Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 982
October 13, 2015
America’s long, dark history of “objectively reasonable” murder
Racial battle fatigue makes Black America numb. However, the numbness does not mean that Black America is free from pain. Langston Hughes’ “dream deferred” feels again today like it is ready to explode. Yet miraculously, somehow it does not. Black America is reminded once again, as though black folks have forgotten, that America does not like black men and boys—or black women and girls—very much. We are loved in the abstract as America’s musicians and athletes and sometimes by enough white folks to be elected President. But our humanity, the stuff that is the basis of shared empathy and respect across the colorline, is very much in doubt. The White Gaze does not see black men and boys, boys and girls, as full and equal human beings. They are the semi-permanent Other. As such, black folks can be subjected to legal murder by the State, its police, armed vigilantes, and other enforcers with little punishment or consequence. Black life is cheap. This is the story of America and the Black Atlantic. The child Tamir Rice was killed in November of 2014 by Cleveland police. Like so many other unarmed black people who have been killed by America’s police in recent years, there is video and photographic evidence of the moment when Rice's lives were stolen from him. On that day, two police,Frank Garmback and Timothy Loehmann (who was fired from a previous police department for incompetence) pulled up less than 10 feet from a child playing with a toy gun, and before two seconds had passed he was on the ground, fatally wounded. Like the white cops who strangled Eric Garner, shot Michael Brown six times, or blindly fired five times into a crowd killing Rekia Boyd, it seems that these two men are not likely to be punished. As reported by the New York Times:
“There can be no doubt that Rice’s death was tragic and, indeed, when one considers his age, heartbreaking,” Mr. Sims wrote. But he added that “Officer Loehmann’s belief that Rice posed a threat of serious physical harm or death was objectively reasonable as was his response to that perceived threat.” Tamir’s death resulted in a lengthy series of investigations that have frustrated some activists, who see the shooting as a clear case of police overreach and have called for the arrests of Officer Loehmann and his partner, Officer Frank Garmback, who drove his police cruiser to within feet of Tamir but who did not fire his weapon. Some have criticized Officer Garmback for parking his cruiser so close. “To suggest that Officer Garmback should have stopped the car at another location is to engage in exactly the kind of ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ the case law exhorts us to avoid,” Mr. Sims wrote.Justice is not colorblind in America. Black Americans are routinely punished more severely than white people for the same crimes. The myth of “black crime” is sustained by a criminal justice system that at almost every level (from arrests through to conviction) discriminates against black and brown people. The law represents the interests of elites and not of the masses. In a society structured around white privilege, and founded on a Herrenvolk principle, where to be “white” is to be truly “American,” people of color are second-class citizens. The post-civil right era’s lie of racial “colorblindness” means that the inequalities along the American color line cannot be cured because to ignore the fact of race means that a society cannot effectively deal with the consequences of white supremacy. Ultimately, as Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun famously said, “To get beyond racism we must first take account of race. There is no other way." The lie of colorblindness also encourages confusion, denial, and hypocrisy on matters of racial justice for many white Americans. According to recent surveys, a majority of white Americans believe, even in an era of visible and rampant police brutality against people of color, that African-Americans and whites are treated equally by local police. Even more troubling, when white Americans are shown evidence that the country’s criminal justice system is unfair and racist against blacks, they still support such outcomes. The language of “colorblindness” and “race neutral” decision making actively buttresses racial disparities in the United States. For example, defenders of the police, and those others who would deny the grotesque way that Tamir Rice was killed, will likely appeal to the supposed “fairness” of “outside experts.” The white racial frame legitimates those outcomes: The system is supposed to be “neutral” and “fair”, thus how can any “reasonable” person doubt the outcome? Likewise, white racial logic proceeds from an assumption that white folks are “neutral” and “rational” while by comparison non-whites are somehow “emotional,” “irrational,” and incapable of “objective” thinking. The killing of Tamir Rice, and the subsequent finding that his unconscionable death can somehow be rationalized as “objectionably reasonable,” digs and stabs at Black America’s feelings of racial battle fatigue. It is a reminder of a profound material and philosophical dilemma: How can the law be fair to people of color when the legal system is an extension of a racist society? White supremacy killed the child Tamir Rice. White supremacy is likely to exonerate the police who killed him. Anti-black racism is not opinion. It is an empirically documented fact. Tamir was killed by “adultification,” a phenomenon where black children are viewed by whites as being considerably older, and less innocent than white children. (Officer Loehmann told police dispatchers that Tamir Rice, who was 12-years-old, was actually a black man in his twenties.) Tamir was killed because police are seven times more likely to shoot unarmed black people than they are whites. Tamir was killed by implicit bias, and how large percentages of white Americans (and others) possess significant, internalized, subconscious anti-black biases. Tamir was killed by an American police culture that in cities such as Cleveland, New York, Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere routinely harasses, abuses, and kills black and brown citizens with impunity. Tamir Rice was also killed by a broader American society where day-to-day anti-black racism is the norm. The shooting dead of unarmed black boys, girls, men, and women by the police are a type of extreme violence. But quotidian white supremacy also hurts the life chances, sanity, health, and happiness of many millions more people of color. The United States is a country that tolerates obscene levels of racial wealth inequality, where discrimination in the labor market denies black and brown Americans a fair return on their educations, in which hospitals force racial minorities to wait longer than whites for assistance, and where black employees are more harshly assessed than their white peers. The lie of American colorblindness is demonstrated in stark and obscene relief by how black boys in Cleveland with toy guns, where the “open carry” of firearms is allowed by law, are shot dead by the police in two seconds while white boys and men with real guns are allowed to walk free, unmolested. Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback pulled the triggers on the guns that were used to shoot the 12-year-old child Tamir Rice. But it was White American society that actually killed him.Racial battle fatigue makes Black America numb. However, the numbness does not mean that Black America is free from pain. Langston Hughes’ “dream deferred” feels again today like it is ready to explode. Yet miraculously, somehow it does not. Black America is reminded once again, as though black folks have forgotten, that America does not like black men and boys—or black women and girls—very much. We are loved in the abstract as America’s musicians and athletes and sometimes by enough white folks to be elected President. But our humanity, the stuff that is the basis of shared empathy and respect across the colorline, is very much in doubt. The White Gaze does not see black men and boys, boys and girls, as full and equal human beings. They are the semi-permanent Other. As such, black folks can be subjected to legal murder by the State, its police, armed vigilantes, and other enforcers with little punishment or consequence. Black life is cheap. This is the story of America and the Black Atlantic. The child Tamir Rice was killed in November of 2014 by Cleveland police. Like so many other unarmed black people who have been killed by America’s police in recent years, there is video and photographic evidence of the moment when Rice's lives were stolen from him. On that day, two police,Frank Garmback and Timothy Loehmann (who was fired from a previous police department for incompetence) pulled up less than 10 feet from a child playing with a toy gun, and before two seconds had passed he was on the ground, fatally wounded. Like the white cops who strangled Eric Garner, shot Michael Brown six times, or blindly fired five times into a crowd killing Rekia Boyd, it seems that these two men are not likely to be punished. As reported by the New York Times:
“There can be no doubt that Rice’s death was tragic and, indeed, when one considers his age, heartbreaking,” Mr. Sims wrote. But he added that “Officer Loehmann’s belief that Rice posed a threat of serious physical harm or death was objectively reasonable as was his response to that perceived threat.” Tamir’s death resulted in a lengthy series of investigations that have frustrated some activists, who see the shooting as a clear case of police overreach and have called for the arrests of Officer Loehmann and his partner, Officer Frank Garmback, who drove his police cruiser to within feet of Tamir but who did not fire his weapon. Some have criticized Officer Garmback for parking his cruiser so close. “To suggest that Officer Garmback should have stopped the car at another location is to engage in exactly the kind of ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ the case law exhorts us to avoid,” Mr. Sims wrote.Justice is not colorblind in America. Black Americans are routinely punished more severely than white people for the same crimes. The myth of “black crime” is sustained by a criminal justice system that at almost every level (from arrests through to conviction) discriminates against black and brown people. The law represents the interests of elites and not of the masses. In a society structured around white privilege, and founded on a Herrenvolk principle, where to be “white” is to be truly “American,” people of color are second-class citizens. The post-civil right era’s lie of racial “colorblindness” means that the inequalities along the American color line cannot be cured because to ignore the fact of race means that a society cannot effectively deal with the consequences of white supremacy. Ultimately, as Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun famously said, “To get beyond racism we must first take account of race. There is no other way." The lie of colorblindness also encourages confusion, denial, and hypocrisy on matters of racial justice for many white Americans. According to recent surveys, a majority of white Americans believe, even in an era of visible and rampant police brutality against people of color, that African-Americans and whites are treated equally by local police. Even more troubling, when white Americans are shown evidence that the country’s criminal justice system is unfair and racist against blacks, they still support such outcomes. The language of “colorblindness” and “race neutral” decision making actively buttresses racial disparities in the United States. For example, defenders of the police, and those others who would deny the grotesque way that Tamir Rice was killed, will likely appeal to the supposed “fairness” of “outside experts.” The white racial frame legitimates those outcomes: The system is supposed to be “neutral” and “fair”, thus how can any “reasonable” person doubt the outcome? Likewise, white racial logic proceeds from an assumption that white folks are “neutral” and “rational” while by comparison non-whites are somehow “emotional,” “irrational,” and incapable of “objective” thinking. The killing of Tamir Rice, and the subsequent finding that his unconscionable death can somehow be rationalized as “objectionably reasonable,” digs and stabs at Black America’s feelings of racial battle fatigue. It is a reminder of a profound material and philosophical dilemma: How can the law be fair to people of color when the legal system is an extension of a racist society? White supremacy killed the child Tamir Rice. White supremacy is likely to exonerate the police who killed him. Anti-black racism is not opinion. It is an empirically documented fact. Tamir was killed by “adultification,” a phenomenon where black children are viewed by whites as being considerably older, and less innocent than white children. (Officer Loehmann told police dispatchers that Tamir Rice, who was 12-years-old, was actually a black man in his twenties.) Tamir was killed because police are seven times more likely to shoot unarmed black people than they are whites. Tamir was killed by implicit bias, and how large percentages of white Americans (and others) possess significant, internalized, subconscious anti-black biases. Tamir was killed by an American police culture that in cities such as Cleveland, New York, Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere routinely harasses, abuses, and kills black and brown citizens with impunity. Tamir Rice was also killed by a broader American society where day-to-day anti-black racism is the norm. The shooting dead of unarmed black boys, girls, men, and women by the police are a type of extreme violence. But quotidian white supremacy also hurts the life chances, sanity, health, and happiness of many millions more people of color. The United States is a country that tolerates obscene levels of racial wealth inequality, where discrimination in the labor market denies black and brown Americans a fair return on their educations, in which hospitals force racial minorities to wait longer than whites for assistance, and where black employees are more harshly assessed than their white peers. The lie of American colorblindness is demonstrated in stark and obscene relief by how black boys in Cleveland with toy guns, where the “open carry” of firearms is allowed by law, are shot dead by the police in two seconds while white boys and men with real guns are allowed to walk free, unmolested. Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback pulled the triggers on the guns that were used to shoot the 12-year-old child Tamir Rice. But it was White American society that actually killed him.
Kids these days with their dangerous hugs: Worst aunt ever sues 8-year-old nephew over “exuberant” greeting
I really keep hoping there's some other side to this story that just hasn't been disclosed yet. Because from the sounds of it so far, this is just another one of "Everything is awful and people are terrible" tales. Here's your headline to get you started: "8-year-old Westport boy on trial for exuberance." Oh, Jennifer Connell, the social media wrath you've just opened up. According to the Connecticut Post, Connell, a 54-year-old Manhattan human resources manager with no children of her own, is seeking $127,000 in damages from her nephew Sean Tarala, stemming from a 2011 incident at the boy's 8th birthday party at his Westport, Connecticut home. According to her testimony, the boy was riding his new bicycle — his first two-wheeler — when she arrived for the festivities. She claims when he saw her, he quickly abandoned the bike and leapt toward her, saying, "Auntie Jen, Auntie Jen." She claims, "All of a sudden he was there in the air, I had to catch him and we tumbled onto the ground. I remember him shouting, 'Auntie Jen I love you,' and there he was flying at me." She says she fell to the ground and broke her wrist. Now, four years later, she acknowledges that her nephew is a "very loving, sensitive" kid, but her insists, "The injuries, losses and harms to the plaintiff were caused by the negligence and carelessness of the minor defendant in that a reasonable eight-year-old under those circumstances would know or should have known that a forceful greeting such as the one delivered by the defendant to the plaintiff could cause the harms and losses suffered by the plaintiff." Tarala, now 12, is the only defendant. The Post reports that the boy appeared "confused" when he sat in court Friday with his father Michael, a local electrician. Sounds like Connell has had some tough times since that fateful wrist injury. She told the court this week that, "I live in Manhattan in a third-floor walk-up so it has been very difficult," which does make me wonder how she's walking up her apartment stairs — I, for one, use my feet. Connell continued, "And we all know how crowded it is in Manhattan." She also claims, "I was at a party recently, and it was difficult to hold my hors d’oeuvre plate." Can you really put a price on not being able to hold one's canapés? Well, maybe you can. Maybe it's exactly $127,000. Given the extent of Connell's reported suffering, why should young Sean Tarala get off scot-free for bounding into his aunt's arms? What else has he got going on these days anyway? Just because his mother Lisa died suddenly last year is no reason to let him off the hook. After her death, her family cryptically requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention or Domestic Violence Crisis Center. Based on her obituary, which only names a sister Karen, it does not appear the plaintiff was related to Mrs. Tarala. In 2012, the Westport Daily Voice reported that a 45-year-old Lisa Tarala was arrested and charged with drunk driving, and issued an infraction for possession of marijuana, after being spotted speeding on Riverside Avenue. The surviving Tarala parent's company, meanwhile, is currently the subject of another lawsuit involving "unfair and deceptive practices in trade and commerce," to the tune of $250,000. Why Connell waited so long to press her case, and why against a child, is not clear — perhaps she and the family unsuccessfully attempted other means of resolution outside of court. And because the current case is before a jury now, the records are sealed. What does seem clear, though, is that young Sean Tarala has been through a hell of a lot the past few years. Jennifer Connell will no doubt not have to worry about getting any more hugs from him any time soon. Update: The Associated Press reports that a jury found boy not liable for his aunt's injuries. 
