Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 973

They’ll only get more extreme: After Donald Trump or Ben Carson loses in a landslide, here’s how the right will spin it

Donald Trump and Ben Carson are the clear frontrunners in the Republican presidential race. It’s possible – perhaps even probable – that one of them could actually win the nomination. It was thought that Trump’s political star was fading, that conservatives had finally grown tired of his screwy shtick. But that’s not the case. After dipping momentarily, Trump’s national lead is creeping back up. The latest ABC/Washington Post poll shows Trump at 32 percent, well above the rest of the field. (Carson is comfortably in second with 22 percent support.) GOP insiders have been waiting patiently for Trump and Carson to implode. And there’s an argument to be made that Trump and Carson are like previous Republican candidates who caught fire early in the race but inevitably foundered when voters started paying attention – e.g., Herman Cain or Michelle Bachmann or Fred Thompson. But this time may be different. If you look at how the race is shaping up, it’s hard to see how Trump or Carson fall anytime soon. The early primaries are key, both in terms of fundraising and momentum, and Trump and Carson are well-positioned. In Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Trump and Carson are dominating. Both, moreover, are appealing to conservatives in every corner of the country, from Massachusetts to Nevada to Arizona to Florida. They’re not regional candidates, in other words – they can win everywhere. These numbers ought to terrify the Republican establishment. If either Trump or Carson become the nominee, the GOP will lose in a landslide. The conservative base is comfortable nominating political neophytes for president, but the rest of the country is not. Once the nation sees how breathtakingly ignorant Carson and Trump are in comparison to a Clinton or a Sanders, both of whom have actual political experience, the choice will be obvious. There are, however, serious conservatives who despise Trump but see a silver lining in his nomination. In July, Bruce Bartlett penned an essay for Politico in which he argued that a massive loss by Trump in a general election would, ultimately, be a good thing for the GOP. Bartlett writes:

The Republican establishment foresees a defeat of Barry Goldwater proportions in the unlikely event Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination. As Trump’s lead in the polls grows, so too does their panic. Yet, for moderate Republicans, a Trump nomination is not something to be feared but welcomed. It is only after a landslide loss by Trump that the GOP can win the White House again. Trump’s nomination would give what’s left of the sane wing of the GOP a chance to reassert control in the wake of his inevitable defeat, because it would prove beyond doubt that the existing conservative coalition cannot win the presidency. A historic thrashing of the know-nothings would verify that compromise and reform are essential to recapture the White House and attract new voters, such as Latinos, who are now alienated from the Republican Party.

I understand Bartlett’s logic, but this borders on wishful thinking. This isn’t 1964, the year Goldwater ran for president. We live in a new political reality, with a completely different information infrastructure. Conservatives, far more than liberals, live in an echo chamber. As Bartlett acknowledges, the “nutty ideas” animating the Republican base have become “staples of Fox News programming, which is the primary source of information for most conservatives.” No matter what happens in the general election, then, conservatives will find a way to collectively avoid the truth – and Fox News and right wing talk radio will gladly help them. But let’s indulge Bartlett’s hypothesis. Say Donald Trump wins the nomination and then loses badly to the Democratic nominee. Conservative Republicans can interpret this loss in two ways. On the one hand, they can say, as Bartlett hopes, that Trump lost because he’s too extreme, too unhinged in his views on immigration and women and practically everything else. On the other hand, they can say that Trump lost because he wasn’t extreme enough, because he didn’t double down on whatever they think conservatism is. You can hear the refrain now: Trump used to be pro-choice. He's anti-trade. He endorsed single-payer health care. He's not Christian enough. The same is true of a Carson loss. Sure, Carson is the latest darling of the conservative movement, but if he loses to Clinton or Sanders, conservatives will suddenly notice that he never really knew what he was talking about. Rather than accept that Carson lost on account of his extreme conservatism, they’ll look for ways to retroactively condemn him as a liberal. They’ll open up just enough space in their information bubble to acknowledge articles like this, which highlight the many liberal things Carson has said and written in the past. Although Carson parroted every conservative dogma you can imagine during this campaign, conservatives are unlikely to connect that to his loss, because that would be an indictment of conservatism as such. Bartlett may be right. Perhaps a big loss by an outsider conservative candidate would cause the Republican Party to recalibrate. I doubt it, though. Fundamentalists still control this party; they’re the most active, the most energized, and they’re supported by a conservative media-industrial complex that doesn’t care about what’s best for the Republican Party. Moderates like Bartlett underestimate the self-reinforcing power of ideological narratives. The hardcore wing of the Republican base is wedded to a political mythology that is based on a host of assumptions – about America’s history, about the role of government, about the primacy of religion, and about the roots and utility of economic inequality. Abandoning these ideological commitments means abandoning an entire political worldview, and that’s unlikely to happen. To be a conservative ideologue today is to live in a feedback loop, where every loss is reinterpreted as a win. Republican culture warriors, who hijacked the conservative movement years ago, have done nothing but lose in the last decade, and yet they’re convinced most of the country agrees with them – because Sean Hannity tells them so. From abortion to drug legalization to same sex marriage, conservatives find themselves on the wrong side of history. No one is suggesting that social conservatives renounce their beliefs, but if they were honest with themselves, they’d accept that they’re a minority and that their views have been rejected. Instead, thanks to the good folks at Fox, they’re told that the problem isn’t their positions but their representatives, who just aren’t conservative enough. What they really need are bolder conservatives, people like Ted Cruz, who will pander mercilessly to them but fail to win a single legislative battle. Bartlett thinks a devastating loss in the general election will force Republican voters to renounce people like Cruz in favor of more moderate candidates like Jeb Bush. I think the opposite is true: They’ll clamor for more conservatives and more conservatism, and if the establishment gives them moderates instead, they’ll walk away from the party. And since the GOP would cease to be competitive at all without its fundamentalist base, the party will have no choice but to yield to the purists. But maybe I’m wrong. We’ll know soon enough. [image error]Donald Trump and Ben Carson are the clear frontrunners in the Republican presidential race. It’s possible – perhaps even probable – that one of them could actually win the nomination. It was thought that Trump’s political star was fading, that conservatives had finally grown tired of his screwy shtick. But that’s not the case. After dipping momentarily, Trump’s national lead is creeping back up. The latest ABC/Washington Post poll shows Trump at 32 percent, well above the rest of the field. (Carson is comfortably in second with 22 percent support.) GOP insiders have been waiting patiently for Trump and Carson to implode. And there’s an argument to be made that Trump and Carson are like previous Republican candidates who caught fire early in the race but inevitably foundered when voters started paying attention – e.g., Herman Cain or Michelle Bachmann or Fred Thompson. But this time may be different. If you look at how the race is shaping up, it’s hard to see how Trump or Carson fall anytime soon. The early primaries are key, both in terms of fundraising and momentum, and Trump and Carson are well-positioned. In Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Trump and Carson are dominating. Both, moreover, are appealing to conservatives in every corner of the country, from Massachusetts to Nevada to Arizona to Florida. They’re not regional candidates, in other words – they can win everywhere. These numbers ought to terrify the Republican establishment. If either Trump or Carson become the nominee, the GOP will lose in a landslide. The conservative base is comfortable nominating political neophytes for president, but the rest of the country is not. Once the nation sees how breathtakingly ignorant Carson and Trump are in comparison to a Clinton or a Sanders, both of whom have actual political experience, the choice will be obvious. There are, however, serious conservatives who despise Trump but see a silver lining in his nomination. In July, Bruce Bartlett penned an essay for Politico in which he argued that a massive loss by Trump in a general election would, ultimately, be a good thing for the GOP. Bartlett writes:

The Republican establishment foresees a defeat of Barry Goldwater proportions in the unlikely event Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination. As Trump’s lead in the polls grows, so too does their panic. Yet, for moderate Republicans, a Trump nomination is not something to be feared but welcomed. It is only after a landslide loss by Trump that the GOP can win the White House again. Trump’s nomination would give what’s left of the sane wing of the GOP a chance to reassert control in the wake of his inevitable defeat, because it would prove beyond doubt that the existing conservative coalition cannot win the presidency. A historic thrashing of the know-nothings would verify that compromise and reform are essential to recapture the White House and attract new voters, such as Latinos, who are now alienated from the Republican Party.

I understand Bartlett’s logic, but this borders on wishful thinking. This isn’t 1964, the year Goldwater ran for president. We live in a new political reality, with a completely different information infrastructure. Conservatives, far more than liberals, live in an echo chamber. As Bartlett acknowledges, the “nutty ideas” animating the Republican base have become “staples of Fox News programming, which is the primary source of information for most conservatives.” No matter what happens in the general election, then, conservatives will find a way to collectively avoid the truth – and Fox News and right wing talk radio will gladly help them. But let’s indulge Bartlett’s hypothesis. Say Donald Trump wins the nomination and then loses badly to the Democratic nominee. Conservative Republicans can interpret this loss in two ways. On the one hand, they can say, as Bartlett hopes, that Trump lost because he’s too extreme, too unhinged in his views on immigration and women and practically everything else. On the other hand, they can say that Trump lost because he wasn’t extreme enough, because he didn’t double down on whatever they think conservatism is. You can hear the refrain now: Trump used to be pro-choice. He's anti-trade. He endorsed single-payer health care. He's not Christian enough. The same is true of a Carson loss. Sure, Carson is the latest darling of the conservative movement, but if he loses to Clinton or Sanders, conservatives will suddenly notice that he never really knew what he was talking about. Rather than accept that Carson lost on account of his extreme conservatism, they’ll look for ways to retroactively condemn him as a liberal. They’ll open up just enough space in their information bubble to acknowledge articles like this, which highlight the many liberal things Carson has said and written in the past. Although Carson parroted every conservative dogma you can imagine during this campaign, conservatives are unlikely to connect that to his loss, because that would be an indictment of conservatism as such. Bartlett may be right. Perhaps a big loss by an outsider conservative candidate would cause the Republican Party to recalibrate. I doubt it, though. Fundamentalists still control this party; they’re the most active, the most energized, and they’re supported by a conservative media-industrial complex that doesn’t care about what’s best for the Republican Party. Moderates like Bartlett underestimate the self-reinforcing power of ideological narratives. The hardcore wing of the Republican base is wedded to a political mythology that is based on a host of assumptions – about America’s history, about the role of government, about the primacy of religion, and about the roots and utility of economic inequality. Abandoning these ideological commitments means abandoning an entire political worldview, and that’s unlikely to happen. To be a conservative ideologue today is to live in a feedback loop, where every loss is reinterpreted as a win. Republican culture warriors, who hijacked the conservative movement years ago, have done nothing but lose in the last decade, and yet they’re convinced most of the country agrees with them – because Sean Hannity tells them so. From abortion to drug legalization to same sex marriage, conservatives find themselves on the wrong side of history. No one is suggesting that social conservatives renounce their beliefs, but if they were honest with themselves, they’d accept that they’re a minority and that their views have been rejected. Instead, thanks to the good folks at Fox, they’re told that the problem isn’t their positions but their representatives, who just aren’t conservative enough. What they really need are bolder conservatives, people like Ted Cruz, who will pander mercilessly to them but fail to win a single legislative battle. Bartlett thinks a devastating loss in the general election will force Republican voters to renounce people like Cruz in favor of more moderate candidates like Jeb Bush. I think the opposite is true: They’ll clamor for more conservatives and more conservatism, and if the establishment gives them moderates instead, they’ll walk away from the party. And since the GOP would cease to be competitive at all without its fundamentalist base, the party will have no choice but to yield to the purists. But maybe I’m wrong. We’ll know soon enough. [image error]Donald Trump and Ben Carson are the clear frontrunners in the Republican presidential race. It’s possible – perhaps even probable – that one of them could actually win the nomination. It was thought that Trump’s political star was fading, that conservatives had finally grown tired of his screwy shtick. But that’s not the case. After dipping momentarily, Trump’s national lead is creeping back up. The latest ABC/Washington Post poll shows Trump at 32 percent, well above the rest of the field. (Carson is comfortably in second with 22 percent support.) GOP insiders have been waiting patiently for Trump and Carson to implode. And there’s an argument to be made that Trump and Carson are like previous Republican candidates who caught fire early in the race but inevitably foundered when voters started paying attention – e.g., Herman Cain or Michelle Bachmann or Fred Thompson. But this time may be different. If you look at how the race is shaping up, it’s hard to see how Trump or Carson fall anytime soon. The early primaries are key, both in terms of fundraising and momentum, and Trump and Carson are well-positioned. In Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Trump and Carson are dominating. Both, moreover, are appealing to conservatives in every corner of the country, from Massachusetts to Nevada to Arizona to Florida. They’re not regional candidates, in other words – they can win everywhere. These numbers ought to terrify the Republican establishment. If either Trump or Carson become the nominee, the GOP will lose in a landslide. The conservative base is comfortable nominating political neophytes for president, but the rest of the country is not. Once the nation sees how breathtakingly ignorant Carson and Trump are in comparison to a Clinton or a Sanders, both of whom have actual political experience, the choice will be obvious. There are, however, serious conservatives who despise Trump but see a silver lining in his nomination. In July, Bruce Bartlett penned an essay for Politico in which he argued that a massive loss by Trump in a general election would, ultimately, be a good thing for the GOP. Bartlett writes:

The Republican establishment foresees a defeat of Barry Goldwater proportions in the unlikely event Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination. As Trump’s lead in the polls grows, so too does their panic. Yet, for moderate Republicans, a Trump nomination is not something to be feared but welcomed. It is only after a landslide loss by Trump that the GOP can win the White House again. Trump’s nomination would give what’s left of the sane wing of the GOP a chance to reassert control in the wake of his inevitable defeat, because it would prove beyond doubt that the existing conservative coalition cannot win the presidency. A historic thrashing of the know-nothings would verify that compromise and reform are essential to recapture the White House and attract new voters, such as Latinos, who are now alienated from the Republican Party.

