Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 951

Pray if you like, but don’t #PrayForParis: Not every emotional response to tragedy needs a hashtag

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After Paris, right-wing media launches new war on reason, reality

Last Friday, I wrote this Salon essay about the barbaric terrorist attacks on Paris, France. I made a very basic and clear argument: Terrorism is a form of political violence that kills and injures people. For decades, America’s right-wing media and other opinion leaders have routinely used violent language—including the word “terrorist”—to describe liberals, Democrats, progressives and others with whom they disagree. In recent weeks and months, Fox News, as well as Republican candidates such as Ben Carson and Chris Christie, have used violent and eliminationist language to talk about Black Lives Matter and the student activists at Yale and Missouri. Both groups are working to create a more just and fair United States that treats people of color with dignity, and respects their full and equal human rights. Neither Black Lives Matter nor the student activists at Yale and Missouri are “terrorists.” They are not killing people. They have not strapped explosives to their bodies. They have not used assault rifles to shoot people. I concluded with the following basic suggestion. In the face of real terrorism in the streets of Paris and elsewhere, with broken and bloodied bodies, families in mourning, and a country in a state of emotional and psychic shock, perhaps America’s right-wing media, and conservatives en masse, should seriously reconsider their casual use of violent rhetoric. The right-wing media and its supplicants responded with apoplectic rage. Right-wing websites such as Breitbart, Twitchy, The Blaze, and NewsBusters featured headlines denouncing Salon and my essay on the Paris terror attacks. Right-wing thugs threatened to kill me and blow up the offices of Salon. Beyond their violent rhetoric, the right-wing cretins who were outraged by my essay also showed themselves to be profoundly delusional. Some of these confused souls even believe that I am an ISIS “sympathizer” or “agent” (quite odd given that I have long advocated for a far more robust and aggressive military policy than has been taken by the Obama administration). This is not a surprise. America’s conservatives are in the grip of an infantile and reactionary ideology that causes them to respond like bratty children, throwing temper tantrums in the political and public sphere, whenever they are faced with basic facts and truths that cannot be reconciled within their deranged and fantastical world view. I have been writing online for almost ten years. As such, I am quite used to the violent rhetoric and threats made against me by the right-wing media and its public. This is why I so gleefully mock them. They deserve scorn. But, their behavior should also be examined for what it reveals about the broken nature of American politics, and why the United States is unable to solve—what should be obvious—issues of shared public concern. It is very difficult if not impossible to solve a problem if one cannot agree on the nature of the facts and reality. The Republican Party and Right-wing media have created an alternate reality for their low-information public. This has been shown during the GOP primary debates, as well as on a litany of issues such as the economy, tax policy, global warming, race, international affairs, science, education and gun control. The right-wing media and its followers willfully lied about and distorted both the title, argument, and content of my essay on the Paris terror attacks. Breitbart, Twitchy, The Blaze, Newsbusters and other right-wing sites reported that I blamed “conservatives” or “Republicans” for the terror attacks in Paris. This is a fabrication. It is fundamentally untrue. The right-wing media machine is one of the most powerful means for disseminating disinformation and propaganda in the United States. Joseph Goebbels would have admired its efficiency. They have created a bubble, what media scholars and observers have described as a state of “epistemic closure”, where talking points are shared and reinforced. Within hours, the right-wing media machine had circulated their dishonest and distorted version of my essay on the Paris terror attacks. The same commentary was often repackaged on multiple sites to provide the illusion that there was some type of “public” outrage about my writing. Right-wing trolls then used social media to gin up more rage within their echo chamber. The drum of right-wing anger and victimology may be loud, but it is playing to a small audience of obsessed fans who have been given too much influence over normal politics by the supposedly “liberal” media. In the post civil-rights era, conservatism and racism is now the same thing. The Republican Party is the United States’ largest white identity organization. As a matter of policy, it uses overt and subtle racism to win votes from racially resentful white people. To point, almost immediately, overt and open white supremacist websites began to feature content from more “mainstream” right-wing websites in response to my essay on the Paris terror attacks. Their “analysis” and “commentary” were almost identical: violent threats, racism, lies and disinformation. Political psychologists and other researchers have shown that the brains and cognitive processes of conservatives exhibit binary thinking, an intolerance of ambiguity, heightened fear centers, and a disdain for subtlety and nuance. This helps to explain conservatives’ inclination towards social dominance behavior, racism, prejudice, nativism, and xenophobia. The increase in authoritarianism in the United States is also a function of the conservative brain and its vulnerability to manipulation by the Right-wing media, as well as anxieties about a changing world. The incoherent rage towards my Salon essay on the Paris terror attacks, and how so many American conservatives have a fetish-like obsession with “guns, God and the flag” are a crystallization of those dynamics. Tens of millions of Americans are functionally illiterate. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that 40 percent of Americans read at a “basic” or “below basic” level. Even more disturbing, more than 50 percent of students at four-year-colleges do not have the reading skills to understand a newspaper editorial. The responses to my essay on the Paris terror attacks demonstrate that most of those upset may in fact be challenged in their ability to read and write at a level necessary to intelligently and competently participate in politics. This is part of a broader phenomenon in the United States where the coarseness of the country’s political culture, often vapid public discourse, and Right-wing media news entertainment complex, are reflections of a society with a broken educational system, and where literacy, and thus engaged citizenship, is systematically devalued and undermined. Movement conservatism and the right-wing media are engaged in “zombie politics.”  This has created a condition among rank and file conservatives where they are unable to practice critical thinking, self-reflection, or introspection. Because of this, the fully propagandized right-wing public can only think in terms of the talking points, disinformation, and lies given to them by their media and other opinion leaders. This is politics as a form of religion; it is hallucinatory ideology as reality. For example, when challenged about their racism, today’s conservatives respond with more racism. If a person intervenes against sexism, their response is to use more sexist language. And as seen in their reaction to my criticism of how the American Right-wing routinely uses violent language to describe liberals and progressives, they, of course, use even more violent language. Beyond the violent threats, bilious language, racism, and other poor behavior ginned up by the right-wing hate media in response to my essay here at Salon about the horrific terror attacks in Paris, the most disturbing lesson is how today’s American conservatism is a pre-Enlightenment era belief system. Its followers do not believe in empirical reality, they create their own facts, Right-wing politics is a type of religion immune from truth-claims and tests. Magical thinking is the norm, and a cosmopolitan public sphere where reason, philosophy, scienc  and learning are valued is to be rejected and subsequently destroyed. I knew this before I sat down last Friday evening to write my essay about the Paris terror attacks. The responses to my basic truth-telling about the right-wing media and its politicians’ careless abuse of language reinforced this knowledge. But, such a fact remains no less troubling for what it portends about the present and future of American politics.Last Friday, I wrote this Salon essay about the barbaric terrorist attacks on Paris, France. I made a very basic and clear argument: Terrorism is a form of political violence that kills and injures people. For decades, America’s right-wing media and other opinion leaders have routinely used violent language—including the word “terrorist”—to describe liberals, Democrats, progressives and others with whom they disagree. In recent weeks and months, Fox News, as well as Republican candidates such as Ben Carson and Chris Christie, have used violent and eliminationist language to talk about Black Lives Matter and the student activists at Yale and Missouri. Both groups are working to create a more just and fair United States that treats people of color with dignity, and respects their full and equal human rights. Neither Black Lives Matter nor the student activists at Yale and Missouri are “terrorists.” They are not killing people. They have not strapped explosives to their bodies. They have not used assault rifles to shoot people. I concluded with the following basic suggestion. In the face of real terrorism in the streets of Paris and elsewhere, with broken and bloodied bodies, families in mourning, and a country in a state of emotional and psychic shock, perhaps America’s right-wing media, and conservatives en masse, should seriously reconsider their casual use of violent rhetoric. The right-wing media and its supplicants responded with apoplectic rage. Right-wing websites such as Breitbart, Twitchy, The Blaze, and NewsBusters featured headlines denouncing Salon and my essay on the Paris terror attacks. Right-wing thugs threatened to kill me and blow up the offices of Salon. Beyond their violent rhetoric, the right-wing cretins who were outraged by my essay also showed themselves to be profoundly delusional. Some of these confused souls even believe that I am an ISIS “sympathizer” or “agent” (quite odd given that I have long advocated for a far more robust and aggressive military policy than has been taken by the Obama administration). This is not a surprise. America’s conservatives are in the grip of an infantile and reactionary ideology that causes them to respond like bratty children, throwing temper tantrums in the political and public sphere, whenever they are faced with basic facts and truths that cannot be reconciled within their deranged and fantastical world view. I have been writing online for almost ten years. As such, I am quite used to the violent rhetoric and threats made against me by the right-wing media and its public. This is why I so gleefully mock them. They deserve scorn. But, their behavior should also be examined for what it reveals about the broken nature of American politics, and why the United States is unable to solve—what should be obvious—issues of shared public concern. It is very difficult if not impossible to solve a problem if one cannot agree on the nature of the facts and reality. The Republican Party and Right-wing media have created an alternate reality for their low-information public. This has been shown during the GOP primary debates, as well as on a litany of issues such as the economy, tax policy, global warming, race, international affairs, science, education and gun control. The right-wing media and its followers willfully lied about and distorted both the title, argument, and content of my essay on the Paris terror attacks. Breitbart, Twitchy, The Blaze, Newsbusters and other right-wing sites reported that I blamed “conservatives” or “Republicans” for the terror attacks in Paris. This is a fabrication. It is fundamentally untrue. The right-wing media machine is one of the most powerful means for disseminating disinformation and propaganda in the United States. Joseph Goebbels would have admired its efficiency. They have created a bubble, what media scholars and observers have described as a state of “epistemic closure”, where talking points are shared and reinforced. Within hours, the right-wing media machine had circulated their dishonest and distorted version of my essay on the Paris terror attacks. The same commentary was often repackaged on multiple sites to provide the illusion that there was some type of “public” outrage about my writing. Right-wing trolls then used social media to gin up more rage within their echo chamber. The drum of right-wing anger and victimology may be loud, but it is playing to a small audience of obsessed fans who have been given too much influence over normal politics by the supposedly “liberal” media. In the post civil-rights era, conservatism and racism is now the same thing. The Republican Party is the United States’ largest white identity organization. As a matter of policy, it uses overt and subtle racism to win votes from racially resentful white people. To point, almost immediately, overt and open white supremacist websites began to feature content from more “mainstream” right-wing websites in response to my essay on the Paris terror attacks. Their “analysis” and “commentary” were almost identical: violent threats, racism, lies and disinformation. Political psychologists and other researchers have shown that the brains and cognitive processes of conservatives exhibit binary thinking, an intolerance of ambiguity, heightened fear centers, and a disdain for subtlety and nuance. This helps to explain conservatives’ inclination towards social dominance behavior, racism, prejudice, nativism, and xenophobia. The increase in authoritarianism in the United States is also a function of the conservative brain and its vulnerability to manipulation by the Right-wing media, as well as anxieties about a changing world. The incoherent rage towards my Salon essay on the Paris terror attacks, and how so many American conservatives have a fetish-like obsession with “guns, God and the flag” are a crystallization of those dynamics. Tens of millions of Americans are functionally illiterate. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that 40 percent of Americans read at a “basic” or “below basic” level. Even more disturbing, more than 50 percent of students at four-year-colleges do not have the reading skills to understand a newspaper editorial. The responses to my essay on the Paris terror attacks demonstrate that most of those upset may in fact be challenged in their ability to read and write at a level necessary to intelligently and competently participate in politics. This is part of a broader phenomenon in the United States where the coarseness of the country’s political culture, often vapid public discourse, and Right-wing media news entertainment complex, are reflections of a society with a broken educational system, and where literacy, and thus engaged citizenship, is systematically devalued and undermined. Movement conservatism and the right-wing media are engaged in “zombie politics.”  This has created a condition among rank and file conservatives where they are unable to practice critical thinking, self-reflection, or introspection. Because of this, the fully propagandized right-wing public can only think in terms of the talking points, disinformation, and lies given to them by their media and other opinion leaders. This is politics as a form of religion; it is hallucinatory ideology as reality. For example, when challenged about their racism, today’s conservatives respond with more racism. If a person intervenes against sexism, their response is to use more sexist language. And as seen in their reaction to my criticism of how the American Right-wing routinely uses violent language to describe liberals and progressives, they, of course, use even more violent language. Beyond the violent threats, bilious language, racism, and other poor behavior ginned up by the right-wing hate media in response to my essay here at Salon about the horrific terror attacks in Paris, the most disturbing lesson is how today’s American conservatism is a pre-Enlightenment era belief system. Its followers do not believe in empirical reality, they create their own facts, Right-wing politics is a type of religion immune from truth-claims and tests. Magical thinking is the norm, and a cosmopolitan public sphere where reason, philosophy, scienc  and learning are valued is to be rejected and subsequently destroyed. I knew this before I sat down last Friday evening to write my essay about the Paris terror attacks. The responses to my basic truth-telling about the right-wing media and its politicians’ careless abuse of language reinforced this knowledge. But, such a fact remains no less troubling for what it portends about the present and future of American politics.

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“I am infuriated by India right now”: Delhi gang-rape documentary director lashes out against government ban on “India’s Daughter”

In 2012, when a young medical student was gang-raped and left for dead on the side of a road in Delhi, India, neither she nor her assailants could have predicted the furor that would follow. India has a problem of systemic, horrific violence against its women—perhaps not more than other nations, but certainly not any better, either. The preconceptions about rape, sexuality and gender were not challenged by any number of stories preceding this one; why should Jyoti Singh’s story be any different? For whatever reason, it was. Protests shook both the capital city of Delhi—India’s "rape capital"—and outrage spread not just to the rest of India but to the rest of the world. In this climate, Leslee Udwin, a novice filmmaker, went to India to attempt to tell the story of a woman the media was beginning to call “India’s daughter.” The resulting documentary—“India’s Daughter”—is, itself, a remarkably balanced documentary, one that distinguishes itself from other accounts of sexual assault by interviewing the rapists and their team of defense lawyers. The only convicted rapist who admits to what he did was the driver, Mukesh Singh, and interviews with him take up nearly as much screentime as the interviews with Jyoti’s bereaved parents. What immediately followed the film was controversy. As the New Yorker reports:

After clips of the Mukesh Singh interview began circulating online, the Indian government stopped the scheduled Indian broadcast of “India’s Daughter,” which was set for March 8th, International Women’s Day. On March 4th, a statement from the Indian Home Minister’s office said that the government was enforcing a ban because Udwin hadn’t secured the correct permissions to interview Singh in prison, didn’t abide by agreements to show authorities unedited versions of the interview, and because Singh’s statements are “an affront to the dignity of women.” (Udwin has since published copies of the letters of permission she received.) In another statement, the government warned that clips from the film “appear to encourage and incite violence against women.” Some supporters of the ban say that airing the Singh interview is tantamount to giving a platform to the rapist’s views; others say that the documentary paints sexual violence as an Indian issue rather than a global one, and fear that it will perpetuate a “white-savior” attitude in foreign viewers. That the government finds the film nationally embarrassing is a likely reason for the ban—members of the ruling B.J.P party have stated that the film is part of “an international conspiracy to defame India” and have protested that its release will affect tourism.