I really keep hoping there's some other side to this story that just hasn't been disclosed yet. Because from the sounds of it so far, this is just another one of "Everything is awful and people are terrible" tales. Here's your headline to get you started: "8-year-old Westport boy on trial for exuberance." Oh, Jennifer Connell, the social media wrath you've just opened up. According to the Connecticut Post, Connell, a 54-year-old Manhattan human resources manager with no children of her own, is seeking $127,000 in damages from her nephew Sean Tarala, stemming from a 2011 incident at the boy's 8th birthday party at his Westport, Connecticut home. According to her testimony, the boy was riding his new bicycle — his first two-wheeler — when she arrived for the festivities. She claims when he saw her, he quickly abandoned the bike and leapt toward her, saying, "Auntie Jen, Auntie Jen." She claims, "All of a sudden he was there in the air, I had to catch him and we tumbled onto the ground. I remember him shouting, 'Auntie Jen I love you,' and there he was flying at me." She says she fell to the ground and broke her wrist. Now, four years later, she acknowledges that her nephew is a "very loving, sensitive" kid, but her insists, "The injuries, losses and harms to the plaintiff were caused by the negligence and carelessness of the minor defendant in that a reasonable eight-year-old under those circumstances would know or should have known that a forceful greeting such as the one delivered by the defendant to the plaintiff could cause the harms and losses suffered by the plaintiff." Tarala, now 12, is the only defendant. The Post reports that the boy appeared "confused" when he sat in court Friday with his father Michael, a local electrician. Sounds like Connell has had some tough times since that fateful wrist injury. She told the court this week that, "I live in Manhattan in a third-floor walk-up so it has been very difficult," which does make me wonder how she's walking up her apartment stairs — I, for one, use my feet. Connell continued, "And we all know how crowded it is in Manhattan." She also claims, "I was at a party recently, and it was difficult to hold my hors d’oeuvre plate." Can you really put a price on not being able to hold one's canapés? Well, maybe you can. Maybe it's exactly $127,000. Given the extent of Connell's reported suffering, why should young Sean Tarala get off scot-free for bounding into his aunt's arms? What else has he got going on these days anyway? Just because his mother Lisa died suddenly last year is no reason to let him off the hook. After her death, her family cryptically requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention or Domestic Violence Crisis Center. Based on her obituary, which only names a sister Karen, it does not appear the plaintiff was related to Mrs. Tarala. In 2012, the Westport Daily Voice reported that a 45-year-old Lisa Tarala was arrested and charged with drunk driving, and issued an infraction for possession of marijuana, after being spotted speeding on Riverside Avenue. The surviving Tarala parent's company, meanwhile, is currently the subject of another lawsuit involving "unfair and deceptive practices in trade and commerce," to the tune of $250,000. Why Connell waited so long to press her case, and why against a child, is not clear — perhaps she and the family unsuccessfully attempted other means of resolution outside of court. And because the current case is before a jury now, the records are sealed. What does seem clear, though, is that young Sean Tarala has been through a hell of a lot the past few years. Jennifer Connell will no doubt not have to worry about getting any more hugs from him any time soon. Update: The Associated Press reports that a jury found boy not liable for his aunt's injuries.
I really keep hoping there's some other side to this story that just hasn't been disclosed yet. Because from the sounds of it so far, this is just another one of "Everything is awful and people are terrible" tales. Here's your headline to get you started: "8-year-old Westport boy on trial for exuberance." Oh, Jennifer Connell, the social media wrath you've just opened up. According to the Connecticut Post, Connell, a 54-year-old Manhattan human resources manager with no children of her own, is seeking $127,000 in damages from her nephew Sean Tarala, stemming from a 2011 incident at the boy's 8th birthday party at his Westport, Connecticut home. According to her testimony, the boy was riding his new bicycle — his first two-wheeler — when she arrived for the festivities. She claims when he saw her, he quickly abandoned the bike and leapt toward her, saying, "Auntie Jen, Auntie Jen." She claims, "All of a sudden he was there in the air, I had to catch him and we tumbled onto the ground. I remember him shouting, 'Auntie Jen I love you,' and there he was flying at me." She says she fell to the ground and broke her wrist. Now, four years later, she acknowledges that her nephew is a "very loving, sensitive" kid, but her insists, "The injuries, losses and harms to the plaintiff were caused by the negligence and carelessness of the minor defendant in that a reasonable eight-year-old under those circumstances would know or should have known that a forceful greeting such as the one delivered by the defendant to the plaintiff could cause the harms and losses suffered by the plaintiff." Tarala, now 12, is the only defendant. The Post reports that the boy appeared "confused" when he sat in court Friday with his father Michael, a local electrician. Sounds like Connell has had some tough times since that fateful wrist injury. She told the court this week that, "I live in Manhattan in a third-floor walk-up so it has been very difficult," which does make me wonder how she's walking up her apartment stairs — I, for one, use my feet. Connell continued, "And we all know how crowded it is in Manhattan." She also claims, "I was at a party recently, and it was difficult to hold my hors d’oeuvre plate." Can you really put a price on not being able to hold one's canapés? Well, maybe you can. Maybe it's exactly $127,000. Given the extent of Connell's reported suffering, why should young Sean Tarala get off scot-free for bounding into his aunt's arms? What else has he got going on these days anyway? Just because his mother Lisa died suddenly last year is no reason to let him off the hook. After her death, her family cryptically requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention or Domestic Violence Crisis Center. Based on her obituary, which only names a sister Karen, it does not appear the plaintiff was related to Mrs. Tarala. In 2012, the Westport Daily Voice reported that a 45-year-old Lisa Tarala was arrested and charged with drunk driving, and issued an infraction for possession of marijuana, after being spotted speeding on Riverside Avenue. The surviving Tarala parent's company, meanwhile, is currently the subject of another lawsuit involving "unfair and deceptive practices in trade and commerce," to the tune of $250,000. Why Connell waited so long to press her case, and why against a child, is not clear — perhaps she and the family unsuccessfully attempted other means of resolution outside of court. And because the current case is before a jury now, the records are sealed. What does seem clear, though, is that young Sean Tarala has been through a hell of a lot the past few years. Jennifer Connell will no doubt not have to worry about getting any more hugs from him any time soon. Update: The Associated Press reports that a jury found boy not liable for his aunt's injuries.
October 12, 2015
“Stick person,” “Skinny bitch,” “Giraffe”: Stop bullying me for being thin
“You look like a stick person,” a girl said to me tonight “What do you eat?” I stared at her, hoping she might take back the question or apologize. She stared back at me, and said only, “Seriously though.”
I'd hoped this would have stopped by now.
I am a skinny woman. I know this, because people, mostly women, tell me so every day. They say it with disdain. They say it with anger. Sometimes they say it in the form of a question: “Do you even eat?” Or by expressing concern: “You should eat something!”
Almost always, they say it in a way that expresses judgment. "Giraffe," I’ve heard, also: "stick person," "skinny bitch." These people walk up to me out of nowhere. The sight of me moves them to tell me what they think. I catch groups of disapproving women staring me down and whispering to one another. One of them might make a comment to me on the way to the bathroom, emboldened by cocktails. A man once complimented my very beautiful friend, then turned to me and said, “You’re skinny but you’re not that pretty.”
These people want me to know what they think. They want to give me a taste of their judgment, reinforced by cultural attitudes that make it acceptable to do so. It isn’t just strangers. It's new coworkers, friends of friends, and parents too. I had to move once after a Craigslist roommate couldn’t help herself from commenting daily on my weight.
My body is a problem for people. And I get it. Skinny is an oppressive symbol in a culture that teaches women to hate themselves. Confronting me is confronting something that has caused them harm. It’s a reaction to the privileges granted - sometimes through extreme diet, sometimes by excessive exercise, by mental illness, or sometimes utterly arbitrarily - to some body types over others. And for women who have struggled with their weight over the course of a lifetime, who have endured fad diets, outlandish exercise regimes, and all shades of deprivation in the hopes of feeling accepted, seeing a body like mine can be an emotional slap in the face.
But while our experiences vary, skinniness isn’t a free pass from the burdens of self-consciousness and the psychic struggle that a ruthlessly superficial society inflicts. No matter how you measure up, being reduced to your body parts is never healthy.
Most genetically thin women develop their sense of worth in girlhood, where messages are less mixed, and their bodies are more ubiquitously perceived as unattractive. Until I was seventeen, lunchtime regularly involved being called anorexic, bulimic, skeleton, or stick-person. Girls approached me in the bathroom, trying to convince me to confide in them. "Eat something, anorexic girl," they'd shout in the hallway. I remember sitting at summer camp overhearing two girls describe my body, part by part. "Look at her arms, they're so gross," one said. I went crying to a camp counselor who told me I could hardly blame them: I was too skinny and should eat more. Adults were not the exception. At the till of my Dairy Queen job, they'd make jokes about how I needed more Blizzards, or brazenly tell me I needed to get help. After another student complained to my junior high school about my appearance, my guidance counselor, someone who had personally observed me eating in the past, brought me into her office to ask if I was bulimic.
I wasn’t. My parents told her the same thing when she called them. My mother hugged me when I got home, inconsolable.
I wasn’t bulimic, or anorexic, and I’m not now either. Being thin is not a choice I've made. I’m skinny because I have Marfan’s Syndrome. It's a genetic condition that makes my body thin and lanky. Marfan's affects the connective tissue, and brings with it a litany of health issues. It's caused my lungs to collapse five times to date, most recently requiring a lung lobectomy (if you don't know what that is, don't ask). My joints don’t always fit together well. I have dislocated lenses in my eyes. My heart valve leaks and may have to be replaced. I'm at risk of having my aorta spontaneously dissect.
It’s been interesting to live with a body that can fail on a whim. Most of the time though, it’s all very manageable. My Marfan's is relatively mild. To protect myself I don't play contact sports, scuba dive, or lift heavy things. I wear protective eye gear when needed, and I get an ultrasound of my heart every year. I am grateful for the perspective my lung issues have gifted me; I learned not to take health for granted.
The far less manageable, in some ways more painful, part of Marfan’s has been the public body critique. Constant scrutiny and feedback led to a tumultuous relationship with my own appearance. It bolstered a shame and isolation that spilled into all areas of my life.
To cope, I learned to mitigate judgment in ways I now know to be standard amongst the unintentionally thin. I stopped going to the bathroom during meals with colleagues and strangers. I avoided ordering salads. I wore loose clothes to events frequented by faux-feminists, who would label me instantly as the enemy. I layered-up, wearing thick tights under my jeans when it was far too warm to do so. I developed standard responses to questions and quips about my weight, and became self-deprecating to make sure people knew I didn’t feel better-than because of my size.
Like everyone, I wanted to be accepted. Moreover, I wanted to just be. But the effect of being picked apart is insidious and eventually I came to feel deeply flawed. I began covering mirrors, avoiding reflections, and obsessing about looking normal. I went through phases of having panic attacks and avoiding going out. When I tried to talk about what I was going through, girls tended to think I was being vain. After all, what did I have to complain about when others had it so much worse?
When the body-positive movement started kicking up a few years ago, it looked promising for everyone. Unfortunately, this movement has, for a time at least, made things harder for women like me: women who resemble the body type fetishized by fashion and popular media but, more and more (and rightly so) skewered by public opinion. Margaret Cho started saying in her stage show that she likes “real women” and that “real women have curves” - a mantra that is still repeated years later. Lady Gaga, in the midst of her body image campaign, approached thin prepubescent girls and criticized their weight. Shows like Drop Dead Diva showed confident, curvy protagonists making cutting jokes about the dumb, skinny characters.
This cultural breakthrough has led to an increase in real-life critique. People feel more entitled than ever to tell skinny women what they think. To be clear, I’m not talking about confrontations of the I’m genuinely and sincerely concerned for your health kind. These are always understandable, if not appreciated. But when comments are not directed at me as a person, but at what I represent to someone else, I’m left wondering if the movement has really achieved its goal of promoting widespread acceptance of varied body types.