I understand Bartlett’s logic, but this borders on wishful thinking. This isn’t 1964, the year Goldwater ran for president. We live in a new political reality, with a completely different information infrastructure. Conservatives, far more than liberals, live in an echo chamber. As Bartlett acknowledges, the “nutty ideas” animating the Republican base have become “staples of Fox News programming, which is the primary source of information for most conservatives.” No matter what happens in the general election, then, conservatives will find a way to collectively avoid the truth – and Fox News and right wing talk radio will gladly help them. But let’s indulge Bartlett’s hypothesis. Say Donald Trump wins the nomination and then loses badly to the Democratic nominee. Conservative Republicans can interpret this loss in two ways. On the one hand, they can say, as Bartlett hopes, that Trump lost because he’s too extreme, too unhinged in his views on immigration and women and practically everything else. On the other hand, they can say that Trump lost because he wasn’t extreme enough, because he didn’t double down on whatever they think conservatism is. You can hear the refrain now: Trump used to be pro-choice. He's anti-trade. He endorsed single-payer health care. He's not Christian enough. The same is true of a Carson loss. Sure, Carson is the latest darling of the conservative movement, but if he loses to Clinton or Sanders, conservatives will suddenly notice that he never really knew what he was talking about. Rather than accept that Carson lost on account of his extreme conservatism, they’ll look for ways to retroactively condemn him as a liberal. They’ll open up just enough space in their information bubble to acknowledge articles like this, which highlight the many liberal things Carson has said and written in the past. Although Carson parroted every conservative dogma you can imagine during this campaign, conservatives are unlikely to connect that to his loss, because that would be an indictment of conservatism as such. Bartlett may be right. Perhaps a big loss by an outsider conservative candidate would cause the Republican Party to recalibrate. I doubt it, though. Fundamentalists still control this party; they’re the most active, the most energized, and they’re supported by a conservative media-industrial complex that doesn’t care about what’s best for the Republican Party. Moderates like Bartlett underestimate the self-reinforcing power of ideological narratives. The hardcore wing of the Republican base is wedded to a political mythology that is based on a host of assumptions – about America’s history, about the role of government, about the primacy of religion, and about the roots and utility of economic inequality. Abandoning these ideological commitments means abandoning an entire political worldview, and that’s unlikely to happen. To be a conservative ideologue today is to live in a feedback loop, where every loss is reinterpreted as a win. Republican culture warriors, who hijacked the conservative movement years ago, have done nothing but lose in the last decade, and yet they’re convinced most of the country agrees with them – because Sean Hannity tells them so. From abortion to drug legalization to same sex marriage, conservatives find themselves on the wrong side of history. No one is suggesting that social conservatives renounce their beliefs, but if they were honest with themselves, they’d accept that they’re a minority and that their views have been rejected. Instead, thanks to the good folks at Fox, they’re told that the problem isn’t their positions but their representatives, who just aren’t conservative enough. What they really need are bolder conservatives, people like Ted Cruz, who will pander mercilessly to them but fail to win a single legislative battle. Bartlett thinks a devastating loss in the general election will force Republican voters to renounce people like Cruz in favor of more moderate candidates like Jeb Bush. I think the opposite is true: They’ll clamor for more conservatives and more conservatism, and if the establishment gives them moderates instead, they’ll walk away from the party. And since the GOP would cease to be competitive at all without its fundamentalist base, the party will have no choice but to yield to the purists. But maybe I’m wrong. We’ll know soon enough. [image error]

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Laurie Anderson on the American way of dying: “I’ll just clonk you on the back of the head with a brick, put you out so you won’t be there”