India is notorious for banning media that hint at the controversial; restricted topics include homosexuality, alternative histories of Hinduism, examinations of revered politicians, and of course, rape. In this case, as with most of the others, it speaks of cowardice. “India’s Daughter” has benefited from the publicity surrounding the decision, as illegal copies have proliferated online, but the ban effectively stopped the film from being seen by the people it is about — the poorest and most disconnected segments of the population, the ones struggling most to survive in the most populous country in the world. Beyond the government’s actions, Udwin’s documentary has sparked a conversation that is very familiar to media criticism in 2015—the ongoing questions of who has the right to tell which kinds of stories. Udwin is an Israeli Londoner, and “India’s Daughter” entirely concerns people and events in Northern India. The best intentions in the world cannot erase the racial implications of such a power dynamic, and as “India’s Daughter” has become such an object of discussion in the press, Udwin herself has begun to sound embattled and defensive. I would characterize my own conversation with her as a bit rancorous. Below is my conversation with Udwin; following that are a few closing thoughts from myself and Freida Pinto, who is an ambassador for “India’s Daugher.” How did you come to this topic? I know that you are not Indian yourself. Yes. Well, as a global citizen, and a woman who cares very deeply about the fact that we are still subordinated to men, that we are still lacking in proper respect and representation—true representation, in the world in terms of decision making, in terms of economies and in terms of being independent, and very much in terms of us being unsafe. We know that on a daily basis, every single second, somewhere a woman or a girl is being violently abused and violated. What brought me to the topic was not so much the rape and the case and the darkness of that. It was the light and the horizon of seeing this mass mobilization of the Indian men and women. It was awe-inspiring to me, to see such mass mobilization on India’s streets fighting for my rights. I took it personally, and I thought the least I could do—when these people were being so courageous and so committed to this issue, and facing the most ferocious government crackdown on peaceful protesters—the least I could do was make a film that would be like a megaphone for those voices and join in the protest in that way. That was my way of joining them. So I believe this is your first documentary film, right? Right, yes, and the first time I’ve directed as well. How did it even occur to you to make a film about this? Were you hoping to make a film at some point already? Was India set in your sights at that point? No, no. Not at all. I had no intentions ever of making a documentary film. But it basically took on its own volition. It became a compulsion for me. I didn’t choose to do it. And you know, I didn’t choose India. If these protests had happened in any other country, in any other part of the world, I would’ve gone there and have made that particular case of those protests. I have been up to this point a producer of feature films. I decided to direct the film because I couldn’t afford to hire a director. But I had so much fire in my belly, I was so utterly compelled to make this film, that I had to just go and do it. Obviously I researched very thoroughly before I did it, I didn’t just step on a plane, but I had to do it and therefore by ordinary means, and the means that I had were private means, whatever I had of family savings. And I’ve used them all. [Laughs.] Had you been to India before, or was it a completely new experience? Many times. I’ve had a very close, loving relationship with India, which is why it hurts my heart so much that they have banned this film, you know. And that they even think of accusing me of a conspiracy to shame India—what absolute nonsense. You know, this is a conspiracy to praise India and thank India for being the only country in the world that has come out with such force and vigor and passion and tenacity for women’s rights, to try and make the world a better place for women and girls. There’s not another country on earth that has done that. I went to praise India, not to bury it. Sadly, shame has now appeared to India. But not from the film. From the ban. From the fact that they have banned a film that simply asks for a better world for women and girls. And they have banned the film without even seeing it, which is shameful. It’s so ridiculous. A lot of the media that I read coming out of India about this film suggested a lot of wounded pride or a sense of violation about having a filmmaker who was not Indian make this story that is centered on India in this way. How did you tackle that concern, and how did you respond to that criticism? Well, here’s how I respond. I can understand that certain segments of the Indian population — and believe me, they’re in the minority — I can understand that they have a postcolonial chip on their shoulder. This is what this is emanating from. They call me a British journalist. I am neither a journalist nor British, OK. There’s a kind of exterior that has flown in the face of facts and proper research. And that’s very sad. Because it boomerangs back on the people who are bandying these terms about. They call me a “gori.” You know what that means? I do know what that means. That’s a derogatory word for a white-skinned person. [Note: The word is used for anyone fair-skinned, including Indians, and is considered mild enough that it is featured in both Bollywood lyrics and “Bend It Like Beckham.”] I’m Jewish. In my people’s history, there was a Holocaust in Germany. If I lived my life constantly keeping that paramount in my mind and letting that filter what is right and what is wrong in terms of what is happening around me, I wouldn’t move very far. I think it’s backward-looking. They have to forget about the colonial era, and whatever ax they have to grind with the Brits, let them grind it. You know, let them move on from grinding it, actually! It’s not my fight. I’m not British, OK? Here’s the thing. Any people who refuse to introspect need to really examine their conscience as to why that is. Is your image as a country really more important than saving the lives of your women and girls? Because if that’s what you’re saying, then I’m afraid I don’t have any respect or time for that attitude. You see, I watched as MPs in the Lok Sabha, the Indian Parliament, the morning after the ban were screaming like headless chickens in hysterics. “She’s decimating our tourist industry.” “She’s a conspiracy to shame India,” they were screaming that when they hadn’t even seen the film. There hadn’t even been the possibility for them to see the film because at that point it existed on one thumb drive in my purse. So you know, we shouldn’t give this any credence. We should see it as part of the change-resisting backwards-looking segments of the population. And they don’t only just exist in India. They exist all over the world. There are those people who resist change. There are those people who welcome change and look forward to it. And there are a handful of people who are actively working to change. I know which category I’d like to be in. So let’s talk a little bit about what is the linchpin of your film, which is this very disturbing set of interviews with Mukesh, one of the convicted rapists. Correct. Yes. I interviewed seven rapists over 31 hours. Four of them had nothing to do with this case. One of those four had raped a 5-year-old girl. I sat and interviewed him for three hours. And the reason why I interviewed others who were not involved in this particular case was because I felt the need to practice. Because I was raped when I was 18, and I’m ashamed to say I’ve kept silent about it for 20 years. I didn’t know to what degree the demons inside me that I had buried would rise up. Also, I’d never made a documentary before. I’d never interviewed people before. So I was relying on who I am and what I cared about, you know? Why did Mukesh end up in the film and not the other two rapists? Of the four adults who were candidates to be interviewed — because, remember, Ram Singh either committed suicide or had been murdered in the process, and there was the juvenile, whom there was no possibility of interviewing. I did meet him for 10 minutes, and there was a point in which I had been given permission from the magistrate to simply interview him, but not record him, and have his answers transcribed. And then, the magistrate changed her mind, so I couldn’t do that any longer. Now, one of these four men refused to meet me altogether – Akshay Thakur, the one with the wife and baby in the film. And the two younger ones — whom I sat with over two sessions, for three hours each — they were still maintaining that they were not on the bus. [Here Udwin pauses, as if waiting for me to respond.] They were saying that they were at a music festival—and that music festival was proven by the court not to have existed. They were either in denial, or trying to deny, or mouthing what their lawyers were telling them to say until the appeal. So, there was absolutely no point in including them in the film. What do we gain by them saying they weren’t there? Mukesh spoke very openly and very honestly. That’s strange that he would be honest when — I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you why he was being honest. For the same reason. Because he and not a single one of the other rapists I spoke to held any remorse. Really, deep down, they do not believe they did anything wrong. And that is the truth. Their attitude is indignant, in fact. Everybody is doing it, so why are they made an example of? Indeed, from Mukesh’s point of view, why is he being given the death sentence, when there are worse and equally bad crimes, et cetera. That is why he spoke so honestly. As horrible as it is, one of the things your film demonstrates well is that he has a point. There is something about this that really struck a nerve in a way that nothing else had before. Where are the protests now about the 2-and-a-half and 5-year-old girls who were gang-raped last weekend in Delhi? Where are the protests about the 4-year-girl, who in the previous weekend, lay in the same hospital that Jyoti laid in, and had been slashed from vagina to anus by three adults who had gang-raped her? Four years old, and she wound up having a three-hour operation to have a colostomy bag fitted. Where are the protests? What do you think? Where do you think they are? Well, I think that people feel so hopeless about this. We must have sunk so low in terms of our moral crisis in this world. We have woefully and irresponsibly neglected to educate our children. And of course, we have a lot of people, and that has to be said, who don’t even have access of education. But putting that aside, the people who do have access to education do not have access to the right kind of education because they are educating their heads, and not their hearts. We are responsible, as a world, to lead our children, at that crucial period between 3 and 5 years old when neuroscience tells us is the only window to cognitively modify a human being, to change attitudes, change behavior and build attitude. After that, it is all over. How irresponsible have we been not to teach our children the value of another human being? To respect moral values. No wonder we are in the state we are in. And I saw people being so cowed by all of this that they become apathetic. It’s too vast a problem to do anything about it. I, at least, have committed my life. I am not making any more films until I get as many countries in the world, who will be enlightened to do so, to co-op this global human rights initiative that I am spearheading and advising the U.N. Human Rights Office on, and have absolutely extraordinary visionaries as patrons on the committee. We are constructing a global human rights curriculum from day one of the entry of the child to school — on a compulsory basis. I got eight countries already, and I will not stop until I get the rest. What are the eight countries so far? That I will not tell you because I am saving it for the launch, when we announce it. This ban illustrates a lot things, but at least in part it illustrates India’s desire to handle this problem of rape in a different way, and in some quarters, their own way. This education initiative sounds that it would be a top-down thing. Do you think that would ruffle feathers in the same way as the film did? Why is this film preventing them from handling things their own way? Why are they choosing to be mutually exclusive? The ban does not illustrate that they want to handle things their own way. The ban illustrates that they don’t want to face it. We have to call a spade a spade. The ban illustrates that they are pretending it doesn't exist, or at least, they don’t want the world to think it exists there. They don’t want to decimate their tourist industry. These are very shallow considerations, when weighed up against the violation of the human rights of women and girls, and violence that is perpetrated against them on a daily basis. A lot of countries in the world are perfectly willing to introspect when they see this film. When I show this film in America, we talk about the fact that there is one in four girls in college campuses are raped. We talk about the fact that women in America get 78 cents on the dollar for the same work that men do. We talk about the fact that whereas India has article 14 of its constitution, which confers equal rights on women, America still does not have that much respect for women in its constitution, in its law. That has been resisted, and the Equal Rights Amendment acts is still not ratified. And that is shameful. Now, when we talk about these things, do you think an American audience can resist that? Absolutely, not. They’re responsible about it. They say, “Yes, we will hold our hands up. This is appalling. We have to do something about it.” Why can’t India just say the same? India, alone in the whole world, is simply not owning up to it. Do you feel that your affection for India has changed? I love India. I love India. I am infuriated by India right now. It really cracked my heart in two. I don’t like it when a section of the Indian population sends me tweets like: “White bitch, you deserve to be raped!” I don’t like it when they send me tweets threatening my life. Or send me pornography on the Internet. I don’t like that. It upsets and infuriate me, but I am not idiot enough to think this is a sign of Indians. This is a minority of people; every country has pathetic people, who simply resist change. And that is what emanates from. And I am really hurt that the Indian government banned this film without seeing it, and refused to call me. I was on television in Delhi, begging them to call me and ask me any questions they’d like answered. They didn’t want to because they didn’t want to hear the truth. They made a big mistake in banning this film. They should simply put those aside. Those are pathetic considerations, when you consider the issues that are at the heart of this. And anyone who prefers to bury their sand rather than address an issue of this magnitude, I’m afraid lacks respect from me.

* * *

A coda, of sorts. Udwin was not very happy with me by the end of this interview. But I also spoke to one of the film’s ambassadors, the actress Freida Pinto. Meryl Streep and Dakota Fanning have also been involved with promoting the film, but I was most interested in Pinto’s inclusion. The lead actress in the Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire” was herself born and raised in the environs of Mumbai. In my brief conversation with Pinto, I asked her why she stood by this documentary, when many other Indians didn’t. She explained: “I support the documentary for the truth that it comes with.” In her view, other Indians had difficulty accepting the film because of a sense of “misplaced national pride.” “That comes into the picture when there is a certain truth, as ugly as it might be, shown to us by an outsider. But sometimes, it is actually more effective, because the outsider does come with a fresher perspective… It’s so easy to get caught up in the blame game of it all, especially when something is kind of bitter.” Udwin, Pinto and even the rapists in “India’s Daughter” express surprise at why Jyoti Singh’s particular tragic story so rocked the nation in December 2012. Pinto offered me her theory as to why her story was the tipping point:

She was a medical student, very aspirational, much like most of the college students who were out on the street protesting. This is a woman who basically had a chance to transform her own life and her parents’. She was very ambitious, and in many ways she was already a fighter, with what she was doing in her life. People love rooting for fighters, we all know that. This girl’s life was taken away from her, in a way that no one expected. It wasn’t a road accident, she wasn’t ill. She was doing something that was absolutely the most normal thing to do—which is watch “Life of Pi” one night. And then something as horrific as a gang rape on the bus followed that. Yes, we hear about rapes all the time, in different parts of the country, but in terms of her being an early 20s aspirational girl, that is something we probably had not heard of on this level. Also the brutality of the crime itself got everybody’s attention. Sometimes, I wish people did not focus on the brutality of the crime, because it really does not help the problem. And the brutality of the crime, in such brutal terms, has happened many times before. I think the number one aspect was that she was an aspirational girl just like you and I.