Maybe this is a temporary cost of a needed evolution, an overcompensation for generations of fat-shaming. More likely though, we are trapping ourselves in an endless pursuit. The media’s ideal female body stretches well beyond weight, after all, and is far from static. The nose we’re told to love today will be different ten years from now. The hips of today, whether rounded or narrow, will somehow fall short of the ideal future generations will set. What we will never love is having our worth boiled down to how we look.
When we, as individuals or as society, objectify “skinny bitches,” we sustain the same system we claim to oppose. We're still reducing women to their shapes, judging women's bodies in unhelpful, reductive, and oppressive ways. We're still trying to empower ourselves by putting other women down, still dictating if women are sexy, strong, or “real” based on the size of their curves.
“You look like a stick person,” a girl said to me tonight “What do you eat?” I stared at her, hoping she might take back the question or apologize. She stared back at me, and said only, “Seriously though.”
I'd hoped this would have stopped by now.
I am a skinny woman. I know this, because people, mostly women, tell me so every day. They say it with disdain. They say it with anger. Sometimes they say it in the form of a question: “Do you even eat?” Or by expressing concern: “You should eat something!”
Almost always, they say it in a way that expresses judgment. "Giraffe," I’ve heard, also: "stick person," "skinny bitch." These people walk up to me out of nowhere. The sight of me moves them to tell me what they think. I catch groups of disapproving women staring me down and whispering to one another. One of them might make a comment to me on the way to the bathroom, emboldened by cocktails. A man once complimented my very beautiful friend, then turned to me and said, “You’re skinny but you’re not that pretty.”
These people want me to know what they think. They want to give me a taste of their judgment, reinforced by cultural attitudes that make it acceptable to do so. It isn’t just strangers. It's new coworkers, friends of friends, and parents too. I had to move once after a Craigslist roommate couldn’t help herself from commenting daily on my weight.
My body is a problem for people. And I get it. Skinny is an oppressive symbol in a culture that teaches women to hate themselves. Confronting me is confronting something that has caused them harm. It’s a reaction to the privileges granted - sometimes through extreme diet, sometimes by excessive exercise, by mental illness, or sometimes utterly arbitrarily - to some body types over others. And for women who have struggled with their weight over the course of a lifetime, who have endured fad diets, outlandish exercise regimes, and all shades of deprivation in the hopes of feeling accepted, seeing a body like mine can be an emotional slap in the face.
But while our experiences vary, skinniness isn’t a free pass from the burdens of self-consciousness and the psychic struggle that a ruthlessly superficial society inflicts. No matter how you measure up, being reduced to your body parts is never healthy.
Most genetically thin women develop their sense of worth in girlhood, where messages are less mixed, and their bodies are more ubiquitously perceived as unattractive. Until I was seventeen, lunchtime regularly involved being called anorexic, bulimic, skeleton, or stick-person. Girls approached me in the bathroom, trying to convince me to confide in them. "Eat something, anorexic girl," they'd shout in the hallway. I remember sitting at summer camp overhearing two girls describe my body, part by part. "Look at her arms, they're so gross," one said. I went crying to a camp counselor who told me I could hardly blame them: I was too skinny and should eat more. Adults were not the exception. At the till of my Dairy Queen job, they'd make jokes about how I needed more Blizzards, or brazenly tell me I needed to get help. After another student complained to my junior high school about my appearance, my guidance counselor, someone who had personally observed me eating in the past, brought me into her office to ask if I was bulimic.
I wasn’t. My parents told her the same thing when she called them. My mother hugged me when I got home, inconsolable.
I wasn’t bulimic, or anorexic, and I’m not now either. Being thin is not a choice I've made. I’m skinny because I have Marfan’s Syndrome. It's a genetic condition that makes my body thin and lanky. Marfan's affects the connective tissue, and brings with it a litany of health issues. It's caused my lungs to collapse five times to date, most recently requiring a lung lobectomy (if you don't know what that is, don't ask). My joints don’t always fit together well. I have dislocated lenses in my eyes. My heart valve leaks and may have to be replaced. I'm at risk of having my aorta spontaneously dissect.
It’s been interesting to live with a body that can fail on a whim. Most of the time though, it’s all very manageable. My Marfan's is relatively mild. To protect myself I don't play contact sports, scuba dive, or lift heavy things. I wear protective eye gear when needed, and I get an ultrasound of my heart every year. I am grateful for the perspective my lung issues have gifted me; I learned not to take health for granted.
The far less manageable, in some ways more painful, part of Marfan’s has been the public body critique. Constant scrutiny and feedback led to a tumultuous relationship with my own appearance. It bolstered a shame and isolation that spilled into all areas of my life.
To cope, I learned to mitigate judgment in ways I now know to be standard amongst the unintentionally thin. I stopped going to the bathroom during meals with colleagues and strangers. I avoided ordering salads. I wore loose clothes to events frequented by faux-feminists, who would label me instantly as the enemy. I layered-up, wearing thick tights under my jeans when it was far too warm to do so. I developed standard responses to questions and quips about my weight, and became self-deprecating to make sure people knew I didn’t feel better-than because of my size.
Like everyone, I wanted to be accepted. Moreover, I wanted to just be. But the effect of being picked apart is insidious and eventually I came to feel deeply flawed. I began covering mirrors, avoiding reflections, and obsessing about looking normal. I went through phases of having panic attacks and avoiding going out. When I tried to talk about what I was going through, girls tended to think I was being vain. After all, what did I have to complain about when others had it so much worse?
When the body-positive movement started kicking up a few years ago, it looked promising for everyone. Unfortunately, this movement has, for a time at least, made things harder for women like me: women who resemble the body type fetishized by fashion and popular media but, more and more (and rightly so) skewered by public opinion. Margaret Cho started saying in her stage show that she likes “real women” and that “real women have curves” - a mantra that is still repeated years later. Lady Gaga, in the midst of her body image campaign, approached thin prepubescent girls and criticized their weight. Shows like Drop Dead Diva showed confident, curvy protagonists making cutting jokes about the dumb, skinny characters.
This cultural breakthrough has led to an increase in real-life critique. People feel more entitled than ever to tell skinny women what they think. To be clear, I’m not talking about confrontations of the I’m genuinely and sincerely concerned for your health kind. These are always understandable, if not appreciated. But when comments are not directed at me as a person, but at what I represent to someone else, I’m left wondering if the movement has really achieved its goal of promoting widespread acceptance of varied body types.
Maybe this is a temporary cost of a needed evolution, an overcompensation for generations of fat-shaming. More likely though, we are trapping ourselves in an endless pursuit. The media’s ideal female body stretches well beyond weight, after all, and is far from static. The nose we’re told to love today will be different ten years from now. The hips of today, whether rounded or narrow, will somehow fall short of the ideal future generations will set. What we will never love is having our worth boiled down to how we look.
When we, as individuals or as society, objectify “skinny bitches,” we sustain the same system we claim to oppose. We're still reducing women to their shapes, judging women's bodies in unhelpful, reductive, and oppressive ways. We're still trying to empower ourselves by putting other women down, still dictating if women are sexy, strong, or “real” based on the size of their curves.
“You look like a stick person,” a girl said to me tonight “What do you eat?” I stared at her, hoping she might take back the question or apologize. She stared back at me, and said only, “Seriously though.”
I'd hoped this would have stopped by now.
I am a skinny woman. I know this, because people, mostly women, tell me so every day. They say it with disdain. They say it with anger. Sometimes they say it in the form of a question: “Do you even eat?” Or by expressing concern: “You should eat something!”
Almost always, they say it in a way that expresses judgment. "Giraffe," I’ve heard, also: "stick person," "skinny bitch." These people walk up to me out of nowhere. The sight of me moves them to tell me what they think. I catch groups of disapproving women staring me down and whispering to one another. One of them might make a comment to me on the way to the bathroom, emboldened by cocktails. A man once complimented my very beautiful friend, then turned to me and said, “You’re skinny but you’re not that pretty.”
These people want me to know what they think. They want to give me a taste of their judgment, reinforced by cultural attitudes that make it acceptable to do so. It isn’t just strangers. It's new coworkers, friends of friends, and parents too. I had to move once after a Craigslist roommate couldn’t help herself from commenting daily on my weight.
My body is a problem for people. And I get it. Skinny is an oppressive symbol in a culture that teaches women to hate themselves. Confronting me is confronting something that has caused them harm. It’s a reaction to the privileges granted - sometimes through extreme diet, sometimes by excessive exercise, by mental illness, or sometimes utterly arbitrarily - to some body types over others. And for women who have struggled with their weight over the course of a lifetime, who have endured fad diets, outlandish exercise regimes, and all shades of deprivation in the hopes of feeling accepted, seeing a body like mine can be an emotional slap in the face.
But while our experiences vary, skinniness isn’t a free pass from the burdens of self-consciousness and the psychic struggle that a ruthlessly superficial society inflicts. No matter how you measure up, being reduced to your body parts is never healthy.
Most genetically thin women develop their sense of worth in girlhood, where messages are less mixed, and their bodies are more ubiquitously perceived as unattractive. Until I was seventeen, lunchtime regularly involved being called anorexic, bulimic, skeleton, or stick-person. Girls approached me in the bathroom, trying to convince me to confide in them. "Eat something, anorexic girl," they'd shout in the hallway. I remember sitting at summer camp overhearing two girls describe my body, part by part. "Look at her arms, they're so gross," one said. I went crying to a camp counselor who told me I could hardly blame them: I was too skinny and should eat more. Adults were not the exception. At the till of my Dairy Queen job, they'd make jokes about how I needed more Blizzards, or brazenly tell me I needed to get help. After another student complained to my junior high school about my appearance, my guidance counselor, someone who had personally observed me eating in the past, brought me into her office to ask if I was bulimic.
I wasn’t. My parents told her the same thing when she called them. My mother hugged me when I got home, inconsolable.
I wasn’t bulimic, or anorexic, and I’m not now either. Being thin is not a choice I've made. I’m skinny because I have Marfan’s Syndrome. It's a genetic condition that makes my body thin and lanky. Marfan's affects the connective tissue, and brings with it a litany of health issues. It's caused my lungs to collapse five times to date, most recently requiring a lung lobectomy (if you don't know what that is, don't ask). My joints don’t always fit together well. I have dislocated lenses in my eyes. My heart valve leaks and may have to be replaced. I'm at risk of having my aorta spontaneously dissect.
It’s been interesting to live with a body that can fail on a whim. Most of the time though, it’s all very manageable. My Marfan's is relatively mild. To protect myself I don't play contact sports, scuba dive, or lift heavy things. I wear protective eye gear when needed, and I get an ultrasound of my heart every year. I am grateful for the perspective my lung issues have gifted me; I learned not to take health for granted.
The far less manageable, in some ways more painful, part of Marfan’s has been the public body critique. Constant scrutiny and feedback led to a tumultuous relationship with my own appearance. It bolstered a shame and isolation that spilled into all areas of my life.
To cope, I learned to mitigate judgment in ways I now know to be standard amongst the unintentionally thin. I stopped going to the bathroom during meals with colleagues and strangers. I avoided ordering salads. I wore loose clothes to events frequented by faux-feminists, who would label me instantly as the enemy. I layered-up, wearing thick tights under my jeans when it was far too warm to do so. I developed standard responses to questions and quips about my weight, and became self-deprecating to make sure people knew I didn’t feel better-than because of my size.
Like everyone, I wanted to be accepted. Moreover, I wanted to just be. But the effect of being picked apart is insidious and eventually I came to feel deeply flawed. I began covering mirrors, avoiding reflections, and obsessing about looking normal. I went through phases of having panic attacks and avoiding going out. When I tried to talk about what I was going through, girls tended to think I was being vain. After all, what did I have to complain about when others had it so much worse?
When the body-positive movement started kicking up a few years ago, it looked promising for everyone. Unfortunately, this movement has, for a time at least, made things harder for women like me: women who resemble the body type fetishized by fashion and popular media but, more and more (and rightly so) skewered by public opinion. Margaret Cho started saying in her stage show that she likes “real women” and that “real women have curves” - a mantra that is still repeated years later. Lady Gaga, in the midst of her body image campaign, approached thin prepubescent girls and criticized their weight. Shows like Drop Dead Diva showed confident, curvy protagonists making cutting jokes about the dumb, skinny characters.
This cultural breakthrough has led to an increase in real-life critique. People feel more entitled than ever to tell skinny women what they think. To be clear, I’m not talking about confrontations of the I’m genuinely and sincerely concerned for your health kind. These are always understandable, if not appreciated. But when comments are not directed at me as a person, but at what I represent to someone else, I’m left wondering if the movement has really achieved its goal of promoting widespread acceptance of varied body types.
Maybe this is a temporary cost of a needed evolution, an overcompensation for generations of fat-shaming. More likely though, we are trapping ourselves in an endless pursuit. The media’s ideal female body stretches well beyond weight, after all, and is far from static. The nose we’re told to love today will be different ten years from now. The hips of today, whether rounded or narrow, will somehow fall short of the ideal future generations will set. What we will never love is having our worth boiled down to how we look.
When we, as individuals or as society, objectify “skinny bitches,” we sustain the same system we claim to oppose. We're still reducing women to their shapes, judging women's bodies in unhelpful, reductive, and oppressive ways. We're still trying to empower ourselves by putting other women down, still dictating if women are sexy, strong, or “real” based on the size of their curves.