There is a lot of loss in Laurie Anderson’s new film, “Heart of a Dog.” As the title suggests, there’s the death of her beloved rat terrier and longtime companion, Lolabelle, who learned to play the piano and paint after she became blind in her old age. There’s the death of her mother, who Anderson worries she never truly loved, and who hallucinated animals on the ceiling as her children gathered around her death bed. And of course, overshadowing it all is the death of her husband, Lou Reed, whose name is not uttered in the film, although it concludes with the strains of his love song “Turning Time Around” and a dedication "to the magnificent spirit of my husband, Lou Reed (1942-2013)." But like the majority of work throughout the 68-year-old performance artist's impressive career, the film eludes simple description. Rather, it's an elliptical, almost hallucinatory voyage, exploring the interconnected themes of love, death, motherhood, Tibetan Buddhism, Wittgenstein's theories of language, 9/11, the surveillance state, and, of course, dogs (so, yeah, if you hadn’t already figured it out, it's an art film). While "Heart of a Dog" features anecdotes from Anderson’s youth, including a series of 8-millimeter old home videos and a few jarring stories of childhood tragedy, the autobiographical elements are Anderson's way in to a more universal story (although the film certainly shares elements with Joan Didion’s paean to personal loss “The Year of Magical Thinking.") But more than that, it’s a dreamlike portrait of the mind of an artist, an exploration of storytelling and how we tell stories to construct meaning out of life, and, above all, a reflection on the inextricable connection between love and death. In the film, Anderson quotes David Foster Wallace’s line: “Every love story is a ghost story.” In person, she has a more catchy way of putting it. “If I was Woody Allen and had cojones I would just call [the film] 'Love and Death,'" she tells me, with a dreamy smile. A bit of scene-setting, because it’s not often you get to conduct an interview in the home of a New York legend: When I arrive at the West Village loft owned by Anderson and formerly shared with Reed, I am greeted by Will the border terrier, Lolabelle’s successor, who initially yips at me, but warms up quickly and nestles in my feet in an oversized bean bag chair. We’re running late — Anderson, as I’ll find out, is prone to lengthy digressions — so I have time to observe the space, a spacious loft brightened by three vast windows overlooking the intersection between Canal Street and the West Side Highway. Reed’s presence is certainly felt in the apartment: A framed Grammy Hall of Fame certificate celebrating Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” is propped against the front door and a framed black-and-white photo of Reed hangs on the wall, but there’s lot of other stuff to feast the eyes on: a series of tiny arm-chairs, as if made for children; rich burgundy rugs; a wall-mounted stringed instrument; a framed photograph of the Dalai Lama draped in a white scarf; a painting of a yin and yang; books, many books, crammed in on shelves strewn with trinkets and sculptures hewn of ceramic and clay; cardboard packing boxes, and canine chew toys as far as the eye can see -- all the flotsam and ephemera of a life richly-lived. Eventually I am taken to meet Anderson, who sports her recognizable spiked hairdo and a starched white-button up and sneakers. The artist greets me with a warm smile and, after offering me some sesame cookies from a tupperware container, we settle in to discuss the film. Sitting in a bright red room off the main space, with me perched in a bright yellow "Lou Reed" chair (designed by French designer Phillippe Stack in honor of the rocker) opposite a candle-lit shrine of the departed singer, I talked to the legendary performance artist about storytelling, dogs, and the art of dying and grieving gracefully; or, as she puts it in the film, "how to feel sad without being sad." Understandably, Anderson seems reluctant to talk about her late husband, but she has lots of unexpected thoughts about Johnny Depp's "Black Mass" and Idris Elba's "Beasts Of No Nation," and how her own work stands in juxtaposition to the violent depictions of death in much American cinema. Suffice to say, much like her fascinating and singular career, talking to Anderson is anything but predictable. The following interview has been edited and condensed. How did the film come about? I know that feature films are not traditionally a medium that you’ve worked in. I started off with dogs, and then I realized, maybe it should be like collected short stories. And then I started mapping it out and seeing how they influenced each other, and then I realized that a film is not like a record. You can’t just have twelve songs. And so with this, it became a lot about questions and how stories work. It wasn’t really an autobiographical thing. It was really more like using my own life as examples: how you move through time, what happens when you repeat a story too many times, when you can’t remember it, when someone else tells your story and just pushes it on you. And surveillance culture kind of came in. And then the bridge between those worlds was Lolabelle, who was a perfectly typical, West Village see-and-be-seen dog. There are a lot of different vantage points we move through in the film, from aerial views to dog's eye views.  You’re asked to do a lot of things, there's a dog’s POV, and then next is a high angle of a security camera lens, and then the next is you’re floating through the Bardo [The plane of existence between death and reincarnation, according to Tibetan Buddhists]. It asks you to do a lot, and to imagine a lot because a lot of the stories that are told -- you don’t see pictures, [but there are] voice-overs. it’s all about your own imagination and you sort of drift, and your relationship to words. Can you talk a little bit about your decision to center the film around Lolabelle? Well, she’s a thread as there are many of these threads. It’s not about my dog, or me, or about my mother. It’s about how you move through time, and a lot of questions about who you think you are, and how your sense of identity can shred. So the Bardo is all about that, of how you tell a certain story about yourself. If somebody says, “what kind of kid were you?” you have one or two stories that you tell about how I was shy or a show-off, or whatever, and it’s a two-cent story. It’s not meant to really say who you were. I know you began the film after Lolabelle’s death, and the filmmaking process was interrupted by obviously the death of your partner Lou Reed. What was involved in the decision to go back to the film after Lou’s death? There was an editor who was continuing to work on it while I was away from it, and she was really great. I probably wouldn’t have finished without her. She was just like, I’ll do a little cutting, and you can look at it, and Lou said that you’d wanted to try something like that. But she was fantastic. She just kind of kept it going in that way. You know, just low key. And the whole thing actually was pretty low key. And I was very happy about that, that it went through a few different stages and then when I came back to it it felt different, and generally I don’t have that kind of working arc. The other reason for having Lolabelle in the title or a dog in the title, is really empathy. It’s almost a film about that. It’s about empathy, not just for yourself, but for others as well. One of the interesting parts of the film was about your decision not to euthanize Lolabelle when she gets sick, because Buddhist teachings say that dying is a process that involves approaching death and then withdrawing from it, and you didn't want to deny Lolabelle that cathartic experience. But could you also argue that it wasn't empathetic to keep her alive through her illness? Of course you could. I try to be really light-handed with that because there are animals that get so sick that you kind of have to do that. The trouble is, the American way of death is really about that. There’s this fear of pain and fear of suffering. So I’ll just clonk you on the back of the head with a brick, put you out so you won’t be there. And I think being there is a really important thing now. Of course you might ask me that [question] when I’m on my deathbed, begging for morphine and you'll go, “Remember what you said! I just want to see it through. We’ll take you home. There’s no equipment at all. “ I’m not trying to tell people what to do. I’m just trying to say what we did. Something that I didn’t put in the film was the doctor, the vet said: “You’re going to have to put her down because she’s going to have to live in an oxygen room for the rest of her life. That’s no way to live so you have to put her down.” And so Lou said, “Where do we get him an oxygen room?” And we got one and put it in later that day, and she slept there in the night and then in the morning she came out and went, “Mmm.” And then she would go in once in awhile a little bit during the day, but mostly she was out and they’re not expensive, and she lived for eight more months. She was really happy and graceful, and I thought, Oh, I’m learning how to get old from watching Lolabelle. Because she’s just slowing down and spending a little more time basking in the sun, and I figured it’s just wonderful to be with an old dog. It was just great. Was it difficult continuing with the film after Lou’s death, and was there any thought or desire on your part to make it more pointedly about him? No. Again, it’s not so much specifically about me. It’s as much about your death as my death as his death and her death. If I was Woody Allen and had cojones I would just call it “Love and Death.” That’s it. That’s what it’s about. Take it or leave it. Forget the metaphors. I mean, of course the more you experience different kinds of deaths, the more you know about it; the more you can see how varied it is, how personal it is, how you kind of die the way you live. It’s not something that’s suddenly really out of character. And also, what a weird taboo it is. And yet when I counted the number of deaths in "Black Mass" when I was looking at different films... I probably have them beat on the number of deaths, because I’ve got, you know, a baby dies... But I can’t take all those stranglings. Stranglings? Yeah, in “Black Mass.” I’m really interested in energy and transformation and dreams and death. But strangling women? And men, in the goriest way. I don’t have the time for that. I know that we’re interested in that and in punishment... have you ever looked at MSNBC after midnight on Saturday? It’s like seven prison reality shows in a row. I mean, Americans are into violence and punishment. You wanted to look at death in a more peaceful way? It’s not necessarily more peaceful. Peaceful, I don’t think, is the opposite of violence. You know, I think maybe aware, or something like that. But I get just nauseated hearing myself talk about stuff like that. I’m just trying to say I guess that death is so much a part of American filmmaking, but it’s always violent death. And it’s death that absolutely ends at that cut -- nothing ever really goes on unless it’s a creepy vampire or ghost story, in which the afterlife is just creepy and Halloween-y. Dying in an American film would be an interesting thing to think about, because, when there’s a death in a film there’s almost like a blackout -- there’s a thud and then there’s nothing. It’s just really deadly. I saw “Beasts of No Nation” last night, and there's lots of death in that. Did you see it? No, I haven’t seen it yet. But I’ve heard it was intense. It’s pretty hardcore, and all violent. And all the nothingness of death, and just the children who get their skulls cracked. But I suppose that film is about a child learning to kill. And so from that point of view, it’s not just about clonking people out over the head and sending them to some, just, to a blackout thing. It’s about watching him learn to do that. And then again, when is it that you’re supposed to develop a sense of conscience? It’s twelve or something. It's pretty late. Or nine? You don't really have one before that, you don't really understand the consequences. In a way it was a really odd film. It wasn’t an adult learning to be brutal and kill. It was a child who was trained, not taught. Just trained, like a monkey. So you say that we have all these American films that we do that are obsessed with the idea of death and violence. We’re obsessed with it. And do you situate your film as a response to that? I have never put it into words like that, but why not? "Great American response to death." Yeah, I mean I do think it’s very odd that it’s just one death after another in most films, and they’re mostly violent, and so without comment. It’s just highly stylized deaths and no sense of the actual impact of it or the way anybody feels about it. It’s just hysterical. It’s just a kind of hysterical response to death. And anytime you do it that many times, you might as well be re-enacting -- what’s the name of the film? -- the film about re-enacting the killings. “The Act of Killing?” Yeah. That it becomes an obsession and you see it’s a huge obsession, but one that’s never really worked out. It’s just stylized in different ways and happens over and over and over, like some weird loop without anybody going, “Why are so many people getting strangled in this movie?” It’s just a film about evil? Not really. There is no penetration of what evil really is. “Black Mass” is just one after the other: tchung, tchung, tchung. You see that one? “Black Mass”? Yeah, it’s brutal. So do you see the psychological aspect of it? I don’t really. What’s it about, in your opinion? I mean, in part it it’s a portrait of a sociopath. But I don’t think we ever really get a sense of what makes him tick. It’s supposed to be mysterious, right? He [Whitey Bulger] is supposed to be impenetrable. Big forehead. Is anyone impenetrable? Yeah, I think so, if they try to build this wall. But then you just see somebody trying to build a wall, you know? I don’t know. I didn’t like it. And I wasn’t attracted to him enough as a character to care one way or another who he was. It didn’t make me feel anything, except tired. It was a time-waster for me. How do you feel watching your own film now? I’m really sorry. I’m embarrassed to say this, but I enjoy watching it [laughs]. You should! I don’t know. I don’t know if I should. But I want to see how flexible people are, and the best audiences so far have been in London, because they’ve got such a sharp sense of language. So they’re really into the nuance of stuff. And they love that. I love that. Also, they’re really goofy, so they get the goofy parts and they’re not afraid to just laugh at something that’s just stupid. And I sometimes think film festival audiences think that they shouldn’t, like: “I’m an artist, so I should probably be a little more serious, and shouldn’t be goofy.” ["Heart of a Dog"] kind of goes through a lot of ranges of things. It asks a lot of audiences, I think. It’s not a passive thing. So this is a bit of a digression, but I have to ask; were you always going to get another dog? Probably. We weren’t planning on it. We suddenly found ourselves out in western Connecticut at a breeder’s. I don’t know what we were doing. [It was like] “why are we here?” And this little dog -- he was three times the size of his father. All the other dogs were show dogs. They were small. He’s a lummox. So they were saying, “This one over here you might be interested in,” and [Will[ was really sad and sitting in a corner, and we said, “I don’t know.” Because the other ones were like, “Take me! Hello! I’m a show dog!” And we were like, “Urgh.” They seemed kind of labor-intensive. But little Will -- he seemed too lumpy. So we said, ”Okay, we’ll take him out.” And as soon as he got out onto the grass, he started doing tumbles and pirouettes, and he was like, “Hello! Hello!” and he’s just a really sweet dog. He’s never going to play the piano or paint or anything, I don’t think. Not all dogs can. No, he’s not that kind of dog. But he likes eating a lot. [image error]There is a lot of loss in Laurie Anderson’s new film, “Heart of a Dog.” As the title suggests, there’s the death of her beloved rat terrier and longtime companion, Lolabelle, who learned to play the piano and paint after she became blind in her old age. There’s the death of her mother, who Anderson worries she never truly loved, and who hallucinated animals on the ceiling as her children gathered around her death bed. And of course, overshadowing it all is the death of her husband, Lou Reed, whose name is not uttered in the film, although it concludes with the strains of his love song “Turning Time Around” and a dedication "to the magnificent spirit of my husband, Lou Reed (1942-2013)." But like the majority of work throughout the 68-year-old performance artist's impressive career, the film eludes simple description. Rather, it's an elliptical, almost hallucinatory voyage, exploring the interconnected themes of love, death, motherhood, Tibetan Buddhism, Wittgenstein's theories of language, 9/11, the surveillance state, and, of course, dogs (so, yeah, if you hadn’t already figured it out, it's an art film). While "Heart of a Dog" features anecdotes from Anderson’s youth, including a series of 8-millimeter old home videos and a few jarring stories of childhood tragedy, the autobiographical elements are Anderson's way in to a more universal story (although the film certainly shares elements with Joan Didion’s paean to personal loss “The Year of Magical Thinking.") But more than that, it’s a dreamlike portrait of the mind of an artist, an exploration of storytelling and how we tell stories to construct meaning out of life, and, above all, a reflection on the inextricable connection between love and death. In the film, Anderson quotes David Foster Wallace’s line: “Every love story is a ghost story.” In person, she has a more catchy way of putting it. “If I was Woody Allen and had cojones I would just call [the film] 'Love and Death,'" she tells me, with a dreamy smile. A bit of scene-setting, because it’s not often you get to conduct an interview in the home of a New York legend: When I arrive at the West Village loft owned by Anderson and formerly shared with Reed, I am greeted by Will the border terrier, Lolabelle’s successor, who initially yips at me, but warms up quickly and nestles in my feet in an oversized bean bag chair. We’re running late — Anderson, as I’ll find out, is prone to lengthy digressions — so I have time to observe the space, a spacious loft brightened by three vast windows overlooking the intersection between Canal Street and the West Side Highway. Reed’s presence is certainly felt in the apartment: A framed Grammy Hall of Fame certificate celebrating Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” is propped against the front door and a framed black-and-white photo of Reed hangs on the wall, but there’s lot of other stuff to feast the eyes on: a series of tiny arm-chairs, as if made for children; rich burgundy rugs; a wall-mounted stringed instrument; a framed photograph of the Dalai Lama draped in a white scarf; a painting of a yin and yang; books, many books, crammed in on shelves strewn with trinkets and sculptures hewn of ceramic and clay; cardboard packing boxes, and canine chew toys as far as the eye can see -- all the flotsam and ephemera of a life richly-lived. Eventually I am taken to meet Anderson, who sports her recognizable spiked hairdo and a starched white-button up and sneakers. The artist greets me with a warm smile and, after offering me some sesame cookies from a tupperware container, we settle in to discuss the film. Sitting in a bright red room off the main space, with me perched in a bright yellow "Lou Reed" chair (designed by French designer Phillippe Stack in honor of the rocker) opposite a candle-lit shrine of the departed singer, I talked to the legendary performance artist about storytelling, dogs, and the art of dying and grieving gracefully; or, as she puts it in the film, "how to feel sad without being sad." Understandably, Anderson seems reluctant to talk about her late husband, but she has lots of unexpected thoughts about Johnny Depp's "Black Mass" and Idris Elba's "Beasts Of No Nation," and how her own work stands in juxtaposition to the violent depictions of death in much American cinema. Suffice to say, much like her fascinating and singular career, talking to Anderson is anything but predictable. The following interview has been edited and condensed. How did the film come about? I know that feature films are not traditionally a medium that you’ve worked in. I started off with dogs, and then I realized, maybe it should be like collected short stories. And then I started mapping it out and seeing how they influenced each other, and then I realized that a film is not like a record. You can’t just have twelve songs. And so with this, it became a lot about questions and how stories work. It wasn’t really an autobiographical thing. It was really more like using my own life as examples: how you move through time, what happens when you repeat a story too many times, when you can’t remember it, when someone else tells your story and just pushes it on you. And surveillance culture kind of came in. And then the bridge between those worlds was Lolabelle, who was a perfectly typical, West Village see-and-be-seen dog. There are a lot of different vantage points we move through in the film, from aerial views to dog's eye views.  You’re asked to do a lot of things, there's a dog’s POV, and then next is a high angle of a security camera lens, and then the next is you’re floating through the Bardo [The plane of existence between death and reincarnation, according to Tibetan Buddhists]. It asks you to do a lot, and to imagine a lot because a lot of the stories that are told -- you don’t see pictures, [but there are] voice-overs. it’s all about your own imagination and you sort of drift, and your relationship to words. Can you talk a little bit about your decision to center the film around Lolabelle? Well, she’s a thread as there are many of these threads. It’s not about my dog, or me, or about my mother. It’s about how you move through time, and a lot of questions about who you think you are, and how your sense of identity can shred. So the Bardo is all about that, of how you tell a certain story about yourself. If somebody says, “what kind of kid were you?” you have one or two stories that you tell about how I was shy or a show-off, or whatever, and it’s a two-cent story. It’s not meant to really say who you were. I know you began the film after Lolabelle’s death, and the filmmaking process was interrupted by obviously the death of your partner Lou Reed. What was involved in the decision to go back to the film after Lou’s death? There was an editor who was continuing to work on it while I was away from it, and she was really great. I probably wouldn’t have finished without her. She was just like, I’ll do a little cutting, and you can look at it, and Lou said that you’d wanted to try something like that. But she was fantastic. She just kind of kept it going in that way. You know, just low key. And the whole thing actually was pretty low key. And I was very happy about that, that it went through a few different stages and then when I came back to it it felt different, and generally I don’t have that kind of working arc. The other reason for having Lolabelle in the title or a dog in the title, is really empathy. It’s almost a film about that. It’s about empathy, not just for yourself, but for others as well. One of the interesting parts of the film was about your decision not to euthanize Lolabelle when she gets sick, because Buddhist teachings say that dying is a process that involves approaching death and then withdrawing from it, and you didn't want to deny Lolabelle that cathartic experience. But could you also argue that it wasn't empathetic to keep her alive through her illness? Of course you could. I try to be really light-handed with that because there are animals that get so sick that you kind of have to do that. The trouble is, the American way of death is really about that. There’s this fear of pain and fear of suffering. So I’ll just clonk you on the back of the head with a brick, put you out so you won’t be there. And I think being there is a really important thing now. Of course you might ask me that [question] when I’m on my deathbed, begging for morphine and you'll go, “Remember what you said! I just want to see it through. We’ll take you home. There’s no equipment at all. “ I’m not trying to tell people what to do. I’m just trying to say what we did. Something that I didn’t put in the film was the doctor, the vet said: “You’re going to have to put her down because she’s going to have to live in an oxygen room for the rest of her life. That’s no way to live so you have to put her down.” And so Lou said, “Where do we get him an oxygen room?” And we got one and put it in later that day, and she slept there in the night and then in the morning she came out and went, “Mmm.” And then she would go in once in awhile a little bit during the day, but mostly she was out and they’re not expensive, and she lived for eight more months. She was really happy and graceful, and I thought, Oh, I’m learning how to get old from watching Lolabelle. Because she’s just slowing down and spending a little more time basking in the sun, and I figured it’s just wonderful to be with an old dog. It was just great. Was it difficult continuing with the film after Lou’s death, and was there any thought or desire on your part to make it more pointedly about him? No. Again, it’s not so much specifically about me. It’s as much about your death as my death as his death and her death. If I was Woody Allen and had cojones I would just call it “Love and Death.” That’s it. That’s what it’s about. Take it or leave it. Forget the metaphors. I mean, of course the more you experience different kinds of deaths, the more you know about it; the more you can see how varied it is, how personal it is, how you kind of die the way you live. It’s not something that’s suddenly really out of character. And also, what a weird taboo it is. And yet when I counted the number of deaths in "Black Mass" when I was looking at different films... I probably have them beat on the number of deaths, because I’ve got, you know, a baby dies... But I can’t take all those stranglings. Stranglings? Yeah, in “Black Mass.” I’m really interested in energy and transformation and dreams and death. But strangling women? And men, in the goriest way. I don’t have the time for that. I know that we’re interested in that and in punishment... have you ever looked at MSNBC after midnight on Saturday? It’s like seven prison reality shows in a row. I mean, Americans are into violence and punishment. You wanted to look at death in a more peaceful way? It’s not necessarily more peaceful. Peaceful, I don’t think, is the opposite of violence. You know, I think maybe aware, or something like that. But I get just nauseated hearing myself talk about stuff like that. I’m just trying to say I guess that death is so much a part of American filmmaking, but it’s always violent death. And it’s death that absolutely ends at that cut -- nothing ever really goes on unless it’s a creepy vampire or ghost story, in which the afterlife is just creepy and Halloween-y. Dying in an American film would be an interesting thing to think about, because, when there’s a death in a film there’s almost like a blackout -- there’s a thud and then there’s nothing. It’s just really deadly. I saw “Beasts of No Nation” last night, and there's lots of death in that. Did you see it? No, I haven’t seen it yet. But I’ve heard it was intense. It’s pretty hardcore, and all violent. And all the nothingness of death, and just the children who get their skulls cracked. But I suppose that film is about a child learning to kill. And so from that point of view, it’s not just about clonking people out over the head and sending them to some, just, to a blackout thing. It’s about watching him learn to do that. And then again, when is it that you’re supposed to develop a sense of conscience? It’s twelve or something. It's pretty late. Or nine? You don't really have one before that, you don't really understand the consequences. In a way it was a really odd film. It wasn’t an adult learning to be brutal and kill. It was a child who was trained, not taught. Just trained, like a monkey. So you say that we have all these American films that we do that are obsessed with the idea of death and violence. We’re obsessed with it. And do you situate your film as a response to that? I have never put it into words like that, but why not? "Great American response to death." Yeah, I mean I do think it’s very odd that it’s just one death after another in most films, and they’re mostly violent, and so without comment. It’s just highly stylized deaths and no sense of the actual impact of it or the way anybody feels about it. It’s just hysterical. It’s just a kind of hysterical response to death. And anytime you do it that many times, you might as well be re-enacting -- what’s the name of the film? -- the film about re-enacting the killings. “The Act of Killing?” Yeah. That it becomes an obsession and you see it’s a huge obsession, but one that’s never really worked out. It’s just stylized in different ways and happens over and over and over, like some weird loop without anybody going, “Why are so many people getting strangled in this movie?” It’s just a film about evil? Not really. There is no penetration of what evil really is. “Black Mass” is just one after the other: tchung, tchung, tchung. You see that one? “Black Mass”? Yeah, it’s brutal. So do you see the psychological aspect of it? I don’t really. What’s it about, in your opinion? I mean, in part it it’s a portrait of a sociopath. But I don’t think we ever really get a sense of what makes him tick. It’s supposed to be mysterious, right? He [Whitey Bulger] is supposed to be impenetrable. Big forehead. Is anyone impenetrable? Yeah, I think so, if they try to build this wall. But then you just see somebody trying to build a wall, you know? I don’t know. I didn’t like it. And I wasn’t attracted to him enough as a character to care one way or another who he was. It didn’t make me feel anything, except tired. It was a time-waster for me. How do you feel watching your own film now? I’m really sorry. I’m embarrassed to say this, but I enjoy watching it [laughs]. You should! I don’t know. I don’t know if I should. But I want to see how flexible people are, and the best audiences so far have been in London, because they’ve got such a sharp sense of language. So they’re really into the nuance of stuff. And they love that. I love that. Also, they’re really goofy, so they get the goofy parts and they’re not afraid to just laugh at something that’s just stupid. And I sometimes think film festival audiences think that they shouldn’t, like: “I’m an artist, so I should probably be a little more serious, and shouldn’t be goofy.” ["Heart of a Dog"] kind of goes through a lot of ranges of things. It asks a lot of audiences, I think. It’s not a passive thing. So this is a bit of a digression, but I have to ask; were you always going to get another dog? Probably. We weren’t planning on it. We suddenly found ourselves out in western Connecticut at a breeder’s. I don’t know what we were doing. [It was like] “why are we here?” And this little dog -- he was three times the size of his father. All the other dogs were show dogs. They were small. He’s a lummox. So they were saying, “This one over here you might be interested in,” and [Will[ was really sad and sitting in a corner, and we said, “I don’t know.” Because the other ones were like, “Take me! Hello! I’m a show dog!” And we were like, “Urgh.” They seemed kind of labor-intensive. But little Will -- he seemed too lumpy. So we said, ”Okay, we’ll take him out.” And as soon as he got out onto the grass, he started doing tumbles and pirouettes, and he was like, “Hello! Hello!” and he’s just a really sweet dog. He’s never going to play the piano or paint or anything, I don’t think. Not all dogs can. No, he’s not that kind of dog. But he likes eating a lot. [image error]

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“SNL”‘s Sasheer Zamata mocks clueless white-dude privilege in painfully hilarious video

“Saturday Night Live” cast member Sasheer Zamata is the ACLU’s newest celebrity ambassador, and as part of the gig, she made a very funny (but also very important) video about white privilege, which features her and a white male friend walking around New York, as he waxes poetic about how far the country has come, and she gets stopped-and-frisked, cat-called, and bombarded with images of white male hegemony. Zamata — who was hired on “SNL” amidst an outcry about the show's lack of diversity last year — also penned an empowering essay for the ACLU, writing of privilege that “it’s a secret weapon that helps us even when we don’t know it, makes structural discrimination difficult to see, and disproportionately affects women." Read the full essay here, and watch the video below: [image error]“Saturday Night Live” cast member Sasheer Zamata is the ACLU’s newest celebrity ambassador, and as part of the gig, she made a very funny (but also very important) video about white privilege, which features her and a white male friend walking around New York, as he waxes poetic about how far the country has come, and she gets stopped-and-frisked, cat-called, and bombarded with images of white male hegemony. Zamata — who was hired on “SNL” amidst an outcry about the show's lack of diversity last year — also penned an empowering essay for the ACLU, writing of privilege that “it’s a secret weapon that helps us even when we don’t know it, makes structural discrimination difficult to see, and disproportionately affects women." Read the full essay here, and watch the video below: [image error]

