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justfinishedreading · 4 years

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Remainder by Tom McCarthy

I read this book about two or three months ago, it’s the sort of book I can say is really good, in a literary sense, but ask me if I enjoyed it and my answer is definitely no. The blurb describes it as “a darkly comic meditation on memory, identity and history”. I take a less romantic view and say it’s a disturbing -and occasionally comic story- about white male privilege, the abuse of wealth and power, the danger of diminishment of responsibility, and the importance of post-trauma therapy.

Before the story commences, the protagonist has already suffered an accident; an object dropped from a flying plane and nearly killed him. Part of his brain was damaged, and he could no longer walk or move. He had to re-learn every basic physical movement from scratch, starting with the simple act of picking up a small object. The part of his brain dedicated to movement was gone and to learn moment anew meant psychologically rewiring his thought-process. He learnt about the mechanics of his muscles, his bones, every change that occurs to make possible that simple act of picking something up. Over and over again these mechanics had to be thought out before action could be taken. As a consequence, when we meet our protagonist all his actions are slow, every detail must be thought through. Repetition and routine are key.

The unnamed airline company has offered him eight and a half million pounds to settle the case out of court, under the condition that he never talks about this publicly or privately. He accepts. And this is where the story begins.

One day, our unnamed protagonist, remembers a particular memory. His memories were gone when he woke up hospitalized, but they’ve been coming back slowly and in random bits. He sees a crack in a bathroom wall and is instantly reminded of a similar crack in an unknown apartment. He remembers looking out of the window and seeing black cats walking on the roof of the building opposite, he remembers leaving the apartment and walking down the internal staircase, he remembers the smell of someone cooking liver and someone playing piano, and he remembers feeling happy, feeling himself, feeling real and at one with everything around him.

He is struck by this memory of feeling natural, because since his accident all his movements, all his actions, seem rehearsed, studied, or as he puts it “second-hand”. Instead of trying to find out where this apartment is, why he was there, and what was going on at that time that brought him a form of peace, he decides instead to recreate the memory; the building and the people, to “re-enact” the scene from his memory, over and over again. Ironically experiencing the feeling of that memory second-hand…

From the point of view of the audience it is quite tedious to read about the unfolding of this plan, to us it seems obvious that this is doomed to fail, that manufacturing a feeling is counter-productive to feeling authentic. For me, I just wanted the book to end, I have never wanted more for a book to just… please, please… END.

The protagonist spends a lot of money, time and effort in finding a correct-looking building, paying off everyone that lives there to move out, hiring contractors to strip down the interior, recreate the look and feel of his memory building (which includes, amongst many other things, the wearing and sanding down of materials to look aged), and hiring people to be live-in actors, 24/7 on call, repeating the same actions over and over again: frying liver, playing the piano, taking out the rubbish etc.

Now we might say yes these actions, this way of spending money seems utterly pointless, but if he feels comforted by these actions and he has the money and it is his to do with as he pleases, what is wrong with that? What does it matter if we don’t approve? These actions are deeply important to him.

Now this is where white male privilege comes in, and also the power that comes with wealth. Speaking as a woman from a working-class background, of emigrant parents, I could never make someone go through what he puts his employees through. Here’s an example; in his memory, there’s the smell of someone pan-frying liver. To recreate this smell, he and his team found that they have to put about fours pans on the go for the smell to drift from downstairs up to his new apartment. His employees would fry liver all day, every day, for months on end, even when he wasn’t in the building, he still wants that to take place. The constant frying of liver meant that the air vents were frequently clogging up with huge amounts of fat. Imagine living there? The smell of liver every single day, all day, how nauseating it must be for those people. We may say that money can make monsters out of anyone, but the sense of entitlement the protagonist feels, in so short a space of time, is astounding, and I argue that he had some existing feelings of entitlement to bounce off of.

Another example; he hired a middle-aged pianist to re-enact the pianist from his memory, the pianist would practice a music score on the piano, occasionally making mistakes (intentionally “accidently” making mistakes). He would repeat the problem passage, then continue practicing, again make mistakes, repeat problem passage, over and over again, every day, the same score of music, but with no intention of it ever being played in public, with no end goal except to fake practicing. Imagine what that would do to a person psychologically.

We are never told what these people feel, because the protagonist, who is also the narrator, simply does not care. Whenever someone questions his motives, the protagonist replies with just one word: “whatever”. He never takes the time to explain his thought-process, he has no need for social approval or connection. In this respect the novel is remarkable, characters with these traits are usually portrayed as psychopaths in thrillers and horror stories, so it’s interesting to see that character outside the cliché box. And make no mistakes about it he is a psychopath; the team recreate the memory of black cats walking on roofs by acquiring black cats and everyday pushing them out onto the roof. Unfortunately, the roof is unnatural and artificially made, there’s nowhere for the cats to go or escape, they end up slipping and falling off and dying on impact with the ground. The protagonist is aware of this and is unmoved.

Surprisingly the protagonist does start to experience some pleasure from these re-enactments, in fact he becomes addicted to them. But the ‘high’ he gets from the control and repetition lessens as time goes on, soon he seeks out new and more problematic scenarios to re-enact, more potentially dangerous ways to feel elated. I won’t spoil the rest of the book or discuss the ending except to mention that a lot of people who read Remainder get dazzled by the ending and the various interpretations of the “truth” of what happens. We know for a fact that the narrator is highly unreliable because he withholds information, changes details and, in one occasion at least, told a story that at the end he admits was completely made up. Some readers get excited about possibilities like is he perhaps still in a coma and is this all a weird dream? Is he actually dead and this is purgatory or hell? Sort of a Third Policeman type thing. Me, I take it at face value; I think the main structure of the story is true, certain details certainly were changed, and things exaggerated, the man is a liar for sure, and the end does not tell us the full ending of what happened, but the rest we can guess ourselves.

The final thing I want to talk about is relationships, the importance of social relationships and human connection. At the start of the story the protagonist has two friends; a man about the same age as him (late twenties / early thirties) and who is a bit of a douchebag (the protagonist tells us that before the accident he used to find his friend’s humour funny, I take that as proof that the protagonist was already a wanker before the accident). There’s also a long-distance female friend, who is visiting. Now these two are taken out of the picture quite quickly, the woman continues her travels, and the protagonist stops answering his mate’s calls. No family is ever mentioned, which is really weird considering he’s been recovering from serious injuries -unless the protagonist is an orphan, but even then surely he has more people in his life? We never find out. What this means is there is no one to hold him accountable for his actions, there is no one to call him out on his bullshit, everyone he is now in contact with is an employee.

The second most significant character, after the protagonist, is Nazrul Vyas. When the protagonist first sets out to make his replica building he has a very hard time getting people to understand what he wants. The organizational aspect of this project doesn’t faze him but it’s the endless questions posed by contractors that he finds irritating to deal with. His lawyer suggests a company that specializes in management for rich clients, they facilitate any requests a client may make. Think personal assistant but with a huge network of contacts, resources and personnel. That’s where “Naz” comes in, he’s intelligent and patient and quietly relishes a challenge, the bigger and more complex, the better. The protagonist often describes him as machine-like, alluring to him having a computer for a brain. Naz is our main hope of someone being able to reach the protagonist… but a character described a robot, with the sole aspiration of materializing a client’s dreams, does not inspire much optimism… Commentary on the evils of blindly following orders, ay?

So in conclusion, yes Remainder is an interesting book; it’s literally studied in modern literature courses… Pick it up if you want something more original and challenging than your average mass-market best-seller. But for me, I’m just happy it’s finally over.

Review by Book Hamster

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sole-cuore-amore-e-droga · 5 years

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Tel Aviv 2019: Straight outta Latvia to Eurovision with a cinematic French rendez-vous

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Supernova with their strict-on decision to only focus on all that’s radiofriendly this year went to hell for me. I mean, I like me some pop tunes, but not those that are purposefully marketed to be enjoyed by the massive sheeps of the Eurofandom who usually fall for those songs by Michael James Down, Will Taylor, even Ylva & Linda... because at the end of the day they’re all just shallow and pointless outside the ESC bubble.

Well the best they could do is to accept some different winds out of nowhere! And so they did when the audition stage hit place and we guys got to witness the 33 shortlisted tunes for this year, among which of them are loudly and proudly different - like “Alligator” and “Grow”, which I did not fathom but I was also raging for their not qualification for - more precisely “Alligator” which was way more outstanding of those two I mentioned. The guys that performed that song were fun, their performance choice was fun, they could have totally rocked on Supernova... but alas.

In fact not that many alternative songs made it to the final down-to-16 cut! There might have been a couple of those that sound nothing a radio would play unless it’s not playing pop on its purpose (Laime Pilnīga’s ”Awe” comes to mind right away), but in the end of the day, not many of those survived and we were graced with some... choices, like letting Samanta Tina waste herself on a cocky-ass tune with terrible chorus rhyme-scheme and unbearable charisma and putting through the most Eirodziesma-like mess-fest with the Beaver guy on top of it. Honey I like you in costume but... not in this emploi.

I don’t blame them though, as one of non-blatant-pop tunes conquered the Latvian hearts for this year. These next Latvian people in Laura Rizzotto’s succession are collectively named Carousel and their song is “That Night”.

It sets a romantic mood throughout, like we all are reliving this magical last date - it was in a restaurant, the candles were lit, the restaurant looked vintage with bordeaux satin tablecloth on the table, and the couple is having a smooth evening... until the love runs out to the probably cold and rainy streets and the other half of the couple starts longing for one's love. That's all I can imagine with this.

So yeah, I really like this! It's got lovely instrumentation that doesn't need all the over the top instruments - just guitar, simple drums, etc.; the noir flair is distinct on here and that's not bad on here; this is just a simple and soft song that you too could play in your own restaurants when all the lovely couples have romantic dinners and sip wine. And in some kind of a French movie, too (with the lead role being a curly redhead artiste with striped sweater, looking for love in Paris (because it’s so romantic in there honhonhon). I'm not sure if the revamp touched upon this one little problem I noticed but the problem kinda seems to be that the chorus repeats. A lot. And verses are way too short that they could be easily forgotten against the 4th and 5th time one would be hearing the "lo-o-o-o-ove, where? Are? You?" line, and then lulled into sleep at how peacefully relaxing it is. Which is indeed of a problem because repetition has quite a bit of a negative effect on people. Yes, it gets the song onto your brain more easily, but the repetition drives people insane too. Just like it was suspected for “Story of My Life” (Belarus 2017) on its original version to be unable to be ‘stood’ - after the 2nd chorus, the rest of the song just went like “hey hey hayayayaho” until the end. Naviband fixed the problem by throwing in another vocal onomatopoeia in a form of the song bridge and I loved them for it, even if there still were too many “hey hey hey”s at the end, haha.

Final conclusion? Yep, issa good entry, and if anything it’s helluva underrated. Say what you want about it being “boring”, to me it’s somewhat fresh and exciting, because the melodies are pleasant, the instrumentation is top notch and Sabīne’s vocals are relaxing. Delightful starry night music, oh yes, thanks a lot for it, Carousel, I’m taking it.

Obviously, after they won Supernova, there was a lowkey uprising from fans who were dead certain on wanting Edgars Kreilis or Markus Riva to win, eek. Honeys, honeys. I do like those two as well, BUT for a bit of a mess that Supernova 2019 was with some of their decisions to include, I think it’s for the better they finally let themselves go lighthearted over it all rather than blatant tryhard to sound radio for the masses just cuz the NF wanted. Just forgive Carousel for winning, okay? Okay. ^_^

Approval factor: Definite yes from me, because why wouldn’t I rate it a yes. Yay brotherland!

Follow-up factor: For me personally this is miles better than Laura Rizzotto's last year's melodrama. Overall I think it just flows nice and is a delightful addition to the Latvian collection.

Qualification factor: This I cannot think about all too often but I am not sure if they'd... stand a chance anymore? I'd use to think it did, but that was weeks before supposedly much stronger entries rushed in, squeezing Latvia into an uncomfortable position. But I really hope it's just charming enough to kind of get through. Sort of. A little bit. I'm positive about it happening, but not that much. And a lot of older audiences might love it enough to vote it, too.

NATIONAL FINAL BONUS

I admit that I got way too heated about hearing Supernova’s new approach to selecting entries, but in the end it turned out that I didn’t need to worry all that much in the first place - some of those alternative entries we got were very nice (or at least the entries out of the standart overbearing radio-pop norm), both in their actual auditions (this time they were on an actual stage in front of a jury instead of the listeners pick-pocketing the submissions themselves) AND among the actual picks. But what else is there to be note-worthy in this year’s edition of this show?