The science behind the “Bro Job”: Why ‘straight’ men have sex with each other
At this point, lesbian sex (the porny kind) is practically considered vanilla. But when it comes to two self-identified straight guys getting together, we tend to stiffen up, and not in the fun way. The term “bro job” generally refers to sex acts taking place between heterosexual men. The phenomenon was recently explored by Dr. Jane Ward in her book
Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men
, who suggests it's a lot more common than most people may think. Sex therapist Susan Block agrees. “I hear about it going on in Saudi Arabia, in Latin America – I talk to guys from all over the world who are doing this. In all different cultures.” Block explained to AlterNet that sexual activity between self-identifying straight males is one of the most common topics introduced during her therapy sessions with men. “We’ve shut down on the phenomenon of male sexuality. Now, we’re starting to ease up on that natural fluidity of men. But it's always been there,” she says. “Sometimes you hide it because you don’t want to suffer from society’s punishments.” Of course, identity politics is a messy game. And while arousal makes up just one piece of the very complex puzzle that is sexual orientation, it is a major player. We’re quick to assign the “bisexual” label to those for which sexual arousal is not dictated by gender. But it’s not always a welcome title. “I am often forced to call myself ‘bi,’ but I rarely find labels appropriate,” says model Paul LaBlanc (a pseudonym). As Block explains, sexual orientation goes a lot further than the sexual activities we engage in. “I think to a great degree when people think about their own sexual orientation, they’re thinking about their hopes and dreams for themselves in terms of love and romance. Not just sex.” In her book, Ward insists that sex acts between men are not symptoms of a suppressed gay identity, but rather an example of the fluid nature of human sexuality. Still, some ask, why men? Ward writes, “By understanding their same-sex sexual practice as meaningless, accidental, or even necessary, straight white men can perform homosexual contact in heterosexual ways.” “Meaningless.” A hard word to sneak by a therapist. But this notion of meaninglessness may help explain what makes sex between men appealing. “Women are full of meaning,” says Block “One of the things that men like about other men is how meaningless it is. It’s just for fun.” That’s not to say that men don’t crave intimacy – they do, in its place. But Block suggests that for men looking for free, no-strings-attached sex, a male partner may be their best bet. Removing sex from its prescribed context is often discouraged in heterosexual relationships. If you’re looking to have sex for sport, doing it with another man might make some sense. Professional dominatrix Sandra LaMorgese once told AlterNet, “I’m dominant in every aspect of life but I'm not going to have a submissive partner. I need someone to dominate me. That way I get the balance too.” LaMorgese refers to herself as an “alpha submissive.” It's an experience that many men crave as well. And some will step outside the bounds of gender to achieve it. LaBlanc explains, “I tend strongly towards being dominant with women and submissive with men. Not totally in either direction, it's not that simple... But it is clear that I take on different roles with different genders.” “To me, no man has the soft indescribable beauty of a woman. And no woman can ‘take me’ the way a man can.” There are other reasons self-identified straight men might have sex with each other. Block explained that some men are looking for the BDSM element, which can involve humiliation by means of another penis, a larger penis. There’s the curiosity bit, the desire to be with someone ‘who looks like me.’ There's also mutual masturbation. And then there’s the simple fact that males manifest their sexual excitement in much more obvious ways than women, and that’s something a lot of guys find arousing, even relieving. Of course, condensing the scope of sexual desire isn’t something that can be done in a thousand words or so. The recent wave of interest in this not-so-recent phenomenon says something about the our current sexual climate. We can now admit that "bro jobs" are happening, and happening often. Though where they take place is often indicative of how people expect others to digest the news of these rendezvous. “I hear a lot about secrets,” says Block. The fact that society is starting to have more open discussions about sex is good. The fact that society only wants to discuss certain kinds of sex leaves something to be desired. But if we take a step back we might find that what traditionalists deem “unnatural” sexual behavior (i.e. anything outside the confines of heterosexual marriage) can be fairly intrinsic. However those participating in them want to self-identify is up to them. Block suggests we take a look at our closest "kissing cousins," the Bonobo. In her book, The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace Through Pleasure, Block explains that the apes often engage in what’s known as “penis fencing,” whereby two males will rub their erect penises against each other’s. She told us, “They stop each other from killing each other by rub rub rubbing, until they come come come. And then have a banana together or something," adding, "I think there’s a very positive and certainly very natural aspect to this.”
At this point, lesbian sex (the porny kind) is practically considered vanilla. But when it comes to two self-identified straight guys getting together, we tend to stiffen up, and not in the fun way. The term “bro job” generally refers to sex acts taking place between heterosexual men. The phenomenon was recently explored by Dr. Jane Ward in her book
Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men
, who suggests it's a lot more common than most people may think. Sex therapist Susan Block agrees. “I hear about it going on in Saudi Arabia, in Latin America – I talk to guys from all over the world who are doing this. In all different cultures.” Block explained to AlterNet that sexual activity between self-identifying straight males is one of the most common topics introduced during her therapy sessions with men. “We’ve shut down on the phenomenon of male sexuality. Now, we’re starting to ease up on that natural fluidity of men. But it's always been there,” she says. “Sometimes you hide it because you don’t want to suffer from society’s punishments.” Of course, identity politics is a messy game. And while arousal makes up just one piece of the very complex puzzle that is sexual orientation, it is a major player. We’re quick to assign the “bisexual” label to those for which sexual arousal is not dictated by gender. But it’s not always a welcome title. “I am often forced to call myself ‘bi,’ but I rarely find labels appropriate,” says model Paul LaBlanc (a pseudonym). As Block explains, sexual orientation goes a lot further than the sexual activities we engage in. “I think to a great degree when people think about their own sexual orientation, they’re thinking about their hopes and dreams for themselves in terms of love and romance. Not just sex.” In her book, Ward insists that sex acts between men are not symptoms of a suppressed gay identity, but rather an example of the fluid nature of human sexuality. Still, some ask, why men? Ward writes, “By understanding their same-sex sexual practice as meaningless, accidental, or even necessary, straight white men can perform homosexual contact in heterosexual ways.” “Meaningless.” A hard word to sneak by a therapist. But this notion of meaninglessness may help explain what makes sex between men appealing. “Women are full of meaning,” says Block “One of the things that men like about other men is how meaningless it is. It’s just for fun.” That’s not to say that men don’t crave intimacy – they do, in its place. But Block suggests that for men looking for free, no-strings-attached sex, a male partner may be their best bet. Removing sex from its prescribed context is often discouraged in heterosexual relationships. If you’re looking to have sex for sport, doing it with another man might make some sense. Professional dominatrix Sandra LaMorgese once told AlterNet, “I’m dominant in every aspect of life but I'm not going to have a submissive partner. I need someone to dominate me. That way I get the balance too.” LaMorgese refers to herself as an “alpha submissive.” It's an experience that many men crave as well. And some will step outside the bounds of gender to achieve it. LaBlanc explains, “I tend strongly towards being dominant with women and submissive with men. Not totally in either direction, it's not that simple... But it is clear that I take on different roles with different genders.” “To me, no man has the soft indescribable beauty of a woman. And no woman can ‘take me’ the way a man can.” There are other reasons self-identified straight men might have sex with each other. Block explained that some men are looking for the BDSM element, which can involve humiliation by means of another penis, a larger penis. There’s the curiosity bit, the desire to be with someone ‘who looks like me.’ There's also mutual masturbation. And then there’s the simple fact that males manifest their sexual excitement in much more obvious ways than women, and that’s something a lot of guys find arousing, even relieving. Of course, condensing the scope of sexual desire isn’t something that can be done in a thousand words or so. The recent wave of interest in this not-so-recent phenomenon says something about the our current sexual climate. We can now admit that "bro jobs" are happening, and happening often. Though where they take place is often indicative of how people expect others to digest the news of these rendezvous. “I hear a lot about secrets,” says Block. The fact that society is starting to have more open discussions about sex is good. The fact that society only wants to discuss certain kinds of sex leaves something to be desired. But if we take a step back we might find that what traditionalists deem “unnatural” sexual behavior (i.e. anything outside the confines of heterosexual marriage) can be fairly intrinsic. However those participating in them want to self-identify is up to them. Block suggests we take a look at our closest "kissing cousins," the Bonobo. In her book, The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace Through Pleasure, Block explains that the apes often engage in what’s known as “penis fencing,” whereby two males will rub their erect penises against each other’s. She told us, “They stop each other from killing each other by rub rub rubbing, until they come come come. And then have a banana together or something," adding, "I think there’s a very positive and certainly very natural aspect to this.”
It’s not all about you, Bruce and Bono: This is why the Rock Hall is so lame
The history of rock and pop is like a giant iceberg: Only a tiny portion of it is readily visible. Rock’n’roll can engage you, entertain you and obsess you, regardless of whether you’re aware of the entire iceberg, just the tip, or anywhere in between. In order to love Bruce Springsteen, you don’t have to also know about Ramblin’ Jack Elliot; to enjoy Green Day, you don’t necessarily have to know who Stiff Little Fingers or D.O.A. are; and you can be enthralled by the power of Arcade Fire without ever having heard Pere Ubu, Stereolab, or the Feelies. Like a fractal, the endless permeations of rock and pop are both complete unto themselves and astounding when viewed from a larger perspective. Creating a monument to the beautiful, complex and diverse history of rock and pop is an exceedingly difficult task. This makes the idea and successful execution of “The” Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame very challenging (creating a fish-tank full of Hall of Fames targeted towards specific genres and interests would be a more realistic enterprise, though certainly less appealing to HBO). To further complicate matters, those who run the Hall apply a personal bias that diminishes the already limited credibility of the enterprise. Last week, I addressed one outstanding omission to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame (Kraftwerk). But there’s a lot more to say, including what the new crop of nominees reveal about the organization. First, let’s address how personal bias is clearly altering the complexion of the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. I only need to say three names: New York Dolls, Todd Rundgren, and the MC5. All clearly belong in any institution honoring creative and stylistic musical innovators who also achieved a high public profile (the omission of the Dolls, inarguably one of the most influential acts in the history of the genre, is especially confounding). These exclusions are so heinous that one can only conclude that somehow, something about these particular acts got under somebody’s skin. If one or more people have the ability to veto deserving artists just because of personal bias, we can basically toss the entire legitimacy of the enterprise out the window. Other omissions may not be personal, but instead reflect a consistent artistic bias of the Hall. For instance, the Carpenters made exquisite pop records constructed with a grace and skill comparable to Brian Wilson, George Martin, and Phil Spector; they were also a huge part of people’s lives and a generational touchstone. They belong in the Hall as much as other high-pop acts like the Mamas and the Papas, Neil Diamond, and Abba (all selections I agree with, by the way), yet clearly the “While we were listening to Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers in the 1970s we thought (fill in the blank) were uncool” bias of the Hall is going to block their entry. How about the Monkees? They made fantastic music, they contained at least one bona fide musical genius (Michael Nesmith), and they produced not only one of the best rock films ever made (Head), but the strangest and most combative rock TV special ever produced (33 1/3rdRevolutions Per Monkee, which is nothing short of a 60-minute acid blues prime time freak out). But I sincerely doubt the Monkees will ever get in the Hall. Now, listen, and listen close: Joan Jett began her career in a manufactured band, and her most famous hits were written by other artists; it’s arguable (but barely) that she is as artificial a construction as the Monkees, and she’s in the Hall. And true, the Monkees didn’t play instruments on their early hits, but the Dave Clark 5 are in the Hall, and drummer Dave Clark didn’t play on any of his own hit records. A further problem – and a big one -- is that the people operating the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame may know something about the genre, but they don’t know enough. For instance, the 1920s/30s minstrel singer Emmett Miller not only helped mainstream the blues, but his inventive and pioneering vocal style influenced everyone from Hank Williams to Bob Dylan; in his own way, Miller belongs in the Hall as much as Chuck Berry does, but that’ll happen around the same time Jann Wenner calls and asks me to write about Neu! More shockingly, Alan Lomax, the ethnomusicologist and archivist who recorded some of the most important music of the 20th Century (and whose recordings taught everyone from Dylan to the Stones to Zeppelin about authentic American roots music), isn’t in the Hall. I say, without reservation, that Lomax should have been in the first or second Hall of Fame class. Another flaw of the Hall is a tendency to not pay enough attention to the United Kingdom. Any rock fan outside of the United States would literally find it laughable that Thin Lizzy hasn’t been inducted. And the same applies to Mott the Hoople, another inexplicable omission caused by a careless and ignorant attitude towards British music (they’re trying to make up for that this year by nominating the Smiths, but where’s Joy Division, New Order, or the Cure?). Oh, and don’t get me started on Motorhead and Slayer. Just don’t. They’re only two of the most influential and visible rock acts of the last quarter century. On to the 2016 nominees. Cheap Trick certainly belongs in any Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame; they have credibility, quality, influence, and visibility. But if Cheap Trick are in the Hall, what about Electric Light Orchestra and the Move, two popular bands that were fundamental influences on Cheap Trick? Where do you draw the line and say, “This band is visible, innovative, and popular, but not visible, innovative and popular enough; this act had great influence, but they didn’t influence Springsteen the bands we care about?” I can’t stand Yes, but they probably belong in the hall. They made conceptually interesting and unique music and were a big part of people’s lives. Chicago are trickier. They were on the radio a lot and they did vaguely interesting things, but are they Hall of Famers? I mean, Madness are a hell of a lot more interesting and ginormous in the UK, but I don’t think anyone’s in a rush to put them in. Steve Miller was also popular during an era that was personally significant to the Hall’s higher-ups and voters; however, Miller had a creative and inventive spark that Chicago lacked, so personally, I’d vote no on Chicago and yes on Miller. The Cars, an inconsistent and contrived (but generationally significant) band that came up with some very good singles, are probably on their way in, but the idea that they’re going in before Roxy Music or the Modern Lovers is ludicrous. Personally, I’d vote no, unless I knew for sure that they would hand their award to Jonathan Richman, Bryan Ferry, and Brian Eno. Deep Purple are a no-brainer, a dynamic and influential band who absolutely belong in the Hall. You can’t write the story of heavy metal without them. I’m not a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails, but regardless, NIN are influential, innovative, and successful, and they’re a stone cold yes. I’m probably a weak yes on Chic, a much weaker yes on Chaka