He has a real strong hatred of America. Is it because he’s part black? I don’t know. Is it because his father was mistreated by the British in Kenya? I don’t know.” Implying that black=Muslim=fundamentalist Muslim=supporter of terrorism is a common conflation in birtherism. The rule of thumb is that if you're not a white Christian, you're probably working for ISIS. Ralph Peters on Fox News on Wednesday: "I'm waiting for this president to call Eric Holder out of retirement to lead a new movement, jihadi lives matter." Jim Garlow of WorldNetDaily Tuesday: "I have never beat the “Obama’s a Muslim” drum, and I won’t now. But the evidence is overwhelming that he cares little for authentic Christians, while doing everything he can to affirm Islam and to coddle Muslims – violent or peaceful." Donald Trump on Laura Ingraham's show Tuesday: “They send them to the Republicans, not to the Democrats, you know because they know the problem … why would we want to bother the Democrats?” Clearly, all those families are just sleeper cells for Obama's secret plan to take over the country. Lots of people just saying out there these days. It's a mode of communicating conspiracy theories that has a couple of major benefits. First, it allows the conspiracy theorist to perpetuate the theory without coming right out and saying it, giving them a blanket of plausible deniability when they're called out for it (which will likely happen in response to this article). Second of all, it perpetuates the idea that conservatives in this country are oppressed, that they are so unable to speak freely that they have to communicate their ideas in coded ways. It's a paranoia twofer! The world is clearly out to get you guys, so better stay home and mainline more Fox News. Arguing against this viewpoint is probably a waste of time. As the saying goes, you can't reason people out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into. Still, it pays to be mindful of the spread of birtherism and the way it surges in times of stress like this. The belief that a certain subset of people with secret agendas have lied and flattered their way into power so they can destroy the nation from the inside is a common, recurring feature of right wing politics. It cropped up during the Clinton administration, when right wing radicals in the U.S. formed "militias", arguing that Clinton was a secret something (it was never quite clear) and he was, with his black helicopters, going to take over the country by force one day. It fueled the McCarthy era and the hunt for secret communists. It's fueling the anti-refugee sentiment, as refugees are accused of sneaking ISIS terrorists in their midst, because going through a two year screening process is a well-known and efficient way to do that, instead of tapping the existing ISIS sympathizers living in the U.S. (who are mostly trying to get to Syria). It's the basis of the homophobic theory that gays are trying to "recruit" your kids. At its most extreme, it created the "stabbed in the back" theory in Nazi Germany that held that Jews secretly subverted the World War I effort, causing Germany to lose the war. This is just more of the same. Hushed, paranoid theories of secret subversion are never really about protecting the nation, but about scoring political points and drumming up bigotry. There's a crass opportunism to all of this, as these folks clearly are more worried about scoring political points against Obama than about talking about the best methods for fighting ISIS.Most conspiracy theories rarely die, so much as slumber, ready to be woken fresh anew when political or social circumstances arouse the paranoid. So it is with birtherism, the theory that holds that President Obama is lying about his native-born citizenship. Or that he's secretly Muslim and just pretending to be Christian. Or maybe he's not actually Muslim, but still secretly has a big, loving heart for terrorist organizations pushing radical Islamic ideas. Or some combination of the above. Conspiracy theories work like that, with many branches and offshoots and every theorist combining the disparate ideas into their own puzzle of how it all works. But while birtherism is a complex beast, all theories have in common two elements: Obama has a secret identity. This gives him the desire to destroy the United States from the inside, usually so it can fall into the hands of whatever group, real or imaginary, the conspiracy theorists fears most -- anarchists, ISIS, Jeremiah Wright, Saul Alinsky. While most mainstream conservatives know they aren't supposed to be out-and-out birthers in the public square, where people will laugh at them and ask if they also believe in lizard people, the attacks in Paris have created a surge of right-wing pundits winking at the birthers in their audience, indulging the widespread conservative paranoia that Obama is secretly out to get them. In 2015, the typical birther move is to push some variation on this line: "I'm not saying he's a secret Muslim born in Kenya for the purpose of installing him in government for a radical Islamic takeover, but...