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Torture, Iran, and Secrecy: Trove of CIA Director John Brennan’s emails released by WikiLeaks

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This is not a democracy: Behind the Deep State that Obama, Hillary or Trump couldn’t control

There are two ways to consider the White House’s announcement last week that, no, American troops will no longer withdraw from Afghanistan as previously planned. You can look back over President Obama’s record in such matters or you can face forward and think about what this decision means, or implies, or suggests —or maybe all three—about the next president’s conduct of foreign policy. I do not like what I see in either direction. What anyone who looks carefully and consciously can discern in Obama’s seven years in office are limits. These are imposed in part by inherited circumstances, but let us set these aside for now, appalling as they are. My concern is with the limits imposed by the entrenched power of our permanent government, otherwise known as the “deep state.” With the first Democratic debate in Las Vegas last week, the serious party joins the unserious party in articulating a vision of America’s proper conduct abroad. The question Obama’s two terms force upon us is how much any of what we hear from the Democratic candidates will matter even if we assume one of them succeeds him. The Obama administration’s accumulated inventory on the foreign side is a mixed bag to put the point mildly, and one has to count it heavily net-negative at this point. The big accomplishments, of course, are the accord governing the Iran nuclear program and the resumption of diplomatic ties with Cuba. While both represent hard-fought political victories, there was considerable backing for these undertakings in the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, the State Department bureaucracy and the corporate sector. Hang on to this distinction. Against the successes stands a long list of failures, reversals and something else that does not make such punchy headlines but is just as important as the policies that do: I refer to the president’s unwillingness or inability to counter what we can call policy momentum. Time and again, Obama has allowed State, Defense and the intelligence apparatus to proceed with programs and strategies not remotely in keeping with his evident tilt toward a less militarized, interventionist and confrontational foreign policy. I put this down to two realities. One is Obama’s ambivalent thinking. Many, many people misread what this man stood for and against when he was elected seven autumns ago, and we are now able to separate the one from the other. More on this in a minute. Two is the “power elite” C. Wright Mills told us about in the book of this name he published many decades ago. “They are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society,” Mills wrote. “They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives.” They are, in short, the deep state. Mills’ book came out in 1956, when the phenomenon he described was newly emergent. Having ignored this elite’s accumulating influence in the 59 years since, we get the questions Obama’s experience raises: Does it matter who we put in the White House? Is there any prospect at all of changing this nation’s conduct and direction? Are our policy-setting institutions any longer capable of self-correction? The best that can be said now is that the power elite/permanent government/deep state, take your pick, is greatly more visible. At least we know enough, some of us, to ask the questions. * Where to begin? Well, Obama came to office promising to end the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and will leave having ended neither. With the new decision to keep 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan, it is plain that (1) he has no serious exit strategy in either case and (2) no one at the Pentagon is especially concerned with developing one. Closing the prison at Guantánamo was one of Obama’s signature commitments when he was elected, and now look: His own defense secretary, the worrisomely unintelligent Ashton Carter, stands in open defiance by refusing to sign release papers for 52 detainees cleared to leave. Just as astonishing, the president can apparently do nothing about it. As to Syria, the president has taken to blaming others for the ever-worsening debacle on the argument he was not behind this interventionist program from the start. Unseemly is the very kindest word here. There is no reason to doubt Obama’s word, but he begs a question almost too large to contemplate: If you opposed the policy, Mr. President, why are we there and why is your name on it? By way of the Iran agreement, it appeared that Obama had a serious chance to alter Washington’s profoundly distorted engagement with Israel. But this, clearly, was never the story. The story all along has been to preserve Israel’s nuclear-weapons monopoly in the Middle East while keeping neighbors either onside or off balance. Hence the obsession with removing the Assad government in Syria. Hence Washington’s explicit green light a matter of hours prior to the coup deposing President Morsi in Egypt two year ago. Other matters. The wholly unnecessary confrontation with Russia will stand as the worst and most consequential blot on the Obama administration’s foreign policy legacy, in my view. Who runs this policy and why? Tension in Sino-American relations is less charged but not less stupid. And as the evidently ongoing program to destabilize the Maduro government in Venezuela suggests, the subversion machines at the CIA and State continue firing on all eight. This is the backward glance. What does this splattered, pockmarked record tell us as we look forward and wonder what the policies of Obama’s successor will look like? It is time to consider this question carefully. Now that Democrats join Republicans in advancing their thinking—is this the word?—as to America’s conduct abroad, what are we hearing? * The foreign policy of any Republican candidate now in the race, with the exception of the rapidly vanishing Rand Paul, is a no-brainer, and I mean this literally. We find among them a seamless unity behind reactionary policies that lie between unworkable and dangerous. In this respect, the most worrisome G.O.P. aspirants are Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, the two who purport to have operational agendas. I do not find anyone in the right-wing lineup electable, but I will stay short of any prediction. It is not my point. However little sense they make, they are a very influential presence in the national political conversation, and no one can afford to miss this. Two reasons. One, the Republicans’ argument for militarized, often-perilous assertions of American prerogative abroad are perfectly congruent with the ideology that sustains the deep state. In effect, the G.O.P. is the agency through which the exceptionalist consciousness that drives the deep state remains a political imperative for anyone seeking high office. One may find the Republican leadership—in Congress as well as on the stump—primitive nostalgists lost in a half-imagined version of the past. But these people exist among us because we decline to dismiss them as frivolous—which they are and which we should. This is partly the fault of our “political-media ecosystem,” as Paul Krugman put it very cogently in a recent New York Times column. “The modern Republican Party is a post-policy enterprise, which doesn’t do real solutions to real problems,” he wrote. “And the news media really, really don’t want to face up to that awkward reality.” Too true. But it is a cheap dodge to place all blame on those media operating as a deep state appendage. We all own a piece of the Republican charade, in my view, so long as we remain unwilling to look squarely at the system—including the press and the broadcasters—that puts political vandals before us as somehow credible. Two, in the circumstances just described the G.O.P. has an unmistakable influence on America’s foreign policy discourse. Maybe all societies have categories designating what is sayable and unsayable, but ours is drastically skewed. It should be obvious to all that even those candidates not part of the Republican clown show will find it that much more difficult to advance any seriously innovative policy proposals. And so to the Democrats. As Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir suggested in a superbly pithy piece after the first Democratic debate last week, it is impossible to know whether Hillary Clinton is a progressive candidate or a political predator intent on swallowing Bernie Sanders whole, but it grows more likely that she will win the Democratic nomination before we are able to tell. Here is O’Hehir’s piece. I do not buy into the idea that last week’s exchange in Las Vegas was Clinton’s triumph and the beginning of Sanders’ decline. When I read as much in the following morning’s Times, the report struck me as a hopelessly bald attempt to mold the truth—as power elitists always think nothing of doing. I thought Sanders carried the evening. This said, weaknesses appeared in Sanders’ positions, and foreign policy was high among them. He does not, it grieves me a little to say, appear to have much of one. Senator Sanders’ opposition to the Iraq war back in 2003 is greatly to his credit. But Candidate Sanders seems to take the safe, default position on one question after another—Russia, the Middle East, most recently Obama’s decision to keep troops in Afghanistan. I do not see that this will do. But neither will Clinton’s righteous faith in spreading neoliberal ideology across the planet, her stacked-deck idea of humanitarian intervention, a liking for military solutions in foreign affairs that sometimes puts her closer to Republican candidates than to her boss when she was secretary of state. Whatever Clinton wants us to know or not know about her thinking, exceptionalist consciousness is inscribed in every sentence she utters. What have we got on the Democratic side? A candidate smart enough to understand that were he to propose an authentically progressive foreign policy agenda he would be mauled for the positions it would logically include? Another candidate who is very likely more at home in the deep state than anyone else from either party? It is hard to say, but maybe. Easier to say what we do not have on foreign policy questions in this election: much of a choice. * Is this by design? I put this question to David Talbot in a telephone exchange Tuesday. Talbot (who founded Salon 20 years ago) has just published “The Devil’s Chessboard,” an account of the deep state focused on the crucial role of Allen Dulles as it emerged in the 1950s. Dulles directed the CIA from 1953 until President Kennedy fired him in 1961. It is Talbot’s contention that elements of the deep state, probably including Dulles, were responsible for Kennedy’s assassination two years later. “Presidents have to be thoroughly vetted before getting to the White House,” Talbot replied. “Kennedy was probably the last president not thoroughly approved by the deep state. This may be edgy, but I think there’ve been lessons in this for every president since. It’s a question of what a president can and can’t do, or what he does at his own peril.” If “edgy” means very far from the orthodox version of events, O.K. But I see no grounds whatsoever to push any part of Talbot’s thesis off the table. The reality we must all grasp if we are to straighten out our nation’s bent path into the 21st century is that a very vast swathe of history requires a fundamental rewrite. “Every president has been manipulated by national security officials,” Talbot said in a long Q & A with Salon’s Liam O’Donoghue when “the Devil’s Chessboard” was published last week. You can read that interview here. Return briefly to Obama’s foreign policy record. In my view, it is the story of a president discovering the limits of his prerogative as defined by various elements of our permanent government—primarily uniformed military officers and the national security officials Talbot mentions. He appears to have won (Iran, Cuba) or lost (most of the rest) depending on whether the deep state sanctioned the policy direction. “Obama came up through all the usual institutions—Columbia, Harvard Law,” Talbot remarked when we spoke. “He has the basic ideology of the group, which is American exceptionalism.” It is an interesting observation in that it helps us to read into Obama’s choices. Without exception, every one of his initiatives abroad concerned how policy is executed—never the policy goals. The ancient Greeks distinguished between techne—means, method—and telos, meaning purpose, intent, desired outcome. Obama concerns himself solely with the techne of American policy. As Talbot put it, “He wanted to moderate and modulate some of the excesses.” And this, I conclude, is the borderline that will circumscribe the choices of any candidate voters and wealthy donors, many of them deep state inhabitants, send to the White House in 2017. We are to see nothing more than tinkering at the edges. * I read an extremely compelling piece on environmental politics the other day. Wen Stephenson’s “Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Climate Justice Movement” came out in The Nation and is taken from his just-published book, “What We’re Fighting for Now is Each Other.” The Nation essay is here. I had better say right away why I end a column on our foreign policy prospects with mention of a piece on the climate question. It is very simple. Stephenson is concerned with the failure of incremental change of the kind attempted by mainstream Greens over the past several decades. He writes about “wide-awake people” and their ideas as to what needs to get done to put effective, planet-saving policies in place. Their thinking runs to “changing power structures.” “To be serious about climate change is to be radical,” Stephenson writes. He quotes an activist (and divinity student at Harvard) who tells him, “The kind of change you’re talking about—anything feasible within the current political system—really won’t do us any good. You’re talking about going off the cliff at 40 miles per hour instead of 60.” What is the topic here? Fair enough to say it is the ability among our political and policy-setting institutions to self-correct, to advance toward rational, life-enhancing outcomes. They have lost it. The urgent task is to face this. And now you know why this column ends as it does: The truths carry over, perfectly congruent.There are two ways to consider the White House’s announcement last week that, no, American troops will no longer withdraw from Afghanistan as previously planned. You can look back over President Obama’s record in such matters or you can face forward and think about what this decision means, or implies, or suggests —or maybe all three—about the next president’s conduct of foreign policy. I do not like what I see in either direction. What anyone who looks carefully and consciously can discern in Obama’s seven years in office are limits. These are imposed in part by inherited circumstances, but let us set these aside for now, appalling as they are. My concern is with the limits imposed by the entrenched power of our permanent government, otherwise known as the “deep state.” With the first Democratic debate in Las Vegas last week, the serious party joins the unserious party in articulating a vision of America’s proper conduct abroad. The question Obama’s two terms force upon us is how much any of what we hear from the Democratic candidates will matter even if we assume one of them succeeds him. The Obama administration’s accumulated inventory on the foreign side is a mixed bag to put the point mildly, and one has to count it heavily net-negative at this point. The big accomplishments, of course, are the accord governing the Iran nuclear program and the resumption of diplomatic ties with Cuba. While both represent hard-fought political victories, there was considerable backing for these undertakings in the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, the State Department bureaucracy and the corporate sector. Hang on to this distinction. Against the successes stands a long list of failures, reversals and something else that does not make such punchy headlines but is just as important as the policies that do: I refer to the president’s unwillingness or inability to counter what we can call policy momentum. Time and again, Obama has allowed State, Defense and the intelligence apparatus to proceed with programs and strategies not remotely in keeping with his evident tilt toward a less militarized, interventionist and confrontational foreign policy. I put this down to two realities. One is Obama’s ambivalent thinking. Many, many people misread what this man stood for and against when he was elected seven autumns ago, and we are now able to separate the one from the other. More on this in a minute. Two is the “power elite” C. Wright Mills told us about in the book of this name he published many decades ago. “They are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society,” Mills wrote. “They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives.” They are, in short, the deep state. Mills’ book came out in 1956, when the phenomenon he described was newly emergent. Having ignored this elite’s accumulating influence in the 59 years since, we get the questions Obama’s experience raises: Does it matter who we put in the White House? Is there any prospect at all of changing this nation’s conduct and direction? Are our policy-setting institutions any longer capable of self-correction? The best that can be said now is that the power elite/permanent government/deep state, take your pick, is greatly more visible. At least we know enough, some of us, to ask the questions. * Where to begin? Well, Obama came to office promising to end the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and will leave having ended neither. With the new decision to keep 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan, it is plain that (1) he has no serious exit strategy in either case and (2) no one at the Pentagon is especially concerned with developing one. Closing the prison at Guantánamo was one of Obama’s signature commitments when he was elected, and now look: His own defense secretary, the worrisomely unintelligent Ashton Carter, stands in open defiance by refusing to sign release papers for 52 detainees cleared to leave. Just as astonishing, the president can apparently do nothing about it. As to Syria, the president has taken to blaming others for the ever-worsening debacle on the argument he was not behind this interventionist program from the start. Unseemly is the very kindest word here. There is no reason to doubt Obama’s word, but he begs a question almost too large to contemplate: If you opposed the policy, Mr. President, why are we there and why is your name on it? By way of the Iran agreement, it appeared that Obama had a serious chance to alter Washington’s profoundly distorted engagement with Israel. But this, clearly, was never the story. The story all along has been to preserve Israel’s nuclear-weapons monopoly in the Middle East while keeping neighbors either onside or off balance. Hence the obsession with removing the Assad government in Syria. Hence Washington’s explicit green light a matter of hours prior to the coup deposing President Morsi in Egypt two year ago. Other matters. The wholly unnecessary confrontation with Russia will stand as the worst and most consequential blot on the Obama administration’s foreign policy legacy, in my view. Who runs this policy and why? Tension in Sino-American relations is less charged but not less stupid. And as the evidently ongoing program to destabilize the Maduro government in Venezuela suggests, the subversion machines at the CIA and State continue firing on all eight. This is the backward glance. What does this splattered, pockmarked record tell us as we look forward and wonder what the policies of Obama’s successor will look like? It is time to consider this question carefully. Now that Democrats join Republicans in advancing their thinking—is this the word?