Khan, on the fence-leaning-to-yes on the Spinners and on the fence-leaning-to-no on the J.B.s The J.B.’s are a band of great power and nearly historic impact, but I think regularly inducting bands primarily known via their association with other artists is a dangerous raft to climb on (and one that already sailed, thanks to the ridiculous induction of the E Street Band). Call me when you induct The Witnesses (Louis Prima’s amazing, honking, rollicking and rocking band); then I’ll reconsider. I don’t think Janet Jackson was any great innovator, and if we’re going to induct state-of-the-art-pop artists who sold gazillions, I’d once again say, “Where are the Carpenters?” But she will draw viewers to the HBO induction show, so that’s a done deal. Listen, rock’n’roll isn't any one thing. It’s the sound of America's disenfranchised and dispossessed cultures, celebrated, mainstreamed and displayed as art. It’s the angry but ecstatic dynamite of the MC5 and the apocalyptic beauty of Tim Buckley; it’s the dirt-yard hallelujahs of Sid Hemphill and the whorehouse hosannas of ZZ Top; it’s the Southern California Car Dreams of the Beach Boys and the Hollywood Hills Bad Dreams of the Beach Boys. Any attempt to memorialize it within any single building or organization is destined to fail. But it would be nice if the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame tried just a little harder; I’d recommend taking a closer look at U.K. innovators and hitmakers, I’d really crawl into the historical alleys where people like Lomax and Miller lie, and most of all, to retain any shred of legitimacy, they have to find a way around the all-too-obvious personal biases that erode the credibility of the Hall enormously.The history of rock and pop is like a giant iceberg: Only a tiny portion of it is readily visible. Rock’n’roll can engage you, entertain you and obsess you, regardless of whether you’re aware of the entire iceberg, just the tip, or anywhere in between. In order to love Bruce Springsteen, you don’t have to also know about Ramblin’ Jack Elliot; to enjoy Green Day, you don’t necessarily have to know who Stiff Little Fingers or D.O.A. are; and you can be enthralled by the power of Arcade Fire without ever having heard Pere Ubu, Stereolab, or the Feelies. Like a fractal, the endless permeations of rock and pop are both complete unto themselves and astounding when viewed from a larger perspective. Creating a monument to the beautiful, complex and diverse history of rock and pop is an exceedingly difficult task. This makes the idea and successful execution of “The” Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame very challenging (creating a fish-tank full of Hall of Fames targeted towards specific genres and interests would be a more realistic enterprise, though certainly less appealing to HBO). To further complicate matters, those who run the Hall apply a personal bias that diminishes the already limited credibility of the enterprise. Last week, I addressed one outstanding omission to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame (Kraftwerk). But there’s a lot more to say, including what the new crop of nominees reveal about the organization. First, let’s address how personal bias is clearly altering the complexion of the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. I only need to say three names: New York Dolls, Todd Rundgren, and the MC5. All clearly belong in any institution honoring creative and stylistic musical innovators who also achieved a high public profile (the omission of the Dolls, inarguably one of the most influential acts in the history of the genre, is especially confounding). These exclusions are so heinous that one can only conclude that somehow, something about these particular acts got under somebody’s skin. If one or more people have the ability to veto deserving artists just because of personal bias, we can basically toss the entire legitimacy of the enterprise out the window. Other omissions may not be personal, but instead reflect a consistent artistic bias of the Hall. For instance, the Carpenters made exquisite pop records constructed with a grace and skill comparable to Brian Wilson, George Martin, and Phil Spector; they were also a huge part of people’s lives and a generational touchstone. They belong in the Hall as much as other high-pop acts like the Mamas and the Papas, Neil Diamond, and Abba (all selections I agree with, by the way), yet clearly the “While we were listening to Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers in the 1970s we thought (fill in the blank) were uncool” bias of the Hall is going to block their entry. How about the Monkees? They made fantastic music, they contained at least one bona fide musical genius (Michael Nesmith), and they produced not only one of the best rock films ever made (Head), but the strangest and most combative rock TV special ever produced (33 1/3rdRevolutions Per Monkee, which is nothing short of a 60-minute acid blues prime time freak out). But I sincerely doubt the Monkees will ever get in the Hall. Now, listen, and listen close: Joan Jett began her career in a manufactured band, and her most famous hits were written by other artists; it’s arguable (but barely) that she is as artificial a construction as the Monkees, and she’s in the Hall. And true, the Monkees didn’t play instruments on their early hits, but the Dave Clark 5 are in the Hall, and drummer Dave Clark didn’t play on any of his own hit records. A further problem – and a big one -- is that the people operating the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame may know something about the genre, but they don’t know enough. For instance, the 1920s/30s minstrel singer Emmett Miller not only helped mainstream the blues, but his inventive and pioneering vocal style influenced everyone from Hank Williams to Bob Dylan; in his own way, Miller belongs in the Hall as much as Chuck Berry does, but that’ll happen around the same time Jann Wenner calls and asks me to write about Neu! More shockingly, Alan Lomax, the ethnomusicologist and archivist who recorded some of the most important music of the 20th Century (and whose recordings taught everyone from Dylan to the Stones to Zeppelin about authentic American roots music), isn’t in the Hall. I say, without reservation, that Lomax should have been in the first or second Hall of Fame class. Another flaw of the Hall is a tendency to not pay enough attention to the United Kingdom. Any rock fan outside of the United States would literally find it laughable that Thin Lizzy hasn’t been inducted. And the same applies to Mott the Hoople, another inexplicable omission caused by a careless and ignorant attitude towards British music (they’re trying to make up for that this year by nominating the Smiths, but where’s Joy Division, New Order, or the Cure?). Oh, and don’t get me started on Motorhead and Slayer. Just don’t. They’re only two of the most influential and visible rock acts of the last quarter century. On to the 2016 nominees. Cheap Trick certainly belongs in any Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame; they have credibility, quality, influence, and visibility. But if Cheap Trick are in the Hall, what about Electric Light Orchestra and the Move, two popular bands that were fundamental influences on Cheap Trick? Where do you draw the line and say, “This band is visible, innovative, and popular, but not visible, innovative and popular enough; this act had great influence, but they didn’t influence Springsteen the bands we care about?” I can’t stand Yes, but they probably belong in the hall. They made conceptually interesting and unique music and were a big part of people’s lives. Chicago are trickier. They were on the radio a lot and they did vaguely interesting things, but are they Hall of Famers? I mean, Madness are a hell of a lot more interesting and ginormous in the UK, but I don’t think anyone’s in a rush to put them in. Steve Miller was also popular during an era that was personally significant to the Hall’s higher-ups and voters; however, Miller had a creative and inventive spark that Chicago lacked, so personally, I’d vote no on Chicago and yes on Miller. The Cars, an inconsistent and contrived (but generationally significant) band that came up with some very good singles, are probably on their way in, but the idea that they’re going in before Roxy Music or the Modern Lovers is ludicrous. Personally, I’d vote no, unless I knew for sure that they would hand their award to Jonathan Richman, Bryan Ferry, and Brian Eno. Deep Purple are a no-brainer, a dynamic and influential band who absolutely belong in the Hall. You can’t write the story of heavy metal without them. I’m not a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails, but regardless, NIN are influential, innovative, and successful, and they’re a stone cold yes. I’m probably a weak yes on Chic, a much weaker yes on Chaka Khan, on the fence-leaning-to-yes on the Spinners and on the fence-leaning-to-no on the J.B.s The J.B.’s are a band of great power and nearly historic impact, but I think regularly inducting bands primarily known via their association with other artists is a dangerous raft to climb on (and one that already sailed, thanks to the ridiculous induction of the E Street Band). Call me when you induct The Witnesses (Louis Prima’s amazing, honking, rollicking and rocking band); then I’ll reconsider. I don’t think Janet Jackson was any great innovator, and if we’re going to induct state-of-the-art-pop artists who sold gazillions, I’d once again say, “Where are the Carpenters?” But she will draw viewers to the HBO induction show, so that’s a done deal. Listen, rock’n’roll isn't any one thing. It’s the sound of America's disenfranchised and dispossessed cultures, celebrated, mainstreamed and displayed as art. It’s the angry but ecstatic dynamite of the MC5 and the apocalyptic beauty of Tim Buckley; it’s the dirt-yard hallelujahs of Sid Hemphill and the whorehouse hosannas of ZZ Top; it’s the Southern California Car Dreams of the Beach Boys and the Hollywood Hills Bad Dreams of the Beach Boys. Any attempt to memorialize it within any single building or organization is destined to fail. But it would be nice if the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame tried just a little harder; I’d recommend taking a closer look at U.K. innovators and hitmakers, I’d really crawl into the historical alleys where people like Lomax and Miller lie, and most of all, to retain any shred of legitimacy, they have to find a way around the all-too-obvious personal biases that erode the credibility of the Hall enormously.
Love “Fargo” but hate “True Detective?”: Inside the good, the bad and the ugly of TV’s prestige anthology shows
You may have heard that we have a lot of good television these days. As David Carr wrote in this 2014 column, “In the short span of five years, table talk has shifted, at least among the people I socialize with, from books and movies to television. The idiot box gained heft and intellectual credibility to the point where you seem dumb if you are not watching it.” And in the space of prestige TV—that niche of expensive and critically acclaimed television, made for that niche of wealthy and critical audiences—you’re dumbest of all if you’re not hip to “anthology series,” a fancy-sounding name for a show that reboots its premise with some regularity. (Often, it switches up the actors, too, though that’s not a requirement.) It’s a phrase that gets used a lot today, but anthology series are nearly as old as television and haven’t gone anywhere, though they have changed quite a bit. The heyday of the anthology series was in the 1950s, when American audiences were looking for theater, literally, on television. There’s a lot to say on this topic—Stephen Bowie wrote an in-depth piece for the A.V. Club last year on “Playhouse 90,” a CBS anthology series that swept the Emmys in 1957 with its high quality, huge budget, and live broadcasts. PBS’ ongoing “Masterpiece Theatre” is an extension of this same desire to see plays enacted on television, except exhibited in installments, over the course of a few weeks or months. But it’s not just theater. Thrillers like the iconic “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”—and the decidedly less iconic Nickelodeon series “Are You Afraid Of The Dark?”—are also anthology series. Like everything else TV does, the format is an attempt to snag a consistent audience. Some shows go for serialization (“Lost”) or even hyperserialization (“All My Children”) in order to keep an audience interested. The anthology series has a different angle; it promises a thrill or a chill, but is always mixing up the how. As a result, the viewing experience is shot through with a bit more tension; the audience can’t expect the same actors, relationships, or storylines that got them interested in the first place. Currently, anthology miniseries represent a middle ground between film and television—even more of a middle ground than traditional prestige drama, which often stretched to five, six, or seven seasons. An anthology promises a collection of stories that definitively end, instead of trickle off; but it also promises eight or 10 or 12 installments of each story, to develop over a few months. The boundedness of the format means that movie stars like Matthew McConaughey, Felicity Huffman, and Jessica Lange can be drawn into starring roles without being tied to a years-long contract. It also means a viewer can join the show in season four and still watch a complete story. And as evidenced by how all four of the anthology miniseries on air right now are headed by distinctive showrunners, the format offers a canvas for an incredible exploration of style. But though each one has had elements of brilliance, there isn’t one that is peerless — “True Detective”’s second season was a failure, “Fargo” has too many weird wannabe problems to be really great, “American Crime” is a bit too broadcast-network boring, and “American Horror Story” is out of its goddamn mind. That’s a lot of time and money spent on four shows when none of them are the next “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad.” I think this is because each series is trying so hard to be relevant and popular, albeit in four rather different ways. Anthology miniseries have been packaged and presented as the next big thing for studios as well as audiences, and each one has its own tragic flaw. “True Detective,” the most well-known series, has the most romantic origin story possible—unknown writer Nic Pizzolatto creating a script on a shadow and a dream, and then somehow getting it noticed by A-lister Matthew McConaughey, who angled to play Rust Cohle and attracted fellow star Woody Harrelson to the project. “True Detective” was the subject of a bidding war in spring 2012, as HBO, Showtime, and FX battled over it. HBO, as we know, won this battle. Showtime stepped out of the anthology miniseries game. FX went on immediately to create “Fargo,” in a studio-driven creative process that is almost the exact opposite of Pizzolatto’s lonely scribbling. FX teamed up with MGM’s television arm to choose a movie to adapt into a series. The Coen Brothers’ cult hit “Fargo” was selected from a list. It’s no wonder, then, that “True Detective”’s fiery appeal crashed and burned in season two, as the extremely inexperienced Pizzolatto made every second-season mistake in the book, along with taking some time for petty digs at critics, his former colleagues, and the industry at large. And it's similarly no wonder that “Fargo” has felt frustratingly derivative right from the start, as its well-compensated characters take on the Minnesotan accent that “Fargo,” the film, drew out from obscurity and lent charm through the studied musings of Frances McDormand. Meanwhile, though “American Horror Story” is the show that inspired “True Detective”’s Nic Pizzolatto to build his spec script in anthology form, Ryan Murphy’s creation became an anthology series almost after the fact. The first season has been retroactively dubbed “Murder House,” but when the show debuted, FX didn’t package the show as an anthology—either hedging on the idea of a changing premise every season or worrying that audiences, confused by the format, might not tune in. When “American Horror Story” stuck with the anthology format—now in its fifth iteration, with “Hotel”—viewers and critics stuck with it, too, taken by both the wild gyrations of Murphy’s style and the incredible talent he drew to the show, including Lange, Kathy Bates, and Sarah Paulson. But the format has also exacerbated a lot of Murphy’s longstanding issues with continuity and character development, flattening the show into an hours-long music video. And “American Crime,” on ABC, is good, but deadly earnest—after-school special earnest. The show boasts more focus on diversity than any of the other series—“American Horror Story” is a study in fantastic and diverse casting, but “American Crime” is saturated with the politics of race relations. It’s brought to screen by John Ridley, screenwriter for Oscar winner “12 Years A Slave.” And of all these shows, it is most like HBO’s heralded “The Wire”—but without that show’s dry wit and coarse speech, because you know, broadcast. The portrayal of addiction feels a little too Hollywood, and the pronouncements of racism a little too convenient. It’s a reminder of both why we love television and why prestige TV was so thrilling when it first appeared on the scene in the late ‘90s—broadcast’s circumspectness is understandable and even necessary, but it’s also so cathartic to engage in the issues of the day with the invective, grit, and physicality that is only possible on cable. For all that “anthology miniseries” is a fancy-sounding phrase with many syllables, it’s not a guarantor of quality. It’s more that “anthology miniseries” is the label we give our most ambitious experiments. And you don’t always want to be in the same room as ambitious experiments—haven’t we learned anything from comic books? Still, what is true for Spider-Man is true for us, too—there are rewards to be reaped, along with the risks. Just wear your safety goggles.