[imply that's exactly what he is]." Dennis Miller on Fox News Wednesday: "Listen, I think it's fair to say at this point, you know, people always let him off the hook when they say he was born somewhere else or think he's a Muslim. I'm not saying any of that, but it is entirely fair to say he has Islamic sympathies." Bonus points, Dennis, for implying that the birther theories are concocted by liberals trying to cover for him. Adds a nice extra layer of paranoia to the proceedings. Kimberly Guilfoyle on Fox News on Wednesday: "Literally it's so disconcerting to me, Greg, that we have a president that is really, not only not rising up to the Winston Churchill moment, but he's really almost helping the other side because he's not doing anything to help our team." Could it be that he's Satan?! Nah, just a secret Muslim who wants ISIS to execute a global takeover, wink wink. Ben Stein on Newsmax on Tuesday: "“I think the question is why is he so angry at America? I don’t think there’s much question that he does not wish America well. He has a real strong hatred of America. Is it because he’s part black? I don’t know. Is it because his father was mistreated by the British in Kenya? I don’t know.” Implying that black=Muslim=fundamentalist Muslim=supporter of terrorism is a common conflation in birtherism. The rule of thumb is that if you're not a white Christian, you're probably working for ISIS. Ralph Peters on Fox News on Wednesday: "I'm waiting for this president to call Eric Holder out of retirement to lead a new movement, jihadi lives matter." Jim Garlow of WorldNetDaily Tuesday: "I have never beat the “Obama’s a Muslim” drum, and I won’t now. But the evidence is overwhelming that he cares little for authentic Christians, while doing everything he can to affirm Islam and to coddle Muslims – violent or peaceful." Donald Trump on Laura Ingraham's show Tuesday: “They send them to the Republicans, not to the Democrats, you know because they know the problem … why would we want to bother the Democrats?” Clearly, all those families are just sleeper cells for Obama's secret plan to take over the country. Lots of people just saying out there these days. It's a mode of communicating conspiracy theories that has a couple of major benefits. First, it allows the conspiracy theorist to perpetuate the theory without coming right out and saying it, giving them a blanket of plausible deniability when they're called out for it (which will likely happen in response to this article). Second of all, it perpetuates the idea that conservatives in this country are oppressed, that they are so unable to speak freely that they have to communicate their ideas in coded ways. It's a paranoia twofer! The world is clearly out to get you guys, so better stay home and mainline more Fox News. Arguing against this viewpoint is probably a waste of time. As the saying goes, you can't reason people out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into. Still, it pays to be mindful of the spread of birtherism and the way it surges in times of stress like this. The belief that a certain subset of people with secret agendas have lied and flattered their way into power so they can destroy the nation from the inside is a common, recurring feature of right wing politics. It cropped up during the Clinton administration, when right wing radicals in the U.S. formed "militias", arguing that Clinton was a secret something (it was never quite clear) and he was, with his black helicopters, going to take over the country by force one day. It fueled the McCarthy era and the hunt for secret communists. It's fueling the anti-refugee sentiment, as refugees are accused of sneaking ISIS terrorists in their midst, because going through a two year screening process is a well-known and efficient way to do that, instead of tapping the existing ISIS sympathizers living in the U.S. (who are mostly trying to get to Syria). It's the basis of the homophobic theory that gays are trying to "recruit" your kids. At its most extreme, it created the "stabbed in the back" theory in Nazi Germany that held that Jews secretly subverted the World War I effort, causing Germany to lose the war. This is just more of the same. Hushed, paranoid theories of secret subversion are never really about protecting the nation, but about scoring political points and drumming up bigotry. There's a crass opportunism to all of this, as these folks clearly are more worried about scoring political points against Obama than about talking about the best methods for fighting ISIS.