• Well, among of the auditionees there were those too-weird-ass bands/artists (some of them I mentioned), and you saw me mention the “Alligator” song to you beforehand, which is done by an ambitious project ATOM.LV (so did I mention “Grow" by Waterflower and her show is worth mentioning as well <3 Those flowers in her hair, the hair color, the makeup, her overall image (it’s like Jamie-Lee upgraded) and the dance moves are ADORABLE <3333 but the song is... hmm... :c). And I’ll repeat myself - those guys rocked! I may have not been a massive fan of this but I can at least commend them - they had a good song structure going on, a clear message (alligators from the stars *catchy trumpet fanfare part* trying to probably conquer the world, yeah!) and an outrageous tribal image with that facepaint on! Awh hell yeah! Who wouldn't want THAT through the live shows??? Ah, only the Latvian juries ofc. (And me because I never got the appeal of this but I sure felt sad for 'em kids hoping and wishing for them through :x)

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• Thank Goodness I had my faves through - all hail Double Faced Eels! They're the little legendary pop band who went all their way to compete in some Youtube contest and have had sung with Bebe Rexha as the prize for winning it almost 1,5 years ago :o Believe it or not but I have heard of them way before their Sulernova stint - I got introduced to them through a friend, known on Tumblr as Soupgeist. :3 And I don't regret stanning a name I know, as "Fire", their entry in this year's 'Nova, was a pop-rock banger with some electro in! Granted the vocaliat might've had some troubles singing live but he still pulled it off nicely in the finals, with that energy coming out on top! Yeah yeah, uguns. 🔥

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• Like I mentioned earlier, there were people rooting for other favourites this year so heavily, and that annoyed the hell out of me, because I thought that Eurofans have some sort of evolving tastes that accept more than just pretty pop boys/girls with not-so-special songs? Well, I mentioned that Eurofans’ targets were Edgars Kreilis and Markus Riva. The latter felt so attacked about him trying to achieve his representation dream over and over he even tweeted about it once... well I did like his song “You Make Me So Crazy”, but I found it a little too overrated with the fans. So I did Edgars, but his song was way catchier and had way more personality than being a club track, I tell ya. Why would his song be renamed from “Fire” (yes, he partially shared a song title with that Double Faced Eels’s song!) to “Cherry Absinthe”, anyway? It gives it a bit more of an exciting feeling, tbh. ^_^ So I ended up rooting for him a little bit more out of the two ‘pretty’ pop boys, if I had to accept one of those kind of winners that everyone wanted (like everyone wanted just either yesyes or The Middletonz for Hungary this year).

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• There were a lot of other nice chosen songs too that I would’ve loved to discuss, but I just can’t not mention the Riga’s Beaver as one of the more memorable moments here. I did write earlier in this that I was disappointed though. Not because of the beaver being out of costume and coming at us as a young-to-middle-aged stunning lad, but because the Beaver-entry, “Tautasdziesma”, was a “Supernova”-times cluster-mess. I think of this as a charity music medley-parody of some sorts, and that doesn’t bode with me well, and sometimes I like parodies, like the one Klemen Slakonja (aka the guy who portrayed Putin for a musical number once) did in his country’s NF in 2012 (that he hosted) was fairly nice (although a bit too much), but... ehhh... at least the men are fine and their costumes were dandy.

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• Let’s not forget that those auditions had this one glorious thing going on during the performances - we saw shots of the jurors judging all of the 33 shortlisted acts with... rather less-than-enthusiastic looks, and man oh man were they fabulously done with this shit <3333

if that’s not a big indicator of them being too dead inside to be judging anything that day, then idk what is...

Anyway, I am finished with this review also, and I’m happy about it! I don’t think I can move any of this at a more quicker pace (seriously, I have to do so many more even during rehearsals!!!), but I am still trying to do my best. Good luck to the Carousel quartet and may they not flop in May! To hell with the naysayers sweeties, you’ll do just fine x ✨

#eurovision 2019 #tel aviv 2019 reviews #latvia 2019 #carousel #that night #latvia

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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years

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Homicide: Life on the Street season five full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

36.36% (eight of twenty-two).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

31.18%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Three (episode twelve ‘Betrayal’ (40%), episode sixteen ‘Valentine’s Day’ (41.17%), and episode seventeen ‘Kaddish’ (50%)).

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Fifty-three. Fifteen who appeared in more than one episode, two who appeared in at least half the episodes, and one who appeared in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

ONE HUNDRED. Twenty-six who appeared in more than one episode, seven who appeared in at least half the episodes, and four who appeared in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

The overall quality of the representation is changing with the quality of the show itself; it’s still solidly good stuff, and there are some distinct highlights across the season, but in totality it feels less incisive than it has in the past, and less self-aware (average rating of 3.09).

General Season Quality:

As above - still solidly good stuff, some distinct highlights, but less incisive and less self-aware as the writing caves to the pressure to be more generic and ‘traditionally entertaining’. There’s still no single episode here that I would call ‘bad’, but the comparison to previous seasons definitely comes up lacking.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

My opening credit sequence!!! Let us all take a moment to bow our heads and remember the scratchy black-and-white montage of the original, CLASSIC opening titles, with the faces of the characters looming ominously out of the shadows. It set the mood for the show perfectly, it was iconic, it was perfect. In their increasingly hilarious desperation to make the show into something flashy and generic for the masses, the network has henceforth replaced that wonderful sequence with a bizarre rainbow array of neon lights and random crime-y words overlaying stock images of crime-y stuff, complete with nice, glowing, DEEPLY NINETIES shots of the cast being zoomed past the camera. It’s awful. It’s funny. It’s infinitely more dated than the original titles could ever have been. And it has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with the show. No grainy shots of Baltimore landmarks. No artistic interplay of light and darkness. No barking dog (how DARE they take that from me!). Where the old sequence prepared the viewer for a show about serious unlovely business, this replacement caws: “CRIME! CRIME CRIME! Bright colours! Pretty people! Crime stuff! Popping, exciting, colourful crime! Nineties! CRIME!” Welcome to season five of Homicide: Life on the Street. It’s not as good as the previous seasons.

Now, in fairness, the show hasn’t changed in any major fundamental way (which makes that new opening credits sequence even more embarrassing, like the execs really thought a ‘cool’ header would convince audiences that the show was hip and fun now), and this is still both solid viewing in its own right, and better viewing than most of its contemporaries (and a lot of what’s on today, for sure). I’d also like to acknowledge something that is kinda being lost in translation due to my (STILL TERRIBLE) decision to make these posts summary-only, and that’s the actual number of named-and-speaking female characters per episode. Because the average when compared to the number of men on the floor isn’t that inspiring (as noted in previous posts, it’s still shockingly high compared to the standard set by other shows of the time/genre), but the number, independent of its comparison to men? The most common incidence this season was to have seven female characters in any given episode (eight of the twenty-two episodes this season boast that many). There are two episodes this season with eight women in compliment, and four others which managed six; the lowest number of women in any episode was three (which happened twice). Of course, when the flip side of that is a number of men which only once dipped into single digits (’Kaddish’, a balanced eight and eight), you still wind up with a less than thrilling average. But having six or more women around for the vast majority of the season? That’s practically unheard of, even in most modern shows - even some female-driven shows don’t always boast so many, though they make up for it (usually) with 1. less male characters, and 2. more story and screen time for their female characters - I won’t pretend that Homicide’s women get a comparable amount of narrative time and attention as its men, but it is not to their exclusion. To have so many women around is especially rare in anything male-dominated or masculine-coded (like, oh, everything that counts within the ‘crime’ genre), and for far too many shows, three women in an episode is a surprisingly large number, not the absolute minimum. Whatever other criticisms I have (and I’ve got ‘em!) for this season, that thing I’ve acknowledged before, about how this show manages to be fairly nonchalantly inclusive of women despite the odds? That still holds true.

MEANWHILE, IN CRITICISM LAND: this season feels a lot more serialised than previous seasons have, and I - normally a vocal supporter of serialised television over episodic - do not love it. The episodic nature of the show is a given - cases come and go - and as such, the thing that increases the serialised approach here is an increase in personal dramas, and specifically, an increase in narratives that take place outside of work and sometimes entirely independent of it. Obviously, the characters always had personal lives, and sometimes their personal lives impacted their work, and sometimes that impact rolled out in a protracted fashion over multiple episodes or even a whole swathe of a season (I’m mostly thinking about the disaster of Beau Felton’s marriage and his descent into alcoholism which formed such a significant part of his story in season three). The difference was that in previous seasons, these personal life developments felt more like they existed simply because these things happen in real life, and the focus was predominantly on the way that such events interact with the work the characters do, because that’s what the show is about, after all: life as a homicide detective, not life as a person who also incidentally happens to be a cop. I don’t hate any of what they were doing in this season, and some of it has serious merit, but altogether it does feel a lot more dramatic and distracting than what has come before, more manufactured, and more like it exists to create conflict in the characters lives instead of just letting them be who and what they are, and let the story come naturally from that.

We’ll start with Pembleton: in the season four finale, Pembleton had a stroke. This season begins with his first day back on the job - such as it is - and it’s not smooth sailing. Pembleton’s ability to perform his duties is physically impaired, he’s limping, he doesn’t have a full range of motion, he can’t drive, and he’s stuck on desk duty until he can re-qualify on the gun range. But he’s also having cognitive difficulties: he has a major stutter, his memory struggles even on small things like names, numbers, or simple spelling that he has known since childhood, and his mind wanders or makes leaps not pertinent to his current situation (as when he fails his first attempt at the gun range after becoming distracted by the dual meaning of the word ‘magazine’). Remembering Stan Bolander being evaluated before receiving approval to return to active duty after being shot in season three, it’s hard to imagine Pembleton receiving the same seal of approval under these circumstances. By the end of the season, he’s getting along just fine and it’s like the stroke never happened, and whether that degree of recovery is realistic or not, I feel like it’s unrealistic for him to have been sent back to work when he was not even close to being capable of actually doing the work. I feel like the writers were too busy indulging in the range of side-effects that a stroke can have in order to make the consequences dramatic, they overplayed the whole idea and then had to walk it back in order to have the character be functional within the narrative. Pembleton’s stroke has everything to do with the dramatic potential of disabilities, but nothing to do with a realistic assessment of the long-term consequences those disabilities might have on his ability to work or play like he used to, and that’s a sad disappointment for the veracity this show once represented.

Meanwhile - though I welcome the decision to include Pembleton’s wife Mary in the story more often - the strain on the Pembleton marriage reaches critical mass, and it’s not hard to see why: though Pembleton says the words out loud to other characters (”Mary’s been so good with everything”, etc), he’s erratic, self-absorbed, and inconsiderate in his home life, and his behaviour toward Mary reflects little gratitude or even recognition for the colossal amount of work that she has put in to both caring for Frank after his stroke, and caring for their newborn child born not long before said stroke. Mary is an unsung superhero in the Pembleton home, and it’s understandable that Frank is very preoccupied with his own recovery, but it’s not acceptable that he fails to respect the struggle that Mary has been through at his side. Even after she leaves him, Frank doesn’t really seem to acknowledge his own shortcomings - Mary didn’t leave him because he had a stroke and she couldn’t deal (he was ‘better’ by this point), she left him because she was done with being ignored and having herself and their child treated like completely secondary considerations in Frank’s life, after his own self-image - and when he petitions Mary to return, it’s still all in terms of what having his family around means to HIM. He’s miserably eating Mary’s cooking from the freezer and feeling sorry about the fact that she’s not there to make him more, and he wants her back because he loves her, sure, but also because being a husband and father is part of his self-image, and that’s what his entire personal arc this season boils down to, stroke, job, separation, and all: it’s about Frank Pembleton’s all-important concept of self, to the exclusion of any concern, respect, or basic recognition for the other people in his life and their own wants or needs or value as individuals whose lives do not actually revolve around him.

Pembleton also has dramas with his partner Bayliss, which is par for the course at this point and mostly pretty useless as a result: how many times has one or the other of them declare that they don’t want to be partners anymore, and then they dance around one another for several episodes before admitting that, yeah, actually they do want to work together after all? Brodie hangs a lantern on it, but that doesn’t make it any more compelling to watch. What is more compelling - and actually a well-earned character revelation which makes a huge amount of sense when compared to past evidence - is Bayliss’ confession that he was sexually abused by his uncle when he was a child. Bayliss actually mentioned it - in an obfuscated fashion, substituting ‘cousin’ for ‘uncle’ and claiming not to remember what happened - back in season three when he and Pembleton were talking about whether or not they’d ever had a gay-questioning moment, and in that context we can see how Bayliss’ homophobia has manifested from that experience, as well as his disdain for anything he considers sexually ‘perverse’ - Pembleton has accused Bayliss of being sexually repressed on more than one occasion, and this revelation shows us that the repression is not out of ignorance or puritanism so much as it is a gut reaction to anything which reminds him of the childhood abuse he has tried so hard to hide. That doesn’t make it ok for him to be a homophobe, but it explains, and it’s necessary for Bayliss to make peace with his past in order to be open-minded and understanding of others moving forward. As much as I applaud that storytelling, the decision to have Bayliss ‘confront’ his uncle and then start taking care of the man after seeing the squalor in which he now lives kinda turns my stomach. It would be one thing, to have Bayliss take the high road and decide that compassion was more important than hate, forgiving his uncle and then moving on with his life, but what he does instead involves physical and emotional labour for his uncle’s comfort, it has cost in money, energy, and the potential to jeopardise Bayliss’ job as he is repeatedly ‘out on errands’ instead of working, and on one occasion the uncle even calls him at work and asks him to come out to his place NOW and bring him stuff, which Bayliss does after initially refusing. The whole situation plays not like compassionate forgiveness and healing (even though the show frames it that way), it looks and smells exactly like the uncle taking advantage of Bayliss’ good nature for his own gain (not just enjoying what he is given, but actively demanding and pushing for more), and that is alarming and disturbing. Of all the ways this particular facet of the plot could have played out, I am extremely troubled that this is what they went for, without any reflection upon the decision.