Dying is never easy: Assisted suicide doesn’t necessarily help us have a “good death”
Governor Jerry Brown has just signed a measure making California the fifth state in the country to legalize physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. A former Jesuit seminary student, Gov. Brown openly voiced conflicting feelings over the bill, but claims he ultimately does not want to deny people the right to end of life options. As a pro-choice liberal with a background working in hospice, most people I know assume I am enthusiastic about the passing of this measure, but the truth is that it gives me pause. When I was 25 years old my father asked me to help him die. We were standing in his bedroom and he was in the mechanical hospital bed the hospice team had installed. I had just finished brushing his dentures, and they were still drying in my hand, when he proposed the idea that I compile all of his pain meds and help him ingest them. I placed the dentures gently on the swiveling table at his bedside and told him I needed to think about it. Alone in the living room I stood before the sliding glass doors of my father’s Orange County condominium and watched some neighbor kids playing in the pool. I would have done anything my father asked of me. I had already quit my job so that I could care for him. I had defied his team of doctors who urged me to place him in a skilled care facility, and I had moved into his condo with him, so that he could live out his final weeks in his own home. I slept with a baby monitor next to my pillow, starting out of my sleep every night when I heard his voice. But this? Helping him die? Something about it didn’t feel right. I wouldn’t be able to put my finger on what that feeling was until nearly seven years later, long after he was gone. I had been working as a hospice grief counselor in Chicago for nearly four years, and was preparing for the birth of my first child. I spent my days driving around the snowy Illinois suburbs helping people care for their dying loved ones, just as I had with my father. All that long winter while my belly grew so large that I could barely fit behind the wheel of my car, I was struck by the differences in the ways we welcome life into this world, and the ways in which we pay homage to its end. During my pregnancy I was thrown multiple baby showers, invested hours in birthing classes, employed a doula and a midwife, lit candles as I wrote letters to my yet-to-be-born child, and both inwardly and outwardly celebrated the coming change in my life. The contrast to the hushed and somber homes in which I watched people meeting the end of their lives was stark. The air was often thick with fear, sadness and resistance. There were no rituals, no ceremonies, and very few blessings bestowed upon the end of life. It turns out that as the human race has extended life well into our eighties and nineties, we have also turned away from facing death. One of the issues most commonly faced by hospices across the country is the problem of patients who sign up with only a day or two to live. Dr. BJ Miller of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco reports that, “in 2012 forty-two percent of Californians died in hospice. That’s almost half. But a third of those were on hospice for less than a week.” Of this dilemma he goes on to explain that, “in a day or two we can get a little physical comfort for the patient, make a little space to dwell in the emotional realm, maybe have a reconciling conversation or two, and maybe eke out a salvaged, non-horrible death. That’s better than the alternative.” My mother’s death was a prime example of the alternative. Rather than opting for hospice at the end of her four-year battle with colon cancer, as her doctors advised, she continued seeking last-ditch treatments until her very last hours, where she died in the middle of the night in a hospital in Washington, D.C., without saying goodbye to those she loved, having failed to accept the end of her life. My father wanted his death to be different. He knew he was dying; he had accepted this, and he was seemingly at peace with it. His only wish was to do it in his own home. And so on that day when he asked me for help ending his life, something in me balked. Wasn’t the whole point of this to face it? To be present to death? Unable to bring myself to respond to my father’s request, I instead confided in the hospice nurse. I felt as though I was betraying my father by doing so, but what happened next would ease this concern. The nurse gave me a sad, warm smile and told me something that I would see play out in so many of the homes I would later work in myself. “Dying isn’t easy,” she said to me. “But there are so many things we can do to make someone more comfortable.” She explained that she wanted to explore the reasons my father wanted to hasten his already impending death. Was it possible that his medications needed to be adjusted, that he was experiencing more pain than was necessary? Or was there perhaps something causing him psychological discomfort? It turned out that it was both. He was in pain, something the hospice team was able to remedy with adjustments to his medication, but more importantly, he was worried about something. He admitted that he felt burdensome. The guilt he felt about letting me give over my life to take care of the end of his was weighing on him greatly. I assured him that I was dedicated to sharing his final days with him, no matter how difficult they might be, and I promised him that I would be there, holding his hand, when he took his final breaths. Those last weeks of his life were not easy, not for him or for me. But they also were not in any way painful or horrific. There were, in fact, many peaceful hours spent, with my father both in and out of consciousness as he slowly ventured towards the end. In his lucid moments we looked into each other’s old, familiar eyes and said beautiful and necessary things to each other. And when he was gone I had no regrets about how he left, or what the circumstances were that led up to his departure, something I very much felt following my mother’s passing, and something I see so often in the clients I counsel through their grief process. Ever since my father died, ever since witnessing what Miller refers to as a “good death,” I have come to hold a deep reverence for the process of dying. I ultimately support California’s new End of Life bill because I think people should have as much freedom as possible when it comes to their own medical decisions, and I also do not believe people should suffer unnecessarily. But I do think that the actual process of dying should not be overlooked, nor hastened, in cases when there is much that can be done to make it comfortable. Let us not always leap to the last page without at least skimming the last chapter. My concern about this new measure is that although it appears on the outside to allow us to embrace death in significant way, in certain cases it will also provide a way for us to shrink from it. I do believe that there are cases in which physician-assisted suicide can eliminate potential weeks and months of suffering, but my fear is that some patients will choose assisted suicide as a way of circumnavigating issues that could have been otherwise addressed, such as fear, guilt, and sadness. My hope is that the physicians who are signing off on assisted suicide are asking the same questions that the hospice nurse asked of my father, and that they are looking at all the factors contributing to a patient’s wish to end their life. My father died naturally only a few weeks after that conversation with the nurse, and I was there holding his hand when he took his last breaths. In those last days we had some of our most profound conversations, moments I’m so grateful we were able to have. His last words to me were, “If there were no death, we would never know how sweet life really is.”
Benghazi farce blows up in GOP’s face: The political witch hunt faces unwanted scrutiny
The chaos and dysfunction currently roiling the Republican majority in the House of Representatives has made life difficult for the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Under the leadership of Trey Gowdy, the committee had been maintaining a low profile, keeping quiet and staying out of the news as it dug up dirt on Hillary Clinton to strategically leak to the press. The low-profile game plan was shot to hell by Kevin McCarthy, who bragged of the committee’s political agenda on national television, and was then forced to walk back his comments and deny saying the thing he said several times over. Suddenly, Gowdy and his committee were facing the one thing they’d hoped to avoid: scrutiny. That scrutiny has taken the form of a front-page New York Times investigation into what the committee has been up to over the past year and half. What the paper turned up is an investigation that didn’t really seem to be going anywhere until Hillary Clinton’s emails emerged as an issue, at which point its focus “shifted” from the actual attacks in Benghazi to Clinton’s electronic communications. And, in keeping with the general disarray of the House Republican caucus, the Republicans on the Benghazi committee are offering confused and contradictory explanations for what is going on with the investigation. As the Times notes, the official response from the Republicans on the committee is to “dispute any suggestion that their inquiry… has been partisan or ineffective or that it has changed course.” That has been the consistent refrain from Republicans since the committee was established, though it became harder to maintain that fiction in the aftermath of McCarthy’s inopportune truth-telling. But the unofficial Republican response to the committee’s recent troubles is a bit more enlightening: 
Senior Republican officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing confidential conversations, said that Mr. Boehner had long been suspicious of the administration’s handling of the attacks and that Mrs. Clinton’s emails gave him a way to keep the issue alive and to cause political problems for her campaign. But he thought that the task was too delicate to entrust to others and that it should remain with Mr. Gowdy, the former prosecutor.Boehner announces he’s stepping down as Speaker, McCarthy gives up the game on the committee’s real purpose, and now Republican officials are dishing to the Times about how it was all the outgoing Speaker’s idea to focus on Hillary’s emails for political benefit. This has all the hallmarks of a cover-your-ass operation – Paul Waldman sees this as Gowdy and his people working to push away any responsibility for what is turning into a damaging story for his committee. One can understand why the chairman would want to do that, given that Gowdy’s and the committee’s credibility are intertwined. His reputation as a serious, “prosecutorial” investigator was offered by the committee’s supporters as a defense against claims that the investigation would become a partisan fishing expedition. But it doesn’t really matter what excuses Republicans come up with. The Times story has punched a hole in the committee’s credibility and made clear just how little trust one can place in the public statements emerging from the Benghazi investigators. Way back in May, the House Select Committee on Benghazi released was is, to date, its only official publication: an interim progress report detailing what the committee had accomplished in the first year of its existence. Even by its own reckoning, the committee couldn’t point to much in the way of meaningful discoveries – a large portion of the report is devoted to complaints about delays in obtaining documents. But Gowdy and the Republican majority insisted that the investigation was proceeding apace and focused on “three broad questions” related to the Benghazi attacks: why we were there, what actions “relevant agencies” took during the attacks, and the White House’s response. They wrote that they were going to start conducting interviews with personnel outside the State Department. “The Committee takes its mandate seriously,” the report concluded. We now know that none of that was true. The three-pronged investigation was supplanted by a singular focus on Clinton’s emails. The interviews they promised would happen were, per the Times, “never followed up on.” And its mandate seems to have been abandoned in a messy political fight that is threatening to blow up in their faces.