View more on Helen H. Moore's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on November 19, 2015 15:10

We’re hard-wired to want vengeance: “Those are the brain systems that are old — they’re the ones we share with dogs and rats and deer”

Last week's Paris terrorist attacks, like most other large-scale crimes, has seen the original violence followed by a period in which the perpetrators are tracked down and killed, often one by one. Pick up a newspaper or glance at the Internet, and someone else has been found and killed. We see it in death penalty cases; we saw it on the hunting of Osama Bin Laden after the September 11 attacks. The latest example involves a raid that killed Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected leader of the attacks. Jailing someone who commits a crime – so he or she won’t break the law again -- makes rational sense. But vengeance is a different kind of process, deeply rooted in our emotional system. Where does blood lust come from and what does it lead us to do? How ancient is the urge? We spoke to Art Markman, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and co-host of the radio show "Two Guys on Your Head." The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. All the reports of terrorists being hunted down and killed has my blood stirring. How far back does vengeance go in human history? And do we have any sense of where it comes from? It goes back as far as we can remember. If you think about a lot of the early codes: What’s the idea of a eye for an eye? It’s vengeance. That’s just a reflection of the way that we do things. Whenever somebody transgresses a norm, we want to correct it in some way. And there’s always a tension between two modes – one is punishment and the other is rehabilitation, which we see in our criminal justice system. Why do we punish offenders? You know? You mean because it doesn’t solve the problem to kill someone – it doesn’t undo the crime or bring a victim back to life… I think the data suggests that the death penalty is not a deterrent – the murder rate does not go down when there is or isn’t a death penalty. People who are gonna murder someone are not thinking, “Oh wow, I could get the death penalty for this.” So if it’s not a deterrent, why are we doing it? It’s to satisfy a different urge – an urge for retribution, for vengeance. The idea is that if you commit an act that transgresses a norm, that you should suffer a consequence roughly equal in magnitude to what you did. Otherwise it’s not fair. And in fact it’s that particular definition of fairness that plays a role here. People will say, “It’s not fair that this person gets to keep on living, when my family member doesn’t.” So this is a psychological thing, but also a social thing – it has to do with our social contract, who gets to be part of the community, who doesn’t. Let’s take it away from murder for a second: We have now internalized that if you cause damage to a person of their property, that you pay money for that. There’s a civil court process, it costs money to have done something negligent. But that was, universally, not the way things happened. It was only a couple of thousands of years ago that we transferred from destroying somebody else’s property. “You kill my ox? I’ll kill your ox.” We went from that to transfers of money. We still want there to be retribution in a way, but it doesn’t have to be physical harm. In the case of these terrorists attacks, it’s an old-fashioned kind of vengeance – a hunting down and killing of the people responsible. There must be something in the human psyche, having nothing to do with society, nothing to do with physical changes, that wants to meet an offense with an equal offense. Look at the animal kingdom. Forget about going to the African savannah. Look at dogs. Even dogs who like each other get on each other’s nerves – and snap [at each other]. And that’s a way of saying, “Cut that out.” Hopefully they calm down, but once in a while they get in a fight. They go at each other. We’re animals – we’ve got the same [insincts.] This idea that we can create alternate means of vengeance is a cultural means of stopping the cycle of vengeance, the I-kill-one-of yours, you-kill-one-of-mine. Where does that end? Cultures have tried to solve that problem by creating legal systems to break that cycle. You kill someone… what we’ve agreed to do instead is have you arrested and incarcerated, and maybe after 30 years you’ll be put to death. You’re not getting the immediate vengeance. [These cultural alternatives] are our way of avoiding just picking each other off. Do we know where the urge for vengeance sits in the human brain? Is there a physical place where it originates? Anything that’s emotional like that engages your emotional system. Those reactions are a reflection of the fact that structures deep inside your brain have been engaged and are trying to accomplish something. When you have a very strong, energetic reaction, what that’s saying is, “I very strongly want to perform this action.” When you get very strong anger, it’s your emotional system saying, “I want to inflict harm on you.” Those are the brain systems that are old – they’re the ones we share with dogs and rats and deer. We engage that system, and then