“India’s Daughter” airs Monday on PBS at 10 p.m.In 2012, when a young medical student was gang-raped and left for dead on the side of a road in Delhi, India, neither she nor her assailants could have predicted the furor that would follow. India has a problem of systemic, horrific violence against its women—perhaps not more than other nations, but certainly not any better, either. The preconceptions about rape, sexuality and gender were not challenged by any number of stories preceding this one; why should Jyoti Singh’s story be any different? For whatever reason, it was. Protests shook both the capital city of Delhi—India’s "rape capital"—and outrage spread not just to the rest of India but to the rest of the world. In this climate, Leslee Udwin, a novice filmmaker, went to India to attempt to tell the story of a woman the media was beginning to call “India’s daughter.” The resulting documentary—“India’s Daughter”—is, itself, a remarkably balanced documentary, one that distinguishes itself from other accounts of sexual assault by interviewing the rapists and their team of defense lawyers. The only convicted rapist who admits to what he did was the driver, Mukesh Singh, and interviews with him take up nearly as much screentime as the interviews with Jyoti’s bereaved parents. What immediately followed the film was controversy. As the New Yorker reports:

After clips of the Mukesh Singh interview began circulating online, the Indian government stopped the scheduled Indian broadcast of “India’s Daughter,” which was set for March 8th, International Women’s Day. On March 4th, a statement from the Indian Home Minister’s office said that the government was enforcing a ban because Udwin hadn’t secured the correct permissions to interview Singh in prison, didn’t abide by agreements to show authorities unedited versions of the interview, and because Singh’s statements are “an affront to the dignity of women.” (Udwin has since published copies of the letters of permission she received.) In another statement, the government warned that clips from the film “appear to encourage and incite violence against women.” Some supporters of the ban say that airing the Singh interview is tantamount to giving a platform to the rapist’s views; others say that the documentary paints sexual violence as an Indian issue rather than a global one, and fear that it will perpetuate a “white-savior” attitude in foreign viewers. That the government finds the film nationally embarrassing is a likely reason for the ban—members of the ruling B.J.P party have stated that the film is part of “an international conspiracy to defame India” and have protested that its release will affect tourism.

India is notorious for banning media that hint at the controversial; restricted topics include homosexuality, alternative histories of Hinduism, examinations of revered politicians, and of course, rape. In this case, as with most of the others, it speaks of cowardice. “India’s Daughter” has benefited from the publicity surrounding the decision, as illegal copies have proliferated online, but the ban effectively stopped the film from being seen by the people it is about — the poorest and most disconnected segments of the population, the ones struggling most to survive in the most populous country in the world. Beyond the government’s actions, Udwin’s documentary has sparked a conversation that is very familiar to media criticism in 2015—the ongoing questions of who has the right to tell which kinds of stories. Udwin is an Israeli Londoner, and “India’s Daughter” entirely concerns people and events in Northern India. The best intentions in the world cannot erase the racial implications of such a power dynamic, and as “India’s Daughter” has become such an object of discussion in the press, Udwin herself has begun to sound embattled and defensive. I would characterize my own conversation with her as a bit rancorous. Below is my conversation with Udwin; following that are a few closing thoughts from myself and Freida Pinto, who is an ambassador for “India’s Daugher.” How did you come to this topic? I know that you are not Indian yourself. Yes. Well, as a global citizen, and a woman who cares very deeply about the fact that we are still subordinated to men, that we are still lacking in proper respect and representation—true representation, in the world in terms of decision making, in terms of economies and in terms of being independent, and very much in terms of us being unsafe. We know that on a daily basis, every single second, somewhere a woman or a girl is being violently abused and violated. What brought me to the topic was not so much the rape and the case and the darkness of that. It was the light and the horizon of seeing this mass mobilization of the Indian men and women. It was awe-inspiring to me, to see such mass mobilization on India’s streets fighting for my rights. I took it personally, and I thought the least I could do—when these people were being so courageous and so committed to this issue, and facing the most ferocious government crackdown on peaceful protesters—the least I could do was make a film that would be like a megaphone for those voices and join in the protest in that way. That was my way of joining them. So I believe this is your first documentary film, right? Right, yes, and the first time I’ve directed as well. How did it even occur to you to make a film about this? Were you hoping to make a film at some point already? Was India set in your sights at that point? No, no. Not at all. I had no intentions ever of making a documentary film. But it basically took on its own volition. It became a compulsion for me. I didn’t choose to do it. And you know, I didn’t choose India. If these protests had happened in any other country, in any other part of the world, I would’ve gone there and have made that particular case of those protests. I have been up to this point a producer of feature films. I decided to direct the film because I couldn’t afford to hire a director. But I had so much fire in my belly, I was so utterly compelled to make this film, that I had to just go and do it. Obviously I researched very thoroughly before I did it, I didn’t just step on a plane, but I had to do it and therefore by ordinary means, and the means that I had were private means, whatever I had of family savings. And I’ve used them all. [Laughs.] Had you been to India before, or was it a completely new experience? Many times. I’ve had a very close, loving relationship with India, which is why it hurts my heart so much that they have banned this film, you know. And that they even think of accusing me of a conspiracy to shame India—what absolute nonsense. You know, this is a conspiracy to praise India and thank India for being the only country in the world that has come out with such force and vigor and passion and tenacity for women’s rights, to try and make the world a better place for women and girls. There’s not another country on earth that has done that. I went to praise India, not to bury it. Sadly, shame has now appeared to India. But not from the film. From the ban. From the fact that they have banned a film that simply asks for a better world for women and girls. And they have banned the film without even seeing it, which is shameful. It’s so ridiculous. A lot of the media that I read coming out of India about this film suggested a lot of wounded pride or a sense of violation about having a filmmaker who was not Indian make this story that is centered on India in this way. How did you tackle that concern, and how did you respond to that criticism? Well, here’s how I respond. I can understand that certain segments of the Indian population — and believe me, they’re in the minority — I can understand that they have a postcolonial chip on their shoulder. This is what this is emanating from. They call me a British journalist. I am neither a journalist nor British, OK. There’s a kind of exterior that has flown in the face of facts and proper research. And that’s very sad. Because it boomerangs back on the people who are bandying these terms about. They call me a “gori.” You know what that means? I do know what that means. That’s a derogatory word for a white-skinned person. [Note: The word is used for anyone fair-skinned, including Indians, and is considered mild enough that it is featured in both Bollywood lyrics and “Bend It Like Beckham.”] I’m Jewish. In my people’s history, there was a Holocaust in Germany. If I lived my life constantly keeping that paramount in my mind and letting that filter what is right and what is wrong in terms of what is happening around me, I wouldn’t move very far. I think it’s backward-looking. They have to forget about the colonial era, and whatever ax they have to grind with the Brits, let them grind it. You know, let them move on from grinding it, actually! It’s not my fight. I’m not British, OK? Here’s the thing. Any people who refuse to introspect need to really examine their conscience as to why that is. Is your image as a country really more important than saving the lives of your women and girls? Because if that’s what you’re saying, then I’m afraid I don’t have any respect or time for that attitude. You see, I watched as MPs in the Lok Sabha, the Indian Parliament, the morning after the ban were screaming like headless chickens in hysterics. “She’s decimating our tourist industry.” “She’s a conspiracy to shame India,” they were screaming that when they hadn’t even seen the film. There hadn’t even been the possibility for them to see the film because at that point it existed on one thumb drive in my purse. So you know, we shouldn’t give this any credence. We should see it as part of the change-resisting backwards-looking segments of the population. And they don’t only just exist in India. They exist all over the world. There are those people who resist change. There are those people who welcome change and look forward to it. And there are a handful of people who are actively working to change. I know which category I’d like to be in. So let’s talk a little bit about what is the linchpin of your film, which is this very disturbing set of interviews with Mukesh, one of the convicted rapists. Correct. Yes. I interviewed seven rapists over 31 hours. Four of them had nothing to do with this case. One of those four had raped a 5-year-old girl. I sat and interviewed him for three hours. And the reason why I interviewed others who were not involved in this particular case was because I felt the need to practice. Because I was raped when I was 18, and I’m ashamed to say I’ve kept silent about it for 20 years. I didn’t know to what degree the demons inside me that I had buried would rise up. Also, I’d never made a documentary before. I’d never interviewed people before. So I was relying on who I am and what I cared about, you know? Why did Mukesh end up in the film and not the other two rapists? Of the four adults who were candidates to be interviewed — because, remember, Ram Singh either committed suicide or had been murdered in the process, and there was the juvenile, whom there was no possibility of interviewing. I did meet him for 10 minutes, and there was a point in which I had been given permission from the magistrate to simply interview him, but not record him, and have his answers transcribed. And then, the magistrate changed her mind, so I couldn’t do that any longer. Now, one of these four men refused to meet me altogether – Akshay Thakur, the one with the wife and baby in the film. And the two younger ones — whom I sat with over two sessions, for three hours each — they were still maintaining that they were not on the bus. [Here Udwin pauses, as if waiting for me to respond.] They were saying that they were at a music festival—and that music festival was proven by the court not to have existed. They were either in denial, or trying to deny, or mouthing what their lawyers were telling them to say until the appeal. So, there was absolutely no point in including them in the film. What do we gain by them saying they weren’t there? Mukesh spoke very openly and very honestly. That’s strange that he would be honest when — I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you why he was being honest. For the same reason. Because he and not a single one of the other rapists I spoke to held any remorse. Really, deep down, they do not believe they did anything wrong. And that is the truth. Their attitude is indignant, in fact. Everybody is doing it, so why are they made an example of? Indeed, from Mukesh’s point of view, why is he being given the death sentence, when there are worse and equally bad crimes, et cetera. That is why he spoke so honestly. As horrible as it is, one of the things your film demonstrates well is that he has a point. There is something about this that really struck a nerve in a way that nothing else had before. Where are the protests now about the 2-and-a-half and 5-year-old girls who were gang-raped last weekend in Delhi? Where are the protests about the 4-year-girl, who in the previous weekend, lay in the same hospital that Jyoti laid in, and had been slashed from vagina to anus by three adults who had gang-raped her? Four years old, and she wound up having a three-hour operation to have a colostomy bag fitted. Where are the protests? What do you think? Where do you think they are? Well, I think that people feel so hopeless about this. We must have sunk so low in terms of our moral crisis in this world. We have woefully and irresponsibly neglected to educate our children. And of course, we have a lot of people, and that has to be said, who don’t even have access of education. But putting that aside, the people who do have access to education do not have access to the right kind of education because they are educating their heads, and not their hearts. We are responsible, as a world, to lead our children, at that crucial period between 3 and 5 years old when neuroscience tells us is the only window to cognitively modify a human being, to change attitudes, change behavior and build attitude. After that, it is all over. How irresponsible have we been not to teach our children the value of another human being? To respect moral values. No wonder we are in the state we are in. And I saw people being so cowed by all of this that they become apathetic. It’s too vast a problem to do anything about it. I, at least, have committed my life. I am not making any more films until I get as many countries in the world, who will be enlightened to do so, to co-op this global human rights initiative that I am spearheading and advising the U.N. Human Rights Office on, and have absolutely extraordinary visionaries as patrons on the committee. We are constructing a global human rights curriculum from day one of the entry of the child to school — on a compulsory basis. I got eight countries already, and I will not stop until I get the rest. What are the eight countries so far? That I will not tell you because I am saving it for the launch, when we announce it. This ban illustrates a lot things, but at least in part it illustrates India’s desire to handle this problem of rape in a different way, and in some quarters, their own way. This education initiative sounds that it would be a top-down thing. Do you think that would ruffle feathers in the same way as the film did? Why is this film preventing them from handling things their own way? Why are they choosing to be mutually exclusive? The ban does not illustrate that they want to handle things their own way. The ban illustrates that they don’t want to face it. We have to call a spade a spade. The ban illustrates that they are pretending it doesn't exist, or at least, they don’t want the world to think it exists there. They don’t want to decimate their tourist industry. These are very shallow considerations, when weighed up against the violation of the human rights of women and girls, and violence that is perpetrated against them on a daily basis. A lot of countries in the world are perfectly willing to introspect when they see this film. When I show this film in America, we talk about the fact that there is one in four girls in college campuses are raped. We talk about the fact that women in America get 78 cents on the dollar for the same work that men do. We talk about the fact that whereas India has article 14 of its constitution, which confers equal rights on women, America still does not have that much respect for women in its constitution, in its law. That has been resisted, and the Equal Rights Amendment acts is still not ratified. And that is shameful. Now, when we talk about these things, do you think an American audience can resist that? Absolutely, not. They’re responsible about it. They say, “Yes, we will hold our hands up. This is appalling. We have to do something about it.” Why can’t India just say the same? India, alone in the whole world, is simply not owning up to it. Do you feel that your affection for India has changed? I love India. I love India. I am infuriated by India right now. It really cracked my heart in two. I don’t like it when a section of the Indian population sends me tweets like: “White bitch, you deserve to be raped!” I don’t like it when they send me tweets threatening my life. Or send me pornography on the Internet. I don’t like that. It upsets and infuriate me, but I am not idiot enough to think this is a sign of Indians. This is a minority of people; every country has pathetic people, who simply resist change. And that is what emanates from. And I am really hurt that the Indian government banned this film without seeing it, and refused to call me. I was on television in Delhi, begging them to call me and ask me any questions they’d like answered. They didn’t want to because they didn’t want to hear the truth. They made a big mistake in banning this film. They should simply put those aside. Those are pathetic considerations, when you consider the issues that are at the heart of this. And anyone who prefers to bury their sand rather than address an issue of this magnitude, I’m afraid lacks respect from me.

* * *

A coda, of sorts. Udwin was not very happy with me by the end of this interview. But I also spoke to one of the film’s ambassadors, the actress Freida Pinto. Meryl Streep and Dakota Fanning have also been involved with promoting the film, but I was most interested in Pinto’s inclusion. The lead actress in the Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire” was herself born and raised in the environs of Mumbai. In my brief conversation with Pinto, I asked her why she stood by this documentary, when many other Indians didn’t. She explained: “I support the documentary for the truth that it comes with.” In her view, other Indians had difficulty accepting the film because of a sense of “misplaced national pride.” “That comes into the picture when there is a certain truth, as ugly as it might be, shown to us by an outsider. But sometimes, it is actually more effective, because the outsider does come with a fresher perspective… It’s so easy to get caught up in the blame game of it all, especially when something is kind of bitter.” Udwin, Pinto and even the rapists in “India’s Daughter” express surprise at why Jyoti Singh’s particular tragic story so rocked the nation in December 2012. Pinto offered me her theory as to why her story was the tipping point:

She was a medical student, very aspirational, much like most of the college students who were out on the street protesting. This is a woman who basically had a chance to transform her own life and her parents’. She was very ambitious, and in many ways she was already a fighter, with what she was doing in her life. People love rooting for fighters, we all know that. This girl’s life was taken away from her, in a way that no one expected. It wasn’t a road accident, she wasn’t ill. She was doing something that was absolutely the most normal thing to do—which is watch “Life of Pi” one night. And then something as horrific as a gang rape on the bus followed that. Yes, we hear about rapes all the time, in different parts of the country, but in terms of her being an early 20s aspirational girl, that is something we probably had not heard of on this level. Also the brutality of the crime itself got everybody’s attention. Sometimes, I wish people did not focus on the brutality of the crime, because it really does not help the problem. And the brutality of the crime, in such brutal terms, has happened many times before. I think the number one aspect was that she was an aspirational girl just like you and I.

“India’s Daughter” airs Monday on PBS at 10 p.m.