—as to America’s conduct abroad, what are we hearing? * The foreign policy of any Republican candidate now in the race, with the exception of the rapidly vanishing Rand Paul, is a no-brainer, and I mean this literally. We find among them a seamless unity behind reactionary policies that lie between unworkable and dangerous. In this respect, the most worrisome G.O.P. aspirants are Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, the two who purport to have operational agendas. I do not find anyone in the right-wing lineup electable, but I will stay short of any prediction. It is not my point. However little sense they make, they are a very influential presence in the national political conversation, and no one can afford to miss this. Two reasons. One, the Republicans’ argument for militarized, often-perilous assertions of American prerogative abroad are perfectly congruent with the ideology that sustains the deep state. In effect, the G.O.P. is the agency through which the exceptionalist consciousness that drives the deep state remains a political imperative for anyone seeking high office. One may find the Republican leadership—in Congress as well as on the stump—primitive nostalgists lost in a half-imagined version of the past. But these people exist among us because we decline to dismiss them as frivolous—which they are and which we should. This is partly the fault of our “political-media ecosystem,” as Paul Krugman put it very cogently in a recent New York Times column. “The modern Republican Party is a post-policy enterprise, which doesn’t do real solutions to real problems,” he wrote. “And the news media really, really don’t want to face up to that awkward reality.” Too true. But it is a cheap dodge to place all blame on those media operating as a deep state appendage. We all own a piece of the Republican charade, in my view, so long as we remain unwilling to look squarely at the system—including the press and the broadcasters—that puts political vandals before us as somehow credible. Two, in the circumstances just described the G.O.P. has an unmistakable influence on America’s foreign policy discourse. Maybe all societies have categories designating what is sayable and unsayable, but ours is drastically skewed. It should be obvious to all that even those candidates not part of the Republican clown show will find it that much more difficult to advance any seriously innovative policy proposals. And so to the Democrats. As Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir suggested in a superbly pithy piece after the first Democratic debate last week, it is impossible to know whether Hillary Clinton is a progressive candidate or a political predator intent on swallowing Bernie Sanders whole, but it grows more likely that she will win the Democratic nomination before we are able to tell. Here is O’Hehir’s piece. I do not buy into the idea that last week’s exchange in Las Vegas was Clinton’s triumph and the beginning of Sanders’ decline. When I read as much in the following morning’s Times, the report struck me as a hopelessly bald attempt to mold the truth—as power elitists always think nothing of doing. I thought Sanders carried the evening. This said, weaknesses appeared in Sanders’ positions, and foreign policy was high among them. He does not, it grieves me a little to say, appear to have much of one. Senator Sanders’ opposition to the Iraq war back in 2003 is greatly to his credit. But Candidate Sanders seems to take the safe, default position on one question after another—Russia, the Middle East, most recently Obama’s decision to keep troops in Afghanistan. I do not see that this will do. But neither will Clinton’s righteous faith in spreading neoliberal ideology across the planet, her stacked-deck idea of humanitarian intervention, a liking for military solutions in foreign affairs that sometimes puts her closer to Republican candidates than to her boss when she was secretary of state. Whatever Clinton wants us to know or not know about her thinking, exceptionalist consciousness is inscribed in every sentence she utters. What have we got on the Democratic side? A candidate smart enough to understand that were he to propose an authentically progressive foreign policy agenda he would be mauled for the positions it would logically include? Another candidate who is very likely more at home in the deep state than anyone else from either party? It is hard to say, but maybe. Easier to say what we do not have on foreign policy questions in this election: much of a choice. * Is this by design? I put this question to David Talbot in a telephone exchange Tuesday. Talbot (who founded Salon 20 years ago) has just published “The Devil’s Chessboard,” an account of the deep state focused on the crucial role of Allen Dulles as it emerged in the 1950s. Dulles directed the CIA from 1953 until President Kennedy fired him in 1961. It is Talbot’s contention that elements of the deep state, probably including Dulles, were responsible for Kennedy’s assassination two years later. “Presidents have to be thoroughly vetted before getting to the White House,” Talbot replied. “Kennedy was probably the last president not thoroughly approved by the deep state. This may be edgy, but I think there’ve been lessons in this for every president since. It’s a question of what a president can and can’t do, or what he does at his own peril.” If “edgy” means very far from the orthodox version of events, O.K. But I see no grounds whatsoever to push any part of Talbot’s thesis off the table. The reality we must all grasp if we are to straighten out our nation’s bent path into the 21st century is that a very vast swathe of history requires a fundamental rewrite. “Every president has been manipulated by national security officials,” Talbot said in a long Q & A with Salon’s Liam O’Donoghue when “the Devil’s Chessboard” was published last week. You can read that interview here. Return briefly to Obama’s foreign policy record. In my view, it is the story of a president discovering the limits of his prerogative as defined by various elements of our permanent government—primarily uniformed military officers and the national security officials Talbot mentions. He appears to have won (Iran, Cuba) or lost (most of the rest) depending on whether the deep state sanctioned the policy direction. “Obama came up through all the usual institutions—Columbia, Harvard Law,” Talbot remarked when we spoke. “He has the basic ideology of the group, which is American exceptionalism.” It is an interesting observation in that it helps us to read into Obama’s choices. Without exception, every one of his initiatives abroad concerned how policy is executed—never the policy goals. The ancient Greeks distinguished between techne—means, method—and telos, meaning purpose, intent, desired outcome. Obama concerns himself solely with the techne of American policy. As Talbot put it, “He wanted to moderate and modulate some of the excesses.” And this, I conclude, is the borderline that will circumscribe the choices of any candidate voters and wealthy donors, many of them deep state inhabitants, send to the White House in 2017. We are to see nothing more than tinkering at the edges. * I read an extremely compelling piece on environmental politics the other day. Wen Stephenson’s “Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Climate Justice Movement” came out in The Nation and is taken from his just-published book, “What We’re Fighting for Now is Each Other.” The Nation essay is here. I had better say right away why I end a column on our foreign policy prospects with mention of a piece on the climate question. It is very simple. Stephenson is concerned with the failure of incremental change of the kind attempted by mainstream Greens over the past several decades. He writes about “wide-awake people” and their ideas as to what needs to get done to put effective, planet-saving policies in place. Their thinking runs to “changing power structures.” “To be serious about climate change is to be radical,” Stephenson writes. He quotes an activist (and divinity student at Harvard) who tells him, “The kind of change you’re talking about—anything feasible within the current political system—really won’t do us any good. You’re talking about going off the cliff at 40 miles per hour instead of 60.” What is the topic here? Fair enough to say it is the ability among our political and policy-setting institutions to self-correct, to advance toward rational, life-enhancing outcomes. They have lost it. The urgent task is to face this. And now you know why this column ends as it does: The truths carry over, perfectly congruent.There are two ways to consider the White House’s announcement last week that, no, American troops will no longer withdraw from Afghanistan as previously planned. You can look back over President Obama’s record in such matters or you can face forward and think about what this decision means, or implies, or suggests —or maybe all three—about the next president’s conduct of foreign policy. I do not like what I see in either direction. What anyone who looks carefully and consciously can discern in Obama’s seven years in office are limits. These are imposed in part by inherited circumstances, but let us set these aside for now, appalling as they are. My concern is with the limits imposed by the entrenched power of our permanent government, otherwise known as the “deep state.” With the first Democratic debate in Las Vegas last week, the serious party joins the unserious party in articulating a vision of America’s proper conduct abroad. The question Obama’s two terms force upon us is how much any of what we hear from the Democratic candidates will matter even if we assume one of them succeeds him. The Obama administration’s accumulated inventory on the foreign side is a mixed bag to put the point mildly, and one has to count it heavily net-negative at this point. The big accomplishments, of course, are the accord governing the Iran nuclear program and the resumption of diplomatic ties with Cuba. While both represent hard-fought political victories, there was considerable backing for these undertakings in the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, the State Department bureaucracy and the corporate sector. Hang on to this distinction. Against the successes stands a long list of failures, reversals and something else that does not make such punchy headlines but is just as important as the policies that do: I refer to the president’s unwillingness or inability to counter what we can call policy momentum. Time and again, Obama has allowed State, Defense and the intelligence apparatus to proceed with programs and strategies not remotely in keeping with his evident tilt toward a less militarized, interventionist and confrontational foreign policy. I put this down to two realities. One is Obama’s ambivalent thinking. Many, many people misread what this man stood for and against when he was elected seven autumns ago, and we are now able to separate the one from the other. More on this in a minute. Two is the “power elite” C. Wright Mills told us about in the book of this name he published many decades ago. “They are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society,” Mills wrote. “They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives.” They are, in short, the deep state. Mills’ book came out in 1956, when the phenomenon he described was newly emergent. Having ignored this elite’s accumulating influence in the 59 years since, we get the questions Obama’s experience raises: Does it matter who we put in the White House? Is there any prospect at all of changing this nation’s conduct and direction? Are our policy-setting institutions any longer capable of self-correction? The best that can be said now is that the power elite/permanent government/deep state, take your pick, is greatly more visible. At least we know enough, some of us, to ask the questions. * Where to begin? Well, Obama came to office promising to end the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and will leave having ended neither. With the new decision to keep 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan, it is plain that (1) he has no serious exit strategy in either case and (2) no one at the Pentagon is especially concerned with developing one. Closing the prison at Guantánamo was one of Obama’s signature commitments when he was elected, and now look: His own defense secretary, the worrisomely unintelligent Ashton Carter, stands in open defiance by refusing to sign release papers for 52 detainees cleared to leave. Just as astonishing, the president can apparently do nothing about it. As to Syria, the president has taken to blaming others for the ever-worsening debacle on the argument he was not behind this interventionist program from the start. Unseemly is the very kindest word here. There is no reason to doubt Obama’s word, but he begs a question almost too large to contemplate: If you opposed the policy, Mr. President, why are we there and why is your name on it? By way of the Iran agreement, it appeared that Obama had a serious chance to alter Washington’s profoundly distorted engagement with Israel. But this, clearly, was never the story. The story all along has been to preserve Israel’s nuclear-weapons monopoly in the Middle East while keeping neighbors either onside or off balance. Hence the obsession with removing the Assad government in Syria. Hence Washington’s explicit green light a matter of hours prior to the coup deposing President Morsi in Egypt two year ago. Other matters. The wholly unnecessary confrontation with Russia will stand as the worst and most consequential blot on the Obama administration’s foreign policy legacy, in my view. Who runs this policy and why? Tension in Sino-American relations is less charged but not less stupid. And as the evidently ongoing program to destabilize the Maduro government in Venezuela suggests, the subversion machines at the CIA and State continue firing on all eight. This is the backward glance. What does this splattered, pockmarked record tell us as we look forward and wonder what the policies of Obama’s successor will look like? It is time to consider this question carefully. Now that Democrats join Republicans in advancing their thinking—is this the word?—as to America’s conduct abroad, what are we hearing? * The foreign policy of any Republican candidate now in the race, with the exception of the rapidly vanishing Rand Paul, is a no-brainer, and I mean this literally. We find among them a seamless unity behind reactionary policies that lie between unworkable and dangerous. In this respect, the most worrisome G.O.P. aspirants are Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, the two who purport to have operational agendas. I do not find anyone in the right-wing lineup electable, but I will stay short of any prediction. It is not my point. However little sense they make, they are a very influential presence in the national political conversation, and no one can afford to miss this. Two reasons. One, the Republicans’ argument for militarized, often-perilous assertions of American prerogative abroad are perfectly congruent with the ideology that sustains the deep state. In effect, the G.O.P. is the agency through which the exceptionalist consciousness that drives the deep state remains a political imperative for anyone seeking high office. One may find the Republican leadership—in Congress as well as on the stump—primitive nostalgists lost in a half-imagined version of the past. But these people exist among us because we decline to dismiss them as frivolous—which they are and which we should. This is partly the fault of our “political-media ecosystem,” as Paul Krugman put it very cogently in a recent New York Times column. “The modern Republican Party is a post-policy enterprise, which doesn’t do real solutions to real problems,” he wrote. “And the news media really, really don’t want to face up to that awkward reality.” Too true. But it is a cheap dodge to place all blame on those media operating as a deep state appendage. We all own a piece of the Republican charade, in my view, so long as we remain unwilling to look squarely at the system—including the press and the broadcasters—that puts political vandals before us as somehow credible. Two, in the circumstances just described the G.O.P. has an unmistakable influence on America’s foreign policy discourse. Maybe all societies have categories designating what is sayable and unsayable, but ours is drastically skewed. It should be obvious to all that even those candidates not part of the Republican clown show will find it that much more difficult to advance any seriously innovative policy proposals. And so to the Democrats. As Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir suggested in a superbly pithy piece after the first Democratic debate last week, it is impossible to know whether Hillary Clinton is a progressive candidate or a political predator intent on swallowing Bernie Sanders whole, but it grows more likely that she will win the Democratic nomination before we are able to tell. Here is O’Hehir’s piece. I do not buy into the idea that last week’s exchange in Las Vegas was Clinton’s triumph and the beginning of Sanders’ decline. When I read as much in the following morning’s Times, the report struck me as a hopelessly bald attempt to mold the truth—as power elitists always think nothing of doing. I thought Sanders carried the evening. This said, weaknesses appeared in Sanders’ positions, and foreign policy was high among them. He does not, it grieves me a little to say, appear to have much of one. Senator Sanders’ opposition to the Iraq war back in 2003 is greatly to his credit. But Candidate Sanders seems to take the safe, default position on one question after another—Russia, the Middle East, most recently Obama’s decision to keep troops in Afghanistan. I do not see that this will do. But neither will Clinton’s righteous faith in spreading neoliberal ideology across the planet, her stacked-deck idea of humanitarian intervention, a liking for military solutions in foreign affairs that sometimes puts her closer to Republican candidates than to her boss when she was secretary of state. Whatever Clinton wants us to know or not know about her thinking, exceptionalist consciousness is inscribed in every sentence she utters. What have we got on the Democratic side? A candidate smart enough to understand that were he to propose an authentically progressive foreign policy agenda he would be mauled for the positions it would logically include? Another candidate who is very likely more at home in the deep state than anyone else from either party? It is hard to say, but maybe. Easier to say what we do not have on foreign policy questions in this election: much of a choice. * Is this by design? I put this question to David Talbot in a telephone exchange Tuesday. Talbot (who founded Salon 20 years ago) has just published “The Devil’s Chessboard,” an account of the deep state focused on the crucial role of Allen Dulles as it emerged in the 1950s. Dulles directed the CIA from 1953 until President Kennedy fired him in 1961. It is Talbot’s contention that elements of the deep state, probably including Dulles, were responsible for Kennedy’s assassination two years later. “Presidents have to be thoroughly vetted before getting to the White House,” Talbot replied. “Kennedy was probably the last president not thoroughly approved by the deep state. This may be edgy, but I think there’ve been lessons in this for every president since. It’s a question of what a president can and can’t do, or what he does at his own peril.” If “edgy” means very far from the orthodox version of events, O.K. But I see no grounds whatsoever to push any part of Talbot’s thesis off the table. The reality we must all grasp if we are to straighten out our nation’s bent path into the 21st century is that a very vast swathe of history requires a fundamental rewrite. “Every president has been manipulated by national security officials,” Talbot said in a long Q & A with Salon’s Liam O’Donoghue when “the Devil’s Chessboard” was published last week. You can read that interview here. Return briefly to Obama’s foreign policy record. In my view, it is the story of a president discovering the limits of his prerogative as defined by various elements of our permanent government—primarily uniformed military officers and the national security officials Talbot mentions. He appears to have won (Iran, Cuba) or lost (most of the rest) depending on whether the deep state sanctioned the policy direction. “Obama came up through all the usual institutions—Columbia, Harvard Law,” Talbot remarked when we spoke. “He has the basic ideology of the group, which is American exceptionalism.” It is an interesting observation in that it helps us to read into Obama’s choices. Without exception, every one of his initiatives abroad concerned how policy is executed—never the policy goals. The ancient Greeks distinguished between techne—means, method—and telos, meaning purpose, intent, desired outcome. Obama concerns himself solely with the techne of American policy. As Talbot put it, “He wanted to moderate and modulate some of the excesses.” And this, I conclude, is the borderline that will circumscribe the choices of any candidate voters and wealthy donors, many of them deep state inhabitants, send to the White House in 2017. We are to see nothing more than tinkering at the edges. * I read an extremely compelling piece on environmental politics the other day. Wen Stephenson’s “Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Climate Justice Movement” came out in The Nation and is taken from his just-published book, “What We’re Fighting for Now is Each Other.” The Nation essay is here. I had better say right away why I end a column on our foreign policy prospects with mention of a piece on the climate question. It is very simple. Stephenson is concerned with the failure of incremental change of the kind attempted by mainstream Greens over the past several decades. He writes about “wide-awake people” and their ideas as to what needs to get done to put effective, planet-saving policies in place. Their thinking runs to “changing power structures.” “To be serious about climate change is to be radical,” Stephenson writes. He quotes an activist (and divinity student at Harvard) who tells him, “The kind of change you’re talking about—anything feasible within the current political system—really won’t do us any good. You’re talking about going off the cliff at 40 miles per hour instead of 60.” What is the topic here? Fair enough to say it is the ability among our political and policy-setting institutions to self-correct, to advance toward rational, life-enhancing outcomes. They have lost it. The urgent task is to face this. And now you know why this column ends as it does: The truths carry over, perfectly congruent.