the rest of our brain – the cortex, particularly the frontal lobe – says, “Maybe, just maybe, that’s not such a good idea.”Last week's Paris terrorist attacks, like most other large-scale crimes, has seen the original violence followed by a period in which the perpetrators are tracked down and killed, often one by one. Pick up a newspaper or glance at the Internet, and someone else has been found and killed. We see it in death penalty cases; we saw it on the hunting of Osama Bin Laden after the September 11 attacks. The latest example involves a raid that killed Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected leader of the attacks. Jailing someone who commits a crime – so he or she won’t break the law again -- makes rational sense. But vengeance is a different kind of process, deeply rooted in our emotional system. Where does blood lust come from and what does it lead us to do? How ancient is the urge? We spoke to Art Markman, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and co-host of the radio show "Two Guys on Your Head." The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. All the reports of terrorists being hunted down and killed has my blood stirring. How far back does vengeance go in human history? And do we have any sense of where it comes from? It goes back as far as we can remember. If you think about a lot of the early codes: What’s the idea of a eye for an eye? It’s vengeance. That’s just a reflection of the way that we do things. Whenever somebody transgresses a norm, we want to correct it in some way. And there’s always a tension between two modes – one is punishment and the other is rehabilitation, which we see in our criminal justice system. Why do we punish offenders? You know? You mean because it doesn’t solve the problem to kill someone – it doesn’t undo the crime or bring a victim back to life… I think the data suggests that the death penalty is not a deterrent – the murder rate does not go down when there is or isn’t a death penalty. People who are gonna murder someone are not thinking, “Oh wow, I could get the death penalty for this.” So if it’s not a deterrent, why are we doing it? It’s to satisfy a different urge – an urge for retribution, for vengeance. The idea is that if you commit an act that transgresses a norm, that you should suffer a consequence roughly equal in magnitude to what you did. Otherwise it’s not fair. And in fact it’s that particular definition of fairness that plays a role here. People will say, “It’s not fair that this person gets to keep on living, when my family member doesn’t.” So this is a psychological thing, but also a social thing – it has to do with our social contract, who gets to be part of the community, who doesn’t. Let’s take it away from murder for a second: We have now internalized that if you cause damage to a person of their property, that you pay money for that. There’s a civil court process, it costs money to have done something negligent. But that was, universally, not the way things happened. It was only a couple of thousands of years ago that we transferred from destroying somebody else’s property. “You kill my ox? I’ll kill your ox.” We went from that to transfers of money. We still want there to be retribution in a way, but it doesn’t have to be physical harm. In the case of these terrorists attacks, it’s an old-fashioned kind of vengeance – a hunting down and killing of the people responsible. There must be something in the human psyche, having nothing to do with society, nothing to do with physical changes, that wants to meet an offense with an equal offense. Look at the animal kingdom. Forget about going to the African savannah. Look at dogs. Even dogs who like each other get on each other’s nerves – and snap [at each other]. And that’s a way of saying, “Cut that out.” Hopefully they calm down, but once in a while they get in a fight. They go at each other. We’re animals – we’ve got the same [insincts.] This idea that we can create alternate means of vengeance is a cultural means of stopping the cycle of vengeance, the I-kill-one-of yours, you-kill-one-of-mine. Where does that end? Cultures have tried to solve that problem by creating legal systems to break that cycle. You kill someone… what we’ve agreed to do instead is have you arrested and incarcerated, and maybe after 30 years you’ll be put to death. You’re not getting the immediate vengeance. [These cultural alternatives] are our way of avoiding just picking each other off. Do we know where the urge for vengeance sits in the human brain? Is there a physical place where it originates? Anything that’s emotional like that engages your emotional system. Those reactions are a reflection of the fact that structures deep inside your brain have been engaged and are trying to accomplish something. When you have a very strong, energetic reaction, what that’s saying is, “I very strongly want to perform this action.” When you get very strong anger, it’s your emotional system saying, “I want to inflict harm on you.” Those are the brain systems that are old – they’re the ones we share with dogs and rats and deer. We engage that system, and then the rest of our brain – the cortex, particularly the frontal lobe – says, “Maybe, just maybe, that’s not such a good idea.”