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We ruined Justin Bieber: Full of apologies and scared of controversy, Bieber makes an unforgivably bland comeback

An average day for Justin Bieber, according to his cover story in Billboard magazine, may end with his “sneaking down from his room to the hotel lounge to play the piano while people drink.” The suggestion is that Biebs is so devoted to his art, he’ll make it for its own sake. But there’s something curious about the idea of a pop superstar happily tickling out aural wallpaper. These days, the best way to be everywhere is to let people forget you’re even there. As Bieber drops his new album “Purpose,” he’s on the verge of completing a perfect 2015 pop comeback. Most musical returns to the public eye have been about proving continued artistic relevance and making strong statements – from LL Cool J’s “Don’t Call It a Comeback” to “It’s Britney, Bitch.” Missy Elliott does both on her brand-new “WTF (Where They From)”: “Got a new idea, let me switch it / Man, I’m so futuristic.” But if she’s continually looking ahead, Bieber, whose adolescent mishaps — from Anne Frank gaffes to a trail of forgotten exotic pets — went disastrously viral, is now perfectly attuned to our social media-driven present: His new music is engineered to offend precisely no one. Bieber’s delivery on “Purpose” is meek – androgynous without the sass of a David Bowie or an Annie Lennox – and the production, some of it by former dubstep bad-boy Skrillex, is airy and vaguely international; you’d expect to hear these songs on credit-card commercials or on an airplane’s PA system before takeoff. The lyrics, seemingly intended to portray Bieber’s personal journey to manhood, are oddly generic. The stark, searching opener, “Mark My Words,” promises much, but in the end, Bieber shies away from definitive statements. He prefers asking questions: “What do you mean?” “What about the children?” “Is it too late to say I’m sorry?” and on the title track, “Ask you to forgive me for my sins, oh would you please?” Forgiveness is certainly a theme for the man who’s been on an apology tour all year, and it’s inevitable his mea culpas should have seeped into his music. In our Taylor Swift/Adele era, pop stars are held up to the same standards of “authenticity” that used to be applied to rockers: They’re supposed to be writing (or co-writing) their own material, which is supposed to reflect who they are as people. There are exceptions to this rule – Bieber’s enigmatic compatriot The Weeknd likes to play the villain – but when you’ve been in the public eye since you were 12, you’re doomed to follow the script. Hence the litany of “nobody’s perfect” songs, themselves shorn of specifics: “People make mistakes,” he sings on “Life Is Worth Living.” For the careful listener, this grows frustrating: Fair enough, Biebs, if you’re not going to sing about abandoning monkeys or egging houses—but couldn’t you make something up to add a little spice? Having had his entire career bolstered, and then buffeted, by social media’s ever-present reality show, Bieber evidently has taken to heart that anything he sings can and will be held against him in the court of public opinion. So the guy who once felt so entitled he pissed in a mop bucket at a restaurant – on video, no less – is adopting the soft sell. Where he once would plead, “Baby, baby, baby, nooooooo!” he now makes non-threatening suggestions. On “Company,” he croons, “Maybe we can stay in touch? Oh, that ain’t doin’ much.” On the lilting “No Pressure,” a song so polite it should come with a downloadable Canadian flag and a coupon for maple syrup, he tells a potential lover, “You ain’t gotta make your mind up right now / Don’t rush.” His milquetoast strategy seems to be working: His last three singles (including the Jack Ü feature, “Where Are Ü Now?”) have hit the U.S. Top 5, and across the Internet, he’s now the recipient of grudging praise by those who used to decry his obnoxious ubiquity. Indeed, Bieber is on the verge of a significant transformation, from courting schadenfreude to engendering goodwill. The odd slip-up aside – a Norwegian stage storm-off here, a petulant chair-flip at a French restaurant there – his narrative is holding up. In “Purpose” he has found an ideal response to what Jon Ronson, in his book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” sees as a “conformist, conservative age,” created by an atmosphere described to him by a journalist friend: “I suddenly feel with social media like I’m tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment.” Bieber has learned his lesson. To make yourself impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous forums, you can either withdraw altogether or aspire to blandness. There are hints of potential and character on “Purpose” — in Bieber’s elastic-voiced R&B workout, “No Sense,” and in the slightly eerie bonus-track collab with Nas (of all people), “We Are.” And the album is catchy and tightly crafted – but also safe, anodyne and as ephemeral as a tweet. Justin Bieber may not be the pop star we need in 2015, but he’s the pop star we deserve.An average day for Justin Bieber, according to his cover story in Billboard magazine, may end with his “sneaking down from his room to the hotel lounge to play the piano while people drink.” The suggestion is that Biebs is so devoted to his art, he’ll make it for its own sake. But there’s something curious about the idea of a pop superstar happily tickling out aural wallpaper. These days, the best way to be everywhere is to let people forget you’re even there. As Bieber drops his new album “Purpose,” he’s on the verge of completing a perfect 2015 pop comeback. Most musical returns to the public eye have been about proving continued artistic relevance and making strong statements – from LL Cool J’s “Don’t Call It a Comeback” to “It’s Britney, Bitch.” Missy Elliott does both on her brand-new “WTF (Where They From)”: “Got a new idea, let me switch it / Man, I’m so futuristic.” But if she’s continually looking ahead, Bieber, whose adolescent mishaps — from Anne Frank gaffes to a trail of forgotten exotic pets — went disastrously viral, is now perfectly attuned to our social media-driven present: His new music is engineered to offend precisely no one. Bieber’s delivery on “Purpose” is meek – androgynous without the sass of a David Bowie or an Annie Lennox – and the production, some of it by former dubstep bad-boy Skrillex, is airy and vaguely international; you’d expect to hear these songs on credit-card commercials or on an airplane’s PA system before takeoff. The lyrics, seemingly intended to portray Bieber’s personal journey to manhood, are oddly generic. The stark, searching opener, “Mark My Words,” promises much, but in the end, Bieber shies away from definitive statements. He prefers asking questions: “What do you mean?” “What about the children?” “Is it too late to say I’m sorry?” and on the title track, “Ask you to forgive me for my sins, oh would you please?” Forgiveness is certainly a theme for the man who’s been on an apology tour all year, and it’s inevitable his mea culpas should have seeped into his music. In our Taylor Swift/Adele era, pop stars are held up to the same standards of “authenticity” that used to be applied to rockers: They’re supposed to be writing (or co-writing) their own material, which is supposed to reflect who they are as people. There are exceptions to this rule – Bieber’s enigmatic compatriot The Weeknd likes to play the villain – but when you’ve been in the public eye since you were 12, you’re doomed to follow the script. Hence the litany of “nobody’s perfect” songs, themselves shorn of specifics: “People make mistakes,” he sings on “Life Is Worth Living.” For the careful listener, this grows frustrating: Fair enough, Biebs, if you’re not going to sing about abandoning monkeys or egging houses—but couldn’t you make something up to add a little spice? Having had his entire career bolstered, and then buffeted, by social media’s ever-present reality show, Bieber evidently has taken to heart that anything he sings can and will be held against him in the court of public opinion. So the guy who once felt so entitled he pissed in a mop bucket at a restaurant – on video, no less – is adopting the soft sell. Where he once would plead, “Baby, baby, baby, nooooooo!” he now makes non-threatening suggestions. On “Company,” he croons, “Maybe we can stay in touch? Oh, that ain’t doin’ much.” On the lilting “No Pressure,” a song so polite it should come with a downloadable Canadian flag and a coupon for maple syrup, he tells a potential lover, “You ain’t gotta make your mind up right now / Don’t rush.” His milquetoast strategy seems to be working: His last three singles (including the Jack Ü feature, “Where Are Ü Now?”) have hit the U.S. Top 5, and across the Internet, he’s now the recipient of grudging praise by those who used to decry his obnoxious ubiquity. Indeed, Bieber is on the verge of a significant transformation, from courting schadenfreude to engendering goodwill. The odd slip-up aside – a Norwegian stage storm-off here, a petulant chair-flip at a French restaurant there – his narrative is holding up. In “Purpose” he has found an ideal response to what Jon Ronson, in his book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” sees as a “conformist, conservative age,” created by an atmosphere described to him by a journalist friend: “I suddenly feel with social media like I’m tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment.” Bieber has learned his lesson. To make yourself impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous forums, you can either withdraw altogether or aspire to blandness. There are hints of potential and character on “Purpose” — in Bieber’s elastic-voiced R&B workout, “No Sense,” and in the slightly eerie bonus-track collab with Nas (of all people), “We Are.” And the album is catchy and tightly crafted – but also safe, anodyne and as ephemeral as a tweet. Justin Bieber may not be the pop star we need in 2015, but he’s the pop star we deserve.

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YouTube star Tyler Oakley on being famous online and beyond: “My inclination is to always go back to the Internet, even if things are rough”