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“Saturday Night Live” and the good-feminist wars: What “SNL” alum Nora Dunn gets wrong about Amy Schumer’s raunchy humor

Former "Saturday Night Live" cast member and Huffington Post writer Nora Dunn is not happy with Amy Schumer’s recent "SNL" monologue. No, she’s not upset about the "Trainwreck" star’s digs at the Kardashians, which prompted a Twitter apology of sorts, in which Schumer wrote, in part, “Nothing but love for that family.” No, what’s so galling to Dunn is that Schumer, who’s been widely lauded for her feminist brand of comedy, had the nerve to say that when faced with the presence of Bradley Cooper, “He’s the kind of hot where, trust me, if he was in front of you, you would just grab your ankles…You would say things you didn’t mean, like ‘any hole is fine.’ That’s the kind of hot that Bradley is.” Completely ignoring the fact that Schumer delivered these lines in an over-the-top manner (on the heels of the phrase “golden vagina”), Dunn immediately zeroed in on the “any hole is fine” line to conclude:

"The image Schumer conjured up on national television was not a funny one. In fact, it's an image of such pornographic subservience that it's sickening. It brought to my mind the sadness of the sex trade, which is real and lurid, and into which female captives have been forced in numbers we haven't bothered to count. There in captivity they strike that pose on command. As presented by Ms. Schumer, it's every bit as soulless."

First of all, I’m 99 percent sure Schumer did not mean the line as literally as Dunn is reading it. But secondly, and most importantly, Schumer is perfectly entitled to talk about sex and lust and desire in any way she sees fit. Her way of thinking about her body and what she wants to do with it doesn’t belong to Dunn—or anyone else. Now, that’s not to say that Dunn has to approve of Schumer’s every move, or that Schumer shouldn’t be criticized and called out just as any other celebrity would. I’m not arguing Schumer should get a free pass simply because she’s a self-proclaimed feminist. I am saying that it’s hard for me to differentiate Dunn’s shaming of Schumer for expressing herself in a way Dunn finds vulgar from conservatives who’d take Schumer to task for simply talking about sex in an open way. In her Vogue sex column, Karley Sciortino wrote that she “literally praised the slut gods” for Schumer’s rise to fame, because “In her comedy, Amy (and her characters alike) are proudly promiscuous. She doesn’t subscribe to the idea that wearing a micro-dress and being taken seriously are mutually exclusive. In a way, Amy is to millennials what Madonna was to women in the eighties—proof that you can be smart, political, funny, and aggressively sexual, all at the same time.” Dunn seems to take the straight up flaunting of their sexcapades by women like Schumer and Sciortino’s as somehow an attack on women who don’t want to engage in one-nights stands or grab their ankles, literally or figuratively. But that’s a false dichotomy. Schumer isn’t pressuring women like Dunn to be more like them. Instead, she’s being true to herself and, clearly, finding success by doing so, which to me signals that both men and women appreciate that she doesn’t shy away from the ins and outs, if you will, of sex. Yet Dunn can’t seem to grasp that we can move beyond a virgin/whore dichotomy—and in fact, that we must, if sexuality and feminism are ever going to peacefully coexist. Instead, Dunn turns back the clock on both feminism and the sexual revolution by insisting that women either follow Schumer’s every raunchy suggestion or be left in the dust. Dunn goes on to hammer home her point that Schumer’s outspokenness is somehow a threat to women who aren’t as sexually forward:

"Why must we abandon a feminine notion of attraction to be set free? Why must we take on the personage of the quintessential bad-boy, the misogynist frat house prig who mocks women who attach emotionality to sex and don't know how to pole dance? Schumer's women are girls who masturbate at the movies the way men once did in porn houses. I don't seek that kind of equality. I'm not ashamed of the fact that I have more estrogen than testosterone. My energy is feminine, and that doesn't make me a weakling."

Except that nobody said she was a weakling, or that casual sex is the only way women can showcase their desire. Yes, it’s how Schumer talks and thinks, and presumably how some other women do too, but not all. I agree with Dunn that Schumer has a major platform, and that plenty of impressionable tween and teen girls probably saw her "SNL" monologue. But there’s huge leap from stating, as Dunn does, “‘Any hole is fine’ doesn't do it for me,” to concluding “Girls are watching 'Saturday Night Live' and in the instance that there's a female host as hot as Schumer now is, they will be looking up to her…Some of the viewers still have teddy bears in bed with them. There are better female role models out there for girls.” I can’t stress enough how tired I am of female entertainers constantly being held up to “role model” status. That’s a polite way of saying that rather than be true to themselves, they should conform to some societally approved way of being and acting, which is as paternalistic as it gets. As Kate Hakala wrote in June at Mic about Schumer’s infamous “I'm like 160 pounds right now, and I can catch a dick whenever I want” line at the Glamour UK’s Women of the Year Awards:

By using "catch a dick" (which, let's just note, is an excellent phrase) to note her weight doesn't make her less sexually desirable, Schumer is co-opting the language of objectification and giving herself sexual agency. In a culture where women still refrain from boldly talking about their sexuality in and out of the bedroom, and where women are hesitant to use typically male words (see: "jerk off"), Schumer's frankness is not only hilarious — it's empowering.

“Empowering” is probably as overused as “role model,” and Schumer doesn’t need to be “empowering” to women in order to succeed in what’s traditionally been largely a man’s world. But if we subscribe to Dunn’s false choice that we can either have casual sex or sex for love, we’ve already lost the sexual freedom battle, because we’re playing by patriarchal rules that pit one against the other. Dunn fails to see that she’s judging Schumer just as much as she feels judged. We have room in the world, especially in 2015, for women to not have to “pick a side” when it comes to who, how and why we are sexual. I want no part of shaming other women for how they talk about or experience sex in the name of feminism, and I would hope that anyone who truly cares about girls and women doesn’t either.Former "Saturday Night Live" cast member and Huffington Post writer Nora Dunn is not happy with Amy Schumer’s recent "SNL" monologue. No, she’s not upset about the "Trainwreck" star’s digs at the Kardashians, which prompted a Twitter apology of sorts, in which Schumer wrote, in part, “Nothing but love for that family.” No, what’s so galling to Dunn is that Schumer, who’s been widely lauded for her feminist brand of comedy, had the nerve to say that when faced with the presence of Bradley Cooper, “He’s the kind of hot where, trust me, if he was in front of you, you would just grab your ankles…You would say things you didn’t mean, like ‘any hole is fine.’ That’s the kind of hot that Bradley is.” Completely ignoring the fact that Schumer delivered these lines in an over-the-top manner (on the heels of the phrase “golden vagina”), Dunn immediately zeroed in on the “any hole is fine” line to conclude:

"The image Schumer conjured up on national television was not a funny one. In fact, it's an image of such pornographic subservience that it's sickening. It brought to my mind the sadness of the sex trade, which is real and lurid, and into which female captives have been forced in numbers we haven't bothered to count. There in captivity they strike that pose on command. As presented by Ms. Schumer, it's every bit as soulless."

First of all, I’m 99 percent sure Schumer did not mean the line as literally as Dunn is reading it. But secondly, and most importantly, Schumer is perfectly entitled to talk about sex and lust and desire in any way she sees fit. Her way of thinking about her body and what she wants to do with it doesn’t belong to Dunn—or anyone else. Now, that’s not to say that Dunn has to approve of Schumer’s every move, or that Schumer shouldn’t be criticized and called out just as any other celebrity would. I’m not arguing Schumer should get a free pass simply because she’s a self-proclaimed feminist. I am saying that it’s hard for me to differentiate Dunn’s shaming of Schumer for expressing herself in a way Dunn finds vulgar from conservatives who’d take Schumer to task for simply talking about sex in an open way. In her Vogue sex column, Karley Sciortino wrote that she “literally praised the slut gods” for Schumer’s rise to fame, because “In her comedy, Amy (and her characters alike) are proudly promiscuous. She doesn’t subscribe to the idea that wearing a micro-dress and being taken seriously are mutually exclusive. In a way, Amy is to millennials what Madonna was to women in the eighties—proof that you can be smart, political, funny, and aggressively sexual, all at the same time.” Dunn seems to take the straight up flaunting of their sexcapades by women like Schumer and Sciortino’s as somehow an attack on women who don’t want to engage in one-nights stands or grab their ankles, literally or figuratively. But that’s a false dichotomy. Schumer isn’t pressuring women like Dunn to be more like them. Instead, she’s being true to herself and, clearly, finding success by doing so, which to me signals that both men and women appreciate that she doesn’t shy away from the ins and outs, if you will, of sex. Yet Dunn can’t seem to grasp that we can move beyond a virgin/whore dichotomy—and in fact, that we must, if sexuality and feminism are ever going to peacefully coexist. Instead, Dunn turns back the clock on both feminism and the sexual revolution by insisting that women either follow Schumer’s every raunchy suggestion or be left in the dust. Dunn goes on to hammer home her point that Schumer’s outspokenness is somehow a threat to women who aren’t as sexually forward:

"Why must we abandon a feminine notion of attraction to be set free? Why must we take on the personage of the quintessential bad-boy, the misogynist frat house prig who mocks women who attach emotionality to sex and don't know how to pole dance? Schumer's women are girls who masturbate at the movies the way men once did in porn houses. I don't seek that kind of equality. I'm not ashamed of the fact that I have more estrogen than testosterone. My energy is feminine, and that doesn't make me a weakling."

Except that nobody said she was a weakling, or that casual sex is the only way women can showcase their desire. Yes, it’s how Schumer talks and thinks, and presumably how some other women do too, but not all. I agree with Dunn that Schumer has a major platform, and that plenty of impressionable tween and teen girls probably saw her "SNL" monologue. But there’s huge leap from stating, as Dunn does, “‘Any hole is fine’ doesn't do it for me,” to concluding “Girls are watching 'Saturday Night Live' and in the instance that there's a female host as hot as Schumer now is, they will be looking up to her…Some of the viewers still have teddy bears in bed with them. There are better female role models out there for girls.” I can’t stress enough how tired I am of female entertainers constantly being held up to “role model” status. That’s a polite way of saying that rather than be true to themselves, they should conform to some societally approved way of being and acting, which is as paternalistic as it gets. As Kate Hakala wrote in June at Mic about Schumer’s infamous “I'm like 160 pounds right now, and I can catch a dick whenever I want” line at the Glamour UK’s Women of the Year Awards:

By using "catch a dick" (which, let's just note, is an excellent phrase) to note her weight doesn't make her less sexually desirable, Schumer is co-opting the language of objectification and giving herself sexual agency. In a culture where women still refrain from boldly talking about their sexuality in and out of the bedroom, and where women are hesitant to use typically male words (see: "jerk off"), Schumer's frankness is not only hilarious — it's empowering.

“Empowering” is probably as overused as “role model,” and Schumer doesn’t need to be “empowering” to women in order to succeed in what’s traditionally been largely a man’s world. But if we subscribe to Dunn’s false choice that we can either have casual sex or sex for love, we’ve already lost the sexual freedom battle, because we’re playing by patriarchal rules that pit one against the other. Dunn fails to see that she’s judging Schumer just as much as she feels judged. We have room in the world, especially in 2015, for women to not have to “pick a side” when it comes to who, how and why we are sexual. I want no part of shaming other women for how they talk about or experience sex in the name of feminism, and I would hope that anyone who truly cares about girls and women doesn’t either.