In a whole ‘nother direction, we have Kellerman, and his partnership with Lewis, and y’all, I am baffled. Kellerman spends half of the season on administrative duties, like Pembleton, but in his case it’s because he’s being investigated by the FBI for allegations of corruption dating back to his time in the arson unit. As with the rest of the story decisions in this season, I don’t object to this on principle, it isn’t a bad narrative arc or piece of character exploration (or deconstruction, as it turns out), but I am kinda amazed and confused that the show took BOTH of its power couples partnerships out of commission for half the season (in Lewis and Kellerman’s case, it’s actually effectively the entire season - they only partner onscreen for four cases, and one of those is a single scene, not an actual episode plot). After the Lewis/Kellerman partnership was such a breath of fresh air last season, I can’t help but feel like their separation this season was a completely deliberate decision to stop them from, what? Stepping on Bayliss/Pembleton’s toes? Bayliss and Pembleton are the only surviving partnership from the show’s first season, and even then they were framed as the ‘main’ partnership on the show - did someone get antsy about the fact that season four had used Lewis/Kellerman so effectively? Did they shoot themselves in the foot on purpose? It certainly fucking feels that way to me. It feels like they tanked Kellerman’s whole character and ruined his partnership with Lewis so that Bayliss/Pembleton could still be the big shots, and that’s very unnecessary; part of what made the first season work so well was that the cast felt more balanced, and even if there was kiiinda a ‘main’ partnership, that didn’t stop the rest of the partnerships from having almost equal footing and almost equal representation in episodes. Lewis/Kellerman has been the only pairing since the originals that has felt meaningful, like there’s a real working chemistry between the characters and not just ‘these two were written together for the episode, because’ (as with, say, Munch/Russert in the second half of last season, which I often forget was even a thing because it was such a nonentity). I’m so mad about this. Pro tip: I will get madder, next season.

Anyway: Kellerman’s arc. It’s not bad, in and of itself (though I could have absolutely done without the ill-advised visit from the Kellerman brothers, that was crap from every angle). But surely, having Kellerman’s life/career unravel regardless of his innocence is an arc they could have achieved in a more intensified fashion, one that sidelined him for less of the season? Surely there was a better way to do this than to just waste him for eleven episodes? I’m not going to wish away the arc in its entirety, because despite being mostly frustrating, it did deliver us the best episode of the season in the form of ‘Have a Conscience’, Kellerman’s first episode back on the job after being cleared of any wrongdoing, and the only episode to truly use the Lewis/Kellerman partnership in the way that the previous season did. Down on the seeming futility of their work and the lingering damage that has been done to his reputation, Kellerman contemplates suicide, and for twenty minutes of screen time, Lewis works his way around to talking him down. The show hasn’t done this kind of contained, lengthy, focused storytelling since the unparalleled ‘Three Men and Adena’ back in season one, and it is a more than welcome return to that format, volatile and tense and insightful, sometimes ugly, but always honest. And it hits all those good male bonding beats, all that lovely vulnerability in Kellerman that made me so happy in season four, and both Lewis’ desire to be open and connecting in the moment, and his tendency to spook and shut down after things get too real (there’s something really heartbreaking about Lewis’ discomfort in the following episode, when Kellerman tells him not to worry because he’s seeking professional help - as much as Lewis is haunted by Crosetti’s death and the question of whether or not he could have done anything to prevent it, he can barely look Kellerman in the eye after being confronted with what it means to help someone through crisis). For one episode, though, we have Lewis and Kellerman as we loved them in season four, being honest about their feelings and listening and supporting one another, and when Lewis gives Kellerman his jacket to keep him warm out in the chilly open air, it feels natural and right, it feels truthful, all toxic masculinity set aside so that they can get through this thing, like partners, like friends. That episode, I wouldn’t trade for a less dramatic Kellerman arc; the rest of his content in the season? Could have been better. Could have been so much better.

The other thing Kellerman had going on this season was a romance, which wasn’t too bad because the basic chemistry was there and the romance itself didn’t override or derail any other stories happening, so I’m not gonna go into it: the important thing is who the romance was with, and that would be Dr Juliana Cox, the new chief medical examiner and the new Other Woman on the show since Russert is largely absent for the majority of the season. Cox is pretty great, which was a bit of a surprise to me since I had never like Michelle Forbes in anything before and I was worried she’d ruin everything (nothing against her as an actor, she’s just always played aggressively disagreeable characters any other time I’ve seen her so I was accustomed to going ‘URGH, it’s you’). Not unlike when they introduced Russert, they do overplay Cox’s identity as a Strong Independent Woman when she first shows up, but I’m ok with it since they use the opportunity to have Cox call men out on their bullshit (the case in her introductory episode involves murdered prostitutes) and lay down the law like a total boss. It may be a little heavy-handed, but it gets the job done, and in fairness, that degree of mettle and ready combativeness if tested doesn’t dissipate over the course of the season, nor does it feel unrealistic: the true test for any new character introduced to this show is whether or not they have the naturalism and believability to fit in, and I approve Cox on those grounds: she is a character deserving of this show at its best.

To wrap this discussion with a few more gripes and one last nod of praise: one of the problems with the more serialised storytelling and the way it revolves around the personal lives of select characters is the huge void this creates between the cast members who seem ‘important’, and the ones who don’t. Howard is still a great, self-possessed character, but the lack of any narrative for her - personal or professional - in this season is egregious. Because previous seasons were more balanced in their attention and harped on long-term personal arcs less, it didn’t matter if a character didn’t seem to have a ‘point’ on the show besides just existing, because existing is the main thing that people do: Howard doesn’t have to legitimise her existence with drama, she’s just gotta be who she is and how she is and let life take care of the rest. As soon as you start letting dramatic events take precedence, however, it starts seeming weird if everyone isn’t having them, and characters start to appear useless if they aren’t generating any drama (this is how unrealistic soap-opera storytelling happens). Kay Howard is and remains better than that, but I wish they had just let her go out on some cases and basically Do Stuff, it doesn’t have to be dramatic. Just let her do her damn job, on screen.

Speaking of underused characters, if the writer’s wanted to do the whole FBI-investigation-sidelines-a-character-for-half-a-season trick so badly, why didn’t they target someone who barely does anything to start with, someone we won’t miss in the regular rotation? Someone like...Munch. As is, the only ‘Munch episode’ in the bunch is ‘Kaddish’, which isn’t bad, but it does include some terrible flashbacks to Munch’s highschool years that are basically just every single highschool cliche ever, and the episode revolves around Munch’s old crush who has now been brutally raped and murdered, and excuse me if the continued obsession with Munch’s fixation on the fuckability of women is not my idea of a good time (ESPECIALLY when it is focused around the way he shared that desire with a number of other men in connection with this particular (VIOLENTLY! MURDERED!) woman). In context, the aspect of the episode which deals with Munch’s relationship with his Jewish faith feels completely disconnected from the rest of the content. I’m not happy about it. I’m also not happy about Brodie, still being a whiny little creep who can also add ‘spying on Howard and filming her with her boyfriend without either party’s consent’ to his roster of misconduct; as much as I have enjoyed ‘The Documentary’ in the past, under the slightest scrutiny it’s actually a total mess of an episode (and Brodie appears to be a terrible documentarian, even accepting that we don’t see every moment of what he’s made), and the entire concept is actually very plot-holed and a poorly-imagined idea of a fourth wall breaker. And speaking of misconduct, I gotta flag a pattern that’s emerging: in ‘Narcissus’, Gee doesn’t want to investigate local black community activist Burundi Robinson, despite allegations that he’s pimping out the women under his care and that he’s recently sanctioned the murder of one of his own in order to cover it up. While Gee comes around after his initial hesitation and pursues the investigation, the fact that he hesitates in the first place out of a desire to ‘protect the good Robinson is doing in the community’ is frustratingly deaf to the fact that Robinson prostituting the women in his care and ordering men killed if they try to speak out against it is obviously NOT GOOD FOR THE COMMUNITY, GEE. This reminds me directly of the arc in season three (which I flagged at the time) with the gay congressman, whose ‘good work as a politician’ was enough for Pembleton to try and help cover up the fact that he was also A VIOLENT DOMESTIC ABUSER. To a lesser extent, they also played this in season four when Bayliss tried to talk himself out of arresting a doctor for negligent homicide after she failed to provide proper care to a patient because she didn’t feel he deserved it - Bayliss’ insistence that the doctor should be allowed to stay in practice because ‘she saves people’s lives’ is at odds with the fact that she deliberately didn’t save this one, and as with the other examples here, the fact that someone does good work in one form does not entitle them to a free pass to do evil elsewhere. The dissonance bugs me, and I don’t know why the showrunners think that these are worthwhile dilemmas to present. Moral quandaries certainly exist, but these are not them.

ANYWAY I promised to end on praise, so here it is: Beau Felton. I’m not saying I’m glad he’s dead, because that’s a sad tragedy, but the way they handled it was excellent, and the delivery of such a twist at such an unexpected time - when we could easily have assumed, after two seasons’ absence, that Felton would never be seen and scarcely be mentioned again - was so well pitched to feel shocking, heavy, and meaningful, when it could so easily have played like a cheap trick, just one last unnecessarily dramatic turn (it was also the closest we got to a ‘Howard story’, though that’s a stretch really, she’s involved but it’s not about her). It was a tall order, to pull off the death of an old regular character off-screen without feeling contrived, but here we are. I’ve complained quite a lot about this season, but the magic ain’t gone, not yet. Not yet.

#Homicide: Life on the Street #Homicide: Life on the Street season five #HLOTS #Bechdel Test #female representation #full season review

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hongkongartman-mlee · 3 years

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‘Godmother’ Olivia Yan Offers One last Defence Of Theatre Practitioners Against The Waves Of COVID & Technology: Embrace!

Misfortunes come on wings and depart on foot: Hong Kong had social commotion in 2019, COVID-19 in 2021 and will face economic downturn. Bad situations are like an amorphous mass of mud. Local theatres were devastatingly forced to close again and again.

The ‘Godmother’ of theatrical circles Olivia Yan(甄詠蓓)said, “We are down. But, we must stand up. Apart from the above misfortunes, the popularity of online streaming of theatrical productions is being a challenge which lies ahead of us! My mother was a Cantonese opera actress and my father was a technician for theatres in the 1950s. They fell by the wayside when Cantonese opera declined. They experienced a period of considerable hardship. It is a funny destiny that I am now making a living as an actress and director. That made me really on the ball to smell any change of dire circumstances in our trade. ‘Plan B’ is not only a fire exit. It should be a future career option for a stage professional and serves as an additional possibility.”

I asked, “What was your theatrical career like in the old days?” Olivia thought about it, “In the 60s and 70s, the theatrical world was a playing field for enthusiastic amateurs. The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts was founded in 1984 and I was one of the early graduates. The government in Hong Kong started to give generous funding to drama developments. As full-time professionals in our field were not many, competition for me was less keen and opportunities were plentiful. Besides, only TV and film were chiefly available as entertainment. People loved stage performances a lot at that time.”

Olivia always talked in a slow, intelligent and irresistibly charming manner. I understood her extraordinary career from the early hits, but I want to find out her fabulous three-career pleasure now: director, actor and educationalist.

I asked, “You are lucky because you are so all-rounded. What is your advice for those struggling in the drama world?” Olivia paused, “I am not lucky. I am still thinking of a way to do better. The window of opportunity in our trade opens and closes as fast as a camera’s shutter. Art business, being volatile and trending rapidly, is never ‘business as usual’ after COVID-19. We must have a keen sense of crisis i.e. the ability to sense the danger of a downward movement of our industry and career. Secondly, we must realize the importance of having alternative part-time business or job. The idea is not to rely on one single source of income. Lastly, we must embrace the future i.e. accept changes and get ready for them. This is why I am now a ‘slashie’.”

I challenged deliberately, “Is future unreliable?” She bit her lip, “Life must be lived forwards. Although tomorrow is uncertain, the future will belong to those who are not afraid to trust an unknown decade. Do not let the good memories of the past or the self-approval of the present limit the potential of your future. If you do not walk the path, the collapsing things behind you will actually block the way for you to turn back. Let me give a solid example: technology like online streaming and technology theatres will be the dominant torrents. If you don’t go ahead to learn and apply, you could be like one of those stubborn Cantonese opera singers in the 1950s!”

“My teacher David Glass in my UK days inspired me a great deal on his engagement with the audiences especially the young for the mission of ‘Creative Learning’. He used workshops, rooted in physical and image-based theatre and storytelling, to help people to ‘see again’, ‘think again’ and ‘feel again’. This is a very explorative investigation of life into drama and drama into life. I want to organise these workshops in Hong Kong. During this time of virtual relationships, the shared visceral experience of theatre, as an applied art, is more important than ever,” said Olivia.

Her words aroused an echo in my heart. I added, “When drama as an art on the stage is facing a precarity, it is not a bad thing that theatrical professionals use their knowledge and skills outside the theatre to earn a living and benefit other people.”

Olivia went further, “Drama has a lot of social and human values. Among many, it promotes teamwork, communication skills, moral education and socialization. It also stimulates imagination and creativity. It can encourage harmony by helping participants develop a better understanding of others. Do try to apply our professional knowhows outside the 4 walls of a theatre as one’s career management.”

Is it sad? People in Hong Kong used to have planned routes about our life. We now start to learn that in life, doors can be locked and windows can be closed. It hurts when there is no alternative to security. However, there is an alternative to insecurity which is walking out from your comfort zone and taking risk—things will be no longer familiar but a new life begins, for better or worse. At least, you can toss a coin with possibly the luck of a ‘better’. Right?