Tyler Oakley figured out social media’s power to launch a brand – in this case, his own – long before most corporations even created Twitter accounts. Oakley uploaded his first public YouTube video in 2007, then only three years later was offered a national marketing campaign with YouTube. He’s obsessed with pop culture – at one point a self-proclaimed "professional fangirl" for One Direction – and charmingly honest, especially about his life as a young gay person. The 26-year-old, who describes himself as “a twink from the Internet,” currently counts 7.5 million YouTube subscribers and 4.6 million Twitter followers. There are some people who don’t want to acknowledge the power of the Internet, but in 2015 social media is a powerful machine. Oakely’s Internet presence – a majority of his followers are teens – even caught the attention of the White House, who reached out to him to interview first lady Michelle Obama. When Oakley posted the trailer for his upcoming documentary "Snervous," it soon (#SnervousTrailer) trended on Facebook. He’ll soon be in homes across America as he’s slated to appear on the upcoming season of CBS’s "Amazing Race." Oakley's rise to Internet prominence, though, didn’t happen overnight, and his recently released collection of humor essays "Binge" discusses his Internet journey. It seems like a wave of YouTubers have been dropping books lately, but Oakley’s stands out, because his topics range from the silly “20 Things I’d Do If I Were Beyoncé for the Day” to the very serious such as his struggle with an eating disorder. To some, 26 might seem young to write a memoir or personal essay collection, but Oakley uses his unique perspective on YouTube to write a touching and timely book. In "Binge," already a New York Times bestseller, readers finds Oakley at his realest. In "Binge," you discuss how much work you’ve put into YouTube and social media accounts over the years. You’ve kind of created your own lane. I have been doing it for eight years now, but the first five years were just kind of a hobby that I loved. I’d come home from work or from class, and it was everything that I loved to do. When I graduated from college, I got a 9-to-5 traditional job doing social media for a company, and I’d spend all day long fighting with the system of getting things approved and the fact that social media has such a quick turnaround. Things had to be very reactive and instant. There had to be a level of trust between the company and social media manager. But back then it was still progressive to even have a social media manager in the first place. It was a battle every single day. Then, I’d come home and work on my own stuff, and I absolutely loved it because I was in charge of my own stuff. I was able to do what I wanted. When I first thought about leaving the traditional route of a 9-to-5 career to pursue full-time YouTube it was terrifying – not many people were doing it. The thought was I have to have money saved up, because this very likely might fail. From the start, I had to give it my all for it to work. If I didn’t, then I would be the only one to blame that it wouldn’t work as a full-time job. Since day one of trying to go full-time it’s been go, go, go, go, go. I think that mentality has just stuck with me, and even though things are going really well, I still haven’t let up the concept of who knows how long it could last. But it’s one of those things where who knows how any job could last? In my mind, it’s kind of just been an unprecedented type of career where who knows how this will go or what the next step is. I’ve always thought if I’m not full-throttle, 100 percent all the time, then it’s on me if it doesn’t work out. There’s this idea in the media that millenials are slackers, but you’re constantly producing stuff and putting it out there for a huge audience on the internet.   Half of the perception is the millenial thing and half the perception of a YouTube star being a simple, lazy type of situation might be that people just don’t get it, which is fine. I know what I do. I feel what I do, so if they don’t want to see it, then that’s on them. Since my first experience with the Internet, I’ve been obsessed with it. There was the One Direction incident and that was a moment when I was like I don’t know if I still want to be on the Internet or if I should be doing what I do to the extent that I do. But my inclination is to always go back to the Internet, even if things are rough on the Internet. The Internet has changed so quickly in such a short time. When I was a teen, I was low-key in the Yahoo! chatrooms, because it was the only space I could find. Oh my God, same. I was talking to people when I was way too young to be doing that. Why are young, gay people so good at the Internet? People like you, Todrick Hall  and Lohanthony have all found an audience. The Internet offers a younger generation of LGBTQ+ people a resource or a place to learn more about LGBTQ+ culture. They can also find a community that might not exist where they live. I think of my coming out experience – I was really fortunate and privileged to have a lot of supportive community. There were openly gay teachers and students at my school, and so many kids don’t have that. I think the Internet lends itself to a place where LGBTQ+ people can succeed, because they’re being sought out. They’re a disenfranchised voice in traditional media. I think it exists for not just LGBTQ+ people, but for all disenfranchised voices that maybe media is ignoring or not giving a platform to. I think those voices are good at it, because it’s fueled by the fact some people feel like they finally have a platform for their voice to exist. It is a phenomenon for sure – gay voices finding platforms on the Internet. How different was the process of writing YouTube videos for the internet and writing a physical book? The YouTube process has kind of been the most organic for me. I’ve just treated it like a diary, and I’ve never really written out a video – I’ll have bullet points like "don’t forget to talk about this" or "say this." But I’ve never scripted it, really. That’s kind of lent itself to the podcast [Psychobabble] which is very free and open and minimal edited. The first time I’ve been kind of more structured has been writing the book. That was a huge challenge for me. When I was first offered the book deal I was like I am not a writer. I haven’t practiced this. My approach has been completely stream-of-consciousness, and then edit down, because that’s been YouTube for me forever. When I first got the book deal – I didn’t know how I write – so I said no to it. I didn’t want to do it if I didn’t feel like it would be the correct way to go about it. After I said no, I started trying to write and figuring out what my voice was written. It kind of followed the same path of YouTube. I tried to write as much as I could and knew that nobody had to see it but me, then edit it down from there. It seems like you work so much and go after opportunities, so I’m surprised you waited to write the book. With everything that I’ve done with YouTube and podcasts for so many years it’s been: you can record it, edit, and then upload that day. With the book and documentary, it’s been such a longer process. YouTube has a more reactive nature to it. It’s been productive to be more reflective and take my time with things and not do things as quickly as possible just because that’s the nature of my job. There were so many topics I was nervous to share in YouTube videos or podcasts, but I started to feel more comfortable sharing them, because I had taken a chance to write them down in the first place. Do any of those things happen to be the "Binge" essays about Grindr hookups? You made a point in "Binge" that straight people talk about Tinder in everyday conversations.  Oh my God [laughs]. Tinder is so common – it’s in movies and in sitcoms. Grindr is usually the butt of the joke or it’s some type of naughty thing that you can’t discuss. But it’s the same thing. That was easier for me to write. I think everyone else was more nervous about those things. The things I was more nervous about were relationships or coming out, body image issues, or about anxiety or feeling pressures or sadness. The more serious things were what I had a challenge with writing. The sex stuff, I was like whatever, who cares. I’ve been talking about hookups on YouTube for a while, so I’m like who cares. It was fun for me. There were some things that didn’t make the book, because everyone was like this is too far. But now having seen the response to it, I’m so ready to write more. How has your family and other people you wrote about responded to seeing it in print as opposed to your YouTube life? I don’t think anyone in my life has gone about their relationship with me and thought oh, someday he might write about this. But I guess that’s a thing that will be on their mind in the future. Almost 99 percent of people in the book have responded to it saying, "you know what that’s a pretty fair assessment of what happened." For example, the boyfriend of mine that is in the chapter “The One That Got Away” and I had dinner after the book was out. He had been hearing some things from friends who read it. We got to really talk through everything. It was nice. He was like we both look like idiots at times, we both look fine at times, but it was really honest. Regardless if they are happy or not, if the response is, "Well, it’s pretty accurate," that’s all I could ever ask for. I love a good breakup essay, and I think that essay “The One That Got Away” is really relatable. When you’re in love for the first time you don’t know how to act. I’m so happy I took a lot of time to write that. It’s the same with a lot of chapters. Had I taken the initial book deal, I would have still been in the middle of things in the chapters. Now that I waited a long time, and I took a long time to write it and wasn’t really on someone else’s deadline, it was like I actually got to find conclusions that didn’t exist yet. I wrote something really similar to “The One That Got Away” in college – I think a year or two after the relationship ended. And I was still going through it. I needed to give myself time to actually process it.  With Facebook, YouTube or Instagram, people curate their personas. Your documentary "Snervous" is about to come out and people will see you going through it all. This is the first time I’ve really given up control of my own edit. As a YouTuber, you’re very lucky to be in charge of how you’re perceived. You get to put out what you want. The documentary was the first time when I was not at all a part of the process – I wasn’t filming. The camera was around and along for the ride for the better part of this entire year. A lot of the times I would forget it was even on or I would be very conscious that it was on and be like can we please turn this off, because it was a less flattering or uncomfortable moment. Luckily, the director, Amy [Rice], was so incredible, and I was so comfortable with her that I was just happy to give up the control. The documentary was the first time I gave up control, and when I saw the first cut of it I was like there is so much in this that I would literally never put out there. To have somebody else’s eyes on my life or situation to give a very different angle of what it’s really like was exciting and terrifying. Even now there are parts of the movie I can’t watch, because I would never want to have this out there. But it’s about to be out there. Yeah you tweeted the first trailer like right before this interview. I just changed my Twitter picture, and I just changed my banner. An era is changing over. I’m going from "Born This Way" to "Cheek to Cheek." I hope people like the trailer. I hope certain people aren’t pissed about the book in the trailer. I hope people like the book. So much of these bigger projects are driven by numbers and charting and this and that – things that as a YouTuber I haven’t really been perceptive of. It’s always been more about I hope people like it, and now it’s about I hope the numbers do well or whatever. I’m still so much about I hope people see me for what we’re putting out there, and it’s not misinterpreted. I just hope people get me.Tyler Oakley figured out social media’s power to launch a brand – in this case, his own – long before most corporations even created Twitter accounts. Oakley uploaded his first public YouTube video in 2007, then only three years later was offered a national marketing campaign with YouTube. He’s obsessed with pop culture – at one point a self-proclaimed "professional fangirl" for One Direction – and charmingly honest, especially about his life as a young gay person. The 26-year-old, who describes himself as “a twink from the Internet,” currently counts 7.5 million YouTube subscribers and 4.6 million Twitter followers. There are some people who don’t want to acknowledge the power of the Internet, but in 2015 social media is a powerful machine. Oakely’s Internet presence – a majority of his followers are teens – even caught the attention of the White House, who reached out to him to interview first lady Michelle Obama. When Oakley posted the trailer for his upcoming documentary "Snervous," it soon (#SnervousTrailer) trended on Facebook. He’ll soon be in homes across America as he’s slated to appear on the upcoming season of CBS’s "Amazing Race." Oakley's rise to Internet prominence, though, didn’t happen overnight, and his recently released collection of humor essays "Binge" discusses his Internet journey. It seems like a wave of YouTubers have been dropping books lately, but Oakley’s stands out, because his topics range from the silly “20 Things I’d Do If I Were Beyoncé for the Day” to the very serious such as his struggle with an eating disorder. To some, 26 might seem young to write a memoir or personal essay collection, but Oakley uses his unique perspective on YouTube to write a touching and timely book. In "Binge," already a New York Times bestseller, readers finds Oakley at his realest. In "Binge," you discuss how much work you’ve put into YouTube and social media accounts over the years. You’ve kind of created your own lane. I have been doing it for eight years now, but the first five years were just kind of a hobby that I loved. I’d come home from work or from class, and it was everything that I loved to do. When I graduated from college, I got a 9-to-5 traditional job doing social media for a company, and I’d spend all day long fighting with the system of getting things approved and the fact that social media has such a quick turnaround. Things had to be very reactive and instant. There had to be a level of trust between the company and social media manager. But back then it was still progressive to even have a social media manager in the first place. It was a battle every single day. Then, I’d come home and work on my own stuff, and I absolutely loved it because I was in charge of my own stuff. I was able to do what I wanted. When I first thought about leaving the traditional route of a 9-to-5 career to pursue full-time YouTube it was terrifying – not many people were doing it. The thought was I have to have money saved up, because this very likely might fail. From the start, I had to give it my all for it to work. If I didn’t, then I would be the only one to blame that it wouldn’t work as a full-time job. Since day one of trying to go full-time it’s been go, go, go, go, go. I think that mentality has just stuck with me, and even though things are going really well, I still haven’t let up the concept of who knows how long it could last. But it’s one of those things where who knows how any job could last? In my mind, it’s kind of just been an unprecedented type of career where who knows how this will go or what the next step is. I’ve always thought if I’m not full-throttle, 100 percent all the time, then it’s on me if it doesn’t work out. There’s this idea in the media that millenials are slackers, but you’re constantly producing stuff and putting it out there for a huge audience on the internet.   Half of the perception is the millenial thing and half the perception of a YouTube star being a simple, lazy type of situation might be that people just don’t get it, which is fine. I know what I do. I feel what I do, so if they don’t want to see it, then that’s on them. Since my first experience with the Internet, I’ve been obsessed with it. There was the One Direction incident and that was a moment when I was like I don’t know if I still want to be on the Internet or if I should be doing what I do to the extent that I do. But my inclination is to always go back to the Internet, even if things are rough on the Internet. The Internet has changed so quickly in such a short time. When I was a teen, I was low-key in the Yahoo! chatrooms, because it was the only space I could find. Oh my God, same. I was talking to people when I was way too young to be doing that. Why are young, gay people so good at the Internet? People like you, Todrick Hall  and Lohanthony have all found an audience. The Internet offers a younger generation of LGBTQ+ people a resource or a place to learn more about LGBTQ+ culture. They can also find a community that might not exist where they live. I think of my coming out experience – I was really fortunate and privileged to have a lot of supportive community. There were openly gay teachers and students at my school, and so many kids don’t have that. I think the Internet lends itself to a place where LGBTQ+ people can succeed, because they’re being sought out. They’re a disenfranchised voice in traditional media. I think it exists for not just LGBTQ+ people, but for all disenfranchised voices that maybe media is ignoring or not giving a platform to. I think those voices are good at it, because it’s fueled by the fact some people feel like they finally have a platform for their voice to exist. It is a phenomenon for sure – gay voices finding platforms on the Internet. How different was the process of writing YouTube videos for the internet and writing a physical book? The YouTube process has kind of been the most organic for me. I’ve just treated it like a diary, and I’ve never really written out a video – I’ll have bullet points like "don’t forget to talk about this" or "say this." But I’ve never scripted it, really. That’s kind of lent itself to the podcast [Psychobabble] which is very free and open and minimal edited. The first time I’ve been kind of more structured has been writing the book. That was a huge challenge for me. When I was first offered the book deal I was like I am not a writer. I haven’t practiced this. My approach has been completely stream-of-consciousness, and then edit down, because that’s been YouTube for me forever. When I first got the book deal – I didn’t know how I write – so I said no to it. I didn’t want to do it if I didn’t feel like it would be the correct way to go about it. After I said no, I started trying to write and figuring out what my voice was written. It kind of followed the same path of YouTube. I tried to write as much as I could and knew that nobody had to see it but me, then edit it down from there. It seems like you work so much and go after opportunities, so I’m surprised you waited to write the book. With everything that I’ve done with YouTube and podcasts for so many years it’s been: you can record it, edit, and then upload that day. With the book and documentary, it’s been such a longer process. YouTube has a more reactive nature to it. It’s been productive to be more reflective and take my time with things and not do things as quickly as possible just because that’s the nature of my job. There were so many topics I was nervous to share in YouTube videos or podcasts, but I started to feel more comfortable sharing them, because I had taken a chance to write them down in the first place. Do any of those things happen to be the "Binge" essays about Grindr hookups? You made a point in "Binge" that straight people talk about Tinder in everyday conversations.  Oh my God [laughs]. Tinder is so common – it’s in movies and in sitcoms. Grindr is usually the butt of the joke or it’s some type of naughty thing that you can’t discuss. But it’s the same thing. That was easier for me to write. I think everyone else was more nervous about those things. The things I was more nervous about were relationships or coming out, body image issues, or about anxiety or feeling pressures or sadness. The more serious things were what I had a challenge with writing. The sex stuff, I was like whatever, who cares. I’ve been talking about hookups on YouTube for a while, so I’m like who cares. It was fun for me. There were some things that didn’t make the book, because everyone was like this is too far. But now having seen the response to it, I’m so ready to write more. How has your family and other people you wrote about responded to seeing it in print as opposed to your YouTube life? I don’t think anyone in my life has gone about their relationship with me and thought oh, someday he might write about this. But I guess that’s a thing that will be on their mind in the future. Almost 99 percent of people in the book have responded to it saying, "you know what that’s a pretty fair assessment of what happened." For example, the boyfriend of mine that is in the chapter “The One That Got Away” and I had dinner after the book was out. He had been hearing some things from friends who read it. We got to really talk through everything. It was nice. He was like we both look like idiots at times, we both look fine at times, but it was really honest. Regardless if they are happy or not, if the response is, "Well, it’s pretty accurate," that’s all I could ever ask for. I love a good breakup essay, and I think that essay “The One That Got Away” is really relatable. When you’re in love for the first time you don’t know how to act. I’m so happy I took a lot of time to write that. It’s the same with a lot of chapters. Had I taken the initial book deal, I would have still been in the middle of things in the chapters. Now that I waited a long time, and I took a long time to write it and wasn’t really on someone else’s deadline, it was like I actually got to find conclusions that didn’t exist yet. I wrote something really similar to “The One That Got Away” in college – I think a year or two after the relationship ended. And I was still going through it. I needed to give myself time to actually process it.  With Facebook, YouTube or Instagram, people curate their personas. Your documentary "Snervous" is about to come out and people will see you going through it all. This is the first time I’ve really given up control of my own edit. As a YouTuber, you’re very lucky to be in charge of how you’re perceived. You get to put out what you want. The documentary was the first time when I was not at all a part of the process – I wasn’t filming. The camera was around and along for the ride for the better part of this entire year. A lot of the times I would forget it was even on or I would be very conscious that it was on and be like can we please turn this off, because it was a less flattering or uncomfortable moment. Luckily, the director, Amy [Rice], was so incredible, and I was so comfortable with her that I was just happy to give up the control. The documentary was the first time I gave up control, and when I saw the first cut of it I was like there is so much in this that I would literally never put out there. To have somebody else’s eyes on my life or situation to give a very different angle of what it’s really like was exciting and terrifying. Even now there are parts of the movie I can’t watch, because I would never want to have this out there. But it’s about to be out there. Yeah you tweeted the first trailer like right before this interview. I just changed my Twitter picture, and I just changed my banner. An era is changing over. I’m going from "Born This Way" to "Cheek to Cheek." I hope people like the trailer. I hope certain people aren’t pissed about the book in the trailer. I hope people like the book. So much of these bigger projects are driven by numbers and charting and this and that – things that as a YouTuber I haven’t really been perceptive of. It’s always been more about I hope people like it, and now it’s about I hope the numbers do well or whatever. I’m still so much about I hope people see me for what we’re putting out there, and it’s not misinterpreted. I just hope people get me.

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The dog ate my vote: How Congress explains its absences