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The genius of “Gilmore Girls”: When your writing is this good, you can always go home again — even to Stars Hollow

Earlier this week, news broke that Netflix has reportedly agreed to reboot the beloved ‘00s comedy-drama “Gilmore Girls.” The revival, which TV Line reports is rumored to take the form of four 90-minute movies, should also hopefully reunite the fast-talking mother-daughter team of Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory (Alexis Bledel) Gilmore; Lorelai’s prim and proper mother, Emily Gilmore (Kelly Bishop); and rugged diner owner/Lorelai love interest Luke (Scott Patterson). For fans, the even better news is that creator Amy Sherman-Palladino—who was not involved with the show’s much-maligned final season—is said to also be involved with the reboot. From a symmetry standpoint, this news is delightful: Sherman-Palladino, who’s long said she already knows how the series will end, now has the opportunity to finish “Gilmore Girls” on her terms, the way she envisioned it. That’s significant, because she and husband Daniel Palladino (who’s also said to be returning) were always extremely protective of how the show’s characters were portrayed. The denizens of “Gilmore Girls” were all deliberately and sometimes flagrantly imperfect, but at heart they were decent, smart people who sometimes made bad decisions. This made the characters more resonant and relatable. Perhaps more important, Sherman-Palladino also recognized how important it was to let the characters grow and evolve: They didn’t have their educational or personal ambitions stifled, and (save for perhaps the last season) weren’t shoehorned into awkward situations for the sake of good TV. For all of the you-can-always-go-home-again vibe of Stars Hollow, the show’s fictional small town setting, the main characters weren’t stuck in a quaint bubble. Sure, there was absurdity—the deadpan character of Kirk Gleason (Sean Gunn) in particular added odd sweetness, while town troubadour Grant-Lee Phillips popped up every so often to add quirkiness—but “Gilmore Girls” never collapsed into preciousness or used wacky scenarios as a storyline crutch. This whimsical backdrop always added levity when needed, as a way to draw the characters out of their self-contained lives and turmoil. In hindsight, this was one of Sherman-Palladino’s most impressive feats. Because the “Gilmore Girls” communication style was based around snappy, brainy dialogue, it would be far too easy for the show to rely on cultural references or twee gestures at the expense of depth. (See: what’s often plagued “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy.”) But the show’s characters weren’t caricatures; in fact, its female characters especially possessed uncommon complexity. They were intelligent and ambitious, and also allowed to slip up without fear of being devalued or stabbed in the back by friends. The “Gilmore Girls” universe was a safe place for women to make (and learn from) mistakes. Bledel’s portrayal of Rory was particularly compassionate. An academic achiever who matriculated at Yale, she spent the later part of the show dealing with growing apart from her college boyfriend, Logan (Matt Czuchry), facing setbacks as she attempted to kickstart a journalism career, and dealing with her complicated relationship with her father, Christopher (David Sutcliffe), and mother. Rory found support in best friend Lane Kim (Keiko Agena), who herself struggled with the cultural clash inherent between pleasing her strict Korean mother and following her dreams of rock stardom, and her academic rival/frenemy Paris (Liza Weil). The show’s adult women also served as role models in regards to friendship: Lorelai and Sookie (Melissa McCarthy) became small business owners after buying an inn, and consequently juggled motherhood, family life and the realities of running a business. This compassion extended to the show’s abundance of romantic and familial drama. “Gilmore Girls” always treated these scenarios with dignity. The knowledge that Luke has a secret daughter understandably sent Lorelai reeling in season 6, while the ongoing friction between Lorelai and her parents—which was amplified or muted depending on how much it involved her ex or Rory’s future—had empathetic nuance despite its overt frustrations. “Gilmore Girls” always excelled at showcasing the shades of grey in any interpersonal conflict and its aftermath, which made the show realistic even during its head-scratching plot twists (Rory stealing a yacht?). Surprisingly, not all fans were thrilled by the news of this reboot. The New York Times chimed in with an article, “Why a New ‘Gilmore Girls’ Wouldn’t Really Be ‘Gilmore Girls.’” The latter piece somewhat-obviously points out that the revived series “will be a different thing, no matter how much of the original talent returns, because there’s one thing even the best-funded, best-intentioned reboot can’t restore: lost time.” This point comes into play later, when the article concludes that “for the reboot to be good, it probably can’t be the same — it will need to be informed by the lost time, and not deny it. Go ahead and take us back to Stars Hollow, Netflix. But you can’t take us back to 2007.” That last statement is completely correct. However, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where a “Gilmore Girls” revival would try to turn back the clock. The show’s premise often hinged on the tension between stasis and growth—how ingrained family dynamics conflict with the unpredictable nature of personal and emotional maturation. And much to the chagrin of Emily Gilmore, life’s little (or big) curveballs triumphed over tradition and how she’d like things to be. In short, it would be out of character for “Gilmore Girls” to try and pick up right where it left off when the series ended. Sherman-Palladino all but said so herself in a past interview. “The beauty of Gilmore, and the beauty of family-relationship shows, is you never really run out of story,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2009. “You’re going to battle your family until you’re all in the ground. Those things never resolve, doesn’t matter how much therapy you get. Ten years later, there’s still going to be [material] there to mine and to delve into.” Indeed, the new “Gilmore Girls” show will already have to figure out how to grapple with the 2014 death of actor Edward Herrmann, a.k.a. Lorelei’s father, Richard Gilmore. (In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that the first new episode would focus on how each family member is dealing with his death, and where they go next.) To be sure, “Gilmore Girls” was absolutely a moment in time, a snapshot of how mothers and daughters navigate adolescence and adulthood, even when the adults don’t feel particularly responsible or mom-like (Lorelai), or know how to accept their daughter’s offbeat path (Emily). However, plenty of “Gilmore Girls” fans are invested enough in the characters to want to hear more of their story. What happened next—where did their lives go? What events continued to shape them in the years they’ve been away? During the show’s initial run, it was never easy to predict what would happen, which is part of what made it so appealing and enduring (and why arguments over who Rory should end up with are still so fierce). Getting reacquainted with “Gilmore Girls” requires having no expectations about what the characters should be like now—and instead reacting to and embracing the people they grew into.Earlier this week, news broke that Netflix has reportedly agreed to reboot the beloved ‘00s comedy-drama “Gilmore Girls.” The revival, which TV Line reports is rumored to take the form of four 90-minute movies, should also hopefully reunite the fast-talking mother-daughter team of Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory (Alexis Bledel) Gilmore; Lorelai’s prim and proper mother, Emily Gilmore (Kelly Bishop); and rugged diner owner/Lorelai love interest Luke (Scott Patterson). For fans, the even better news is that creator Amy Sherman-Palladino—who was not involved with the show’s much-maligned final season—is said to also be involved with the reboot. From a symmetry standpoint, this news is delightful: Sherman-Palladino, who’s long said she already knows how the series will end, now has the opportunity to finish “Gilmore Girls” on her terms, the way she envisioned it. That’s significant, because she and husband Daniel Palladino (who’s also said to be returning) were always extremely protective of how the show’s characters were portrayed. The denizens of “Gilmore Girls” were all deliberately and sometimes flagrantly imperfect, but at heart they were decent, smart people who sometimes made bad decisions. This made the characters more resonant and relatable. Perhaps more important, Sherman-Palladino also recognized how important it was to let the characters grow and evolve: They didn’t have their educational or personal ambitions stifled, and (save for perhaps the last season) weren’t shoehorned into awkward situations for the sake of good TV. For all of the you-can-always-go-home-again vibe of Stars Hollow, the show’s fictional small town setting, the main characters weren’t stuck in a quaint bubble. Sure, there was absurdity—the deadpan character of Kirk Gleason (Sean Gunn) in particular added odd sweetness, while town troubadour Grant-Lee Phillips popped up every so often to add quirkiness—but “Gilmore Girls” never collapsed into preciousness or used wacky scenarios as a storyline crutch. This whimsical backdrop always added levity when needed, as a way to draw the characters out of their self-contained lives and turmoil. In hindsight, this was one of Sherman-Palladino’s most impressive feats. Because the “Gilmore Girls” communication style was based around snappy, brainy dialogue, it would be far too easy for the show to rely on cultural references or twee gestures at the expense of depth. (See: what’s often plagued “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy.”) But the show’s characters weren’t caricatures; in fact, its female characters especially possessed uncommon complexity. They were intelligent and ambitious, and also allowed to slip up without fear of being devalued or stabbed in the back by friends. The “Gilmore Girls” universe was a safe place for women to make (and learn from) mistakes. Bledel’s portrayal of Rory was particularly compassionate. An academic achiever who matriculated at Yale, she spent the later part of the show dealing with growing apart from her college boyfriend, Logan (Matt Czuchry), facing setbacks as she attempted to kickstart a journalism career, and dealing with her complicated relationship with her father, Christopher (David Sutcliffe), and mother. Rory found support in best friend Lane Kim (Keiko Agena), who herself struggled with the cultural clash inherent between pleasing her strict Korean mother and following her dreams of rock stardom, and her academic rival/frenemy Paris (Liza Weil). The show’s adult women also served as role models in regards to friendship: Lorelai and Sookie (Melissa McCarthy) became small business owners after buying an inn, and consequently juggled motherhood, family life and the realities of running a business. This compassion extended to the show’s abundance of romantic and familial drama. “Gilmore Girls” always treated these scenarios with dignity. The knowledge that Luke has a secret daughter understandably sent Lorelai reeling in season 6, while the ongoing friction between Lorelai and her parents—which was amplified or muted depending on how much it involved her ex or Rory’s future—had empathetic nuance despite its overt frustrations. “Gilmore Girls” always excelled at showcasing the shades of grey in any interpersonal conflict and its aftermath, which made the show realistic even during its head-scratching plot twists (Rory stealing a yacht?). Surprisingly, not all fans were thrilled by the news of this reboot. The New York Times chimed in with an article, “Why a New ‘Gilmore Girls’ Wouldn’t Really Be ‘Gilmore Girls.’” The latter piece somewhat-obviously points out that the revived series “will be a different thing, no matter how much of the original talent returns, because there’s one thing even the best-funded, best-intentioned reboot can’t restore: lost time.” This point comes into play later, when the article concludes that “for the reboot to be good, it probably can’t be the same — it will need to be informed by the lost time, and not deny it. Go ahead and take us back to Stars Hollow, Netflix. But you can’t take us back to 2007.” That last statement is completely correct. However, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where a “Gilmore Girls” revival would try to turn back the clock. The show’s premise often hinged on the tension between stasis and growth—how ingrained family dynamics conflict with the unpredictable nature of personal and emotional maturation. And much to the chagrin of Emily Gilmore, life’s little (or big) curveballs triumphed over tradition and how she’d like things to be. In short, it would be out of character for “Gilmore Girls” to try and pick up right where it left off when the series ended. Sherman-Palladino all but said so herself in a past interview. “The beauty of Gilmore, and the beauty of family-relationship shows, is you never really run out of story,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2009. “You’re going to battle your family until you’re all in the ground. Those things never resolve, doesn’t matter how much therapy you get. Ten years later, there’s still going to be [material] there to mine and to delve into.” Indeed, the new “Gilmore Girls” show will already have to figure out how to grapple with the 2014 death of actor Edward Herrmann, a.k.a. Lorelei’s father, Richard Gilmore. (In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that the first new episode would focus on how each family member is dealing with his death, and where they go next.) To be sure, “Gilmore Girls” was absolutely a moment in time, a snapshot of how mothers and daughters navigate adolescence and adulthood, even when the adults don’t feel particularly responsible or mom-like (Lorelai), or know how to accept their daughter’s offbeat path (Emily). However, plenty of “Gilmore Girls” fans are invested enough in the characters to want to hear more of their story. What happened next—where did their lives go? What events continued to shape them in the years they’ve been away? During the show’s initial run, it was never easy to predict what would happen, which is part of what made it so appealing and enduring (and why arguments over who Rory should end up with are still so fierce). Getting reacquainted with “Gilmore Girls” requires having no expectations about what the characters should be like now—and instead reacting to and embracing the people they grew into.

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Ahmed’s clock in Los Alamos: “Manhattan” shows America’s long history of alienating its most brilliant minds

In last night’s episode of “Manhattan,” “Fatherland,” nuclear scientist Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey) wakes up in an internment camp. Though he does not know it, he is in Crystal City, Texas, home of one of the most notorious detention camps in American history—at least, pre-Guantanamo Bay. He’s been imprisoned on suspicion of being a spy; there’s a security leak in Los Alamos, home of the Manhattan Project. It is 1944, and a select group of people in the world know that the American military is creating a world-ending weapon. Winter is one of them—and moreover, as the first season revealed, he is one that is more successful than most in creating that weapon. But he’s haunted by visions of apocalypse and increasingly distrustful of his government; at the end of the first season, he flees Los Alamos, only to be caught and imprisoned. He isn’t the spy, of course—the audience knows exactly who is—but even when he proves it, by the end of “Fatherland,” he can’t get out of prison. Winter might be the most valuable mind in the military research facility of Los Alamos, but the government, in paranoia and suspicion, refuses to have him there any longer. He’s not a spy, but he still knows too much. Winter is just one nuclear physicist of many in “Manhattan,” and like most of our lead characters, he is a fictional construct. But the world of Los Alamos isn’t, and neither are legendary physicists like Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr, who are both secondary characters in the first season. At its simplest, “Manhattan” is a period drama about this circumscribed group of people and an era of extreme anxiety; war with Germany and Japan is all-consuming, and the Americans might not be winning. The mostly male scientists are forced to keep secrets from those closest to them, and it eats them alive. The mostly unemployed wives sit at home and fret over limited rations, bad weather, and the vast stretches of the unknown. Soldiers stationed at Los Alamos get drunk at dance parties that host both members of the indigenous tribe and Spanish-speaking Mexicans. It’s an era and an atmosphere, conveyed through scene-setting. At its slightly more complex, “Manhattan” is a show that looks at history with a modern understanding of the complexities of identity. Chinese-American scientist Sidney Liao (Eddie Shin) is discriminated against for being Asian, distrusted by the military, and then is executed for treason. Housewife Abby (Rachel Brosnahan) finds solace in a relationship with another army wife, Elodie (Carole Weyers). Helen Prins (Katja Herbers) is the only female scientist in a team of men, and struggles to be seen as something more than a strident anomaly. As I discussed with executive producer Thomas Schlamme—who previously worked on “The West Wing”—“Manhattan” is deeply concerned with restoring context to history. The result is “The West Wing” without all the circular Aaron Sorkin dialogue, mixed with “Masters Of Sex,” but with far more compelling stakes (the creator of the show, Sam Shaw, used to be a writer on the Showtime show). And all this alone would make it well with your time, especially if you’re fond of World War II history. But last night’s episode—in which Frank Winter grapples with internment, in the form of a very suspicious fellow inmate (Justin Kirk)—offers a window into what is another of “Manhattan”’s subtle strengths: that of a show that engages with total war as not just mass destruction but also a narrative. While war makes for the simplest story, that of “us” versus “them,” none of the characters of “Manhattan” neatly fit into either category, despite working for one team or another. As is revealed in “Fatherland,” Frank Winter’s mother is German—and grew to despise her American husband and son. Frank is American, and works for the Americans, but is also imprisoned by the Americans. Once you start drawing lines trying to determine who is really “us” and who is really “them,” it becomes increasingly difficult to make any sense of the landscape—as the paranoid gatekeepers of “Manhattan” rapidly discover. It’s 1944, and America had yet to really experience the us/them paranoia of the Cold War; this is just the tip of what will be a massive, world-shaking iceberg. It’s apparently too optimistic to hope that we might have learned something since then. While I was watching “Fatherland,” something was nagging me about the familiar shape of the story, and I realized that Frank Winter’s bomb was reminding me of the homemade clock of a 14-year-old boy—a clock that inspired so much paranoia, it got him arrested. Though of course, the whole point is that the clock wasn’t a bomb, in the case of Ahmed Mohamed, there is one thing both stories have in common—that of losing incredible talent, due to arbitrary reckonings of “us” and “them.” Mohamed’s family announced yesterday that they were all moving to Doha, Qatar, where the government had offered Ahmed fully funded education through college. In raising the specter of “us”/”them”—in treating a 14-year-old boy like a terrorist because of his name and skin color—an American town has actually reinforced the “us”/”them,” because Mohamed is now leaving our country entirely to live and pay taxes in the vilified Middle East. We lost an American, in our attempt to be more American. “Fatherland” is a psychological, almost dream-like exploration of self and allegiance, one that unfolds like a dramatic one-man play with Hickey in the lead. As if to underscore the shifting lines of identity, he introduces himself with a fake name, at first—the name of a colleague. His fellow inmate, over the course of several hours, plays at least three different identities—Nazi, American agent, communist—trying to get Frank to respond to any of them. In the midst of starvation and mind games, Frank tries to maintain some shred of his own “real” self. And in the end, he discovers his allegiance doesn’t even matter to his captors—“Fatherland” reveals that the American military is using the specter of Nazi invasion and German superweapons to keep the team at Los Alamos working faster and faster. Because it’s never just “us” and ”them”—it’s “us,” “them,” and those that profit on the difference between the two.