MLee

Olivia Yan “An Invitation: On Empty Theatre” Acknowledgement - West Kowloon Cultural District https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoDr8InWXv4

Olivia Yan Interview Acknowledgement - HKAPA SRCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-h5BdyekEs

Lost Child HK Films 2020 (Olivia Yan) Acknowledgement-David Glass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ESci1glGWI

Singing by 新馬師曾 (Tang Wing Cheung) Acknowledgement – 林登泰 https://youtu.be/_fXap0EOLUI

Rebecca Pan Acknowledgement – RTHK Radio1 https://youtu.be/D1B91AGKb2o

#Olivia Yan #David Glass #Theatrical Professionals #Slashie #Cantonese Opera #Amorphous #The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts #Technology theatre #Educationalist #Creative Learning #Misfortunes Come On Wings And Depart On Foot #Social Commotion #Stage Professionals #Art Business #Visceral Experience

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loudlytransparenttrash · 6 years

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This Week Within Our Colleges: Part 18

Texas State University student, Rudy Martinez, is doubling down and defending his campus newspaper article ‘Your DNA is an abomination,’ which he argues “white death will be liberation for all,” and tells white people to “accept their death as the first step toward defining themselves as something other than the oppressor.” He goes on to write in his piece, “I hate you because you shouldn’t exist” and “there are only about a dozen white people” he would “consider decent.” He also claims white people have the luxury of always coming home safely and never being nervous when confronted by police officers, hence ‘white privilege.’ Although the article was condemned by the student body president, calling it “blatant racism,” Martinez sees it differently. Citing the left’s dumb, manipulated version of racism which “can only be from a position of power,’ Martinez claims he is proud of his stance against the bad white people.

SIT Graduate Institute have released a paper which encourages educators to promote “racial identity” among minority students to prevent “assimilation into the dominant culture.” The author, Hadiel Mohamed, says she “aims to answer how educators can incorporate ethnic/racial identity development in the classroom for youth of color who are driven to pursue whiteness.” “Our education system has been used as an oppressive tool for people of color.” Mohamed contends. “We see the preservation of whiteness through immigration laws. There has been a deliberate attempt at preserving the white race within the United States by racializing our borders.” She worries her fellow POC will “adapt, conform and assimilate to whiteness" and become just as complicit in all of this oppression. To avoid this, she encourages educators to help them become hyper aware of their own racial identity and develop a sense of ethnic pride early enough in the classroom before they can “conceptualize the ways expected to assimilate within white society.” How does she plan to teach these kids to be proud of their ethnicity and refuse whiteness? Lessons on the “injustices enacted upon people of color,” of course!

A University of Colorado, Denver administrator worries that white children may “forfeit their humanity” if they aren’t raised by sufficiently woke parents. She argues that parents should employ “critical race parenting” to prevent white children from committing “racial microaggressions” against their peers. She goes on to suggest that white people are “constantly wielding racial microaggressions,” and that over time these microaggressions can cause “racial battle fatigue,” noting that children of color are especially susceptible to this horror. White children, on the other hand, are especially prone to committing racial microaggressions because they “learn a complicated dance of whiteness” that teaches them not only to “maintain and defend whiteness,” but to do so while claiming to be “colorblind.” “When they learn to love their whiteness, their souls waste away as they are quietly tearing themselves from humanity and real love,” she writes. “Can we instead begin at the core with our white children and work to ward off white identity and whiteness before they succumb and forfeit their humanity in order to join the oppressor?”

University of Wisconsin-Madison is once again offering their charming course, ‘Problem of Whiteness.’ The African Cultural Studies course seeks to teach students to “understand how whiteness is constructed and experienced in order to dismantle white supremacy,” according to the online description. The professor teaching this course just so happens to be a white guy, and says it’s important to explore whiteness because “the problem of racism is the problem of whites being racist towards blacks.”

The same professor also chaired a panel discussion with the same name as his course, ‘Problem of Whiteness,’ which involved another white professor from the Florida Atlantic University, who encouraged the scholars in the audience to spend more time listening to their white, male conservative students. He goes on to argue the reason professors need to be more open-minded towards them isn’t because it’s the fair and right thing to do, but because if they don’t, it will lead these young white men to become anti-feminist and white nationalists which then leads to “the radical militarization of white men that we’ve seen time and time again, all too recently materialize in mass shootings.” The professor goes on to explain how discussions on whiteness “lets white students come to grips with their racist inheritance” and “allows students of color to talk about alternatives to a white supremacist society.”

University of Michigan held a two-day training session that aimed to encourage white employees to deal with their “whiteness” so they could become better equipped to fight for social justice causes. Participants who took part in the “Conversations on Whiteness” session were taught to “unpack their whiteness” in order for them to “recognize the difficulties they face when talking about social justice issues related to their white identity, explore this discomfort, and devise ways to work through it.”

Two New England professors have urged their colleagues to cultivate a “space free from microaggressions” by adopting a “social justice agenda” in class. Their first recommendation for professors involves requiring students to wear “name cards with gender pronouns” to avoid instant microaggressions on the first day. Their second brilliant idea is to quickly stop any conversation from turning into a debate as that allows “one student to be wrong and one to be right,” and that’s a microaggression. “Dialogue, not debate,” you see? To prevent conversation from turning into a debate, the professors suggest asking the individual pressing the other to “move out” of the discussion, which is a disabled-friendly way of saying “step out,” avoiding another microaggression, you see! They conclude by expressing hope that their recommendations will help to create an “anti-oppressive arena for learning,” declaring social justice essential to education.

University of Southern Indiana is the latest school to embrace the left’s tragically regressive push for us to go back in time and see nothing but a person’s skin color when we look at them. Students are being encouraged to “reject colorblindness,” as it’s today racist and microaggressive against racial minorities when white people say, “I don’t see color when I look at people.” A “good ally” instead identifies and “acknowledges the oppressed and disadvantaged group to which the person belongs,” and then behave accordingly around them in order to “reduce their own complicity or collusion in the oppression” of that group.

San Diego State University held a bizarre workshop which certain students were required to attend as part of their class. Organizers described the experience as “shocking” and “disturbing” but it’s all to help the students “step outside their comfort zone and into the shoes of those who are struggling with oppressive circumstances.” Students were walked through a darkened room where they were met by campus leaders acting out a series of horror scenarios non-white people supposedly find themselves in every day. The students were screamed at and told to face the wall before listing a bunch of minorities “they” have gone after. They were then confronted with “ICE agents” breaking into a home and stealing family members, while another scene acted out Nazis. The performance then showed a girl “having a problem” with her new roommate because she’s “a little too foreign.” The students were then taken into a room and debriefed by professors about how these totally realistic plays made them feel and what they should change about themselves to better combat this oppression. “It is our sincere hope that by exposing students to the oppressive systems in society they’ll take a look at how we all participate in these systems and hopefully commit to changing oppressive patterns and behaviors,” the professor says.

Reed College finance office was shut down for three days after a group of students from the ‘Reedies Against Racism’ group forced their way in and refused to leave, blocking the employees and harassing them with demands. They ordered the school to sever its ties with a bank whom they claim is funding the “mass incarceration of POC.” During planning for the protest, white members of the group were designated jobs listed on the ‘Whitey Tasks” which "did not require POC approval,” such as printing labels and carrying objects, while POC in charge dealt with the more serious stuff. The same group have also protested against the school’s Western Civilization course, demanding for it to be “reformed” and taught through the lens of oppression.

Two University of Northern Iowa professors have blasted the prevalence of "white civility" in college classrooms, saying that civil behavior reinforces "white racial power." This civility can reinforce white privilege, the professors argue, and it can even “reproduce white racial power.” To prove their point, they interviewed ten white students and asked them what civil behavior means to them. Those who mentioned “treating everyone equally" were accused of erasing the identity of POC and reinforcing whiteness. The students also became guilty of white privilege if they admitted they spoke to students of color nicely and politely when discussing race. To fight this, the professors suggest that college professors intervene, saying “it is important instructors ensure their classrooms are spaces that challenge, rather than perpetuate, whiteness and white civility.”

University of Rhode Island professors have come up with a way of helping the school’s non-white students deal with all the “racial microaggressions” they’re confronted with daily on campus. Professor Annemarie Vaccaro, the same person who came up with the term “invisibility microagressions” - which is when a ‘person of color’ “feels invisible” around white people - explains the only way these poor, victimized bastards can cope with all of this microaggression is to provide them with extensive therapy and counseling. Providing therapy to a bunch of people who have been misled into believing every slight and moment of discomfort is a coordinated attack against them? Instead of just reminding them they’re perfectly free and capable adults who are in control of their own damn lives? Sounds a lot like feminism.

University of Wisconsin-Madison social justice student group were outraged to discover the school’s football team and band spent a night in a Trump hotel during their Orange Bowl appearance. The group released a statement stating they are “disappointed” and “concerned” with this “massive violation.” “College football makes its profits off the work and talents of people of color. It is absolutely disgusting the very same people of color are being rewarded with a stay in accommodation owned by a man who is one of the biggest oppressors of people of color in this country.” They then go on to accuse Trump of more racism, “questionable working conditions” and “human rights violations” and demand the school to never stay at a Trump hotel EVER again. There’s only one problem - the retards didn’t realize Orange Bowl’s contract with the Trump hotel was set four years ago, and according to Orange Bowl vice president, the hotel not only meets their standards and requirements but exceeds them.

Professors in New York have united to sign a letter calling for New York City to remove monuments of Theodore Roosevelt and Christopher Columbus, saying the statues of the historical figures represent “white supremacy.” “For too long, they have generated harm and offense as expressions of white supremacy,” the professors say in their petition to the mayor and city commissioners. “The monuments are a stark embodiment of white supremacy, and are an especial source of hurt to black and indigenous people among them.” They go on to call for a “bold statement” to be made in removing the statues, declaring such a move would show the world that “racism won’t be celebrated in New York City.”

Ohio State held an event named “Managing the Trauma of Race,” which aimed to teach black students strategies for “self care and activism” and how to “mitigate the trauma the African American community faces from individual, systemic and institutional racism.” The school’s Multicultural Center website states that black Americans are “bombarded” with racism and that it “leads individuals to experience trauma on a daily basis.” What’s traumatizing here is teaching young Americans everything in life is either racist or microaggressive and their lives are a predetermined dead-end designed by white people.

The University of Washington professor who invented the concept 'white fragility’ has quit her job to travel the country giving seminars on ‘white fragility.’ These seminars begin with Robin DiAngelo, who just so happens to be a white woman, telling the white people in the audience to stand and walk on stage. The white people are then required to read from a projection screen, each taking turns admitting their sins, such as “internalized superiority” and “racial privilege.” When they’re finished reading, DiAngelo tells the audience to “not clap” for the white people as they return to their seats. Question-and-answer sessions are also permitted from her seminars - I’m not surprised.

UC Santa Barbara is currently dealing with one helluva internal catfight. An employee popular with trans student activists was dismissed from her position in the school’s Sexual and Gender Diversity center. What was the response from the students? Angry protests and accusations of the Sexual and Gender Diversity center “perpetuating violence against queer, transgender people and marginalized communities” and “perpetuating the systems of white supremacy,” of course! The activist students listed a set of demands during their protests, which included a new building for the center, a doubling of the center’s program budget and extra funding for the school’s queer and trans health advocate. Along with a “trans taskforce advocacy coordinator” (whatever the hell that is) they also demanded for the employee to be reinstated while demanding the center’s director and assistant dean to resign. What was the administration’s response? Heartfelt apologies and total compliance to the demands, of course!

Cal State San Marcos held an event called “Whiteness Forum,” detailing the many different ways in which “whiteness” in America oppresses people of color and society. Guests were welcomed with a large banner reading the “Whiteness Forum is about reflecting on white privilege and racism.” Several anti-Trump displays were also set up around the room. The forum kicked off with some slam poetry performed by students in the “Communication of Whiteness” class who took the opportunity to express their frustration with whiteness. One of the performers, a black female student, called Africa “the greatest country in the world” and went on to claim, “On a daily basis I am seen as a threat, but you get a pass because you’re white.” Another student offered similar sentiments in their “poetry”: “Whiteness thrives on the hate of everyone. Every day is a day to challenge whiteness.” After the performances, the professor in charge of the event encouraged the crowd to interact with her students and learn about the “white supremacy” in all its forms embedded across the country.

Evergreen State College has a new section in its student newspaper dedicated strictly to non-white students in an effort to provide a “place where POC can be us without it being overshadowed by the dark cloud that is living under white supremacy.” They gave an inspiring introduction, encouraging only POC who are united by fear of Nazis and police to get on board with submissions, before footnoting the popular, “Dear white people“ routine, explaining how having a problem with the bizarre concept of white fragility is actually evidence of white fragility, and how embarrassing it is when white people say “we need to view people through a color-blind lens.”

University of Minnesota community members were handed a memo from their Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action to warn against creating a hostile environment for students who could be offended by the joy of Christmas - I think we all know who they’re talking about here. Items the document describes as “not appropriate,” include bows, bells, Santa Claus, Christmas trees, wrapped gifts, the star of Bethlehem, angels and doves. Also included were decorations in red and green or blue and white themed colors. State University of New York, Brockport issued similar guidances, banning “culturally sensitive holiday decorations.” Life University sponsored a decorating contest, but the decorations were ordered to be “inclusive to other cultures and religions.” University of California, Irvine encouraged everyone to celebrate the winter season rather than the Christmas holiday itself while. Many other institutions omitted the word “Christmas.” University of Alabama’s student newspaper accused Trump of being a Christian bigot for returning a nativity scene to the White House.

#college

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antoine-roquentin · 7 years

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Edward Herman, the co-author (with Noam Chomsky) of Manufacturing Consent, has died. He was 92. His work has never been more relevant.