On a Monday afternoon in October 2011, West Virginia Democrat Nick J. Rahall II waited at the Charleston airport for a 4:50 p.m. U.S. Airways Express flight to Washington. If the plane left on schedule, the roughly 80-minute flight would allow him to get to the Capitol in time for votes in the House of Representatives that evening. Things did not go according to plan. The flight didn’t leave Charleston for another four hours, giving Rahall, then the top Democrat on the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, plenty of time to “boil over,” as he later wrote. When he finally arrived in Washington, having missed three votes, he lambasted the airline’s handling of the delay in a statement in the Congressional Record: “At moments, the arrival/departure information was so confused that the airplane would have had to violate the laws of physics in order to abide by the airline schedule,” Rahall’s statement read. “Needless to say, all passengers were inconvenienced and the airline’s explanations were wholly unsatisfactory. This flight delay prevented me from carrying out my Constitutional duty to represent the people of southern West Virginia: I feel I owe them and this body an explanation about why that was not possible last night.” Voting is one of the most important duties of a lawmaker, and most miss very few votes. Yet voting attendance has become a topic of discussion in the Republican presidential primary, as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has missed about a third of all votes this year, by far the most in that chamber. In the House, unlike the Senate, lawmakers are given a chance to provide “Personal Explanations” to explain missed votes. These entries filed in the Congressional Record say not only how a Representative came to be absent, but also how they would have voted though they don’t have the effect of adding or changing a vote. The custom has been in place since at least 1845, according to a 2008 Congressional Research Service report. In a telephone interview, Rahall said he wanted it on the record that he would have voted in support of the three bills the House considered that day — a measure to convey federal land in Utah to the state, another changing the rules for granting ski area permits on national forest land and a third granting submerged land surrounding the Northern Mariana Islands to the American territory — if only to prevent political opponents from using the missed votes against him. “They could end up as a 30-second sound bite in a campaign,” he said. (Rahall was defeated in 2014 by Evan Jenkins, a Republican). ProPublica has collected all of the Personal Explanations filed since 2007 — some 5,058 in all, covering 21,176 votes — and created a database that lets readers look up their representatives’ missed votes, as well as their explanations. These statements are by no means required — only one in six absences are explained — but they document a little-discussed aspect of the lives and work of lawmakers, and provide hints at the competing priorities and difficulties of a system that, to many, seems chronically dysfunctional. The reasons lawmakers cite most for missing votes range from the mundane (travel delays, often due to weather, or remaining in their districts for job fairs) to more personal (the birth of a child or a graduation ceremony or illness). Lawmakers have missed more than 2,000 votes for medical reasons, and thousands more for personal and family reasons. The record is full of stories documenting the working lives of Representatives: Marcy Kaptur, a Democratic congresswoman from Ohio, missed a 2008 House vote because she was searching the Capitol for high school students visiting from her district. Jeff Landry, a Louisiana Republican, “completely lost track of time” and missed two votes in 2011. For Ben Ray Lujan, Democrat of New Mexico, an “operational issue” with a House voting machine meant that a 2012 vote wasn’t recorded. For some, avoiding a vote is a sign of defiance. In 2012, Jan Schakowsky of Illinois was one of 108 Democrats who declined even to vote on a resolution holding then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. She was the only one, though, to insert a statement in the Record saying she would have voted no: “I would not participate in what I strongly believe was an abuse of power by the majority.” Although many explanations are short, lawmakers can be more expansive when a key issue is at stake. When J. Randy Forbes, a Virginia Republican who has missed less than 3 percent of votes since 2007, was absent for a January 2015 vote on a bill to ban federal funding for abortion, his explanation provided no reason, but emphasized his stance on the issue: “I am and always have been pro-life, and throughout my tenure in Congress will continue to be a strong advocate for the unborn.” The Rules of the House say that “Every Member shall be present within the Hall of the House during its sittings, unless excused or necessarily prevented, and shall vote on each question put, unless having a direct personal or pecuniary interest in the event of such question.” Lawmakers routinely say that they take their voting responsibilities seriously, and in general attendance records bear that out: most lawmakers participate in the overwhelming majority of votes held. Democrats have missed more votes than Republicans since the beginning of 2007, but they account for an even greater share of the explained missed votes: two of every three since the beginning of 2013. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat, has missed nearly one in six votes this year, according to voting records, one of the highest rates among current members of the House. He has been absent for 15 percent of all votes since the beginning of 2007, often due to his work on immigration policy, which frequently has him on the road. “Congressman Gutierrez prioritizes constituent case work and spending time in the District in Chicago,” said Douglas G. Rivlin, a spokesman for Gutierrez, in a statement emailed to ProPublica. “He also devotes a great deal of time to traveling all over the country to build support for immigration reform. As a national figure, his time is in great demand. He rarely misses substantive votes and when he does, it is because he cannot be in two places at once.” Gutierrez sporadically explains his absences — a statement for the Record in July gave a clear reason for one: He was attending oral arguments in a federal court case over immigration policy. He also missed votes due to a family medical issue, meetings at the White House and, in 2011, “my participation in a peaceful rally and protest against the current Administration’s enforcement policies against immigrant students and the families of U.S. citizens.” Representatives’ schedules are hardly overstuffed with days spent in the House chamber. In 2014, the members of the House spent only 29 weeks in session, each of which was bookended by long weekends spent doing district work, fundraising or running for re-election. The House is not scheduled to be in session for a five-day week this year. As lawmakers balance their duties, not every vote is created equal. Both ProPublica’s analysis and research by Eleanor Neff Powell, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, found that lawmakers miss more lopsided votes than ones that are important to either political party. There have been 20 times when the number of explained missed votes exceeded the final margin of approval or defeat. Half were on amendments. One, a 2011 amendment to a spending bill about labor agreements on federal construction projects was approved by a single vote and had eight explanations from the 25 House members who did not vote, including three Republicans opposed to the amendment. Bills that have widespread bipartisan support often are considered “under suspension of the rules,” which means they are debated fairly quickly, sometimes in a few minutes, and must have the support of two-thirds of those voting. About four in 10 personal explanations occur on these so-called suspension votes, which often are scheduled on the first day of the week that the House is in session, when travel delays could make it more likely for a member to miss votes. Absences (explained or not) on suspension votes account for 36 percent of all House votes missed between 2007 and October 2015. If personal explanations are optional, why do representatives use them at all? Often, to indicate to constituents that just because they didn’t vote doesn’t mean they don’t have an opinion. “It shows that you care about what they’re asking about,” said Powell. For lawmakers facing tight re-election contests, missed votes can be part of a political balancing act. Opponents are quick to make use of a poor voting record. Missing a vote can be a graceful way to dodge votes designed to put lawmakers on the spot. Explanations, in turn, can provide a way to miss the actual vote and still claim that they would have voted the way constituents might have preferred. In 2013, Brad Schneider, an Illinois Democrat, voted against a Republican spending bill that also delayed the individual health insurance mandate created by the Affordable Care Act. The next year, he missed a vote on a bill to delay the individual mandate but explained that, had he been there, he would have voted in favor of delaying the mandate, as he did on a similar bill in July 2013. Schneider lost his seat in 2014 to Bob Dold, a Republican former congressman who voted against the health care law while in the House, in a race where the health insurance law figured prominently. He is running against Dold again in 2016; Schneider’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Missing potentially controversial votes, then submitting explanations is an example of what researcher Powell calls “strategic abstention”: when a member skips a vote on which her party’s position is incompatible with her constituents’ views. Rather than disappoint either, the Representative can simply miss the vote, later explaining that she would have voted the way her constituents would have wanted, without actually doing so and creating a rift with her party. The ProPublica analysis, which covers a different time period than Powell’s, found some evidence of this: there were 128 votes on bill passage in which a member who missed the vote later registered opposition to his or her party’s majority position. Fifty-six of those contained no clear reason for the absence. Lawmakers’ explanations cover not only missed votes, but mistaken ones as well. It’s not common — explanations attempting to correct a wrong vote or saying that a member tried to vote but could not — number about 320 during the past eight years. But more than one in five current lawmakers has done it at least once since the beginning of 2007, with John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat and the chamber’s longest-serving member, claiming 12 incorrect votes. The official record of a 2011 vote on an bill to expand offshore oil and gas leases shows Conyers voting in favor, when he meant to vote against the bill. Conyers, who at 86 is also the House’s oldest member, did not respond to several requests for comment made through his office. A handful of other lawmakers have reported voting incorrectly at least four times, including Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat who is the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee. On at least one of those occasions, on a vote that occurred at 1:53 a.m. on Feb. 18, 2011, Smith voted for an amendment and later explained that he should have voted no. Rebecca Bryant, a spokeswoman for Smith, said that in that case the congressman “had some misinformation” on the nature of the amendment that was only clarified the next morning. “The key thing is transparency,” said Bryant of the vote explanations. “We wanted to articulate how the congressman felt.” Occasionally, lawmakers change their minds after a vote and submit a personal explanation about it. In 2008, the House voted to censure Charlie Rangel, a New York Democrat, over ethics violations, and Texas Republican Lamar Smith voted in favor of doing so. Later, in a statement in the Record, Smith reconsidered his vote: “Members had no advance notice of the vote, and I did not familiarize myself with the substance of the motion as much as I would have liked. If the vote were taken again, I would vote present rather than ‘aye’.”

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America is still paying for its wars: The enduring catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan

Let’s begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S.  The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003.  Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at least $1.2 to $1.6 billion of it was stolen and ended up years later in a mysterious bunker in Lebanon.  And that’s just what happened as the starting gun went off. It’s never ended.  In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in the American “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan.  In Iraq, for instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed “as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security.”  It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health hazard.  In 2006, “feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student barracks” and that was only the beginning of its problems. When the bad press started, Parsons Corporation, the private contractor that built it, agreed to fix it for nothing more than the princely sum already paid.  A year later, a New York Timesreporter visited and found that “the ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling, and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning.”  This seems to have been par for the course.  Typically enough, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a $40 million prison Parsons also contracted to build, was never even finished. And these were hardly isolated cases or problems specific to Iraq.  Consider, for instance, those police stations in Afghanistan believed to be crucial to “standing up” a new security force in that country.  Despite the money poured into them and endless cost overruns, many were either never completed or never built, leaving new Afghan police recruits camping out.  And the police were hardly alone.  Take the $3.4 million unfinished teacher-training center in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, that an Iraqi company was contracted to build (using, of course, American dollars) and from which it walked away, money in hand. And why stick to buildings, when there were those Iraqi roads to nowhere paid for by American dollars? At least one of them did at least prove useful to insurgent groups moving their guerrillas around (like the $37 million bridge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built between Afghanistan and Tajikistan that helped facilitate the region's booming drug trade in opium and heroin).  In Afghanistan, Highway 1 between the capital Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar, unofficially dubbed the “highway to nowhere,” was so poorly constructed that it began crumbling in its first Afghan winter. And don’t think that this was an aberration.  The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired an American nonprofit, International Relief and Development (IRD), to oversee an ambitious road-building program meant to gain the support of rural villagers.  Almost $300 million later, it could point to “less than 100 miles of gravel road completed.” Each mile of road had, by then, cost U.S. taxpayers $2.8 million, instead of the expected $290,000, while a quarter of the road-building funds reportedly went directly to IRD for administrative and staff costs.  Needless to say, as the road program failed, USAID hired IRD to oversee other non-transportation projects. In these years, the cost of reconstruction never stopped growing.  In 2011, McClatchy News reported that “U.S. government funding for at least 15 large-scale programs and projects grew from just over $1 billion to nearly $3 billion despite the government's questions about their effectiveness or cost.” The Gas Station to Nowhere So much construction and reconstruction -- and so many failures.  There was the chicken-processing plant built in Iraq for $2.58 million that, except in a few Potemkin-Village-like moments, never plucked a chicken and sent it to market.  There was the sparkling new, 64,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art, $25 million headquarters for the U.S. military in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, that doubled in cost as it was being built and that three generals tried to stop.  They were overruled because Congress had already allotted the money for it, so why not spend it, even though it would never be used?  And don’t forget the $20 million that went into constructing roads and utilities for the base that was to hold it, or the$8.4 billion that went into Afghan opium-poppy-suppression and anti-drug programs and resulted in... bumper poppy crops and record opium yields, or the aid funds that somehow made their way directly into the hands of the Taliban (reputedly its second-largest funding source after those poppies). There were the billions of dollars in aid that no one could account for, and a significant percentage of the 465,000 small arms (rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and the like) that the U.S. shipped to Afghanistan and simply lost track of.  Most recently, there was the Task Force for Business Stability Operations, an $800-million Pentagon project to help jump-start the Afghan economy.  It was shut down only six months ago and yet, in response to requests from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the Pentagon swears that there are “no Defense Department personnel who can answer questions about” what the task force did with its money.  As ProPublica’s Megan McCloskey writes, “The Pentagon’s claims are particularly surprising since Joseph Catalino, the former acting director of the task force who was with the program for two years, is still employed by the Pentagon as Senior Advisor for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism." Still, from that pile of unaccountable taxpayer dollars, one nearly $43 million chunk did prove traceable to a single project: the building of a compressed natural gas station.  (The cost of constructing a similar gas station in neighboring Pakistan: $300,000.)  Located in an area that seems to have had no infrastructure for delivering natural gas and no cars converted for the use of such fuel, it represented the only example on record in those years of a gas station to nowhere. All of this just scratches the surface when it comes to the piles of money that were poured into an increasingly privatized version of the American way of war and, in the form ofovercharges and abuses of every sort, often simply disappeared into the pockets of the warrior corporations that entered America’s war zones.  In a sense, a surprising amount of the money that the Pentagon and U.S. civilian agencies “invested” in Iraq and Afghanistan never left the United States, since it went directly into the coffers of those companies. Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender, while the domestic infrastructure began to fray.  At $109 billion by 2014, the American reconstruction program in Afghanistan was already, in today's dollars, larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped put all of devastated Western Europe back on its feet after World War II) and still the country was a shambles. In Iraq, a mere $60 billion was squandered on the failed rebuilding of the country.  Keep in mind that none of this takes into account the staggering billions spent by the Pentagon in both countries to build strings of bases, ranging in size from American towns (with all the amenities of home) to tiny outposts.  There would be 505 of them in Iraq and at least 550 in Afghanistan.  Most were, in the end, abandoned, dismantled, or sometimes simply looted.  And don’t forget the vast quantities of fuel imported into Afghanistan to run the U.S. military machine in those years, some of which was siphoned off by American soldiers, to the tune of at least $15 million, and sold to local Afghans on the sly. In other words, in the post-9/11 years, “reconstruction” and “war” have really been euphemisms for what, in other countries, we would recognize as a massive system of corruption. And let’s not forget another kind of “reconstruction” then underway. In both countries, the U.S. was creating enormous militaries and police forces essentially from scratch to the tune of at least $25 billion in Iraq and $65 billion in Afghanistan.  What’s striking about both of these security forces, once constructed, is how similar they turned out to be to those police academies, the unfinished schools, and that natural gas station.  It can’t be purely coincidental that both of the forces Americans proudly “stood up” have turned out to be the definition of corrupt: that is, they were filled not just with genuine recruits but with serried ranks of “ghost personnel.” In June 2014, after whole divisions of the Iraqi army collapsed and fled before modest numbers of Islamic State militants, abandoning much of their weaponry and equipment, it became clear that they had been significantly smaller in reality than on paper.  And no wonder, as that army had enlisted 50,000 “ghost soldiers” (who existed only on paper and whose salaries were lining the pockets of commanders and others).  In Afghanistan, the U.S. is still evidently helping to pay for similarly stunning numbers of phantom personnel, though no specific figures are available.  (In 2009, an estimated more than 25% of the police force consisted of such ghosts.)  As John Sopko, the U.S. inspector general for Afghanistan,warned last June: "We are paying a lot of money for ghosts in Afghanistan... whether they are ghost teachers, ghost doctors or ghost policeman or ghost soldiers." And lest you imagine that the U.S. military has learned its lesson, rest assured that it’s still quite capable of producing nonexistent proxy forces.  Take the Pentagon-CIA program to train thousands of carefully vetted “moderate” Syrian rebels, equip them, arm them, and put them in the field to fight the Islamic State.  Congress ponied up $500 million for it, $384 million of which was spent before that project was shut down as an abject failure.  By then, less than 200 American-backed rebels had been trained and even less put into the field in Syria -- and they were almost instantly kidnapped or killed, or they simply handed over their equipment to the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front.  At one point, according to the congressional testimony of the top American commander in the Middle East, only four or five American-produced rebels were left “in the field.”  The cost-per-rebel sent into Syria, by the way, is now estimated at approximately $2 million. A final footnote: the general who oversaw this program is, according to the New York Times, still a “rising star” in the Pentagon and in line for a promotion. Profli-gate You’ve just revisited the privatized, twenty-first-century version of the American way of war, which proved to be a smorgasbord of scandal, mismanagement, and corruption as far as the eye could see.  In the tradition of Watergate, perhaps the whole system could be dubbed Profli-gate, since American war making across the Greater Middle East has represented perhaps the most profligate and least effective use of funds in the history of modern warfare.  In fact, here’s a word not usually associated with the U.S. military: the war system of this era seems to function remarkably like a monumental scam, a swindle, a fraud. The evidence is in: the U.S. military can win battles, but not a war, not even against minimally armed minority insurgencies; it can “stand up” foreign militaries, but only if they are filled with phantom feet and if the forces themselves are as hollow as tombs; it can pour funds into the reconstruction of countries, a process guaranteed to leave them more prostrate than before; it can bomb, missile, and drone-kill significant numbers of terrorists and other enemies, even as their terror outfits and insurgent movements continue to grow stronger under the shadow of American air power.  Fourteen years and five failed states later in the Greater Middle East, all of that seems irrefutable. And here’s something else irrefutable: amid the defeats, corruption, and disappointments, there lurks a kind of success.  After all, every disaster in which the U.S. military takes part only brings more bounty to the Pentagon.  Domestically, every failure results in calls for yet more military interventions around the world.  As a result, the military is so much bigger and better funded than it was on September 10, 2001.  The commanders who led our forces into such failures have repeatedly been rewarded and much of the top brass, civilian and military, though they should have retired in shame, have taken ever more golden parachutes into the lucrative worlds of defense contractors, lobbyists, and consultancies. All of this couldn’t be more obvious, though it’s seldom said.  In short, there turns out to be much good fortune in the disaster business, a fact which gives the whole process the look of a classic swindle in which the patsies lose their shirts but the scam artists make out like bandits. Add in one more thing: these days, the only part of the state held in great esteem by conservatives and the present batch of Republican presidential candidates is the U.S. military.  All of them, with the exception of Rand Paul, swear that on entering the Oval Office they will let that military loose, sending in more troops, or special ops forces, or air power, and funding the various services even more lavishly; all of this despite overwhelming evidence that the U.S. military is incapable of spending a dollar responsibly or effectively monitoring what it's done with the taxpayer funds in its possession.  (If you don’t believe me, forget everything in this piece and just check out the finances of the most expensive weapons system in history, the F-35 Lightning II, which should really be redubbed the F-35 Overrun for its madly spiraling costs.) But no matter. If a system works (particularly for those in it), why change it?  And by the way, in case you’re looking for a genuine steal, I have a fabulous gas station in Afghanistan to sell you...Let’s begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S.  The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003.  Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at least $1.2 to $1.6 billion of it was stolen and ended up years later in a mysterious bunker in Lebanon.  And that’s just what happened as the starting gun went off. It’s never ended.  In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in the American “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan.  In Iraq, for instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed “as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security.”  It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health hazard.  In 2006, “feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student barracks” and that was only the beginning of its problems. When the bad press started, Parsons Corporation, the private contractor that built it, agreed to fix it for nothing more than the princely sum already paid.  A year later, a New York Timesreporter visited and found that “the ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling, and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning.”  This seems to have been par for the course.  Typically enough, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a $40 million prison Parsons also contracted to build, was never even finished. And these were hardly isolated cases or problems specific to Iraq.  Consider, for instance, those police stations in Afghanistan believed to be crucial to “standing up” a new security force in that country.  Despite the money poured into them and endless cost overruns, many were either never completed or never built, leaving new Afghan police recruits camping out.  And the police were hardly alone.  Take the $3.4 million unfinished teacher-training center in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, that an Iraqi company was contracted to build (using, of course, American dollars) and from which it walked away, money in hand. And why stick to buildings, when there were those Iraqi roads to nowhere paid for by American dollars? At least one of them did at least prove useful to insurgent groups moving their guerrillas around (like the $37 million bridge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built between Afghanistan and Tajikistan that helped facilitate the region's booming drug trade in opium and heroin).  In Afghanistan, Highway 1 between the capital Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar, unofficially dubbed the “highway to nowhere,” was so poorly constructed that it began crumbling in its first Afghan winter. And don’t think that this was an aberration.  The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired an American nonprofit, International Relief and Development (IRD), to oversee an ambitious road-building program meant to gain the support of rural villagers.  Almost $300 million later, it could point to “less than 100 miles of gravel road completed.” Each mile of road had, by then, cost U.S. taxpayers $2.8 million, instead of the expected $290,000, while a quarter of the road-building funds reportedly went directly to IRD for administrative and staff costs.  Needless to say, as the road program failed, USAID hired IRD to oversee other non-transportation projects. In these years, the cost of reconstruction never stopped growing.  In 2011, McClatchy News reported that “U.S. government funding for at least 15 large-scale programs and projects grew from just over $1 billion to nearly $3 billion despite the government's questions about their effectiveness or cost.” The Gas Station to Nowhere So much construction and reconstruction -- and so many failures.  There was the chicken-processing plant built in Iraq for $2.58 million that, except in a few Potemkin-Village-like moments, never plucked a chicken and sent it to market.  There was the sparkling new, 64,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art, $25 million headquarters for the U.S. military in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, that doubled in cost as it was being built and that three generals tried to stop.  They were overruled because Congress had already allotted the money for it, so why not spend it, even though it would never be used?  And don’t forget the $20 million that went into constructing roads and utilities for the base that was to hold it, or the$8.4 billion that went into Afghan opium-poppy-suppression and anti-drug programs and resulted in... bumper poppy crops and record opium yields, or the aid funds that somehow made their way directly into the hands of the Taliban (reputedly its second-largest funding source after those poppies). There were the billions of dollars in aid that no one could account for, and a significant percentage of the 465,000 small arms (rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and the like) that the U.S. shipped to Afghanistan and simply lost track of.  Most recently, there was the Task Force for Business Stability Operations, an $800-million Pentagon project to help jump-start the Afghan economy.  It was shut down only six months ago and yet, in response to requests from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the Pentagon swears that there are “no Defense Department personnel who can answer questions about” what the task force did with its money.  As ProPublica’s Megan McCloskey writes, “The Pentagon’s claims are particularly surprising since Joseph Catalino, the former acting director of the task force who was with the program for two years, is still employed by the Pentagon as Senior Advisor for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism." Still, from that pile of unaccountable taxpayer dollars, one nearly $43 million chunk did prove traceable to a single project: the building of a compressed natural gas station.  (The cost of constructing a similar gas station in neighboring Pakistan: $300,000.)  Located in an area that seems to have had no infrastructure for delivering natural gas and no cars converted for the use of such fuel, it represented the only example on record in those years of a gas station to nowhere. All of this just scratches the surface when it comes to the piles of money that were poured into an increasingly privatized version of the American way of war and, in the form ofovercharges and abuses of every sort, often simply disappeared into the pockets of the warrior corporations that entered America’s war zones.  In a sense, a surprising amount of the money that the Pentagon and U.S. civilian agencies “invested” in Iraq and Afghanistan never left the United States, since it went directly into the coffers of those companies. Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender, while the domestic infrastructure began to fray.  At $109 billion by 2014, the American reconstruction program in Afghanistan was already, in today's dollars, larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped put all of devastated Western Europe back on its feet after World War II) and still the country was a shambles. In Iraq, a mere $60 billion was squandered on the failed rebuilding of the country.  Keep in mind that none of this takes into account the staggering billions spent by the Pentagon in both countries to build strings of bases, ranging in size from American towns (with all the amenities of home) to tiny outposts.  There would be 505 of them in Iraq and at least 550 in Afghanistan.  Most were, in the end, abandoned, dismantled, or sometimes simply looted.  And don’t forget the vast quantities of fuel imported into Afghanistan to run the U.S. military machine in those years, some of which was siphoned off by American soldiers, to the tune of at least $15 million, and sold to local Afghans on the sly. In other words, in the post-9/11 years, “reconstruction” and “war” have really been euphemisms for what, in other countries, we would recognize as a massive system of corruption. And let’s not forget another kind of “reconstruction” then underway. In both countries, the U.S. was creating enormous militaries and police forces essentially from scratch to the tune of at least $25 billion in Iraq and $65 billion in Afghanistan.  What’s striking about both of these security forces, once constructed, is how similar they turned out to be to those police academies, the unfinished schools, and that natural gas station.  It can’t be purely coincidental that both of the forces Americans proudly “stood up” have turned out to be the definition of corrupt: that is, they were filled not just with genuine recruits but with serried ranks of “ghost personnel.” In June 2014, after whole divisions of the Iraqi army collapsed and fled before modest numbers of Islamic State militants, abandoning much of their weaponry and equipment, it became clear that they had been significantly smaller in reality than on paper.  And no wonder, as that army had enlisted 50,000 “ghost soldiers” (who existed only on paper and whose salaries were lining the pockets of commanders and others).  In Afghanistan, the U.S. is still evidently helping to pay for similarly stunning numbers of phantom personnel, though no specific figures are available.  (In 2009, an estimated more than 25% of the police force consisted of such ghosts.)  As John Sopko, the U.S. inspector general for Afghanistan,warned last June: "We are paying a lot of money for ghosts in Afghanistan... whether they are ghost teachers, ghost doctors or ghost policeman or ghost soldiers." And lest you imagine that the U.S. military has learned its lesson, rest assured that it’s still quite capable of producing nonexistent proxy forces.  Take the Pentagon-CIA program to train thousands of carefully vetted “moderate” Syrian rebels, equip them, arm them, and put them in the field to fight the Islamic State.  Congress ponied up $500 million for it, $384 million of which was spent before that project was shut down as an abject failure.  By then, less than 200 American-backed rebels had been trained and even less put into the field in Syria -- and they were almost instantly kidnapped or killed, or they simply handed over their equipment to the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front.  At one point, according to the congressional testimony of the top American commander in the Middle East, only four or five American-produced rebels were left “in the field.”  The cost-per-rebel sent into Syria, by the way, is now estimated at approximately $2 million. A final footnote: the general who oversaw this program is, according to the New York Times, still a “rising star” in the Pentagon and in line for a promotion. Profli-gate You’ve just revisited the privatized, twenty-first-century version of the American way of war, which proved to be a smorgasbord of scandal, mismanagement, and corruption as far as the eye could see.  In the tradition of Watergate, perhaps the whole system could be dubbed Profli-gate, since American war making across the Greater Middle East has represented perhaps the most profligate and least effective use of funds in the history of modern warfare.  In fact, here’s a word not usually associated with the U.S. military: the war system of this era seems to function remarkably like a monumental scam, a swindle, a fraud. The evidence is in: the U.S. military can win battles, but not a war, not even against minimally armed minority insurgencies; it can “stand up” foreign militaries, but only if they are filled with phantom feet and if the forces themselves are as hollow as tombs; it can pour funds into the reconstruction of countries, a process guaranteed to leave them more prostrate than before; it can bomb, missile, and drone-kill significant numbers of terrorists and other enemies, even as their terror outfits and insurgent movements continue to grow stronger under the shadow of American air power.  Fourteen years and five failed states later in the Greater Middle East, all of that seems irrefutable. And here’s something else irrefutable: amid the defeats, corruption, and disappointments, there lurks a kind of success.  After all, every disaster in which the U.S. military takes part only brings more bounty to the Pentagon.  Domestically, every failure results in calls for yet more military interventions around the world.  As a result, the military is so much bigger and better funded than it was on September 10, 2001.  The commanders who led our forces into such failures have repeatedly been rewarded and much of the top brass, civilian and military, though they should have retired in shame, have taken ever more golden parachutes into the lucrative worlds of defense contractors, lobbyists, and consultancies. All of this couldn’t be more obvious, though it’s seldom said.  In short, there turns out to be much good fortune in the disaster business, a fact which gives the whole process the look of a classic swindle in which the patsies lose their shirts but the scam artists make out like bandits. Add in one more thing: these days, the only part of the state held in great esteem by conservatives and the present batch of Republican presidential candidates is the U.S. military.  All of them, with the exception of Rand Paul, swear that on entering the Oval Office they will let that military loose, sending in more troops, or special ops forces, or air power, and funding the various services even more lavishly; all of this despite overwhelming evidence that the U.S. military is incapable of spending a dollar responsibly or effectively monitoring what it's done with the taxpayer funds in its possession.  (If you don’t believe me, forget everything in this piece and just check out the finances of the most expensive weapons system in history, the F-35 Lightning II, which should really be redubbed the F-35 Overrun for its madly spiraling costs.) But no matter. If a system works (particularly for those in it), why change it?  And by the way, in case you’re looking for a genuine steal, I have a fabulous gas station in Afghanistan to sell you...

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Let’s listen to Bill Maher: On Paris, religion and race, Maher walks a fascinating and tricky line