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Texas has gotten this bad: Norwegians now use the state’s name as slang for “crazy”

Texas is many things to many people—a state the size of a medium-sized country; home to several idiot governors, one who became president, and a current one who thinks it’s a good idea for college students to openly carry firearms. To Donald Trump, Texas is the place where a "big, beautiful wall" should be built. To people in Norway, “texas” with a small “t” is a synonym for crazy, bonkers, out of control and wild. As in,that’s totally texas. Or in Norwegian: det var helt texas Texas Monthly discovered this hilarious (or humbling, depending on your perspective) piece of slang on a Tumblr page. The magazine accumulated several pieces of evidence that this is really a thing in Norway, and gave these examples:

Here is an article from Aviso Nordland from March 2014 about reckless international truck drivers traveling through the northern part of the country. Norwegian police chief Knut Danielsen, when describing the situation, tells the paper that “it is absolutely texas.” Here’s one from a 2012 edition of Verdens Gang, a Norwegian tabloid, in which Blackburn Rovers soccer manager Henning Berg—a Norwegian former star who played for the British team—describes the atmosphere at a match between the Rovers and the rival Burnley Clarets as “totally texas.” And here’s a fisherman telling the local news about the rare swordfish he caught in Northern Norway: “I heard a loud noise from the bay, but I did not know where it came from right away. Thirty seconds to a minute later it jumped out in the fjord. I got to see some of it before I took up the camera,” he says and continues: “It was totally texas!”-

A Norwegian explained what "texas" meant to him in a Reddit discussion earlier this year, writing: “When I think of the word I picture a cowboy crashing a party and shooting two revolvers into the air. ‘It’s completely texas!" So entrenched is this idiom in Norway that a restaurant called Dolly Dimple's uses "helt texas" to characterize its pizza deals. Note, for those planning on using “texas” as a substitute for “crazy” while in Norway (or elsewhere, perhaps) it is an adjective that applies to situations, not people. So, you can’t call Gov. Greg Abbott “texas,” even if you really believe he is crazy.

This is why I’m still single?: Men think smart women are sexy — but only from a distance

One of my most vivid memories is the night before my first day of kindergarten. My dad sat me down and said it’s more important for me to be smart and nice to people than it is to be pretty or popular. He reiterated this statement the night before my first day of high school, and it’s a piece of advice I’ve carried with me since. So far, it’s worked out pretty well. I love the career I’m building and have a group of friends I trust and admire. Dinner and text conversations range from recent features in the New Yorker, to the political landscape to the etymology of favorite words like the Portuguese “saudade.” Overwhelmingly, though, my female friends and I are for the most part single. There’s been eviscerating break ups, whirlwind romances and casual dates in between. But for some reason few men have stuck. The romantic ones of the bunch attribute it to not yet finding a perfect match, while the more cynical ones say it’s the guys we’re choosing, like we have bad taste in men. I’m more inclined to think it’s not so much bad taste in men, but a taste for the bad boys. When I talk to my dad about it, he rolls his eyes and says to stop over-analyzing and that we’re too smart for our own good. According to science, my old man is right. A new study published in the November issue of "Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin" suggests that while men like the idea of partnering with intelligent women, being presented with one in real life is a turn off. Let’s just jump off this pedestal right now, shall we? Research teams from the University of Buffalo, California Lutheran University and the University of Texas at Austin studied intellectual preferences in men by presenting them with two scenarios. The first scenario told male participants a woman outperformed them in either an English or math course, and then asked them to imagine the woman as a romantic partner. Then the men were asked a series of questions based on a ranking scale. The research team found “men formed favorable impressions and showed greater interest in women who displayed more (versus less) intelligence than themselves.” This sounds great -- promising, even! -- as things in theory are wont to do. For the second part of the study, researchers administered an intelligence test to the men, and then told the participants they were about to meet a woman who had outperformed them on the same test. According to the study, the men “distanced themselves more from her, tended to rate her as less attractive, and showed less desire to exchange contact information or plan a date with her.” When presented with the real life possibility of an intelligent woman as a romantic partner, men seem to find it as inconvenient as a glass filled to its brim. No one wants to dance while balancing a full martini in one hand. The researchers who led this study believe “feelings of diminished masculinity accounted for men’s decreased attraction toward women outperformed them.” So basically women have to worry about stepping on shards of shattered masculinity when breaking glass ceilings. It’s an interesting cultural moment to be a woman. Women are purchasing more music than men, emerging as leaders in STEM fields, and now hold more advanced degrees than men do. Michelle Obama spoke a few weeks ago on the importance of girls paying attention in school and getting good grades. “There is no boy at this age that is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education,” said the First Lady at The Power of the Educated Girl panel hosted by Glamour at the end of September. Actress Charlize Theron reaffirmed the sentiment at the panel, saying “there is nothing sexier than a smart woman.” Intelligence is something most agree to be universally sexy. But when it comes to dating, men seem to admire more intelligent women, and end up with women whom they have intellectual superiority to. Intellectual distance, the paper argues, makes the heart grow fonder. It makes you understand Amazing Amy’s rage in “Gone Girl” once she learns she’s being replaced by the not-so-outstanding Andy. Men today have a much larger selection pool to choose from. In “DATE-ONMICS: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” author Jon Birger argues that shifting dating and hookup culture paradigms among the post-collegiate crowd is due to shifting demographics regarding who is more educated. In 2012, 34 percent of women were more educated than men, and it’s expected that this number will soar to 43 percent within the next decade. It’s an empowering statistic in terms of the progress women have made within the last century, but discouraging when it comes to romantic partnership. Nearly a century ago F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Given cultural and scientific evidence, maybe those words apply to modern women who can outperform men intellectually, but still seek long term romantic partnership. We’re encouraged to cultivate our intellects, but it runs the risk of making us less romantically appealing. Maybe intelligence will put us on idealized pedestals, rendering intelligent women alone but adored. The alternative would be to exist as a pretty fool, a la Daisy Buchanan’s wish for her daughter. But I wouldn’t want to be a woman who’s ignorant to the wonders a scholarly life has to offer — nor would I want a man dumb enough to love me for it.One of my most vivid memories is the night before my first day of kindergarten. My dad sat me down and said it’s more important for me to be smart and nice to people than it is to be pretty or popular. He reiterated this statement the night before my first day of high school, and it’s a piece of advice I’ve carried with me since. So far, it’s worked out pretty well. I love the career I’m building and have a group of friends I trust and admire. Dinner and text conversations range from recent features in the New Yorker, to the political landscape to the etymology of favorite words like the Portuguese “saudade.” Overwhelmingly, though, my female friends and I are for the most part single. There’s been eviscerating break ups, whirlwind romances and casual dates in between. But for some reason few men have stuck. The romantic ones of the bunch attribute it to not yet finding a perfect match, while the more cynical ones say it’s the guys we’re choosing, like we have bad taste in men. I’m more inclined to think it’s not so much bad taste in men, but a taste for the bad boys. When I talk to my dad about it, he rolls his eyes and says to stop over-analyzing and that we’re too smart for our own good. According to science, my old man is right. A new study published in the November issue of "Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin" suggests that while men like the idea of partnering with intelligent women, being presented with one in real life is a turn off. Let’s just jump off this pedestal right now, shall we? Research teams from the University of Buffalo, California Lutheran University and the University of Texas at Austin studied intellectual preferences in men by presenting them with two scenarios. The first scenario told male participants a woman outperformed them in either an English or math course, and then asked them to imagine the woman as a romantic partner. Then the men were asked a series of questions based on a ranking scale. The research team found “men formed favorable impressions and showed greater interest in women who displayed more (versus less) intelligence than themselves.” This sounds great -- promising, even! -- as things in theory are wont to do. For the second part of the study, researchers administered an intelligence test to the men, and then told the participants they were about to meet a woman who had outperformed them on the same test. According to the study, the men “distanced themselves more from her, tended to rate her as less attractive, and showed less desire to exchange contact information or plan a date with her.” When presented with the real life possibility of an intelligent woman as a romantic partner, men seem to find it as inconvenient as a glass filled to its brim. No one wants to dance while balancing a full martini in one hand. The researchers who led this study believe “feelings of diminished masculinity accounted for men’s decreased attraction toward women outperformed them.” So basically women have to worry about stepping on shards of shattered masculinity when breaking glass ceilings. It’s an interesting cultural moment to be a woman. Women are purchasing more music than men, emerging as leaders in STEM fields, and now hold more advanced degrees than men do. Michelle Obama spoke a few weeks ago on the importance of girls paying attention in school and getting good grades. “There is no boy at this age that is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education,” said the First Lady at The Power of the Educated Girl panel hosted by Glamour at the end of September. Actress Charlize Theron reaffirmed the sentiment at the panel, saying “there is nothing sexier than a smart woman.” Intelligence is something most agree to be universally sexy. But when it comes to dating, men seem to admire more intelligent women, and end up with women whom they have intellectual superiority to. Intellectual distance, the paper argues, makes the heart grow fonder. It makes you understand Amazing Amy’s rage in “Gone Girl” once she learns she’s being replaced by the not-so-outstanding Andy. Men today have a much larger selection pool to choose from. In “DATE-ONMICS: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” author Jon Birger argues that shifting dating and hookup culture paradigms among the post-collegiate crowd is due to shifting demographics regarding who is more educated. In 2012, 34 percent of women were more educated than men, and it’s expected that this number will soar to 43 percent within the next decade. It’s an empowering statistic in terms of the progress women have made within the last century, but discouraging when it comes to romantic partnership. Nearly a century ago F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Given cultural and scientific evidence, maybe those words apply to modern women who can outperform men intellectually, but still seek long term romantic partnership. We’re encouraged to cultivate our intellects, but it runs the risk of making us less romantically appealing. Maybe intelligence will put us on idealized pedestals, rendering intelligent women alone but adored. The alternative would be to exist as a pretty fool, a la Daisy Buchanan’s wish for her daughter. But I wouldn’t want to be a woman who’s ignorant to the wonders a scholarly life has to offer — nor would I want a man dumb enough to love me for it.One of my most vivid memories is the night before my first day of kindergarten. My dad sat me down and said it’s more important for me to be smart and nice to people than it is to be pretty or popular. He reiterated this statement the night before my first day of high school, and it’s a piece of advice I’ve carried with me since. So far, it’s worked out pretty well. I love the career I’m building and have a group of friends I trust and admire. Dinner and text conversations range from recent features in the New Yorker, to the political landscape to the etymology of favorite words like the Portuguese “saudade.” Overwhelmingly, though, my female friends and I are for the most part single. There’s been eviscerating break ups, whirlwind romances and casual dates in between. But for some reason few men have stuck. The romantic ones of the bunch attribute it to not yet finding a perfect match, while the more cynical ones say it’s the guys we’re choosing, like we have bad taste in men. I’m more inclined to think it’s not so much bad taste in men, but a taste for the bad boys. When I talk to my dad about it, he rolls his eyes and says to stop over-analyzing and that we’re too smart for our own good. According to science, my old man is right. A new study published in the November issue of "Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin" suggests that while men like the idea of partnering with intelligent women, being presented with one in real life is a turn off. Let’s just jump off this pedestal right now, shall we? Research teams from the University of Buffalo, California Lutheran University and the University of Texas at Austin studied intellectual preferences in men by presenting them with two scenarios. The first scenario told male participants a woman outperformed them in either an English or math course, and then asked them to imagine the woman as a romantic partner. Then the men were asked a series of questions based on a ranking scale. The research team found “men formed favorable impressions and showed greater interest in women who displayed more (versus less) intelligence than themselves.” This sounds great -- promising, even! -- as things in theory are wont to do. For the second part of the study, researchers administered an intelligence test to the men, and then told the participants they were about to meet a woman who had outperformed them on the same test. According to the study, the men “distanced themselves more from her, tended to rate her as less attractive, and showed less desire to exchange contact information or plan a date with her.” When presented with the real life possibility of an intelligent woman as a romantic partner, men seem to find it as inconvenient as a glass filled to its brim. No one wants to dance while balancing a full martini in one hand. The researchers who led this study believe “feelings of diminished masculinity accounted for men’s decreased attraction toward women outperformed them.” So basically women have to worry about stepping on shards of shattered masculinity when breaking glass ceilings. It’s an interesting cultural moment to be a woman. Women are purchasing more music than men, emerging as leaders in STEM fields, and now hold more advanced degrees than men do. Michelle Obama spoke a few weeks ago on the importance of girls paying attention in school and getting good grades. “There is no boy at this age that is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education,” said the First Lady at The Power of the Educated Girl panel hosted by Glamour at the end of September. Actress Charlize Theron reaffirmed the sentiment at the panel, saying “there is nothing sexier than a smart woman.” Intelligence is something most agree to be universally sexy. But when it comes to dating, men seem to admire more intelligent women, and end up with women whom they have intellectual superiority to. Intellectual distance, the paper argues, makes the heart grow fonder. It makes you understand Amazing Amy’s rage in “Gone Girl” once she learns she’s being replaced by the not-so-outstanding Andy. Men today have a much larger selection pool to choose from. In “DATE-ONMICS: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” author Jon Birger argues that shifting dating and hookup culture paradigms among the post-collegiate crowd is due to shifting demographics regarding who is more educated. In 2012, 34 percent of women were more educated than men, and it’s expected that this number will soar to 43 percent within the next decade. It’s an empowering statistic in terms of the progress women have made within the last century, but discouraging when it comes to romantic partnership. Nearly a century ago F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Given cultural and scientific evidence, maybe those words apply to modern women who can outperform men intellectually, but still seek long term romantic partnership. We’re encouraged to cultivate our intellects, but it runs the risk of making us less romantically appealing. Maybe intelligence will put us on idealized pedestals, rendering intelligent women alone but adored. The alternative would be to exist as a pretty fool, a la Daisy Buchanan’s wish for her daughter. But I wouldn’t want to be a woman who’s ignorant to the wonders a scholarly life has to offer — nor would I want a man dumb enough to love me for it.

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