Manufacturing Consent was a kind of bible of media criticism for a generation of dissident thinkers. The book described with great clarity how the system of private commercial media in America cooperates with state power to generate propaganda. Herman's work was difficult for many to understand because the nature of the American media, then and now, seemed at best to be at an arm's length from, say, the CIA or the State Department. Here is how the book put it: "It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent." The basic thesis of Manufacturing Consent was that propaganda in America is generated through a few key idiosyncrasies of our (mostly private) system.

One is that getting the whole population to buy in to a narrative requires the sustained attention of the greater part of the commercial media, for at least a news cycle or two. We don't censor the truth in America, mostly. What we do instead is ignore it. If a lone reporter wants to keep banging a drum about something taboo, like contracting corruption in the military, or atrocities abroad, he or she will a) tend not advance in the business, and b) not be picked up by other media. Therefore the only stories that tended to reach mass audiences were ones in which the basic gist was agreed upon by the editors and news directors of all or most of the major media companies. In virtually all cases this little mini-oligarchy of media overlords kept the news closely in sync with the official pronouncements of the U.S. government.

The appearance of dissent was permitted in op-ed pages, where Democrats and Republicans "debated" things. But what readers encountered in these places was a highly ritualized, artificially narrow form of argument kept strictly within a range of acceptable opinions. Herman and Chomsky stressed the concept of worthy and unworthy victims. In Manufacturing Consent, written during the Cold War, the idea was expressed thusly: One Polish priest murdered behind the Iron Curtain earned about a hundred times as much coverage as priests shot in Latin America by American-backed dictatorships. The Polish priest was the worthy victim, the Latin American priests unworthy. So Americans learned to be furious about atrocities committed in Soviet client states, but blind to almost exactly similar crimes committed within our own spheres of influence. The really sad part about the Herman/Chomsky thesis was that it didn't rely upon coercion or violence. Newspapers and TV channels portrayed the world in this America-centric way not because they were forced to. Mostly, they were just intellectually lazy and disinterested in the stated mission of their business, i.e., telling the truth.

In fact, media outlets were simply vehicles for conveying ads, and a consistent and un-troubling view of the political universe was a prerequisite for selling cars, candy bars, detergent, etc. Upset people don't buy stuff. This is why Sunday afternoon broadcasts featured golf tournaments and not police beatings or reports from cancer wards near Superfund sites. The news business was about making money, and making money back then for big media was easy. So why make a fuss? As a result, the top executives in news agencies were people who were inclined to take official sources as gospel. An additional feature of the business was that the least skeptical reporters were the ones who were promoted the most quickly. And when they got there, reporters manning the top posts were encouraged to develop an almost religious worship of credentialing. A person with a title, be it someone from a think tank, a university, or especially a security service organ, was to be trusted unquestioningly. Meanwhile, outside/dissenting voices were given the hardcore "skeptical journalist" treatment. This is how situations like the Iraq War invasion happened, in defiance of all common sense.

Even though a child could see that the government's stated reason for going into Iraq was both insane and a fiction, virtually everyone in the business jumped into the story with both feet. Round the clock, TV sets were full of current and former generals and/or talking heads from think tanks boosting the war rationale. Antiwar voices were almost totally excluded. Within the business, those with doubts hesitated to say so in public. Even at the editorial level, this was so, thanks to fear of backlash. Herman/Chomsky identified that phenomenon in Manufacturing Consent as "flak" – a policing mechanism whereby reporters and/or media outlets that stepped out of line could expect to be denounced by an entire range of establishment voices.

Those voices were usually the same credentialed "experts" who were accustomed to being worshipped in the normal course of coverage. Flak worked. It scared advertisers, and what scares advertisers scares editors. In the case of Iraq, fear of being called unpatriotic, a terrorist-lover or "against the troops" cowed most news directors or editors with even remote doubts. And when that didn't work, networks like MSNBC simply yanked disobedient antiwar voices like Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura. Through these parallel operations – the pushing of approved narratives on the one hand and the policing and hiding of forbidden ones on the other – this seemingly unconnected federation of competing media companies and establishment spokesfiends "manufactured" public opinion.

There was no dictum from above, the way it might have happened in a tinpot dictatorship or a superpower oligarchy like the Soviet Union. Public "consent" for policies like the Iraq invasion was manufactured through a complex series of organic processes, then kept in place via a mix of powerful economic and psychological incentives. Herman was interested in the phenomenon of how even outright fictions could be sold in a "free" media system. In his last piece, from this past summer, Herman made a list of some of the whoppers the media has foisted on the public over the years: the depiction of the U.S. not as an invader but as a defender of South Vietnam against "aggression," the notion that the Soviets were behind a papal assassination attempt, the "missile gap" and others. Herman was a skeptic about the current Russia news, but that isn't why his work is relevant today. You can believe he's dead wrong on Russia and Trump, and Manufacturing Consent would still be far more relevant now than it was when he and Chomsky first wrote it.

The main reasons for this have to do with the structure of the current commercial media. Because of tech companies like Google and Facebook, it is significantly easier to "manufacture" consent today than it was before. A small handful of monopolistic tech companies like Facebook have life-or-death power over media companies. They can steer traffic wherever they please simply by tweaking their algorithms. Firms that don't themselves create news content wield this monstrous influence. Controlling how, where and when you got the news was how media companies were paid previously. Since those processes are mostly out of their hands now, news companies no longer control their own economic fates. They have become vassals to essentially unregulated, monopolistic distribution mechanisms like Facebook, who additionally appropriate the lion's share of the profits that used to fund things like investigative journalism.

Moreover the policing mechanisms are far more powerful now. Herman and Chomsky wrote about flak in the era before social media. Today blowback against dissenting thought is instantaneous and massive. Individual reporters are far more likely to be freaked out about it because Internet trolls are so personal and can rattle just about anyone. Add the proliferation of fake blowback produced by oppo firms and troll farms and it's not an accident that the overwhelming majority of "legacy media" content stays within the confines of conventional blue or red rhetoric. The major difference between then and now has to do with which narratives are being pushed. When Manufacturing Consent was written the major problem was that Americans across the entire political spectrum were being sold a range of myths about the beneficence of American power and government policy. Today it is not clear who is actually dictating to whom. Is the state dictating to the media, or are global distribution firms dictating the narrative to states?

We can make a few deductions about the new "manufactured consent." The thrust of modern media isn't as simple as cheerleading for the flag and ignoring atrocities, although we clearly still do that. There seems also to be a massive emphasis on political division as a route to profit. Since getting people to discuss and argue is how companies like Facebook get paid, driving us toward ever more divisive media is an obvious imperative. But to what end? Herman and Chomsky's work was a great gift to a generation of thinkers trying to make sense of how power in the West sold itself to populations. The late Herman should be honored for that critical contribution he made to understanding American empire. It's a shame he never wrote a sequel. Now more than ever, we could use another Manufacturing Consent.

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secondsightcinema · 7 years

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“Acting is a ridiculous profession…” —notes on Peter Lorre

This post is part of the 2014 What a Character! blogathon. To see more, click graphic (above).

“Acting is a ridiculous profession unless it is part of your very soul.” —Peter Lorre

Even people who have never seen Peter Lorre in a movie know his nasal, dreamy voice and instantly recognizable bug-eyed face, a caricaturist’s dream, from cartoons and voice mimicry that continue to appear as the years go by—two vividly etched on my memory are the apoplectic cartoon chihuahua Ren (of Ren and Stimpy), who got his bulging eyes and his voice from Lorre, as did The Firesign Theatre’s character Rocky Rococo.

Lorre was born Laszlo Loewenstein in 1904 in Hungary and died in Los Angeles not quite 60 years and 79 films (and a lot of radio and TV) later. His phenomenal screen debut came via Fritz Lang’s M(1931), playing the child molester and murderer Hans Beckert, and the 27-year-old Lorre’s singular appearance and indelible performance burned him into the minds of both moviegoers and filmmakers as a monster capable of the most unspeakable horrors. This, along with his long-term morphine addiction, appear to have been his central tragedies. His huge success in M almost made inevitable the typecasting that kept Lorre, one of the finest actors of the century, from playing more than a fraction of the multitudes he contained. His last appearance on film was in Jerry Lewis’s The Patsy, a satire of Hollywood phoniness that Lorre, with his cordial hatred of the studio bosses whose failure of imagination kept him from the roles he fought so hard for, might well have approved. In between there were great films, good films, and stinkers, and while I cannot claim to have seen anywhere near all of them, I do feel safe in saying that he always added something worthwhile—Lorre made no film worse, and a great many were better or even succeeded because of his contribution.

Lorre’s unique onscreen personality and delicacy as an actor could convey menace, madness, homicidal rage, and both sly wit and an extravagant sense of humor, and that was just in the typecast roles. But he knew he could do so much more. And in the rare instances when he got to play outside type, like Three Strangers, where he is decidedly offbeat, a gentle, sweet-tempered drunk who gets the girl, he proved he could do just about anything.

Like Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, Lorre was a great talent who was only partially understood by most of his audience. That is, Fats Waller was such an extraordinary entertainer, such a delightful and fabulous personality, that a lot of audiences probably didn’t notice that he was one of the greatest of stride pianists and a damned good composer. Back when I was growing up in the ’60s, Armstrong was known for “What a Wonderful World” and “Hello, Dolly!” rather than his stunning trumpet and vocal work from the ’20s and ’30s. It seems difficult for people to accommodate complexity, and most of the time when they’ve decided who you are, they simply don’t see anything else—they’re blind to it.

I think Lorre was, in this, like Waller and Armstrong—a great artist who is beloved, but only for a fraction of his gift.

If you’re curious about Lorre’s life and work hie yourself to Amazon or B&N or your local bookshop and pick up a copy of Stephen D. Youngkin’s authoritative, exhaustively researched The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre (University Press of Kentucky). Lorre presents a lot of interesting items for study, but time is short. So we’ll restrict this post to looking at two areas: how his career was shaped and a few films in which he played atypical roles that allowed him to showcase the spectrum of his talents, such as The Mask of Dimitrios, Three Strangers, and The Constant Nymph.

One of Fritz Lang’s goals in M was to present the escalating madness and violence, the sense of a society at the edge of disintegration, that he saw in the daily papers. Mass murders were occurring with shocking frequency in cities and towns across Germany, horrific crime sprees not by gangsters but by people who seemed utterly ordinary. In Lang’s previous crime films he had depicted master criminals, evil geniuses, but in M he made Hans Beckert as ordinary as the killers of the day. Beckert is no antisocial mastermind, he’s a pathetic dweeb—that’s Lang’s and his wife and collaborator Thea von Harbou’s innovation. But casting Lorre as Beckert was essential to the film’s success. From The Nation‘s review: “[Lorre] gives us an intuition of the conflict of will and desire such as we are accustomed to only in the great classic dramas when they are played by great tragic actors. And in the last scene…his wide-eyed, inarticulate defense is made the equivalent of those passages of rhetoric at the close of Greek or Elizabethan plays in which the hero himself is forced to admit his helplessness before the forces which have undone him. The modern psychopath, through Peter Lorre’s acting, attains to the dignity of the tragic hero. It does not matter that the forces are no longer on the outside. They are perhaps the more ruthless for being inside him. The moirae may be given different names by the doctors, the judges, and the audience, but they have lost none of their ancient inevitability.”

Youngkin says that in that final scene, “the dialogue itself…does not touch Lorre’s performance, which sealed his fate as an actor. Rawly emotional and physically racking, it is as exhausting to watch as it was to give. ‘If I play a pathological part,’ Lorre later admitted, ‘I put myself into this character until I begin to display his symptoms.’ He sweats, screams, pants, pleads, and squeals. His eyes bulge, his fingers clench, and his voice pitches toward an ecstatic frenzy.” Lang, famously autocratic on the set, shot that final scene in a marathon that began at 10 a.m. and finally ended at 1 a.m. after Lorre had actually fainted—the director finally had what he wanted, and he used the shot of Lorre’s collapse.

Such a tour de force debut is as often a curse as a blessing. Brilliant debuts not only create inflated expectations, they create a demand for more of the same. For writers, musicians, actors, painters—the more clearly defined you are in an audience’s mind, the less likely you’ll get a chance to branch out, try something new. The money guys don’t like to gamble: If you succeed as a mug, you’re probably going to play a lot of mugs (ask Cagney). And if you get pigeonholed just out of the gate, before you have a chance to get to know the industry and chart a course that’s consistent with what you want and can do, you may get swept along in the current and end up with a one-way ticket to Poverty Row… Stories like Myrna Loy’s, in which she managed to transition from playing exotic yellowface and bad-girl roles (Fu Manchu’s daughter) to playing impeccably respectable but still sexy (Nora Charles) are very rare.

In contrast to Lorre’s career-defining debut, Bogart’s career benefited from growing slowly through a series of appearances in films throughout the ’30s. He mostly (but not always) played bad guys, but even leading roles as villains in The Petrified Forest and High Sierra somehow didn’t fix him so firmly in the minds of the studio bosses that he couldn’t get a shot at playing Sam Spade. Audiences were familiar with him but not so much that they wouldn’t accept him in the part.

The Maltese Falcon may not have broken the bonds of Lorre’s typecasting, but it did rescue him from the downward spiral that typecasting creates—studios refuse to cast you outside your designated type, then grow stale on the type and refuse to cast you at all. Warner Bros. was not much interested in Lorre, but John Huston was: “Peter just seemed to me to be ideal for the part…. He had that international air about him. You never knew quite where he was from, although one did of course…. He had that clear combination of braininess and real innocence, and sophistication. You see that onscreen always. He’s always doing two things at the same time, thinking one thing and saying something else. And that’s when he’s at his best.”