Bill Maher has made his mark as the comedian who refuses to toe the party line—any party’s line.  He has come under attack by both the right and the left for his positions. This week’s show exemplifies his unflinching desire to muddy the waters of extremist thinking and get viewers to ask tough questions and refuse pre-packaged scripts. He hit the spotlight after September 11 when he rejected the idea that the 9/11 attackers were cowards. Talking with conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza, Maher stated: "We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly.” The comment cost him his ABC show. But he soon landed back on his feet with HBO for “Real time with Bill Maher.” This week’s show, which tackled both the Paris attacks and campus protests over racial discrimination, reminds us why Maher is a comedian we need to watch.  In the wake of the crises on the campuses of University of Missouri and Yale and on the heels of the Paris attacks, Maher rejected the fundamentalist thinking that often tends to frame these issues.  With regard to the student protests, he attacks racism, but defends free speech.  And in connection to the Paris attacks, he asks why liberals refuse to condemn the oppressive fundamentalism connected to the version of Islam practiced by terrorists. While we might disagree with his positions, Maher makes some provocative points.  Even more important he asks viewers to resist intellectual extremism and dogmatic ideologies.  This means that we can condemn Islamic extremism without condemning all Islamic people.  And it means that we can fight structural racism while also wondering if the student protesters’ demands are reasonable. Let’s be clear. Bill Maher can say some outrageous things.  He once compared his dogs to “retarded children.”  But it would be a mistake to dismiss his interventions because they come from a comedian known for being caustic and controversial.   Again and again Maher is willing to ask the questions no one wants to ask.  And one of his key themes is frustration over simple-minded responses to complex issues. After opening with a sign of solidarity with the French people, he asked: How can we respond in a way that allows us to forcefully condemn the attackers while avoiding a full-scale condemnation of Islam?  In an interview with Asra Nomani, Maher wonders why liberals “will not stand up against Sharia Law, which is the law in so many Muslim countries, which is the law of oppression?” Discussing extremist thinking with Nomani, he states, “I am absolutely sure that ISIS thinks that everything they do—every horrific crime, every atrocity—is an act of justice, and an act for god.” Maher’s point it that there is an Islamic extremism that is real and the left has lost the vocabulary for speaking about it meaningfully.  In an effort to avoid demonizing an entire religion, he argues, there has been silence on the very real threats of Islamic extremism.  It is an issue that drives Maher nuts and it’s one that will immediately get him called out as an Islamaphobe. Listening to Maher rant about liberals who are soft on terror, it might even seem like he is on the side of right-wing nut jobs like Ann Coulter. But he’s not on her side at all.  The trouble is that in moments of crisis such nuance almost inevitably gets lost. He has an unfailing ability to stick his finger in our wounds and ask us why we are surprised that it hurts.  Speaking about University of Missouri, Maher reminded viewers that the university’s president was “a clueless white guy” but “not a war criminal.”  “The question I’m asking is, do we purge clueless people from their jobs. Is that where we are with the battle against racism? Maybe the answer’s yes.” For what it’s worth, the panel concluded that, yes, the firing was the right outcome. He then turned to the Yale case.  After quoting from an op-ed that said students were losing sleep, not going to class, skipping meals, and not doing homework as a result of the controversy, Maher characteristically asked, “About an email over a Halloween costume that doesn’t even exist? Over an email? Who raised these little monsters?” When Maher takes the free-speech position on instances of hate speech, racism, and intolerance he always excites the right. Right-wing outlets like Breitbart will cite him as evidence that the struggles for social equality are a cover for intolerance. But they will only cite part of what he says.   They will omit mentioning the part of his show where Maher explicitly goes after the idea of the white male as a victim. In a rant on rising suicide rates for white males Maher stated: “It’s hard out there for a wimp, and that’s why tonight I’d like to remind white people of something very important they may have forgotten: You’re white, cheer the fuck up. Jesus, look at history. It’s always a great time to be white.” He went on to list examples of white privilege:  “Cops don’t shoot you for having your hands in your pockets. When people follow you around a store, it’s because they want to help you find something. Major party presidential candidates aren’t proposing to deport you. You can walk through an entire wedding reception without anyone trying to order a drink from you. And how about this perk? If you’re white, you’re much more likely to be not in prison.”  That’s the sort of thinking we will never see from Coulter. In the same show Maher criticized some student protesters, praised others, and called out white privilege.  In the same show he called liberals extremists for not going after Islamic extremism.  It’s tricky terrain for comedy and it’s likely to get misunderstood.  But Maher doesn’t care.  If there is one ongoing passion in his work, it is that he won’t back down and he won’t make things easy. Maher’s trademark comedy refuses to be channeled easily into ideological silos.  And whether we agree with him or not, his desire to ask tough questions and derail fundamentalist positions is a welcome intervention in a media landscape dominated by extremes.Bill Maher has made his mark as the comedian who refuses to toe the party line—any party’s line.  He has come under attack by both the right and the left for his positions. This week’s show exemplifies his unflinching desire to muddy the waters of extremist thinking and get viewers to ask tough questions and refuse pre-packaged scripts. He hit the spotlight after September 11 when he rejected the idea that the 9/11 attackers were cowards. Talking with conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza, Maher stated: "We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly.” The comment cost him his ABC show. But he soon landed back on his feet with HBO for “Real time with Bill Maher.” This week’s show, which tackled both the Paris attacks and campus protests over racial discrimination, reminds us why Maher is a comedian we need to watch.  In the wake of the crises on the campuses of University of Missouri and Yale and on the heels of the Paris attacks, Maher rejected the fundamentalist thinking that often tends to frame these issues.  With regard to the student protests, he attacks racism, but defends free speech.  And in connection to the Paris attacks, he asks why liberals refuse to condemn the oppressive fundamentalism connected to the version of Islam practiced by terrorists. While we might disagree with his positions, Maher makes some provocative points.  Even more important he asks viewers to resist intellectual extremism and dogmatic ideologies.  This means that we can condemn Islamic extremism without condemning all Islamic people.  And it means that we can fight structural racism while also wondering if the student protesters’ demands are reasonable. Let’s be clear. Bill Maher can say some outrageous things.  He once compared his dogs to “retarded children.”  But it would be a mistake to dismiss his interventions because they come from a comedian known for being caustic and controversial.   Again and again Maher is willing to ask the questions no one wants to ask.  And one of his key themes is frustration over simple-minded responses to complex issues. After opening with a sign of solidarity with the French people, he asked: How can we respond in a way that allows us to forcefully condemn the attackers while avoiding a full-scale condemnation of Islam?  In an interview with Asra Nomani, Maher wonders why liberals “will not stand up against Sharia Law, which is the law in so many Muslim countries, which is the law of oppression?” Discussing extremist thinking with Nomani, he states, “I am absolutely sure that ISIS thinks that everything they do—every horrific crime, every atrocity—is an act of justice, and an act for god.” Maher’s point it that there is an Islamic extremism that is real and the left has lost the vocabulary for speaking about it meaningfully.  In an effort to avoid demonizing an entire religion, he argues, there has been silence on the very real threats of Islamic extremism.  It is an issue that drives Maher nuts and it’s one that will immediately get him called out as an Islamaphobe. Listening to Maher rant about liberals who are soft on terror, it might even seem like he is on the side of right-wing nut jobs like Ann Coulter. But he’s not on her side at all.  The trouble is that in moments of crisis such nuance almost inevitably gets lost. He has an unfailing ability to stick his finger in our wounds and ask us why we are surprised that it hurts.  Speaking about University of Missouri, Maher reminded viewers that the university’s president was “a clueless white guy” but “not a war criminal.”  “The question I’m asking is, do we purge clueless people from their jobs. Is that where we are with the battle against racism? Maybe the answer’s yes.” For what it’s worth, the panel concluded that, yes, the firing was the right outcome. He then turned to the Yale case.  After quoting from an op-ed that said students were losing sleep, not going to class, skipping meals, and not doing homework as a result of the controversy, Maher characteristically asked, “About an email over a Halloween costume that doesn’t even exist? Over an email? Who raised these little monsters?” When Maher takes the free-speech position on instances of hate speech, racism, and intolerance he always excites the right. Right-wing outlets like Breitbart will cite him as evidence that the struggles for social equality are a cover for intolerance. But they will only cite part of what he says.   They will omit mentioning the part of his show where Maher explicitly goes after the idea of the white male as a victim. In a rant on rising suicide rates for white males Maher stated: “It’s hard out there for a wimp, and that’s why tonight I’d like to remind white people of something very important they may have forgotten: You’re white, cheer the fuck up. Jesus, look at history. It’s always a great time to be white.” He went on to list examples of white privilege:  “Cops don’t shoot you for having your hands in your pockets. When people follow you around a store, it’s because they want to help you find something. Major party presidential candidates aren’t proposing to deport you. You can walk through an entire wedding reception without anyone trying to order a drink from you. And how about this perk? If you’re white, you’re much more likely to be not in prison.”  That’s the sort of thinking we will never see from Coulter. In the same show Maher criticized some student protesters, praised others, and called out white privilege.  In the same show he called liberals extremists for not going after Islamic extremism.  It’s tricky terrain for comedy and it’s likely to get misunderstood.  But Maher doesn’t care.  If there is one ongoing passion in his work, it is that he won’t back down and he won’t make things easy. Maher’s trademark comedy refuses to be channeled easily into ideological silos.  And whether we agree with him or not, his desire to ask tough questions and derail fundamentalist positions is a welcome intervention in a media landscape dominated by extremes.

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We kicked the Koch Brothers’ a**: How Denver parents beat back big money, charter schools, right-wing lies

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Jim Jones, deadly white savior: The tragic legacy of the Jonestown massacre

White Nights, Black Paradise , a new novel available from Infidel Books this week, shares a vision of the Jonestown massacre that is rarely emphasized in mainstream literary narratives. One of the largest murder-suicides in modern history has lived on in the popular imagination as a uniquely American tragedy. But the legacy of the People’s Temple is, more particularly, a story of race and religion: 75 percent of the 918 people who perished at Jonestown in 1978 were African-American, and black people—especially black women—were the foot soldiers of that movement. I recently met with author Sikivu Hutchinson on the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she’s currently a visiting scholar at the USC Center for Feminist Research. We talked about the founding of the People’s Temple, why so many African-Americans decided to follow Jim Jones, the “ultimate white savior,” until the bitter, unspeakable end, and what reverberations the tragedy holds for black religiosity today. This is not only Hutchinson’s first novel, but also the first to be written by an African-American woman on the topic. Hutchinson has long examined the intersections of race, gender and religion, and her other books include  Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and the Value Wars and Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels . She has previously written for RD on the failed promise of Jonestown’s mixed-race utopia. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. What was your motivation for writing a novel on the People’s Temple and the Jonestown massacre? I wanted to frame the People’s Temple, its social justice trajectory and the initial involvement of African-American women, all the way from its beginnings in the Midwest. I wanted to explore what compelled them to get involved, stay involved and in some instances, go down with the ship. I see Jonestown as a cautionary tale in terms of why black women are so invested in and indebted to organized religion. I hadn’t seen that in any of the existing literature. I wanted to convey the complexity of their political alignment and the fact that you had African-Americans who were more Civil Rights-oriented, who were coming from the black church, social justice organizing perspective and the Temple represented that aspect for them. And you also have a revolutionary element of secularist, nonbelievers who were disillusioned by the fade-out of the Black Power movement. I wanted to know how the People’s Temple became validated within black people’s perspectives. Because that’s really what anchored the movement. It was the investment of everyday working-class and middle-class African-Americans but also the investment of black politicians, of black power brokers, of black activists. You have said that Jim Jones fashioned himself as the “ultimate white savior.” Why do you think he felt this draw to proselytizing African-Americans, black women especially?  Part of his personal lore was that his father was a klansman, and he would tout that as his motivation for trying to align himself with African-Americans—and ultimately even identifying as African-American. He was the first white person in the state of Indiana to adopt a black child. He always had people of color around him in the early days, and he was quite vocal about pushing back against Jim Crow ideology. He was an orderly in a hospital that refused to treat black patients, and he protested against that. He also desegregated several theaters in Indianapolis. He was also very much opposed by the white Pentecostal power structure for bringing in African-Americans. All those elements were integral to how African-Americans were brought into the movement and why they stayed—because they saw this white man going to the barricades for them, identifying with them, having family members who looked like them and constantly making racial inclusion a part of the superficial cultural propaganda of the Temple. When the People’s Temple moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, black communities were being disempowered and displaced. A lot of parasitic development was going on, and people were being pushed out of the city. So the Temple was at the forefront of organizing around those disruptions and pushing back, providing programs and social services to the community, needs that African-Americans felt black churches in the Bay Area weren’t meeting. The People’s Temple not only fills the breach created by the decline of the black church—as far as it being a movement organizer in social justice and a provider of social welfare—but also the breach caused by the decline of the Black Power movement and Civil Rights movement. There was also the family dynamic that the People’s Temple fostered where there would be several generations of a family connected to the Temple. You had all of these elements pushing African-Americans into the movement and anchoring them there—and that made it more difficult for people to leave the movement when all the abuse, harassment, and terrorism was occurring. Despite the fact that the majority of the People’s Temple membership was black, Jim Jones choose mostly white women for leadership roles. Why did this happen? Had there been prominent African-Americans who exercised real power in the church, then there would have been a lot more questions raised about the funding apparatus—in addition to the cult of personality that he had developed. Jones was a predator who preyed on people sexually but also mentally and emotionally. To reel them in there would be the evocation of the benevolent white man bucking the power structure of white supremacy, wholly invested in and identifying with blackness. He’s telling them we’re going to take all these Social Security payments, the property, the welfare benefits that our members are providing as part of their tithing and say we’re building this black nation, that that’s the ultimate goal. This was something that was internalized and accepted by a lot of the African-American members. You’re careful to never describe the People’s Temple as a cult. Why is that? It’s a demonizing term. It strips religious ideology of its complexity. It’s a term that relies on a dichotomy where the established religious orthodoxy is correct, and then there’s a certain set of religious beliefs, practices or movements that are somehow corrupt and debased because they are not coming from an Abrahamic tradition. And being an atheist, I question the Abrahamic traditions. Just because those are thousands of years old, just because they’ve been validated by scholars and religious leaders, that does not give them infallibility. Why has it been so easy for society to erase the memory of race with regard to the People’s Temple, to think of it as more or less a white movement? The truth of Jonestown has been lost because it’s been demonized to a certain extent. The impression was that you had these “zombie-esque acolytes running over there and bowing down to this white man.” It just creates a very sordid and unsavory picture. Also, it took place in San Francisco, a city that has always been mythicized as a white space. You had a white pastor, so many white bohemian liberal-to-radical members involved quite prominently and that becomes a big part of the ethos. That this is a “free love” church, that it was a new age-y kind of confab, when it’s really coming from the heart of Pentecostal, charismatic spirituality. Black women were then and still are one of the most religious segments of the population. How is the white Jesus paternal figure they’re presented with in mainstream Christianity different from how Jim Jones presented himself? The picture was different because Jones was very conscious about articulating his opposition to biblical dogma and rhetoric around the inhumanity of African-Americans and African bodies. He was up front in saying that the Bible is problematic when it comes to enfranchising and humanizing Africans. He was aware of the terrorist past of race relations in the United States, that Judeo-Christian reign within the United States has always undermined black agency and self-determination. So that was the key difference. He was also very vocal about his atheism, although that atheism was qualified over time. He began to say he was the true god, that he was the real deity and all those others were false deities that were racist and white supremacist. So he presented himself as an antidote to that, saying he loved the black people, he worshiped blackness, he had a black son, he was rooted in the black community with all these black politicians validating him. So he used all this as armor against the claim that he was just another white savior trying to hoodwink these downtrodden African-Americans. On the other side of the coin, you have the increased visibility of the black atheist community. Is that growth we’re seeing today influenced by the way the Bible was historically used to justify the degradation of black people? I absolutely think that is the motivation for many African-American nonbelievers. That the whole Curse of Ham lore, the justification of slavery, the justification of rape and commodification of black women’s bodies— all of that plays a big role in the embrace of atheism and secular humanism by African-American women. I believe that black atheism is expanding and getting more visible, certainly in terms of the virtual sphere. What remains to be seen is whether that is going to turn into anything broad or movement-based as far as African-American nonbelievers and secularists interfacing with other political movements. Do you feel this moving away from churches as authority figures is represented in the Black Lives Matter movement? Absolutely, you can see some of that in the “nones” demographic. There’s been an emergence of those folks who are not explicitly aligned with organized religion, aren’t involved in a church, aren’t coming from that traditional background of black church dogma—but who still explicitly identify as spiritual. Could a tragedy of Jonestown’s scale still happen today? The seeds of Jonestown are still there underneath the surface and given the grip that religiosity and charismatic spirituality have on scores of people, it could absolutely happen again. The severity of economic injustice and political disenfranchisement that really motivated black folks to get involved, stay involved and in some instances, decide to die, those conditions still exist and could still facilitate that kind of tragedy.

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