Columbus Day is the next Confederate Flag: The holiday’s political context is too unsavory to keep ignoring
It wasn’t long ago that Columbus Day – which was begun as a Colorado state holiday 1907 by Italian-Americans in Denver – was just one on those days most people didn’t think about much. If you went to school or worked for the government or most companies, you got the day off. (It became a federal holiday in 1930, courtesy of the Knights of Columbus.) Some Italians of Italian descent loved it, Native American activists and Howard Zinn disciples campaigned against it, but most were just grateful for a free October day and didn't really question why. But over the years, as Americans have become more aware of issues of race, more sensitive to the oppression of Native Americans, and more critical of received myths about our history, the consensus over Columbus Day has been gradually chipped away. One by one, cities – Seattle, Minneapolis, Albuquerque -- have reversed the date the once celebrated the arrival of a European who would turn American life upside down and renamed it Indigenous Peoples Day. It probably hasn’t helped, either, that a lot of employers have removed it from the day-off list. Indifference seems to be dooming it in some places. “The Pew Research Center found the second Monday in October is ‘one of the most inconsistently celebrated’ holidays,” The Washington Post reports. “Just 23 states and the District of Columbia (plus Puerto Rico and American Samoa) recognize Columbus Day as a paid holiday.” The Post suggests that the holiday could fade out from apathy, quoting poll data that show how few people care about it. But what's more interesting is how the polarization of American life has focused on Columbus Day. There are people who love and will defend the holiday, but many of the most vocal are nativists and extreme racists; the hashtag #ColumbusWasAHero has been inspiring white supremacists all day. Many of these posts are harsh indictments about those evil, naïve liberals, of course. (Only a few of these take the even-handed approach of a commenter who argues, “If Columbus hadn't discovered America for the Spanish, then the Danes could have, and tacos would have herring on them.”) On the left, the tone is almost as extreme. Last year, “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” came up with a classic “How Is That Still a Thing?” on Columbus Day, which includes images of Americans binge-drinking and throwing up in public as it describes Columbus inaugurating “a long tradition of obnoxious white people visiting Caribbean islands and acting like they own the place.” (The bit closes by describing “America’s least favorite holiday” as dedicated to “a murderous egomaniac whose most famous discovery was a case of getting lost and refusing to ask directions.”) But the laugh-out loud parody of Oliver’s show is positively lightweight compared to the indictment of Columbus himself by Vox earlier today. Dylan Matt’s piece gives us “9 reasons Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel.” (Here are three: “Columbus kidnapped a Carib woman and gave her to a crew member to rape,” “On Hispaniola, a member of Columbus's crew publicly cut off an Indian's ears to shock others into submission,” and “56 years after Columbus's first voyage, only 500 out of 300,000 Indians remained on Hispaniola,” due to suicide and murder by Columbus’s men.) It's not just a war of words, either: The Detroit Free Press reports that a Columbus statue going back to 1910 "has been splashed with fake blood, and a hatchet has been taped to his forehead as if it had just been struck." At this point, it's probably too late for Christopher Columbus — you can't unlearn those history lessons. If a more nuanced point of view is possible at this point – and it’s pretty distasteful to argue in favor of the destruction and enslavement of native people, no matter what – it’ll surely get lost in the noise of social media. It’s not that people on each side are “politicizing” Columbus Day – it’s that the holiday's political context, which has always been there, has become more explicit, and more part of the larger national conversation. If this kind of intensity keeps up – angry shouters on the pro-Columbus right, angry pleas on the anti-Columbus left – we won't have Columbus Day to kick around. There are surely moderates left of the issue – likely the same kind of Italian-Americans who inaugurated the holiday almost a century ago, motivated more by ethnic pride than ideology – but they won’t matter much longer. We seem very likely headed for a world where Columbus Day resembles the Confederate Flag: if it’s just a mix of Limbaugh-loving crazies defending it, who would want to be seen cheering on "1492 and the ocean blue?" Knowing what we know now about Columbus, of course, it's hard to be upset about this. We hate to see anyone's day off disappearing in a country dedicated to overwork, but it's time for Columbus to take his last sail.It wasn’t long ago that Columbus Day – which was begun as a Colorado state holiday 1907 by Italian-Americans in Denver – was just one on those days most people didn’t think about much. If you went to school or worked for the government or most companies, you got the day off. (It became a federal holiday in 1930, courtesy of the Knights of Columbus.) Some Italians of Italian descent loved it, Native American activists and Howard Zinn disciples campaigned against it, but most were just grateful for a free October day and didn't really question why. But over the years, as Americans have become more aware of issues of race, more sensitive to the oppression of Native Americans, and more critical of received myths about our history, the consensus over Columbus Day has been gradually chipped away. One by one, cities – Seattle, Minneapolis, Albuquerque -- have reversed the date the once celebrated the arrival of a European who would turn American life upside down and renamed it Indigenous Peoples Day. It probably hasn’t helped, either, that a lot of employers have removed it from the day-off list. Indifference seems to be dooming it in some places. “The Pew Research Center found the second Monday in October is ‘one of the most inconsistently celebrated’ holidays,” The Washington Post reports. “Just 23 states and the District of Columbia (plus Puerto Rico and American Samoa) recognize Columbus Day as a paid holiday.” The Post suggests that the holiday could fade out from apathy, quoting poll data that show how few people care about it. But what's more interesting is how the polarization of American life has focused on Columbus Day. There are people who love and will defend the holiday, but many of the most vocal are nativists and extreme racists; the hashtag #ColumbusWasAHero has been inspiring white supremacists all day. Many of these posts are harsh indictments about those evil, naïve liberals, of course. (Only a few of these take the even-handed approach of a commenter who argues, “If Columbus hadn't discovered America for the Spanish, then the Danes could have, and tacos would have herring on them.”) On the left, the tone is almost as extreme. Last year, “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” came up with a classic “How Is That Still a Thing?” on Columbus Day, which includes images of Americans binge-drinking and throwing up in public as it describes Columbus inaugurating “a long tradition of obnoxious white people visiting Caribbean islands and acting like they own the place.” (The bit closes by describing “America’s least favorite holiday” as dedicated to “a murderous egomaniac whose most famous discovery was a case of getting lost and refusing to ask directions.”) But the laugh-out loud parody of Oliver’s show is positively lightweight compared to the indictment of Columbus himself by Vox earlier today. Dylan Matt’s piece gives us “9 reasons Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel.” (Here are three: “Columbus kidnapped a Carib woman and gave her to a crew member to rape,” “On Hispaniola, a member of Columbus's crew publicly cut off an Indian's ears to shock others into submission,” and “56 years after Columbus's first voyage, only 500 out of 300,000 Indians remained on Hispaniola,” due to suicide and murder by Columbus’s men.) It's not just a war of words, either: The Detroit Free Press reports that a Columbus statue going back to 1910 "has been splashed with fake blood, and a hatchet has been taped to his forehead as if it had just been struck." At this point, it's probably too late for Christopher Columbus — you can't unlearn those history lessons. If a more nuanced point of view is possible at this point – and it’s pretty distasteful to argue in favor of the destruction and enslavement of native people, no matter what – it’ll surely get lost in the noise of social media. It’s not that people on each side are “politicizing” Columbus Day – it’s that the holiday's political context, which has always been there, has become more explicit, and more part of the larger national conversation. If this kind of intensity keeps up – angry shouters on the pro-Columbus right, angry pleas on the anti-Columbus left – we won't have Columbus Day to kick around. There are surely moderates left of the issue – likely the same kind of Italian-Americans who inaugurated the holiday almost a century ago, motivated more by ethnic pride than ideology – but they won’t matter much longer. We seem very likely headed for a world where Columbus Day resembles the Confederate Flag: if it’s just a mix of Limbaugh-loving crazies defending it, who would want to be seen cheering on "1492 and the ocean blue?" Knowing what we know now about Columbus, of course, it's hard to be upset about this. We hate to see anyone's day off disappearing in a country dedicated to overwork, but it's time for Columbus to take his last sail.
The DNC screwed Hillary — now get ready for a Bernie Sanders earthquake
With so many people thinking the system is rigged and that politics has devolved into mere vulgar entertainment, the Democratic Party’s choice of a Las Vegas casino as the venue for its first presidential debate seems counterintuitive. That the casino in question bears the surname of Steve Wynn seems odd as well. In 2012, Wynn, once a Democrat of sorts, dropped $10 million on Karl Rove’s Super PAC. He’s gone on Fox News to lambaste Obama, whom he calls a socialist. His punishment: a ton of free publicity plus whatever it cost to rent the hall. The Democratic National Committee delayed the debates as long as it could and limited their total number to six. By way of comparison, there were 26 debates in 2008. The first was held in April 2007; by this point in the cycle there had already been 13. To enforce its new limit the party threatens a drastic sanction: anyone caught participating in a rogue debate will be locked out of all party debates. The phrase ‘Democratic National Committee’ is imprecise. When DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced the schedule last August she didn’t say who made the decision or how. Nor did anyone ask. It seems like an awfully closed system for an outfit with the word ‘democratic’ right there in its name. I wondered how the party picked it. Did its national committee hold a meeting? If so, was it public? Was there a notice, agenda, or minutes? Was there even a vote? On Thursday I spoke to the DNC communications director, a nice man named Luis Miranda. After a few minutes of polite evasions I had my answers: no, no, no, no, no and no. From what I could glean, staff made recommendations to Schultz and she then made the call all on her own. It isn’t clear that party rules authorize her to do so. What is clear is that they shouldn’t. Miranda told me the party consults with all the candidates. I don’t doubt him, but the consultations don’t appear to mean much, in that four of the five candidates wanted more debates. The fifth is Hillary Clinton, who recently said in a low whisper that she’s ‘open’ to more debates. Clinton is still the nominal frontrunner and the establishment choice. In 2008 Schultz was in the bunker with Clinton till the bitter end. Clinton is the only candidate in the field likely to retain Schultz in her present job or otherwise advance her career. There’s a good chance the only important consultation Schultz had was with Clinton. This should come as no surprise. Every four years party insiders tweak the process in hopes that some establishment favorite can wrap things up early. Due to the law of unintended consequences, and because these people aren’t nearly as smart as they think, this almost always backfires. Republicans did it this year with delegate selection rules that starting March 15, Super Tuesday, award candidates who win a mere plurality of the vote all of the delegates. The idea was to save Jeb Bush, or some Bush doppelganger, the trouble of a long, messy nomination fight. Among the variables left out of their equation: Donald Trump and a field the size of the Boston Marathon. Their new nightmare: seven of their 15 candidates survive to Super Tuesday, when Trump gets 24 percent of the vote and 100 percent of the delegates, including in Florida where he waves adios to Jeb and Marco Rubio. That’s right. Trump’s only possible path to victory comes via rules meant to send him packing before he broke any crockery. Nice work, fellas. Schultz’s brazen move to muzzle debate wasn’t any smarter. As Trump points out, debates are free advertising. Democrats could use some. The contrast with the Republicans might have helped. Trump’s made them so rabid Democrats could have scored points just by being polite. Debates could have helped Clinton by reminding voters there’s more to her than the email scandal. And they’d have gotten her outdoors. If she had her druthers, she’d never leave her comfort zone. It’s one reason Bernie Sanders could cut her lead from 60 to 16 points. By limiting debate Schultz is enabling Clinton, not helping her. All of which raises the stakes Tuesday night. What Bernie Sanders has done is all the more remarkable for his having done it without benefit of a primetime debate and despite a virtual media blackout imposed by a know-it-all press. In 2008 Obama drew crowds half the size Sanders pulls and got written up like the Beatles at Shea Stadium. The press believes only in polls and money. In September 2007 Clinton led the young, charismatic Obama by 14 points after debating him every other week for six months. She still led by 8 in national polls the night he ran her over in Iowa. On the eve of their first debate she leads Sanders, a disheveled, 74-year-old socialist from Vermont, by 16 points. Last week Sanders’ finance report showed over a million small donors, better than Obama’s record 2008 pace. More impressive to the press, he pulled even with Hillary in total money raised. This week it began giving him some of the coverage he deserved all along. In a primary, packed stadiums and an army of volunteers and small-dollar donors mean more than polls and Super PACs. Some say Sanders has hit his ceiling but he hasn’t even had a chance to reach his audience. Tuesday will be the first long look many centrist Democrats have had at him and the first time anyone has examined him side by side with Clinton. If he picks up as many points for his performance as Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio did for theirs, it will be an earthquake. No one should underestimate Clinton’s forensic skills. She’s never lost a debate to anyone but Barack Obama and even those were close. There are two dangers for her. One is stylistic. Urged on by the media, her maladroit staff still pursues its five-year, 10-point plan to make her seem more “spontaneous” and “authentic.” These are the same folks who taught her to say ‘ordinary Americans’ and who pepper her speeches with the flattest jokes in the history of politics. Her best bet between now and Tuesday is to have as little to do with them as possible. Clinton somehow translates ‘being authentic’ into being more like someone else, someone more ‘ordinary.’ In April she got in a van and rode from New York to Iowa. She named the van ‘Scooby’ even though it wasn’t hers, ate at a Chipotle and rhapsodized about people she met glancingly along the way. No one told her that ordinary people don’t drive 1,000 miles except in an emergency or on a camping trip, or that she’s far too old to be naming her van after a cartoon character. Little has changed. Now she gets down with the common folk by flipping pancakes with Savannah Guthrie on the "Today" show. No one is fooled. She’s Hillary Clinton. She hasn’t touched a griddle since Bill got elected governor of Arkansas. The closest she’s come to seeming like a regular gal was on "Saturday Night Live" reading from a script written by sketch comedy writers for a TV show. If you’re a passionate, cerebral wonk, busting a move with Ellen or yucking it up with Jimmy Kimmel won’t make you seem any more real; just the opposite. Clinton doesn’t need to be more authentic, she needs to be more honest. The email affair may go down as the ultimate example of the old saw that it isn’t the crime, it’s the cover up. I don’t know if she broke any law. I do know everything she said in that circus of a press conference at the UN has thus far proved untrue. And to what end? Imagine if she’d taken a different approach. Imagine if instead of all the folderol about the server being just for convenience, the emails being personal, and her being just the most transparent person ever, she’d looked straight into a camera and said something like this: I don’t know all the facts but I know I made mistakes. I always meant to abide by the letter of the law. Americans are right to worry about the excesses and abuses that arise from government secrecy. If I’m your president, I promise you a truly open and accountable government. She couldn’t say it because admitting fault comes hard to her, and because she doesn’t believe it. From her tenure as Secretary of State, from her remarks on the Edward Snowden case and for lots of other reasons we know her basic take on government secrets is ‘the more the better.’ This is her problem; misunderstanding many of the issues she studies so hard. She can’t speak with conviction of the evils of globalization, she spent years cheering it on and doesn’t really get what’s wrong with it. She can’t get too worked up about pay to play politics; she perfected it and still deems it the best way to win elections. After four years as Secretary of State she still doesn’t see the folly of exporting democracy by force of arms, or that our safety lies in the rule of law. Clinton has reversed herself on two huge issues: the Keystone pipeline and the Trans Pacific Partnership. She’ll get less credit than she’d like and fume about how hard it is to satisfy liberals. But in making each switch she looked and sounded as if she were moving pawns on a chess board. She announced the Keystone decision in a blog that provided almost no rationale; the line the "SNL" writers gave her was stronger than anything she said about it in real life. Her TPP interview makes clear her commitment there is provisional. (She hasn’t seen the text) She speaks of jobs and currency but not a word on the issue many progressives find most galling, the ceding to corporate interests of the prerogatives of democracy. Nothing she’s ever said in public suggests she’s given that much thought. Sanders faces different challenges. He takes justifiable pride in never having run an attack ad and has taken care throughout this race never to attack Hillary. On Tuesday he must lay out their differences and explain why they matter. It wouldn’t be ‘negative’ or personal, it would be logical and factual and also indispensable. Bernie doesn’t have an authenticity problem. He is that rare politician who stood his ground and waited for the world to come to him. The bum advice he gets from the Zeitgeist consultants pertains to anger. They equate him to Trump, the idea being that both are vessels of populist anger. It’s only a tiny bit true. The violent rage of Trump’s base has to do with race, gender, sexuality and status. Those who feel it would be happy sitting in the audience of the Howard Beale Show, or just listening to Rush in their car. When Trump gets vicious they get a vicarious thrill. The rest of America is over the condition of the middle class, the democracy and the planet. All they want to hear is a plan. Only a portion of the hard core of Bernie’s base is in the least bit dogmatic. They may like a little anger but what they really like is the truth. Sanders’ enemies hope to paint him as an ideologue and a grouch. He must make it through the night without giving them any ammunition. Hillary’s recent epiphanies attest to just how much Sanders has moved the debate. If the TPP dies he more than anyone will deserve the credit. Trump has shown that a rich celebrity can succeed in politics without buying very many TV ads. Bernie’s proving that anyone can. In 2008 Obama built the biggest grass movement in the history of politics, but once he won he took it private. Bernie’s movement is built for his supporters and built to last. Bernie’s miles ahead of Hillary on the issues that count the most but there are two things he still needs to do. The first is to speak more to the problem of public corruption and inefficiency. On most issues most voters are Democrats, yet Republicans run two of the three branches of the federal government and stand a very good chance of perfecting their monopoly in 2016. Voters want to know that the party of government is ready to fix the government. The second thing he or any progressive must do is help people connect the dots: show how climate change, globalization, pay-to-play politics and mindless militarism reinforce one another, then offer them not just another liberal to do list but a coherent theory of the problem and a strategy for solving it rooted in values deeper than ideology. It’s been so long since any politician in America has done that and he’s one of the few who could. If he starts that discussion on Tuesday night, there’s no telling where this will all go.With so many people thinking the system is rigged and that politics has devolved into mere vulgar entertainment, the Democratic Party’s choice of a Las Vegas casino as the venue for its first presidential debate seems counterintuitive. That the casino in question bears the surname of Steve Wynn seems odd as well. In 2012, Wynn, once a Democrat of sorts, dropped $10 million on Karl Rove’s Super PAC. He’s gone on Fox News to lambaste Obama, whom he calls a socialist. His punishment: a ton of free publicity plus whatever it cost to rent the hall. The Democratic National Committee delayed the debates as long as it could and limited their total number to six. By way of comparison, there were 26 debates in 2008. The first was held in April 2007; by this point in the cycle there had already been 13. To enforce its new limit the party threatens a drastic sanction: anyone caught participating in a rogue debate will be locked out of all party debates. The phrase ‘Democratic National Committee’ is imprecise. When DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced the schedule last August she didn’t say who made the decision or how. Nor did anyone ask. It seems like an awfully closed system for an outfit with the word ‘democratic’ right there in its name. I wondered how the party picked it. Did its national committee hold a meeting? If so, was it public? Was there a notice, agenda, or minutes? Was there even a vote? On Thursday I spoke to the DNC communications director, a nice man named Luis Miranda. After a few minutes of polite evasions I had my answers: no, no, no, no, no and no. From what I could glean, staff made recommendations to Schultz and she then made the call all on her own. It isn’t clear that party rules authorize her to do so. What is clear is that they shouldn’t. Miranda told me the party consults with all the candidates. I don’t doubt him, but the consultations don’t appear to mean much, in that four of the five candidates wanted more debates. The fifth is Hillary Clinton, who recently said in a low whisper that she’s ‘open’ to more debates. Clinton is still the nominal frontrunner and the establishment choice. In 2008 Schultz was in the bunker with Clinton till the bitter end. Clinton is the only candidate in the field likely to retain Schultz in her present job or otherwise advance her career. There’s a good chance the only important consultation Schultz had was with Clinton. This should come as no surprise. Every four years party insiders tweak the process in hopes that some establishment favorite can wrap things up early. Due to the law of unintended consequences, and because these people aren’t nearly as smart as they think, this almost always backfires. Republicans did it this year with delegate selection rules that starting March 15, Super Tuesday, award candidates who win a mere plurality of the vote all of the delegates. The idea was to save Jeb Bush, or some Bush doppelganger, the trouble of a long, messy nomination fight. Among the variables left out of their equation: Donald Trump and a field the size of the Boston Marathon. Their new nightmare: seven of their 15 candidates survive to Super Tuesday, when Trump gets 24 percent of the vote and 100 percent of the delegates, including in Florida where he waves adios to Jeb and Marco Rubio. That’s right. Trump’s only possible path to victory comes via rules meant to send him packing before he broke any crockery. Nice work, fellas. Schultz’s brazen move to muzzle debate wasn’t any smarter. As Trump points out, debates are free advertising. Democrats could use some. The contrast with the Republicans might have helped. Trump’s made them so rabid Democrats could have scored points just by being polite. Debates could have helped Clinton by reminding voters there’s more to her than the email scandal. And they’d have gotten her outdoors. If she had her druthers, she’d never leave her comfort zone. It’s one reason Bernie Sanders could cut her lead from 60 to 16 points. By limiting debate Schultz is enabling Clinton, not helping her. All of which raises the stakes Tuesday night. What Bernie Sanders has done is all the more remarkable for his having done it without benefit of a primetime debate and despite a virtual media blackout imposed by a know-it-all press. In 2008 Obama drew crowds half the size Sanders pulls and got written up like the Beatles at Shea Stadium. The press believes only in polls and money. In September 2007 Clinton led the young, charismatic Obama by 14 points after debating him every other week for six months. She still led by 8 in national polls the night he ran her over in Iowa. On the eve of their first debate she leads Sanders, a disheveled, 74-year-old socialist from Vermont, by 16 points. Last week Sanders’ finance report showed over a million small donors, better than Obama’s record 2008 pace. More impressive to the press, he pulled even with Hillary in total money raised. This week it began giving him some of the coverage he deserved all along. In a primary, packed stadiums and an army of volunteers and small-dollar donors mean more than polls and Super PACs. Some say Sanders has hit his ceiling but he hasn’t even had a chance to reach his audience. Tuesday will be the first long look many centrist Democrats have had at him and the first time anyone has examined him side by side with Clinton. If he picks up as many points for his performance as Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio did for theirs, it will be an earthquake. No one should underestimate Clinton’s forensic skills. She’s never lost a debate to anyone but Barack Obama and even those were close. There are two dangers for her. One is stylistic. Urged on by the media, her maladroit staff still pursues its five-year, 10-point plan to make her seem more “spontaneous” and “authentic.” These are the same folks who taught her to say ‘ordinary Americans’ and who pepper her speeches with the flattest jokes in the history of politics. Her best bet between now and Tuesday is to have as little to do with them as possible. Clinton somehow translates ‘being authentic’ into being more like someone else, someone more ‘ordinary.’ In April she got in a van and rode from New York to Iowa. She named the van ‘Scooby’ even though it wasn’t hers, ate at a Chipotle and rhapsodized about people she met glancingly along the way. No one told her that ordinary people don’t drive 1,000 miles except in an emergency or on a camping trip, or that she’s far too old to be naming her van after a cartoon character. Little has changed. Now she gets down with the common folk by flipping pancakes with Savannah Guthrie on the "Today" show. No one is fooled. She’s Hillary Clinton. She hasn’t touched a griddle since Bill got elected governor of Arkansas. The closest she’s come to seeming like a regular gal was on "Saturday Night Live" reading from a script written by sketch comedy writers for a TV show. If you’re a passionate, cerebral wonk, busting a move with Ellen or yucking it up with Jimmy Kimmel won’t make you seem any more real; just the opposite. Clinton doesn’t need to be more authentic, she needs to be more honest. The email affair may go down as the ultimate example of the old saw that it isn’t the crime, it’s the cover up. I don’t know if she broke any law. I do know everything she said in that circus of a press conference at the UN has thus far proved untrue. And to what end? Imagine if she’d taken a different approach. Imagine if instead of all the folderol about the server being just for convenience, the emails being personal, and her being just the most transparent person ever, she’d looked straight into a camera and said something like this: I don’t know all the facts but I know I made mistakes. I always meant to abide by the letter of the law. Americans are right to worry about the excesses and abuses that arise from government secrecy. If I’m your president, I promise you a truly open and accountable government. She couldn’t say it because admitting fault comes hard to her, and because she doesn’t believe it. From her tenure as Secretary of State, from her remarks on the Edward Snowden case and for lots of other reasons we know her basic take on government secrets is ‘the more the better.’ This is her problem; misunderstanding many of the issues she studies so hard. She can’t speak with conviction of the evils of globalization, she spent years cheering it on and doesn’t really get what’s wrong with it. She can’t get too worked up about pay to play politics; she perfected it and still deems it the best way to win elections. After four years as Secretary of State she still doesn’t see the folly of exporting democracy by force of arms, or that our safety lies in the rule of law. Clinton has reversed herself on two huge issues: the Keystone pipeline and the Trans Pacific Partnership. She’ll get less credit than she’d like and fume about how hard it is to satisfy liberals. But in making each switch she looked and sounded as if she were moving pawns on a chess board. She announced the Keystone decision in a blog that provided almost no rationale; the line the "SNL" writers gave her was stronger than anything she said about it in real life. Her TPP interview makes clear her commitment there is provisional. (She hasn’t seen the text) She speaks of jobs and currency but not a word on the issue many progressives find most galling, the ceding to corporate interests of the prerogatives of democracy. Nothing she’s ever said in public suggests she’s given that much thought. Sanders faces different challenges. He takes justifiable pride in never having run an attack ad and has taken care throughout this race never to attack Hillary. On Tuesday he must lay out their differences and explain why they matter. It wouldn’t be ‘negative’ or personal, it would be logical and factual and also indispensable. Bernie doesn’t have an authenticity problem. He is that rare politician who stood his ground and waited for the world to come to him. The bum advice he gets from the Zeitgeist consultants pertains to anger. They equate him to Trump, the idea being that both are vessels of populist anger. It’s only a tiny bit true. The violent rage of Trump’s base has to do with race, gender, sexuality and status. Those who feel it would be happy sitting in the audience of the Howard Beale Show, or just listening to Rush in their car. When Trump gets vicious they get a vicarious thrill. The rest of America is over the condition of the middle class, the democracy and the planet. All they want to hear is a plan. Only a portion of the hard core of Bernie’s base is in the least bit dogmatic. They may like a little anger but what they really like is the truth. Sanders’ enemies hope to paint him as an ideologue and a grouch. He must make it through the night without giving them any ammunition. Hillary’s recent epiphanies attest to just how much Sanders has moved the debate. If the TPP dies he more than anyone will deserve the credit. Trump has shown that a rich celebrity can succeed in politics without buying very many TV ads. Bernie’s proving that anyone can. In 2008 Obama built the biggest grass movement in the history of politics, but once he won he took it private. Bernie’s movement is built for his supporters and built to last. Bernie’s miles ahead of Hillary on the issues that count the most but there are two things he still needs to do. The first is to speak more to the problem of public corruption and inefficiency. On most issues most voters are Democrats, yet Republicans run two of the three branches of the federal government and stand a very good chance of perfecting their monopoly in 2016. Voters want to know that the party of government is ready to fix the government. The second thing he or any progressive must do is help people connect the dots: show how climate change, globalization, pay-to-play politics and mindless militarism reinforce one another, then offer them not just another liberal to do list but a coherent theory of the problem and a strategy for solving it rooted in values deeper than ideology. It’s been so long since any politician in America has done that and he’s one of the few who could. If he starts that discussion on Tuesday night, there’s no telling where this will all go.