Huston also noted that some of Lorre’s finest touches were not apparent when they were shooting: “I’d often shoot a scene with Peter and find it quite satisfactory, nothing more…. But then I would see it on the screen in rushes and discover it to be far better than what I had perceived on the set. Some subtlety of expression was seen by the camera and recorded by the microphone that the naked eye and ear didn’t get. He’d be doing little things that the camera close on him would pick up that standing a few feet away you wouldn’t see. It was underplaying; it was a play that you would see if you were close to him, as a close-up, as a camera is close. Things would flicker there and burn up slightly, like a lamp, and then dim down, and come on again. You’re watching something as if it were in motion.”

Lorre said in 1962 that making Maltese Falcon was one of his happiest times, and that for years after, “we used to have a sort of stock company, an ensemble…It was a ball team…Each one of those people, whether it was Claude Rains or Sydney Greenstreet or Bogart, or so on, there is one quality about them in common that is quite hard to come by: You can’t teach it and that is to switch an audience from laughter to seriousness. We can do it at will, most people can’t.”

The Maltese Falcon also brought together the 37-year-old Lorre, a screen veteran, with 61-year-old stage actor Sydney Greenstreet in his first movie. Joel Cairo and Caspar Gutman don’t have a very substantial relationship, but there was an inevitability to the meeting and subsequent pairing of the two. They complemented each other so perfectly—Greenstreet’s girth and Lorre’s slight physique; Greenstreet’s rich, low purr and Lorre’s thinner nasal whine… Lorre drove Greenstreet around the bend on the set, having none of Greenstreet’s serious, detail-oriented professionalism. But when the cameras rolled it always turned out that Lorre had been yanking Greenstreet’s chain (he could never resist) and that Lorre knew the script backward and upside down.

I’m particularly fond of The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), adapted from Eric Ambler’s novel. As directed by Jean Negulesco, it is a tricky little noir thriller that starts in Istanbul and ends in Paris with several stops along the way (at least one in one of the multiple flashbacks). I like Lorre as Leyden, the Dutch mystery writer who becomes obsessed with the story of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a criminal whose ruthlessness and sheer nerve makes him seem a natural subject for Leyden’s next book. Greenstreet appears out of nowhere, looking to confirm Dimitrios’s death, and cultivates Leyden’s friendship by searching his room and pulling a gun on him. As Peterson (Greenstreet) often observes, “How little kindness there is in the world today…” It’s true the film occasionally loses its momentum in long dialogue scenes, but since all of them involve Lorre I’m happy, and as the film goes on Lorre and Greenstreet spend more and more time together, things just get better and better. Lorre functions as the audience, listening to the pieces of Dimitrios’s exploits and the wreckage left in his wake. Youngkin finds him wooden in this; I find him natural and reassuring—I would tell him anything.

And then there’s Three Strangers (1945), from a story by John Huston, also directed by Negulesco. Lorre saw it as an opportunity to play a romantic lead, and for once the studio let him have his way. He plays Johnny West, a petty thief and drunk with a gentle soul. The other two strangers, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Greenstreet, have stories of their own, all anchored by shared ownership of a sweepstakes ticket and an oath to a Chinese statue that is supposed to bring them what they desire. Fitzgerald is a respectable-looking horror, desperate and deceitful, manipulative and utterly solipsistic, and Greenstreet is a respectable-looking embezzler, as bad a lot as Fitzgerald. Only Lorre, the criminal and drunk, has any honor or decency. A nice girl falls for Johnny and moves heaven and earth to save him from the doom that seems to have been made just for him.

One more, though Lorre’s part mostly ended up on the cutting-room floor: The Constant Nymph(1943). This is one of my favorite movies these days. It has a hyper-romanticism that reminds me of my beloved Frank Borzage. The whole cast is fine, from stars Charles Boyer, Joan Fontaine, and Alexis Smith down to supporting cast including Dame May Whitty, Charles Coburn, and Lorre. Lorre’s Fritz doesn’t have much screen time but as always he finds exactly the right tone for the piece. You always enjoy his presence but he doesn’t suck all the air out of the room, chew scenery, or otherwise hog bandwidth.

Films like this demonstrate what Lorre could do when he was allowed out of his dungeon. Don’t get me wrong—the madmen and fiends he gave us are among the most memorable we will ever see, and that’s fine. But I can’t shake a sense of melancholy for him, imagining his frustration and sense of waste. Lorre left us an interesting catalogue of work, but I always wonder what we missed, what we might be talking about right now in a parallel universe where Lorre had been able to maneuver more easily in the studios. Perhaps he would have made disastrous choices… who knows?

It’s a mystery.

Note:

Quotations are from The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre, by Stephen D. Youngkin. Buy a copy; it’s really good.

Also, The Films of Peter Lorre, by Stephen D. Youngkin, James Bigwood, and Ramond Cabana Jr., is a good resource, as is, to a lesser degree, Masters of Menace: Greenstreet and Lorre, by Ted Sennett

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prosperopedia · 5 years

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The Dangers of Being a Rich and Famous Celebrity

Prosperity Doesn’t Mean Celebrity

You might think it strange that I’m discussing the dangers of being rich and famous on a website that is centered on how to become prosperous. Although having money and being financially secure is certainly a core element of prosperity, I think there is a clear difference between the comfortable prosperity that comes from working hard and being responsible and seeking after celebrity-type fame and fortune.

Dr Orville Gilbert Brim

These millions of people who are so strongly motivated for fame are obviously different from the rest of the population. And what has happened is the fame motive has come out of the basic human need for acceptance and approval and when this need is not fulfilled because of rejection by parents, or adolescent peer groups, or others, a basic insecurity develops and emerges as the fame motive.

Well, it turns out that fame is not the answer for the need for love and acceptance. The desire is never fulfilled. The search for fame remains, driven by that basic need.

Is It Good to Aspire to Be Rich and Famous?

For the past several years, my daughter (an accomplished young violin and viola player who also likes to sing and dance) has been told repeatedly by people after the watch her, “Oh, you’re going to be just like Lindsey Stirling.” For those who don’t know, Stirling is fellow Latter-day Saint girl who has made it big as a singing, dancing violinist. Her YouTube channel now has over 11 million subscribers, and her videos have been viewed 2.5 billion times.

Estimates of Stirling’s net worth are in the $15M or more range. It seems she has everything, looks, fame, a ready-made fortune, EVERYTHING.

Why wouldn’t a dad like me want his daughter to grow up to be like someone so accomplished, so successful?

There are lots of reasons.

My conversations about that topic with my daughter, whose social, emotional, and physical welfare are some of my top priorities, used to go like this.

Me: “Actually, you don’t want to be like Lindsey Stirling.”

Her: “Why do you say that, Dad?”

Me: “Well, tell me how she’s ever going to have a normal marriage to someone who loves her for who she is rather than for her celebrity. How can she ever have a normal life, time off from worrying about thumbs down votes and negative comments on her YouTube videos? How difficult is it for her to feel satisfied about who she is? How much focus does she have on what should give her ultimate value, her identity as a daughter of good parents and ultimately as a daughter of God?”

Her: “That’s true. I wonder why people tend to make that comparison so often.”

In fact, in the past I’ve talked many times with my daughter about creating a YouTube channel that would allow her to share her own unique talents, even one that she could use to teach others the Suzuki method that’s been used to train her along with other skills she has on the violin. I’ve just not been able to bring myself to do it…yet, and I likely won’t until I can figure out a proven way to help her keep perspective on life while gaining popularity, an audience that could potentially change her motivations.

Obtaining celebrity status usually tends to come at the expense of a person’s ultimate core values, many of which must be sacrificed in favor of what a group of not very discerning people has determined to be the best way to create a shock effect, and political correctness, and an increasingly anti-Christian public opinion. The virtues, morals, and religious convictions, the traditional understanding of family that too frequently must be dropped at the door to Hollywood and other centers of celebrity incubation are the very things that the bulk of the population uses to provide stability. The process of becoming rich and famous, especially when it’s entered into purposefully by someone from a commoner background, naturally undermines the mental and emotional health of that person.

In our media-rich world where certain people’s lives tend to be more interesting than the normal day-to-days experienced among those of us who comprise the general masses of simply regular folks, instant fame and wealth often become the objective of almost anyone who thinks they can look at least halfway attractive (or peculiar anyhow) in a selfie posted to the social media crowd using an Instagram filter. But being rich and famous (especially in that combination, being rich on its own is much more manageable) is not really as much of a worthwhile pursuit as television makes it seem.

Motivations for Celebrities to Become Famous

An interview done by the University of Michigan with Dr. Orville Gilbert Brim, author of a book called Look at Me!: The Fame Motive from Childhood to Death uncovers some of the primary motivations people have for becoming famous. Dr. Brim makes this statement:

Well, it turns out that fame is not the answer for the need for love and acceptance. The desire is never fulfilled. The search for fame remains, driven by that basic need.

This summary of the motivations most celebrities tend to have for becoming famous suggests that they have an insatiable appetite for being noticed. No matter how many doting fans, no matter how their salary, no matter how many likes, shares, retweets they receive, they can never be satisfied.

This may explain why celebrities tend to be so susceptible to trends and fads.

A Different Expectation for Celebrities

youtube

Coincidentally, Brad Paisley, himself a country musician celebrity (one of the few celebrity groups that seems to be down to earth despite their fame) wrote a song about celebrities called, fittingly, “Celebrity”. His song’s indictment of the celebrity culture includes these lyrics.

‘Cause when you’re a celebrity It’s adios reality You can act just like a fool People think you’re cool Just ’cause you’re on TV I can throw a major fit When my latte isn’t just how I like it When they say I’ve gone insane I’ll blame it on the fame And the pressures that go with Being a celebrity

The general population seems to expect celebrities to act like spoiled children, absent the maturity we would expect from leaders for whom respect is demanded as part of their position of trust, including those who have set the standards of respectable culture that makes a society livable. In the past, conduct standards have been demanded of governmental, military, civic, educational, and religious leaders, but the modern celebrity culture that has developed even among segments of those groups.

This lack of social and emotional maturity coupled with narcissism and selfishness often makes it impossible for celebrities to have meaningful marriage relationships. The term “Hollywood marriage” has long been used as a pejorative for short-lived marriages among celebrity couples. A study by the UK based Marriage Foundation found that while the overall divorce rate in the UK over the first 14 years of a marriage is 25%, among A-list celebrities it is twice that amount, 50%.

The Vortex of Popular Culture

The traditional family and religious values that fostered a healthy society on in the early and mid-1900s have taken a beating by the trends of popular culture, especially since the 1960s.

Wikipedia’s list of celebrities who have taken their own lives in this century alone, many of whom appeared to be living enviable lives and even feigned happiness in public settings previous to their suicides, is replete with names of people whose deaths shocked the society that revered them, never anticipating that they were depressed and unhappy enough to give up on life. Society has for too long mistaken fame and fortune with happiness.

In addition to the list of celebrities who have taken their own lives is an even longer list of celebrities who have issues with substance abuse. In her article Are Celebrities More Prone to Addiction?, Kristen McGuiness quotes Dr. Scott Teitelbaum a psychiatrist at the University of Florida who deals with substance abuse. Regarding substance abuse among the famous, Dr. Teitelbaum concludes, “People with addiction and people with narcissism both seek outside sources for inside happiness. And ultimately neither the fame nor the drugs nor the drinking will work.” He points a loss of their sense of humility as being a significant factor.

Anyone who becomes a celebrity, especially in the music, acting, and other entertainment industries, runs the risk of being sucked into what I commonly refer to as the “vortex of popular culture”, which cares nothing about their background and belief system. Instead, the primary motivation of those who control popular culture is to find the next way to push the envelope, to be more sexy, more stimulating, to find the next, more shocking way to attack the world’s sense of propriety.

Losing Their Religion

One of the causes of severe depression among celebrities is a detachment from their religion and the values associated with a spiritual-based moral code. Studies like that done by The American Journal of Psychiatry show that increased religiosity can be a a deterrent from suicide. Other studies have come to similar conclusions.

Celebrities, including in the United States, have tended towards dismissing conservative upbringings in favor of replacing their value systems with liberal, often anti-religious views. Those views most often conflict with traditional standards for family, sexual expression, and habits that have been known to induce overall happiness and well-being.

The celebrity culture over the past 40 years has increasingly focused on doing away with Christian standards of morality and replacing them with pleasure seeking.

Examples of Celebrities Who’ve Sold Out for Fame

There is a long list of well-known people who could fall into the category of people who have put the pursuit of fame at the top of their priority list. In many cases, these people are super talented, and would deserve to be recognized for those talents in one form or another. However, these are a few that I’ve noted recently in discussions with my wife and kids.

Katy Perry: This entertainer grew up a daughter of Pentecostal pastors singing gospel music, but has long since left behind whatever teachings about chastity and Christian morality in favor of becoming an advocate for homosexuality and general sexual permissiveness.

Taylor Swift: My wife and I used to listen to Taylor Swift songs all the time a decade or so ago. Then she went from being an innocent (seeming) country girl to making songs that repeatedly use the Lord’s name in vain and that are full of sexual themes.

Swift’s fall from grace is the subject of an article entitled Taylor Swift’s False Reputation written by Marilette Sanchez of Think Christian magazine.