View more on Helen H. Moore's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on November 19, 2015 15:00

Olivia Munn slimed by the “Jessica Jinx” effect: We’d rather blame the girlfriend for a football losing streak than the players on the field

After winning their first six games, the Green Bay Packers are on a three-game losing streak. Your opinion on why that may be likely differs: If you’re a reasonable person, you may consider that it’s a simple casualty of the law of averages. Even the best franchises are likely to get their hearts broken a couple times each season; in 2011, the New York Giants lost six games and still won a goddamn Super Bowl. But if you’re a sexist Internet troll, your take has less to do with statistics or Aaron Rodgers’ gifts as a quarterback and everything to do with Olivia Munn’s pudenda—which, like her forthcoming "X-Men" character, is working for the forces of evil. Munn released a statement on her Twitter calling out fans who have blamed the actress for Rodgers’ troubles on the field, as well as news outlets like the Washington Post and Fox Sports for fanning the flames of speculation. She also directly pointed a finger at ESPN’s Rob Demovsky for a column in which he suggested that personal problems in the couple’s relationship may have affected his performance. https://twitter.com/oliviamunn/status... This isn’t the first time that male fans have lashed out at a quarterback’s girlfriend for putting her vaginal witch’s curse on him. When Jessica Simpson attended a Cowboys game in 2007, her then-boyfriend, Tony Romo, had the worst game of his career, completing just 13 of his 36 passes against the Philadelphia Eagles with no touchdowns. Fans and the media branded it the “Jessica Jinx,” and it’s part of a long, disturbing trend of blaming women for men’s failures, mistakes, or even worse—their death. When Kurt Cobain took his own life on April 5, 1994 after a history with depression and drug abuse, it couldn’t have been his own demons that killed him. It had to be his wife, right? It’s natural to want to find an explanation when bad things happen and provide a degree of certainty to chaos of life, but too often that need for closure ends up pointing a misdirected finger at women. Perhaps the most famous case of this is the Beatles’ breakup in 1970—when Paul McCartney announced to the public that he would be leaving the band, following John Lennon’s own disclosure to his bandmates months earlier that he would be departing to pursue other projects. Given that Lennon was in a side project with his wife, the Plastic Ono band, fans assumed that Yoko Ono was the reason behind the split. In a 2009 essay on the band’s dissolution, Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore explained that it had nothing to do with Yoko’s career ambitions and everything to do with Lennon and Paul McCartney’s complicated relationship. “The long friendship of John and Paul, in particular, was undergoing volatile change,” Gilmour explained. “Lennon, the band's founder, had in some ways acquiesced leadership of the band; more important, he was beginning to feel he no longer wanted to be confined by the Beatles, whereas McCartney loved the group profoundly—it was what he lived for.” A friend close to the band explained explained that the breakup was due to the pair’s “unhealthy rivalry,” but that doesn’t even take into consideration George Harrison and Ringo Starr, who had long been dwarfed in the public eye by their bandmates. In a Quora post, music education professor Ethan Hein sheds light on what it must have felt like to live in John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s shadows:

[I]magine being George Harrison, one of the best rock songwriters in history in his own right, stuck in Lennon and McCartney's shadow. (His first solo album, All Things Must Pass, was an explosive burst of all the material he'd been unable to get onto the last few Beatles albums, and it's a must-hear.) And think of poor Ringo -- when John Lennon was asked if Ringo was the best drummer in the world, Lennon replied that he wasn't even the best drummer in the band. McCartney was and is an excellent drummer, and Ringo found himself dejectedly playing maracas or bongos on several of the later tracks.

McCartney himself has likewise absolved Yoko of blame, but it’s not about facts—it’s about having a villain, particularly a devilish femme fatale who prays on a perfect hero. In an essay for Salon, William Todd Schultz explains that “the roots” for this idea “are in ancient Greece: Bewitching siren lures dazed sailor to his watery death,” and we've never stopped being obsessed with heartless vixens who drive men to do very bad things. W. Somerset Maugham’s "Of Human Bondage" canonized the good-hearted man (Philip Carey) who loves a cold woman who will never have him; in true classic novel fashion, Maugham punishes her with a case of syphilis and she’s never seen from again. These themes are likewise ingrained into the history of cinema—especially in film noir, where a marked number of “evil bitches” get what’s coming to them. Notable examples include "The Postman Always Rings Twice," in which Cora (played by a never comelier Lana Turner) seduces Nick (Cecil Kellaway) into an affair as a plot to kill her husband. She, of course, later dies in a car accident for her misdeeds. Her inamorato gets the death penalty, but Nick’s demise is allowed to take place offscreen—cinema’s version of death with dignity. Likewise, 1945’s "Detour" shows its femme fatale (Vera, played by the great Ann Savage) being accidentally strangled to death by a phone cord after blackmailing the film’s antihero, Al. The tropes of the femme fatale and the “Jessica Jinx” have more in common than you think. If it’s hard for us to face the shortcomings or imperfections of men, these ideas play on our cultural distrust of women. In a Huffington Post article, Damon Young argued that men have a difficult time seeing women as credible. “Generally speaking, we (men) do not believe things when they're told to us by women… other than our mothers or teachers or any other woman who happens to be an established authority figure,” he said. “Do we think women are pathological liars? No. But, does it generally take longer for us to believe something if a woman tells it to us than it would if a man told us the exact same thing? Definitely!” According to Young, this explains why it took one man to accuse Bill Cosby of rape when dozens of women had been saying the same thing for years, and it also explains why football fans might see an automatic red flag when a woman stands on the sidelines. If we have a built-in skepticism toward women, they become easy targets. After all, the Cosby accusers have been mocked and ridiculed by critics just as much as they’ve been defended, and no matter how many times the myth that Courtney Love killed Kurt Cobain is debunked, she’ll never shake that horrific rumor as long as she lives. Why is it so much easier to believe that despite all the evidence, Kurt Cobain didn't commit suicide, or that Olivia Munn somehow has single-handedly ruined the Packers' season? Because in a culture that sets women up to be villains, bitches, and liars, people will basically believe anything—except for women themselves. Olivia Munn Slams ESPN Reporter For Blaming Her For Aaron Roger's Season