Dan Reynolds: The lead singer of most recognizable member of Imagine Dragons says that he belongs to my own religion, even having served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. However, despite the faithfulness of large family, led by him mom, Reynolds has clearly lost his way. Many of his songs are clearly about how torn he is between the life he grew up living, including developing musical skills as a religious young man.

The lyrics of his recent popular hit, Bullet in a Gun, captures the essence of this entire article, including in these few lines.

To make a name, you pay the price You give your life, no other way The devil’s deal, it comes around To wear the crown, rise up from the ground

How many voices go unheard? How many lessons never learned? How many artists fear the light Fear the pain, go insane? Lose the mind, lose the self (You only care about fame and wealth) Sellout, sellout, sellout

The lyrics is of this and several of Reynolds’ other songs tell a story of a man who is truly conflicted, not able to figure out how to serve two very different masters.

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Dolly Parton: Although I’ve always known this woman to be a bit edgy, I remember her as a symbol of Christmas in the country. Coming from a humble family of 12 in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, she used to seem like a family-centered woman. Now, in her 70s, she has clearly left behind the values she was raised with and has become an advocate of causes that are clearly anti-family and certainly not Christian.

Who Has Survived Celebrity Status?

On the positive side, there are people who appear to have survived the celebrity culture so far. Two names come to mind immediately, though there are certainly others who have dealt well with the wealth and attention that they’ve received.

Tim Tebow: As a Florida State football fan, it could be hard to like a former Florida Gator quarterback. However, Tebow is a man whose conviction is impressive, a guy who isn’t shy about his commitment to his religious upbringing, even when he is mocked for publicly stating that he’s putting off sex until he’s married.

Bryce Harper: Harper is a committed Latter-day Saint, a member of my own church whose experiences with fame and fortune appear to not have tainted him. He routinely shares things about his religious beliefs on his social media profile, and seems to be living his religion despite pressures in the world he lives to do otherwise.

Hugh Jackman: I couldn’t just list athletes here (although I just realized the good list is made of of only men; feel free to share a female suggestion if you know of one). Hugh Jackman was raised a Christian, and he has apparently maintained his religion, his marriage, his commitment to being genuinely charitable (as opposed to the “charitable giving” marketing ploys common among celebrities), and his down to earth mentality.

Should a Young Musician Aspire to Be Like Lindsey Stirling?

Lindsey Stirling has historically made public commitments to values that include modesty, chastity, and other Christian ideals. But the influence of popularity and those who are waiting on the other side of popularity to guide celebrities to their next levels of success can be difficult to suppress.

I noticed recently that Stirling published at least two videos that depart from her commitment to being family friendly and inspiring, even if they don’t go nearly to the extent that other formerly clean artists turned wild have gone.

In response to some pushback from her fan base who also observed that she’s straying, Stirling wrote this comment:

Just because I look pretty and dare I say, sexy in a video doesn’t mean that I am a “wannabe” “Barbie” “pop star” that has lost her sense of value. I draw the lines that I think are appropriate for me and it is up to you to draw the lines that are appropriate for you.

Those seem like defensive words from someone who has been called out by the part of her fan base that is recognizing that she may very well be following the same path that stars like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift have gone over the past decade. If I had advice for Lindsey Stirling (and I do), I’d say to heed those warnings, even though many of them come across as judgmental and critical of her.

My wife and I actually have on our family bucket list a pipe dream of creating a bluegrass band with our kids and travelling the country (possibly the world) performing for fun. If there comes a time when the band attains any degree of popularity (which is the objective of most performing groups), we plan to have social guard bands in place to prevent any of our kids’ feet from leaving the ground.

For my own daughter specifically, instead of even trying to be like Lindsey Stirling, my recommendation has always been not to seek after accolades that would compromise the values she’s being taught in her home, values that will make her ultimately happy and prosperous.

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Noam Chomsky: ‘Most Of The World Is Just Collapsing in Laughter’ At Russian Intervention Hysteria

We Are Change

“Most of the World is Just Collapsing in Laughter” on Claims that Russia Intervened in the U.S. Election.

This interview took place at the University of Arizona, before a public audience, on February 2, 2017. I thank Marvin Waterstone for arranging the event, and Professor Chomsky, who approved this transcript for publication. The interview is presented in full, with only very slight editing for style. This interview originally appeared in the journal Class, Race, and Corporate Power. – D. Gibbs

Interview transcript via Digital Commons.

David Gibbs: The main issue on everyone’s minds is the inauguration of Donald Trump as president. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has emphasized the extreme danger that Trump poses, due to the augmented risk of nuclear war and uncontrolled climate change. After inauguration, the Bulletin’s metaphoric clock has been repositioned at two and a half minutes to midnight, with “midnight” signifying catastrophe. Do you agree with the Bulletin regarding the alleged dangers posed by the Trump presidency?

Noam Chomsky: One of the dangers is unquestionable. Of the two existential threats – the threats to the termination of the species basically and most other species – one of them, climate change, on that I think there’s no basis for discussion. Trump has been very inconsistent on many things; on Twitter he’s been all over the place, but some of it is very consistent. That is: Do nothing about climate change except make it worse. And he’s not just speaking for himself, but for the whole Republican Party, the whole leadership. It’s already had impact, it will have worse impact. We’ll talk about this next week, but if there are ways out of this, it’s going to be not easy.

With regard to nuclear weapons, it’s kind of hard to say. He’s said lots of things. As you mentioned, the national security experts are terrified. But they’re more terrified by his personality than by his statements. So if you read people like say Bruce Blair1 one of the leading, most sober, knowledgeable specialists, he says, look, his statements are all over the map, but his personality is frightening, he’s a complete megalomaniac. You never know how he’s going to react. When he learned for example that he’d lost the election by about three million votes, his instant reaction was insanity; you know, three to five million illegal immigrants somehow were organized in some incredible fashion to vote. On any little issue – Miss Universe, or whatever it may be – he’s completely unpredictable, he’ll go off into outer space. His guru Steve Bannon is worse, he’s much scarier. He probably knows what he’s doing.

Over the years, there’s been case after case when there were very narrow decisions that had to be made about whether to launch nuclear weapons in serious cases. What is this guy going to do if his vaunted negotiating skills fail, if somebody doesn’t do what he says? Is he going to say, “Okay we’ll nuke them? We’re done?” Remember that in any major nuclear war, the first strike destroys the country that attacks; it’s been known for years. The first strike of a major power is very likely to cause what’s called nuclear winter, leads to global famine for years and everything’s basically gone. Some survivors straggling around. Could he do it? Who knows.

Some of his comments can be interpreted as potentially reducing the threat of nuclear war. The major threat right now is right on the Russian border. Notice, not the Mexican border, the Russian border. And it’s serious. He has made various statements moving towards reducing the tensions, accommodating Russian concerns and so on. On the other hand, you have to balance that against expanding our nuclear forces, add to our so-called depleted military, which is already more powerful than the rest of the world combined; attack in Syria, send forces to Syria, start bombing. Who knows what could be next? Michael Flynn, national security advisor,2 [his reaction] to the Iranian missile test the other day was very frightening. Now the missile test is ill-advised, they shouldn’t have done it. But it’s not in violation of international law or international agreements. They shouldn’t have done it. His reaction suggested maybe we’re going to go to war in retaliation. Would they do it? If they did, you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Everything could blow up.

This crazy ban on the seven states, where we can’t accept immigrants, almost every analyst points out the obvious: It just increases the threat of terror. It lays the basis for terror. It’s just like the atrocities in Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantanamo. They’re the most fabulous recruiting techniques for Al Qaeda and ISIS. Everyone knows it. Now, you ban not the whole Muslim world. You ban seven states, seven states that have not been responsible for a single terrorist act. Those are the seven he banned. But, you leave the ones that really are responsible, like Saudi Arabia, which is the center for propaganda and funding and so on for radical Islamic Jihadism, well you can’t touch them because of business interests, also they have oil and so on and so forth. There’s actually an article in the Washington Post, I don’t know whether it’s tongue in cheek or not, which said the criterion for being on the list of banned states is that Trump doesn’t have business interests there. Maybe. But it’s this kind of wild unpredictability, megalomania, thin-skinned craziness that really has me worried, more than his statements. Now, on the climate change there’s just nothing to say, he’s perfectly straightforward.

Gibbs: Let us turn to the role of the media in reporting alleged Russian interference in the US electoral process. Mainstream journalists have called Trump a puppet of Russia, a modern version of the Manchurian Candidate. Others have criticized the media for accepting unsubstantiated claims about Russian influence, and reporting such claims as facts. Normon Soloman and Serge Halimi, for example, stated that press reporting on this issue amounts to a mass hysteria reminiscent of the McCarthy era, while Seymour Hersh called the media reporting on Russia “outrageous.”3 What is your view of this situation?

Chomsky: My guess is that most of the world is just collapsing in laughter. Suppose all the charges are true, I mean every single one, it is so amateurish by US standards that you can hardly even laugh. What the US does is the kind of thing I described in Italy in 1948. Case after case like that, not hacking or spreading rumors in the media; but saying look, we’re going to starve you to death or kill you or destroy you unless you vote the way we want. I mean that’s what we do.

Take the famous 9/11, let’s think about it for a minute. It was a pretty awful terrorist act. It could have been a lot worse. Now let’s suppose that instead of the plane being downed in Pennsylvania by passengers, suppose it had hit its target, which was probably the White House. Now suppose it had killed the president. Suppose that plans had been set for a military coup to take over the government. And right away, immediately 50,000 people were killed, 700,000 tortured. A bunch of economists were brought in from Afghanistan, let’s call them the “Kandahar Boys,” who very quickly destroyed the economy, and established a dictatorship which devastated the country. That would have been a lot worse than 9/11. It happened: the first 9/11, it happened on September 11, 1973, in Chile. We did it. Was that interfering or hacking a party? This record is all over the world, constantly overthrowing governments, invading, forcing people to follow what we call democracy, as in the cases I mentioned. As I say, if every charge is accurate, it’s a joke, and I’m sure half the world is collapsing in laughter about this, because people outside the United States know it. You don’t have to tell people in Chile about the first 9/11.

Gibbs: One of the surprises of the post-Cold War era is the persistence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other US-led alliances. These alliances were created during the Cold War mainly or exclusively for containing the claimed Soviet threat. In 1991, the USSR disappeared from the map, but the anti-Soviet alliance systems persisted and in fact expanded. How do we account for the persistence and expansion of NATO? What in your view is the purpose of NATO after the Cold War?

Chomsky: We have official answers to that. It’s a very interesting question, which I was planning to talk about but didn’t have time. So thanks. It’s a very interesting question. For fifty years, we heard NATO is necessary to save Western Europe from the Russian hordes, you know the slave state, stuff I was taking about. In 1990-91, no Russian hordes. Okay, what happens? Well there are actually visions of the future system that were presented. One was Gorbachev. He called for a Eurasian security system, with no military blocs. He called it a Common European Home. No military blocs, no Warsaw Pact, no NATO, with centers of power in Brussels, Moscow, Ankara, maybe Vladivostok, other places. Just an integrated security system with no conflicts.

That was one. Now the other vision was presented by George Bush, this is the “statesman,” Bush I and James Baker his secretary of state. There’s very good scholarship on this incidentally. We really know a lot about what happened, now that all the documents are out. Gorbachev said that he would agree to the unification of Germany, and even adherence of Germany to NATO, which was quite a concession, if NATO didn’t move to East Germany. And Bush and Baker promised verbally, that’s critical, verbally that NATO would not expand “one inch to the east,” which meant East Germany. Nobody was talking about anything farther at the time. They would not expand one inch to the east. Now that was a verbal promise. It was never written. NATO immediately expanded to East Germany. Gorbachev complained. He was told look, there’s nothing on paper. People didn’t actually say it but the implication was look, if you are dumb enough to take faith in a gentleman’s agreement with us, that’s your problem. NATO expanded to East Germany.

There’s very interesting work, if you want to look into it by a young scholar in Texas named Joshua Shifrinson, it appeared in International Security, which is one of the prestige journals, published by MIT.4 He goes through the documentary record very carefully and he makes a pretty convincing case that Bush and Baker were purposely deceiving Gorbachev. The scholarship has been divided on that, maybe they just weren’t clear or something. But if you read it, I think it’s quite a convincing case, that they were purposely setting it up to deceive Gorbachev.

Okay, NATO expanded to East Berlin and East Germany. Under Clinton NATO expanded further, to the former Russian satellites. In 2008 NATO formally made an offer to Ukraine to join NATO. That’s unbelievable. I mean, Ukraine is the geopolitical heartland of Russian concern, quite aside from historical connections, population and so on. Right at the beginning of all of this, serious senior statesmen, people like Kennan for example and others warned that the expansion of NATO to the east is going to cause a disaster.5 I mean, it’s like having the Warsaw Pact on the Mexican border. It’s inconceivable. And others, senior people warned about this, but policymakers didn’t care. Just go ahead.

Right now, where do we stand? Well right at the Russian border, both sides have been taking provocative actions, both sides are building up military forces. NATO forces are carrying out maneuvers hundreds of yards from the Russian border, the Russian jets are buzzing American jets. Anything could blow up in a minute. In a minute, you know. Any incident could instantly blow up. Both sides are modernizing and increasing their military systems, including nuclear systems.

So what’s the purpose of NATO? Well actually we have an official answer. It isn’t publicized much, but a couple of years ago, the secretary-general of NATO made a formal statement explaining the purpose of NATO in the post-Cold War world is to control global energy systems, pipelines, and sea lanes. That means it’s a global system and of course he didn’t say it, it’s an intervention force under US command, as we’ve seen in case after case. So that’s NATO. So what happened to the years of defending Europe from the Russian hordes? Well, you can go back to NSC-68,6 and see how serious that was. So that’s what we’re living with.

Right now the threat to our existence is Muslim terrorists from seven states, who have never had a single terrorist act. About half the population believes that. I mean you look back at American history and American culture, it’s pretty striking. I mean this has been the safest country in the world forever, and the most frightened country in the world. That’s a large part of the source of the gun culture. You have to have a gun when you go into Starbucks, because who knows what’s going to happen. It just doesn’t happen in other countries.

There’s something deeply rooted in American culture. You can pretty much identify what it was. You take a look at the history. Remember, the US is not a global power until pretty recently. It was internal conquest. You had to defend yourself against what the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, an enlightened figure, called the attacks of the “merciless Indian savages,” whose known way of warfare was torture and destruction. Jefferson wasn’t a fool. He knew that it was the merciless English savages who were carrying out these acts. That is in the Declaration of Independence, recited piously every July Ffourth, the merciless Indian savages with no reason at all were suddenly attacking us. I mean, you can imagine the reasons. That’s one. Also you had a slave population, you had to protect yourself against them. You needed guns. One consequence of that was in southern culture, possession of a gun became kind of a sign of manhood, not just because of slaves but other white men. If you had a gun, you’re not going to push me around. You know, I’m not one of those guys you can kick in the face.

There was another element, which was kind of interesting. In the mid to late nineteenth century, the gun manufacturers recognized that they had a limited market. Remember that this is a capitalist society, you’ve got to expand your market. They were selling guns to the military. That’s a pretty limited market. What about all the rest of the people? So what started was all kinds of fantastic stories about Wyatt Earp and the gunmen and the Wild West, how exciting it was to have these guys with guns defending themselves against all sorts of things.

I grew up in that, when I was a kid. My friends and I used to play cowboys and Indians. We were cowboys killing the Indians, following the Wild West stories. All of this combined into a very strange culture, which is frightened. You look at the polls today, I think half the population supports this ban on these dangerous immigrants who are going to come in and do something, who knows what. And meanwhile the countries that really have been involved in terrorism, they’re out. It’s kind of like I think it was Oklahoma banning Sharia law. Now there’s probably fifty Muslims in Oklahoma, and they have to ban Sharia law, you know. This terror which is all over the country is constantly incited. The Russians were part of NSC-68, is a dramatic case. And that case, like most propaganda wasn’t totally fabricated. The Russians were doing a lot of rotten things, you can point to them. But the idea that if you consider what Hans Morgenthau called “I called abuse ofe reality,” the picture of the world was almost the opposite of what they presented. But somehow this sells and is continually repeated, at least in this kind of situation.

Gibbs: During the Cold War, the political left generally opposed military intervention. After 1991, however, the anti-interventionist movement collapsed and in its place has emerged the idea of humanitarian interventionism, which celebrates intervention as a defense of human rights. Military actions in the Balkans, Iraq, Libya have all been presented as acts of humanitarianism, which aimed to liberate oppressed peoples, and these interventions were at least initially popular among political liberals. Proposals for augmented US intervention in Syria often invoke the humanitarian principle. What is your view of humanitarian intervention?

Chomsky: Well, I don’t quite see it like that. Now, if you look back to the anti-intervention movements, what were they? Let’s take the Vietnam War – the biggest crime since the Second World War. Those of you who are old enough will remember what happened. You couldn’t be opposed to the war for years. The mainstream liberal intellectuals were enthusiastically in support of the war. In Boston, a liberal city where I was, we literally couldn’t have a public demonstration without it being violently broken up, with the liberal press applauding, until late 1966. By that time there were hundreds of thousands of American troops rampaging in South Vietnam. South Vietnam had been practically destroyed. The leading, the most respected Vietnam historian, military historian Bernard Fall7 – he was a hawk incidentally, but he cared for the Vietnamese – he said it wasn’t clear to him whether Vietnam could survive as a historical and cultural entity under the most massive attack that any region that size had ever suffered. He was talking about South Vietnam, incidentally. By that time, we did begin to get some protests. But not from liberal intellectuals; they never opposed the war.

In fact, it’s pretty dramatic when you get to 1975, very revealing, the war ends. Everybody had to write something about the war, what it meant. And you also had polls of public opinion, and they’re dramatically different. So if you look at the writings of intellectuals, there are two kinds. One said, l“Look, if we fought harder we could have won.” You know, the stab in the back. But the others, who were way at the left, people like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, way out in left stream, his view in 1975 was the Vietnam war began with blundering efforts to do good. But by 1969, it was clear that it was a disaster, that was too costly to us. We could not bring democracy to South Vietnam at a cost that we were willing to accept. So it was a disaster. That’ is the left extreme.

Take a look at public opinion. About 70 percent of the population, in the polls, said the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. And that attitude lasted as long as polls were taken in the early ‘80s. The pollsters don’t ask reasons, they just give numbers. So why did the people think it was fundamentally wrong and immoral? The guys who ran the polls, John E. Rielly, a professor at the University of Chicago, a liberal professor, he said what that means is that people thought too many Americans had beenwere being killed. Maybe. Another possibility is they didn’t like the fact that we were carrying out the worst crime since the Second World War. But that’s so inconceivable that wasn’t even offered as a possible reason.

Now what happened in the following years? Well, I think that among the educated classes it stayed the same. You talk about humanitarian intervention, it’s like Vietnam was a humanitarian intervention. Among the public, it’s quite different. Take the Iraq War, , it’s the second worst crime after the Second World War. It’s the first time in history, in the history of imperialism, there were huge demonstrations, before the war was officially launched. Actually it was already under way. But before it was officially launched, there were huge demonstrations everywhere. I think it had an effect. The public still was split.

And [after Vietnam] the type of interventions that are carried out are designed so as not to elicit public reactions. In fact, it was stated early in the first Bush [presidency], Bush I, in one of their documents they pointed out in the future, US wars are going to be against much weaker enemies. And they have to be won quickly and decisively before a popular reaction develops. And Iif you take a look, that’s what’s done. Look at Panama, for instance, over a couple of days; and Kosovo, no American troops. You wrote a great book about it.8 But I’m not convinced that it’s different from what it was.

Gibbs: With the end of the Cold War, there has been a decline of activism in the US and elsewhere around the issue of nuclear disarmament. Once again, this state of affairs differs from the period of the Cold War, when there was a mass movement that opposed nuclear weapons – recall the Freeze movement from the 1980s — but this movement largely disappeared after 1991. The danger of nuclear war remains as high as ever, but there is little public engagement on this issue, it would seem. How would you explain the disappearance of the anti-nuclear movement?

Chomsky: Well that’s absolutely right. The peak of anti-nuclear popular activism was in the early ‘80s, when there was a huge movement. And the Reagan administration attempted decided to defuse it and partially succeeded, by presenting the illusion of Star Wars, SDI, that somehow we’re going to eliminate nuclear weapons. The Reagan administration picked up the rhetoric of the anti-nuclear movement; they said “Yyeah, you’re right.” We have to eliminate nuclear weapons. And the way we’re going to do it is by having SDI, TStar Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative, which prevent nuclear weapons from impacting. Well, that did defuse the movement.

And whthen the Russians collapsed, and it looked like as if maybe we can reduce the nuclear tensions. And for a while they actually were reduced. There was a reduction of nuclear weaponsreally were reduced on both sides. Various steps were taken. Nowhere near enough, but some of them were taken.

On the other hand, it’s very important to understand the official position of the United States. You should read it. So in 1995, this is Clinton, a very important document came out, still classified, but large parts of it were declassified. It’s called “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence.”9 What does post-Cold War deterrence mean? Deterrence means use of nuclear weapons. This was released by the Strategic Command, which was in charge of nuclear weapons planning and running nuclear weapons. I wrote about it when it came out and have been writing about it since. . Since then, I’ve never seen a reference to it. But it is an amazing document. Here’s what it says basically: It says we have to maintain the right of first strike, the right of the first use of nuclear weapons, even against nonnuclear powers. Nuclear weapons, they point out, are really constantly used, because they cast a shadow over other military actions. In other words, when people know we are ready to use nuclear weapons, they’re going to back off if we do something aggressive. So basically, nuclear weapons are always being used.

Now that’s a point that Dan Ellsberg has made for years. He said it’s kind of like if you and I go into a grocery store to rob it, and I have a gun. The guy may give you the money in the cash register. I’m using the gun even if I don’t shoot. Well that’s nuclear weapons — essential to post-war deterrence — they cast a shadow over everything. Then, it goes on to say that we must present a national persona of being irrational and vindictive, because that’s going to terrify people. And then, they’ll back off. And this is not Trump, this is Clinton. It’s not Nixon, you know. We have to be irrational and vindictive, because that’s going to frighten people. And we have to maintain this for years. And then we’ll be able to carry out the actions that we want to carry out.

That’s our nuclear weapons strategy, as of the early post-Cold War years. And I think this is a real failure of the intellectual community, including scholarship and the media. It’s not like you had headlines all over the place. And it’s not secret, the documents are there. And I think that’s probably the right picture. You know, people talk about Nixon’s “madman theory.” We don’t really know much about that. It was in memoirs, by somebody else.10 But this is real. This is the real mad man theory. We have to be irrational and vindictive, so people don’t know what we’re up to. This is not Trump and Bannon, it’s from the Clinton era.

Gibbs: I think we have time for one more question. In popular discussion, the phrase “national security” has come to mean security against military threats almost exclusively. This narrative downgrades the significance of nonmilitary threats, such as climate change, antibiotic resistant bacteria, or viral epidemics. It would seem that there is an imbalance between perceived military threats, which receive overwhelming governmental funding and press attention on the one hand, and nonmilitary threats, which receive relatively little on the other hand. How do we account for the apparent overemphasis on military threats?

Chomsky: Well [with] military threats, you can see them actually, you can imagine it. People don’t think about it enough. But Iif you think about it for a minute, you can see that a nuclear attack could be the end of everything. These other threats are kind of slow, maybe we won’t see them next year. Maybe the science is uncertain, maybe we don’t have to worry about it. Climate change is the worst, but there’s others.

Take pandemics. There could easily be a severe pandemic. A lot of that comes from something we don’t pay much attention to: Eating meat. The meat production industry, the industrial production of meat, uses an immense amount of antibiotics. I don’t remember the exact figure, it’s probably like half the antibiotics. Well antibiotics have an effect: They lead to mutations that make them ineffective. We’re now running out of antibiotics that deal with the threat of rapidly mutating bacteria. A lot of that just comes from the meat production industry. Well, do we worry about it? Well, we ought to be. You go into a hospital now, it’s dangerous. We can get diseases that can’t be dealt with, that are moving around the hospital. A lot of that traces back to industrial meat production. These are really serious threats, all over the place.

Take something you really don’t think about: Plastics in the ocean. I mean plastics in the ocean have an enormous ecological effect. When geologists announced the beginning of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, humans destroying the environment, one of the main things they pointed to is the use of plastics in the earth. We don’t think about it, but it has a tremendous effect. But these are things you don’t see right in front of your eyes. You need to think about them a little, to see what the consequences are. It’s easy to put them aside, and the media don’t talk about them. Other things are more important. How am I going to put food on the table tomorrow? That’s what I’ve got to worry about, and so on. It’s very serious, but it’s hard to bring out the enormity of these issues, when they do not have the dramatic character of something you can show in the movies, with a nuclear weapons falling and everything disappears.

Notes

1 For the recent opinions of Princeton University nuclear weapons specialist Bruce G. Blair, see Blair, “Trump and the Nuclear Keys,” New York Times, October 12, 2016.

2 Note that Michael T. Flynn resigned as national security advisor on February 13, 2017, several days after this interview took place

3 See Solomon, “Urgent to Progressives: Stop Fueling Anti-Russia Frenzy,” Antiwar.com, December 21, 2016, http://original.antiwar.com/solomon/2016/12/20/urgent-progressives-stop-fueling-anti-russia-frenzy/ ; Halimi, January, 2017, ; Jeremy , “Seymour Hersh Blasts Media for Uncritically Reporting Russian Hacking Story,”

4?: The End of the Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International Security 40, no. 4, 2016.

5 On George F. Kennan’s warning about the dangers of NATO expansion, see Thomas L. Friedman, “Foreign Affairs: Now a Word from X,” New York Times, May 2, 1998.

6 Here, Chomsky references the National Security Council memorandum NSC-68, one of the key documents of the Cold War. This document was the topic of Chomsky’s lecture, which preceded the interview. The document text is now fully declassified and available online. See “A Report to the National Security Council – NSC 68,” April 14, 1950, made available through the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/pdf/10-1.pdf .

7 Regarding Bernard Fall’s writings on Vietnam, see Fall, Last Reflections on a War. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967.

8 The book Chomsky references with regard to the Kosovo intervention is David N. Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009.

9 This e full text of this declassified document is now available online. See US Department of Defense, Strategic Command, “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence,” 1995 [no exact date indicated], made available through provided by the Federation of American Scientists, Nuclear Information Project,http://www.nukestrat.com/us/stratcom/SAGessentials.PDF.

10 The idea that President Richard Nixon subscribed to a “madman” theory of international relations first appeared in the memoir by former Nixon aide H. R. Haldeman, in Haldeman and Joseph DiMona, The Ends of Power. New York: Times Books, 1978, p. 98.

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