Olivia Munn Slams ESPN Reporter For Blaming Her For Aaron Roger's Season

After winning their first six games, the Green Bay Packers are on a three-game losing streak. Your opinion on why that may be likely differs: If you’re a reasonable person, you may consider that it’s a simple casualty of the law of averages. Even the best franchises are likely to get their hearts broken a couple times each season; in 2011, the New York Giants lost six games and still won a goddamn Super Bowl. But if you’re a sexist Internet troll, your take has less to do with statistics or Aaron Rodgers’ gifts as a quarterback and everything to do with Olivia Munn’s pudenda—which, like her forthcoming "X-Men" character, is working for the forces of evil. Munn released a statement on her Twitter calling out fans who have blamed the actress for Rodgers’ troubles on the field, as well as news outlets like the Washington Post and Fox Sports for fanning the flames of speculation. She also directly pointed a finger at ESPN’s Rob Demovsky for a column in which he suggested that personal problems in the couple’s relationship may have affected his performance. https://twitter.com/oliviamunn/status... This isn’t the first time that male fans have lashed out at a quarterback’s girlfriend for putting her vaginal witch’s curse on him. When Jessica Simpson attended a Cowboys game in 2007, her then-boyfriend, Tony Romo, had the worst game of his career, completing just 13 of his 36 passes against the Philadelphia Eagles with no touchdowns. Fans and the media branded it the “Jessica Jinx,” and it’s part of a long, disturbing trend of blaming women for men’s failures, mistakes, or even worse—their death. When Kurt Cobain took his own life on April 5, 1994 after a history with depression and drug abuse, it couldn’t have been his own demons that killed him. It had to be his wife, right? It’s natural to want to find an explanation when bad things happen and provide a degree of certainty to chaos of life, but too often that need for closure ends up pointing a misdirected finger at women. Perhaps the most famous case of this is the Beatles’ breakup in 1970—when Paul McCartney announced to the public that he would be leaving the band, following John Lennon’s own disclosure to his bandmates months earlier that he would be departing to pursue other projects. Given that Lennon was in a side project with his wife, the Plastic Ono band, fans assumed that Yoko Ono was the reason behind the split. In a 2009 essay on the band’s dissolution, Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore explained that it had nothing to do with Yoko’s career ambitions and everything to do with Lennon and Paul McCartney’s complicated relationship. “The long friendship of John and Paul, in particular, was undergoing volatile change,” Gilmour explained. “Lennon, the band's founder, had in some ways acquiesced leadership of the band; more important, he was beginning to feel he no longer wanted to be confined by the Beatles, whereas McCartney loved the group profoundly—it was what he lived for.” A friend close to the band explained explained that the breakup was due to the pair’s “unhealthy rivalry,” but that doesn’t even take into consideration George Harrison and Ringo Starr, who had long been dwarfed in the public eye by their bandmates. In a Quora post, music education professor Ethan Hein sheds light on what it must have felt like to live in John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s shadows:

[I]magine being George Harrison, one of the best rock songwriters in history in his own right, stuck in Lennon and McCartney's shadow. (His first solo album, All Things Must Pass, was an explosive burst of all the material he'd been unable to get onto the last few Beatles albums, and it's a must-hear.) And think of poor Ringo -- when John Lennon was asked if Ringo was the best drummer in the world, Lennon replied that he wasn't even the best drummer in the band. McCartney was and is an excellent drummer, and Ringo found himself dejectedly playing maracas or bongos on several of the later tracks.

McCartney himself has likewise absolved Yoko of blame, but it’s not about facts—it’s about having a villain, particularly a devilish femme fatale who prays on a perfect hero. In an essay for Salon, William Todd Schultz explains that “the roots” for this idea “are in ancient Greece: Bewitching siren lures dazed sailor to his watery death,” and we've never stopped being obsessed with heartless vixens who drive men to do very bad things. W. Somerset Maugham’s "Of Human Bondage" canonized the good-hearted man (Philip Carey) who loves a cold woman who will never have him; in true classic novel fashion, Maugham punishes her with a case of syphilis and she’s never seen from again. These themes are likewise ingrained into the history of cinema—especially in film noir, where a marked number of “evil bitches” get what’s coming to them. Notable examples include "The Postman Always Rings Twice," in which Cora (played by a never comelier Lana Turner) seduces Nick (Cecil Kellaway) into an affair as a plot to kill her husband. She, of course, later dies in a car accident for her misdeeds. Her inamorato gets the death penalty, but Nick’s demise is allowed to take place offscreen—cinema’s version of death with dignity. Likewise, 1945’s "Detour" shows its femme fatale (Vera, played by the great Ann Savage) being accidentally strangled to death by a phone cord after blackmailing the film’s antihero, Al. The tropes of the femme fatale and the “Jessica Jinx” have more in common than you think. If it’s hard for us to face the shortcomings or imperfections of men, these ideas play on our cultural distrust of women. In a Huffington Post article, Damon Young argued that men have a difficult time seeing women as credible. “Generally speaking, we (men) do not believe things when they're told to us by women… other than our mothers or teachers or any other woman who happens to be an established authority figure,” he said. “Do we think women are pathological liars? No. But, does it generally take longer for us to believe something if a woman tells it to us than it would if a man told us the exact same thing? Definitely!” According to Young, this explains why it took one man to accuse Bill Cosby of rape when dozens of women had been saying the same thing for years, and it also explains why football fans might see an automatic red flag when a woman stands on the sidelines. If we have a built-in skepticism toward women, they become easy targets. After all, the Cosby accusers have been mocked and ridiculed by critics just as much as they’ve been defended, and no matter how many times the myth that Courtney Love killed Kurt Cobain is debunked, she’ll never shake that horrific rumor as long as she lives. Why is it so much easier to believe that despite all the evidence, Kurt Cobain didn't commit suicide, or that Olivia Munn somehow has single-handedly ruined the Packers' season? Because in a culture that sets women up to be villains, bitches, and liars, people will basically believe anything—except for women themselves. Olivia Munn Slams ESPN Reporter For Blaming Her For Aaron Roger's Season

View more on Helen H. Moore's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on November 19, 2015 14:34

“You won’t enroll me in this lie”: Watch Ta-Nehisi Coates’ powerful National Book Award acceptance speech

“Between the World and Me” author Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award for nonfiction last night.

During his acceptance speech, Coates told the crowd that at the “core” of his decision to write the book was “the death, the murder, the killing of my friend Prince Carmen Jones.”

Jones, Coates’ classmate at Howard and the son of a radiologist, was shot to death by an undercover narcotics officer in Fairfax, Virginia, on September 1, 2000. The officer’s account described a case of mistaken identity, though the suspect and Jones had a ten-inch height differential; the former sporting dreadlocks, the latter with closely cropped hair.

Coates described Jones as “an exceptional, exceptional student” who “could’ve gone to Harvard, could’ve gone to Princeton, could’ve gone to Yale.”

“I’ve never met an individual that was just so filled with love and compassion,” Coates added.

Coates attributed Jones’ death to America’s “notion that we are okay with the presumption that Black people somehow have an angle, somehow have a predisposition towards criminality.”

Jones’ killer was never found guilty and, as of 2006, was still working in the Prince George County police department’s technical services division.

“I can’t secure the safety of my son. I can’t go home and tell him that it’s going to be okay, ‘You definitely will not end up like Prince Jones,’” Coates said. “I just don’t have that right, I just don’t have that power.”

What power he does have, Coates concluded, is to say, “You won’t enroll me in this lie.”

Watch Coates’ full acceptance speech below: