Taking kids to the art museum can be a bit like offering kids a nutritious snack. You can sell the outing as good news/bad news. The good news is we’re leaving the house today. The bad news is we’re not going to the mall. (And as a parent you want to avoid the mall – and any other place – that has multiple branded items for sale.);
America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It's astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.
There's no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We've somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you're seeing this more and more in the west. I don't think it's unique to America.
I think we've perfected a lot of the tragedy and we're getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named Karl Marx.
I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.
You know if you've read Capital or if you've got the Cliff Notes, you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.
That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.
We understand profit. In my country we measure things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us what we're supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God. Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not want your bonus?
And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we're going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.
Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.
It's pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don't let it work entirely. And that's a hard idea to think – that there isn't one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we've dug for ourselves. But man, we've dug a mess.
After the second world war, the west emerged with the American economy coming out of its wartime extravagance, emerging as the best product. It was the best product. It worked the best. It was demonstrating its might not only in terms of what it did during the war but in terms of just how facile it was in creating mass wealth.
Plus, it provided a lot more freedom and was doing the one thing that guaranteed that the 20th century was going to be – and forgive the jingoistic sound of this – the American century.
It took a working class that had no discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working on subsistence wages. It turned it into a consumer class that not only had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn't need, and that was the engine that drove us.
It wasn't just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.
And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win.
Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments, capital doesn't get to. But it's in the tension, it's in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.
The unions actually mattered. The unions were part of the equation. It didn't matter that they won all the time, it didn't matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers were not worth less, they were worth more.
Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got built, I don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.
That we've gotten to this point is astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state's journey towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we've descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we're all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances.
Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have "some", it doesn't mean that everybody's going to get the same amount. It doesn't mean there aren't going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It's not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don't get left behind. And there isn't a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.
And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.
We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.
Socialism is a dirty word in my country. I have to give that disclaimer at the beginning of every speech, "Oh by the way I'm not a Marxist you know". I lived through the 20th century. I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth. I don't.
I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me.
And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted.
And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labour. They would want labour to be diminished because labour's a cost. And if labour is diminished, let's translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less.
From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism.
Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way. Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It's a great tool to have in your toolbox if you're trying to build a society and have that society advance. You wouldn't want to go forward at this point without it. But it's not a blueprint for how to build the just society. There are other metrics besides that quarterly profit report.
The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?
If you watched the debacle that was, and is, the fight over something as basic as public health policy in my country over the last couple of years, imagine the ineffectiveness that Americans are going to offer the world when it comes to something really complicated like global warming. We can't even get healthcare for our citizens on a basic level. And the argument comes down to: "Goddamn this socialist president. Does he think I'm going to pay to keep other people healthy? That's socialism you know. HMO [health-maintenance organisation] contract. Motherfucker."
What do you think group health insurance is? You know you ask these guys, "Do you have group health insurance where you …?" "Oh yeah, I get …" you know, "my law firm …" So when you get sick you're able to afford the treatment.
The treatment comes because you have enough people in your law firm so you're able to get health insurance enough for them to stay healthy. So the actuarial tables work and all of you, when you do get sick, are able to have the resources there to get better because you're relying on the idea of the group. Yeah. And they nod their heads, and you go "Brother, that's socialism. You know it is."
And ... you know when you say, OK, we're going to do what we're doing for your law firm but we're going to do it for 300 million Americans and we're going to make it affordable for everybody that way. And yes, it means that you're going to be paying for the other guys in the society, the same way you pay for the other guys in the law firm … Their eyes glaze. You know they don't want to hear it. It's too much. Too much to contemplate the idea that the whole country might be actually connected.
So I'm astonished that at this late date I'm standing here and saying we might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you don't mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don't embrace some other values for human endeavour.
And that's what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.
That's the great horror show. What are we going to do with all these people that we've managed to marginalise? It was kind of interesting when it was only race, when you could do this on the basis of people's racial fears and it was just the black and brown people in American cities who had the higher rates of unemployment and the higher rates of addiction and were marginalised and had the shitty school systems and the lack of opportunity.
And kind of interesting in this last recession to see the economy shrug and start to throw white middle-class people into the same boat, so that they became vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or they became unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain faith in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and market logic started to fall away from people. And they realised it's not just about race, it's about something even more terrifying. It's about class. Are you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?
So how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because they dealt the cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody's going to get left behind. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get the banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people to have some hope.
We're either going to do that in some practical way when things get bad enough or we're going to keep going the way we're going, at which point there's going to be enough people standing on the outside of this mess that somebody's going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get to the end there's always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I'm losing faith.
The other thing that was there in 1932 that isn't there now is that some element of the popular will could be expressed through the electoral process in my country.
The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate moral authority over what's a good idea or what's not, or what's valued and what's not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.
Right now capital has effectively purchased the government, and you witnessed it again with the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m that was heaved into Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order that the popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative process.
So I don't know what we do if we can't actually control the representative government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if we all start having the same sentiments that I'm arguing for now, I'm not sure we can effect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise of the Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.
David Simon is an American author and journalist and was the executive producer of The Wire. This is an edited extract of a talk delivered at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney.
[Screencap of Simon at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas via YouTube]
Reports trumpeting basic differences between male and female brains are biological determinism at its most trivial, says the science writer of the year
As hardy perennials go, there is little to beat that science hacks' favourite: the hard-wiring of male and female brains. For more than 30 years, I have seen a stream of tales about gender differences in brain structure under headlines that assure me that from birth men are innately more rational and better at map-reading than women, who are emotional, empathetic multi-taskers, useless at telling jokes. I am from Mars, apparently, while the ladies in my life are from Venus.
And there are no signs that this flow is drying up, with last week witnessing publication of a particularly lurid example of the genre. Writing in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia revealed they had used a technique called diffusion tensor imaging to show that the neurons in men's brains are connected to each other in a very different way from neurons in women's brains.
This point was even illustrated by the team, led by Professor Ragini Verma, with a helpful diagram. A male brain was depicted with its main connections – coloured blue, needless to say – running from the front to the back. Connections within cranial hemispheres were strong, but connections between the two hemispheres were weak. By contrast, the female brain had thick connections running from side to side with strong links between the two hemispheres.
"These maps show us a stark difference in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks and women at others," said Verma.
The response of the press was predictable. Once again scientists had "proved" that from birth men have brains which are hardwired to give us better spatial skills, to leave us bereft of empathy for others, and to make us run, like mascara, at the first hint of emotion. Equally, the team had provided an explanation for the "fact" that women cannot use corkscrews or park cars but can remember names and faces better than males. It is all written in our neurons at birth.
As I have said, I have read this sort of thing before. I didn't believe it then and I don't believe it now. It is biological determinism at its silly, trivial worst. Yes, men and women probably do have differently wired brains, but there is little convincing evidence to suggest these variations are caused by anything other than cultural factors. Males develop improved spatial skills not because of an innate superiority but because they are expected and encouraged to be strong at sport, which requires expertise at catching and throwing. Similarly, it is anticipated that girls will be more emotional and talkative, and so their verbal skills are emphasised by teachers and parents. As the years pass, these different lifestyles produce variations in brain wiring – which is a lot more plastic than most biological determinists realise. This possibility was simply not addressed by Verma and her team.
Equally, when gender differences are uncovered by researchers they are frequently found to be trivial, a point made by Robert Plomin, a professor of behavioural genetics at London's Institute of Psychiatry, whose studies have found that a mere 3% of the variation in young children's verbal development is due to their gender. "If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls, you get two graphs that overlap so much you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference between them. Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls and instead exaggerate wildly the tiny difference between them. It drives me wild."
I should make it clear that Plomin made that remark three years ago when I last wrote about the issue of gender and brain wiring. It was not my first incursion, I should stress. Indeed, I have returned to the subject – which is an intriguing, important one – on a number of occasions over the years as neurological studies have been hyped in the media, often by the scientists who carried them out. It has taken a great deal of effort by other researchers to put the issue in proper perspective.
A major problem is the lack of consistent work in the field, a point stressed to me in 2005 – during an earlier outbreak of brain-gender difference stories – by Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London, and author of Y: The Descent of Men. "Researching my book, I discovered there was no consensus at all about the science [of gender and brain structure]," he told me. "There were studies that said completely contradictory things about male and female brains. That means you can pick whatever study you like and build a thesis around it. The whole field is like that. It is very subjective. That doesn't mean there are no differences between the brains of the sexes, but we should take care not to exaggerate them."
Needless to say that is not what has happened over the years. Indeed, this has become a topic whose coverage has been typified mainly by flaky claims, wild hyperbole and sexism. It is all very depressing. The question is: why has this happened? Why is there such divergence in explanations for the differences in mental abilities that we observe in men and women? And why do so many people want to exaggerate them so badly?
The first issue is the easier to answer. The field suffers because it is bedevilled by its extraordinary complexity. The human brain is a vast, convoluted edifice and scientists are only now beginning to develop adequate tools to explore it. The use of diffusion tensor imaging by Verma's team was an important breakthrough, it should be noted. The trouble is, once more, those involved were rash in their interpretations of their own work.
"This study contains some important data but it has been badly overhyped and the authors must take some of the blame," says Professor Dorothy Bishop, of Oxford University. "They talk as if there is a typical male and a typical female brain – they even provide a diagram – but they ignore the fact that there is a great deal of variation within the sexes in terms of brain structure. You simply cannot say there is a male brain and a female brain."
Even more critical is Marco Catani, of London's Institute of Psychiatry. "The study's main conclusions about possible cognitive differences between males and females are not supported by the findings of the study. A link between anatomical differences and cognitive functions should be demonstrated and the authors have not done so. They simply have no idea of how these differences in anatomy translate into cognitive attitudes. So the main conclusion of the study is purely speculative."
The study is also unclear how differences in brain architecture between the sexes arose in the first place, a point raised by Michael Bloomfield of the MRC's Clinical Science Centre. "An obvious possibility is that male hormones like testosterone and female hormones like oestrogen have different effects on the brain. A more subtle possibility is that bringing a child up in a particular gender could affect how our brains are wired."
In fact, Verma's results showed that the neuronal connectivity differences between the sexes increased with the age of her subjects. Such a finding is entirely consistent with the idea that cultural factors are driving changes in the brain's wiring. The longer we live, the more our intellectual biases are exaggerated and intensified by our culture, with cumulative effects on our neurons. In other words, the intellectual differences we observe between the sexes are not the result of different genetic birthrights but are a consequence of what we expect a boy or a girl to be.
Why so many people should be so desperate to ignore or obscure this fact is a very different issue. In the end, I suspect it depends on whether you believe our fates are sealed at birth or if you think that it is a key part of human nature to be able to display a plasticity in behaviour and in ways of thinking in the face of altered circumstance. My money is very much on the latter.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[Image credit: Couple fighting and dressed for a night out via Shutterstock.com]
Research shows female stars are paid less, have fewer lines and spend more time with their clothes off than men
By Monday morning, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the sci-fi adventure thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence, will have taken close to half a billion dollars in global ticket sales. A female-led blockbuster is rare in any year, and all the more so in one marked by box-office disappointments and industry turmoil.
Nevertheless the film's success is likely to intensify rather than diminish calls for greater sexual equality in film. For despite the success of women-led films such as The Hunger Games and Cate Blanchett's Oscar-tipped performance in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, or directors like Kathryn Bigelow and writers such as Lena Dunham – and most recently the taboo-busting French lesbian romance Blue Is the Warmest Colour – Hollywood remains stubbornly set in its ways regarding sexual equality.
The New York Film Academy has published a remarkably comprehensive study that demonstrates just that: enduring disparities are revealed in the number of speaking parts given to men and women; the relative number of roles requiring full or partial nudity also shows a stark difference; and the sexual divide in offscreen jobs and the gulf in earnings between male and female actors is laid bare.
In publishing the survey, the academy called for a discussion about why, when women comprise half of ticket-buyers and nearly half of directors entered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, their numbers fall away dramatically at the top end of the industry. "By shedding light on gender inequality in film, we hope to start a discussion about what can be done to increase women's exposure and power in big-budget films," its publishers state.
Examining the top 500 films from 2007 to 2012, the survey found one third of speaking parts are filled by women and only 10% of films are equally balanced in terms of roles. The average ratio of male to female actors is 2.25 to 1.
"Like in any big industry, change takes time," points out Dr Martha M Lauzen, executive director, Centre for the Study of Women in Television, Film & New Media at San Diego state university, California, whose research forms the basis of the academy study. "The film industry doesn't exist in a bubble. It's part of a larger society that tends to have biases and prejudices."
According to Lauzen, women comprised 18% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinema- tographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films in 2012 – an improvement of only 1% since 1998. Counting directors alone, women accounted for only 9% – the same figure as in 1998. Lauzen says it is relevant to compare the number of women in positions of power in film, onscreen or off, to the number of women in leadership positions in Fortune 500 companies. "All of these are highly coveted, high-status positions – and when you're talking about those kinds of positions, they remain dominated by men."
The most surprising thing, Lauzen says, is the apparent lack of change. "A filmgoer might reference Hunger Games and think things must be OK. It's easy to be misled by a few high-profile cases. But you have to do the count; and the numbers show we're not seeing any change." According to Forbes, the 10 highest-paid actresses made a collective $181m (£110m) versus $465m made by the top 10 male actors. At last year's Academy Awards, 140 men were nominated compared with 35 women. There were no female nominees in directing, cinematography, writing or in several other categories.
When it comes to the silver screen itself the results of Lauzen's research are even more stark: 29% of women in the top 500 films wore sexually revealing clothes compared with only 7% of men; 26% of actresses appear partially naked, compared with 9% of men, and the percentage of teenage females depicted with some nudity has risen by a third since 2007. While those figures may be skewed by one film alone (Harmony Korine's hit teenage skin celebration Spring Breakers) the overall pattern of sex bias is unmistakable.
The casting of 50 Shades of Grey has been dogged by the reluctance among a series of potential male leads (including British hunk Charlie Hunnam, who accepted the part before dropping out over "scheduling conflicts") to get their kit off in a three-movie deal. At the same time, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, the stars of Blue Is the Warmest Colour, who were jointly awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, have spoken of their embarrassment at the excessive attention paid to the 20 minutes of sex in the three-hour movie. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis likened director Abdellatif Kechiche's filming to pornography. "Women tend be younger and are still expected to adhere to a higher standard of appearance," says Lauzen, whose studies have found filmgoers are more likely to know the marital status of a female character and occupation of a male. All of this feeds into stereotypes about the important parts of identity. For women, that is to be very young and look a certain way."
In her acceptance speech for an award for excellence in film, at Women in Film LA's annual Crystal+Lucy awards in June, actress Laura Linney witheringly described the overwhelmingly male ambience in the US film industry. When she first started, she said, she was astonished at the "enormous amount of time" men spent discussing the colour of her hair – a process that became "absurd and a complete waste of time".
"I soon realised that for the most part I was surrounded by men. As an actress in film, it is very easy to become isolated just due to the ratio of gender inequality that exists. Rarely do you have a scene with other women, very few women are on the crew, and what few female executives arrive tend to keep to themselves."
The success of individual women in film, whether Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games, Cate Blanchett or Kathryn Bigelow, is often treated as a sign of progress, when, according to Lauzen and other critics, they are the exceptions that prove the rule. "The Hunger Games is just one film," says Lauzen. "The same thing happened when Bridesmaids came out, or when Kathryn Bigelow won her Oscar. People start talking about a 'Bridesmaids effect' or a 'Bigelow effect' – that these high-profile successes would radiate an effect to other women in the business."
But, she says, that's not the case. "Kathryn Bigelow's success may have helped her, but it didn't change the world because attitudes about gender or race or age are held on a very deep level. Old habits die hard. One of the reasons we haven't seen much change, is that it's not seen as a problem by people in positions of power – even by some women. Unless you perceive something as a problem you're not going to fix it."
For some reason, the Daily Mail in the last couple of weeks is doing its utmost to make two self-published fantasies by a couple of marginal cranks sound like legitimate dispatches from the world of science.
Well, it's pretty obvious what the reason is. Pseudoscience sells.
The first salvo arrived on November 14, when a ludicrous self-published book with a cover that looks like it was made on MS Paint was treated like a startling new advance in biology. Humans are not from Earth was written, the Mail says, by a "U.S. ecologist" by the name of Ellis Silver.
Now, there's this stuff called "DNA" that we share with every other living thing on the planet which makes it pointless to examine the silly idea in this book -- that human beings were suddenly dropped off here from another solar system just a few tens of thousands of years ago. This "theory" is supported with an amateur scientist's litany of puzzlements -- why do humans sunburn? Why do our backs seem so poorly adapted for the way we live? Why are the heads of babies so large and make childbirth so difficult? It's the usual stuff that sends your garden variety crank looking for spectacularly bad answers.
There's a reason a book like this was self-published by someone no one has ever heard of.
And there's a funny thing about the way the Mail refers to him. In newspaper style, it's rare to refer to someone as "Dr." and yet in this story the Mail refers to him as "Dr. Ellis" no less than ten times. (And why "Dr. Ellis" as opposed to "Dr. Silver"? One can only wonder.)
It's the sure sign of a newspaper straining to lend credibility to someone it actually knows nothing about.
Silver's Twitter account hasn't been active in two years, but it lists him as "an ecological consultant" from Madison, Wisconsin. A brief description Ellis wrote about himself in 2008 says that he was "an eco consultant, better living evangelist, and writer, originally from Madison, Wisconsin, but currently living in England. Ellis is the author of two guidebooks on eco solutions, to be published shortly. A website is under construction."
We're still waiting for his website, but we're sure it will be a doozy.
Seven of the eight tweets that Silver put out before his account went dormant all promoted a vanity publishing site, "ideas4writers," which Ellis also used to publish his book.
Any newspaper editor will assure you that silly books published through vanity sites arrive in the mail every day. Promoting a book like this, and straining to make it seem legitimate, is pretty much the opposite of a newspaper's role.
But the Daily Mail was only getting warmed up.
Today, it is promoting an entirely different theory for the ascent of man.
This time, a writer comes up with his own puzzlements about odd human traits -- hairless skin, a protruding nose, heavy eyelashes and the like -- and rather than conclude that we're space aliens dropped off after a trip from another planet, he says we're the result of monkeys fucking pigs several million years ago.
Right off the bat, the Mail pretends that this theorist -- with the unlikely name of Eugene McCarthy -- is "of the University of Georgia."
That would seem to suggest that Mr. McCarthy is on the faculty of that august academy, wouldn't you agree?
But looking at McCarthy's website, he makes it clear that he took a degree from the university and taught there at one time, as grad students typically do. But the university's website doesn't currently list him on the faculty. He also explains that he had some success writing about hybrid bird species, but once he turned to mammals he ran into trouble with a university press, and he found solace publishing from his own website.
As in the previous story, the Mail is title-happy, and Eugene is referred to as "Dr. McCarthy" no less than eight times.
Well-known biologist and blogger Professor PZ Myers, who actually is OF the University of Minnesota-Morris, skillfully took apart McCarthy's ideas in a recent blog post. Even if monkeys and pigs somehow found reason to produce and raise human babies in some bizarre sub-Saharan sex orgy, there's a major problem preventing their hybrid offspring from surviving -- namely, that chimps have 48 chromosomes and pigs have only 38.
The Mail does refer to the drubbing that Myers gave the "Monkey-Fucking-A-Pig hypothesis," but called Myers "impudent," and Myers -- who not only has a PhD but actually teaches at a university -- does not get the "Dr." treatment.
We know it's probably futile to point out the intellectually dishonest practices of a news organ its own readers refer to as the "Daily Fail." But if we don't do it, who will?
[IMAGE: From a YouTube video of a monkey riding a pig.]
A Sheriff's department in western Virginia confirms this morning that a scuffle over a parking spot at a Walmart in Tazewell County resulted in a stabbing, which is, of course, how we know that the holiday shopping season is upon us.
We're collecting videos and tweets of the Black Friday madness this morning.
We'll begin in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, which experienced a stampede for savings!
This video has been popular this morning, showing a manic shopper pushing through a crowd like a fullback sniffing the end zone...
Here's a scuffle over something -- tablets? -- which results in an arrest that a Walmart employee doesn't want filmed...
And here's a frenzy over some Rachael Ray cookware in Tennessee...
Things were going great for Amy...
Not only is Walmart practically empty, there is SO MUCH STUFF left! Kind of shocked.
— Amy Zeigler (@AmyZig) November 29, 2013But not so well for this guy...
Went to walmart for nothing...... Fuck...
— Layno (@TheMainEvent13) November 29, 2013Aw, mom...
Mom called me and woke me up and had me drive to Walmart because the grill she bought was too big to fit in her car
— Ty (@Ty_Sager) November 29, 2013A satisfied customer!
Me & @ATV_LIFE450 stood in line at Walmart for 3 tvs for 6 hours. It was totally worth it tho.
— Morgan Renee (@Its_MW_Bro) November 29, 2013Now this sounds like an odd special...
This Walmart is advertising $9.99 iPads to anyone who throws their baby into a snakepit.
— dulcetry (@dulcetry) November 29, 2013No idea.
WALMART SMELLS LIKE BREAKFAST.
— Katievw (@katieveegee) November 29, 2013Score!
i swear my mommy is the best she got us the last tv at Walmart ! merry tristmas to us
— Ororo Munroe (@yosoyklee) November 29, 2013Maranda's going in!
About to go into Walmart, pray for me.
— Maranda Phillips (@Marannddaa) November 29, 2013Hang in there, Kaylyn...
Going on 3 hours in line for iPhone. Walmart get your crap together, I should not be besties with the strangers in line #Survivin
— Kaylyn Popp (@kaylynpopp) November 29, 2013Now, now, Darth...
I wish my wife was off today so we could go judge assholes at walmart
— Darth BUCN (@LRNeuby) November 29, 2013Getting teased...
They are laughing at me bc I went to Walmart last night and only bought pajamas and socks. Lol.
— Traycee (@traycee30) November 29, 2013Madness in Quincy...
Now that's a sister...
Been standing at Walmart for two hours for my brother to get a phone... #thestruggleisreal #BlackFriday
— Emily Poe (@em_poe) November 29, 2013And amid the madness, life goes on...
That awkward moment when you see your ex's parents at Walmart and you look like you just rolled out of bed.
— Shayna Bess (@sheelah_beach) November 29, 2013A shopper scoffs...
Just overheard two co-workers agreeing together that "how can you not love Wal-Mart?!" Barf. I can think of every reason under the sun.
— El Gev (@inactivedesert) November 29, 2013Hold it together, Jerod...
Going on 3 hours of waiting at Walmart for my Iphone upgrade. :(
#BlackFriday #soomanybetterwaystospendmytime!
— Jerod Keyes (@jerodkeyes) November 29, 2013Carmen's life will never be the same...
All I came for was this, walmart you ruined my day and my nephews Christmas I hope you're happy
— Carmen Alvarado (@AvocadoCarmen) November 29, 2013And some were inspired...
i start a business, make it a walmart-like store or something
— Griz (@YoungGreeezy) November 29, 2013Injured in the line of duty...
Officer suffers broken wrist as he brakes up brawl between two men at S. Calif Wal-Mart store https://t.co/rndJi7Qs1M
— Ventura County Star (@vcstar) November 29, 2013Someone forgot what day it is...
Last time I ever go into walmart early to get milk.
— Nicccc (@niccystevens) November 29, 2013The irony...
Just got into a fight jockeying for position to try and film a Walmart fight
— Anthony Lima (@AnthonyLimaFAN) November 29, 2013Good old dad...
My sister was crying cause she wanted to go Black Friday shopping so my dad took her to Walmart and told her to pick out anything she wants
— Taylor Peace (@Taylor_Peace9) November 29, 2013Victory tastes so sweet!
Just made some awesome waffles with my $4.50 waffle iron, courtesy of walmart's #BlackFriday.
— Jessica Montgomery (@jessamonty) November 29, 2013Aw dad, not here...
No dad your not allow to just start singing in walmart
— Emily Traynor (@emilyytraynor) November 29, 2013But think of the savings!
Man I really spent 365.76 at walmart last night !!! Wow lol
— Beautiful 3 (@ItsDeejYaBish_) November 29, 2013Last night, ProPublica founder and executive chairman Paul Steiger received the Burton Benjamin Memorial award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Here are his remarks.
In recent days I thought a lot about the 16 previous recipients of the Burton Benjamin award, and re-read the words from this platform of some of them.
Their words are inspiring. Their deeds are awesome. I am humbled and deeply honored to be among them.
The first honoree, in 1997, was Ted Koppel of ABC, who for a significant time brought serious reporting to late-night TV with sustained high quality. The most recent, last year, was Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian, who has the vision to be a leader in reinventing journalism for the digital age and the courage to challenge both his government and ours on the extent to which they spy on us. Together, and with those in between, they inhabit an arc of profound change that I want to reflect on briefly tonight.
The arc actually goes back to 1981, when Michael Massing and other young writers with overseas experience founded CPJ.
American journalists were still basking in the reflected glow of All the President's Men, the Robert Redford/Dustin Hoffman movie that five years earlier had won three Academy Awards and anointed Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and by implication all reporters as rock stars with typewriters. Yes, typewriters.
Woodward's and Bernstein's reporting in the Washington Post, based partly on tips from anonymous sources, helped drive President Nixon from office. This came only a few years after the Pentagon Papers case, in which the Supreme Court denied Nixon's motion to bar the New York Times and the Post from publishing leaks of the papers, which detailed abuses during the Vietnam War.
U.S. journalists, in other words, were riding high.
What Michael and his young colleagues saw was that journalists in America had it far better than those abroad, particularly in repressive states. Americans had the protection of the First Amendment and the backing of wealthy, committed, and lawyer-stocked news organizations. In vast parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, reporters, editors, and broadcasters could be bankrupted, beaten, thrown into jail, or killed, by powerful people offended by what they wrote or aired.
As the experience of our incredibly courageous honorees tonight demonstrates, in many places around the world the life of a journalist who is determined to find and report the truth is no better today than it was 32 years ago. Reporters, editors, photographers, and publishers are still threatened, beaten, and murdered, often with impunity. The core mission of CPJ is just as critical as it ever was, in many respects more so.
What has changed is the position of us, American journalists. We are still far better off than our beleaguered cousins in danger zones abroad, of course.
But financially, I don't need to tell this group of the hammering our industry has taken in the last decade. Publications shrinking or even closing, journalists bought out or laid off, beats shrunk or eliminated.
And now, more recently, we are facing new barriers to our ability to do our jobs 2013 denial of access and silencing of sources.
For the starkest comparison, I urge any of you who haven't already done so to read last month's report, commissioned by CPJ and written by Len Downie, former editor of the Washington Post. It lays out in chilling detail how an administration that took office promising to be the most transparent in history instead has carried out the most intrusive surveillance of reporters ever attempted.
It also has made the most concerted effort at least since the plumbers and the enemies lists of the Nixon Administration to intimidate officials in Washington from ever talking to a reporter.
Consider this: As we now know from the Snowden documents, investigators seeking to trace the source of a leak can go back and discover anyone in government who has talked by phone or email with the reporter who broke the story. Match that against the list of all who had access to the leaked info and voila!
In my days editing the Wall Street Journal, I used to joke that no one in the Washington Bureau ever had an on-the-record conversation. Now I would have to wonder whether anyone was having any kind of conversation at all that wasn't a White House-sanctioned briefing.
It isn't just words. The White House has been barring news photographers from all sorts of opportunities to ply their craft. Routine meetings and activities of the president, of which they used to be able to shoot still and video images under certain constraints, now are often 2013 not always, but often -- off limits, according to the American Society of News Editors, which is protesting the action, along with other groups.
The administration has invited news organizations to pick up images handed out by the press office or from the White House website. Sort of like saying, "just print the press release," as some corporate PR people used to say to me years ago when I asked for an interview with the CEO.
I don't mean to suggest that this administration is always and everywhere implacably hostile to journalists. After its snooping into communications of the Associated Press and of a Fox News reporter was revealed, the administration agreed to certain restraints.
It ostensibly agreed not to prosecute anyone for engaging in journalism. News organizations will generally be given advance notice when the Justice Department wants access to their records, so that they can resist in court, and warrants for access to a reporter's records won't be sought unless the reporter is a target of a criminal investigation. Still, the government can waive these constraints if national security is involved.
CPJ chairman Sandra Mims Rowe noted in announcing the Downie Report last month that the founders of CPJ "did not anticipate the need to fight for the rights of U.S. journalists who work with the protection of the First Amendment." Limited resources, she said, had to be directed at countries with the greatest need. Even with declining revenues at U.S. news organizations, the principal need is still abroad.
But, she added, the time has come for CPJ to speak out against excessive government secrecy here at home. As just one supporter of CPJ, I agree. If we are going to be credible admonishing abusers of journalists abroad, we can't stand silent when it is going on at home.
One last thing. I don't want to leave the impression that I'm in despair. I'm definitely not.
A couple of billionaires, Jeff Bezos and Pierre Omidyar, have put up several hundred millions of dollars in funding to, respectively, rebuild one great old platform 2013 the Washington Post 2013 and erect an entirely new one.
From New York to Texas to California, and in scattered places in between, non-profit reporting teams, ProPublica happily among them, are enjoying increasing success with both their journalism and their fundraising.
And new forms of web-based reporting like Buzzfeed are both attracting young audiences and sliding towards profitability. I was at first cranky the other day when Buzzfeed stole one of our brilliant senior editors. But then I realized his new job is to recruit half a dozen reporters and start an investigations team. For society and for journalism, that is progress.
We can't rest. We need to stand up in stout opposition whenever the First Amendment is challenged at home. We need to speak out, even more vigorously than before, when journalists are abused around the world. We need to keep finding and funding more inventive ways to carry out serious reporting.
Watch video, uploaded to YouTube, below:
[Eye spying through a keyhole via Shutterstock.com]
Before the "madman in a box," there was a man and a box. And An Adventure In Space And Time -- a 90-minute retelling of the origins of Doctor Who as part of the show's 50th anniversary this weekend -- packs a surprisingly potent love letter both to Doctor Who's original star, William Hartnell, and the fanbase that has followed the show since his arrival.
While Hartnell (David Bradley) is recruited to play the first of the show's 12 galaxy-tripping Doctors, the film quickly establishes rookie producer Verity Lambert (Jessica Raine) as the source of the character's courage. If early clips sold the movie as a sort of UK take on Mad Men, then Lambert faces a struggle not unlike Peggy Olson's. Not only does she take the assignment on the whim of former boss Sydney Newman (Brian Cox, perhaps supplying the Doctor's eventual bowtie), but she defends both herself and the project against in-house sexism.
Thanks to Lambert's persistence, the show also survives (barely) the worst possible intrusion of real life into her nascent sci-fi show: As the show premieres in the United Kingdom, the world at large is following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But she wins a do-over from the increasingly skeptical Newman, who grants her a repeat of the pilot episode, "The Unearthly Child," the following week, which helps the show become a surprise hit.
Meanwhile, Hartnell (David Bradley) is as surprised as anyone, given his situation: a veteran stage actor charged by a rookie producer with playing a cross between "H.G. Wells, C.S. Lewis and Father Christmas," the First Doctor is revealed as an off-screen grump with children flocking to him in wonder after seeing him gallivanting around the space-time continuum. And it's not just him capturing their imagination: we can see the show beginning to change project into product when Newman sees kids gleefully yelling "EXTERMINATE!" on a bus and Harnell's granddaughter cheerfully dresses up like one of the Doctor's arch-rivals, the Daleks. In a respectful touch, writer/producer Mark Gatiss, part of the show's current creative team, makes sure that, even from a behind-the-scenes perspective, the Daleks are always at least a little creepy.
Another pleasant surprise -- at least for newer progressive Whovians -- is seeing a person of color, director Waris Hussein, as Lambert's chief ally, the springboard to his own long career. While it's no spoiler to say that Doctor Who is in no danger of losing commercial steam any time soon, seeing Hussein alongside Lambert is gratifying for anyone dismayed by current showrunner Steven Moffat's trollish responses to calls for more diversity both in front and behind the camera.
But, the heart (or hearts, if you prefer) of Space and Time lies in Hartnell, who -- much like the Doctor -- sees himself become the show's only constant as Hussein, Lambert and his co-stars depart; "Why do things always have to change?" he protests. But with his own health failing to the point where he becomes a liability for the production, Hartnell becomes the first recipient of one of the show's harshest, most enduring points: Everything has its time. And everything ends. Even if you don't want to go.
However, Gatiss allows the audience one bit of "timey-wimeyness," suggesting that Harnell might have been able to see how far the show's legacy would stretch. The moment is a little bit hopeful and a little bit childish. But then, so is the character himself.
A few weeks back, I went to my first baby shower. My friends have only recently started getting married and having babies – although not necessarily in that order – and I was psyched to pick out a set of adorable baby clothes for the twins to whom my friend had only weeks earlier given birth. I popped into a cutesy Brooklyn baby shop and said I was looking for a baby shower gift for new twins. Her first question: "Girls or boys?" One of each, I said. She pointed me to the section of girls' clothes, all pink, and boys' clothes, all blue.
I said:
It's a little weird how all the clothes are pink for girls and blue for boys, isn't it?
She agreed, and said they had one yellow outfit, but then said that nearly everyone who comes in demands the gender color-coding. I ended up buying burp cloths and bibs printed with zigzags – one yellow and one grey.
Gendering kids starts immediately after birth, when we wrap a baby in a pink blanket or a blue one. Babies have no idea what they're even wearing and just need to be kept warm. It's parents who buy into the binary, and the rest of us who are thoroughly uncomfortable when they don't. There's the yellow aisle of gender-neutral toys and apparel, but show up to a baby shower with a pink onesie for a male baby and see what kind of looks you get (believe me, I was tempted, but given that there was a baby of each gender it wouldn't have been quite as effective).
The boy/girl divide gets even more pronounced as kids get older, but there's more of a stigma for boys who cross it than for girls. Most progressive parents these days will buy their daughters building blocks or sign her up for a sports team, but they're a lot less likely to get their son a baby doll or sign him up for ballet. Kids, though, are natural gender-transgressors. Of course they soak up our cultural gender norms and respond accordingly, and even the most feminist parent can attest that it's impossible to keep a daughter totally protected from Disney Princess mania or a son entirely away from war and gun play.
But as influenced as kids may be by the culture outside their front doors, they're still newbies to the whole gender role thing, which means they break the rules more often than adults. And that freaks out some parents, especially when the rule-breaker is their son. Katie may be a tomboy because she likes to climb trees, but if Kevin likes to wear dresses? He's a sissy, he's not acting like a boy, and he might be gay.
That parental anxiety was highlighted this week in a Dear Prudence column in Slate, where a mom wrote in concerned about her husband's over-reaction to their son's penchant for playing dress-up in mom's shoes. Dad makes the kid remove the shoes, then punishes the kid when he gets hysterical – all over donning a pair of ballet flats. The dad in question isn't an unusual tyrant; parents across the US punish their sons for playing dress-up, painting their nails, wanting to grow their hair long, or engaging in other activities that the parent deems "feminine".
Christian parenting manuals instruct parents to quash any sort of play that involves identifying as a gender other than the one the child was assigned at birth. When I was a kid, I had a male friend who loved to dress up in women's clothes – in particular, his sister's gold lame skirt. After he refused to take the skirt off one day, his dad cut it off of him and burned it in the back yard.
The result of harsh gender policing isn't upstanding masculine sons and submissive feminine daughters. It's kids who are hurt, confused and alienated from their parents.
It should go without saying that the majority of kids who play dress-up in gender non-conforming ways don't grow up to be gay or transgender. But some do, and many of the kids who grow up to be gay or trans will point to cross-gender play as an early indicator, for them, of their sexuality and identity. Others still are confused about their sexuality.
The best ally any kid can have as their identity takes shape is an involved, accepting and loving parent. No amount of parental intervention will make a gay kid straight or change the identity of a trans kid. But positive parental actions that affirm your child's individuality and identity can mean that your kid comes to you with questions. She'll know you'll be her biggest advocate in a world that is notoriously cruel to anyone who's different – whether that means gay, transgender, gender non-conforming or simply a boy who wants to wear nail polish or a girl who wants to play football.
Parental intervention in normal explorative play that shames a kid for gender non-conformity sends a very clear message that certain behaviors and identities aren't OK. At best you end up with a kid who's also a homophobe and a bully; at worst your child believes he's unlovable because of who he is, and lives with the attendant psychological and emotional scars. Gay kids have suicide, depression and victimization rates that are significantly higher than their straight counterparts. Of course, that's often not the parent's fault, but parents contribute more often than many would like to admit – to both the victims and the bullies.
What is it, exactly, that's going to break down if a little boy puts on a dress or if a girl wants to cut her hair short? A few years back a Toronto couple refused to publicly disclose the sex of their child – not a big deal, one would think, given that what's between the child's legs isn't really a matter of pressing public interest. Nonetheless, the public went ballistic, accusing the couple of child abuse because the child wasn't clearly identified to outsiders as male or female (the family knew the child's sex, they just didn't want anyone else knowing). Talking heads said the couple was raising a "freak" and denying the child their identity.
It's worth pausing here to note that "male" and "female" are not as clearly-defined categories as we would like them to be. Physically, we're much more the same than we are different, and there's great variation even within each group. And there's a vast middle of intersex people, and people who may have ambiguous genitalia, non-standard genitalia, chromosomes that don't match their external sex organs or hormones that deviate from the normal. Nature, unlike many parents, isn't quite so intent on keeping males and females clearly differentiated.
So why are we so deeply concerned with making sure boys are identified as boys and girls as girls – especially with things that have nothing to do with genitalia, hormones, chromosomes or, most importantly, how the child sees themselves? There's nothing about having a penis that correlates with the color blue; there's nothing about having a vagina that correlates with the ability to cook (just ask Time Magazine).
While gender identity is a real thing, the trappings we put onto gender – the colors, the clothes, the assumed preferences – are all cultural, not natural. There are certainly behavioral patterns that are influenced by hormones and body chemistry, but we don't know exactly what, or to what extent. We can take educated guesses, but we've never lived in a world without cultural constructs around gender, so pinpointing "X personality characteristic is male" becomes impossible. Cultural beliefs about gender also influence biology – how a child is treated physically, emotionally and intellectually impacts their neural pathways, brain development and even musculature.
So, why apply gender roles so strictly to the youngest among us, and punish transgressors so harshly?
We'd be much better off if we let kids be kids, and didn't project our own gender anxieties onto their preferences or playtimes. And we should start recognizing that terrorizing a kid for cross-gender play isn't "tough love"; it's abuse.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
["Stock Photo: Confused Young Lass" on Shutterstock]
Chef Mario Batali announced yesterday afternoon on his Twitter account (540K followers) that for the next 30 minutes he was going to match donations from his followers up to $5,000 as, in New York, Sarah Silverman and Lizz Winstead were holding a fundraiser for Lady Parts Justice, a pro-choice effort to support women in Texas struggling under new restrictive laws...
Hello Americans i am happy to match your donations for the next 30 minutes up to 5 grand in support of @TXWomenForever C'mon !!!!!
— Mario Batali (@Mariobatali) November 19, 2013Of course, even the genial TV chef had to know that no good deed goes unpunished on Twitter.
First, he had to fend off complaints that offering to match what others gave would limit his own donation...
I'm trying to help raise awareness AND money!!
RT. @Quiara: @Mariobatali @niais @TXWomenForever Why not just donate $5k?”
— Mario Batali (@Mariobatali) November 19, 2013Then came another classic complaint: How could Batali give to cause X when cause Y needs his help?
Yes working on Philippines aid too!
RT. @JeanTerranova: the Philippines could use your help. Bet you have cooks from the area.”
— Mario Batali (@Mariobatali) November 19, 2013But inevitably, things turned political.
I'm for personal choice!
RT. @KristiLuvsJesus: @NARAL Abortion is murder!! You claim to be for women; but what about unborn women??”
— Mario Batali (@Mariobatali) November 19, 2013I think you need a nap it's pro choice. Bubye
RT. @PolitiBunny: Pro-death is pro-woman? That's offensive. @jenjohnsonann @Mariobatali”
— Mario Batali (@Mariobatali) November 19, 2013As things got meaner, Mario only got more charming...
You seem successful and delightful!
RT. @USSANews: Pro choice? Then choose to eat a carrot once in a while you fat fuck. Just sayin...”
— Mario Batali (@Mariobatali) November 19, 2013Thx for the tip, I imagine you could give me even more life advice
RT. @Pambeaux:@TXWomenForever Stay in the kitchen and out of politics.”
— Mario Batali (@Mariobatali) November 19, 2013I support all women's right to decide about their own body by themselves.
RT. @PatriotMom69 @Pambeaux @TXWomenForever
— Mario Batali (@Mariobatali) November 19, 2013Finally, this morning, he'd had enough of the nuttiness and pushed the keyboard away. But not before one final note of defiance...
signing out for now but you all keep trying to pick a fight. I'll be back to describe freedom every day and tell you why I believe in it!
— Mario Batali (@Mariobatali) November 19, 2013Batali. That guy can cook.
The election of Kshama Sawant, a socialist, to the city council of Seattle seems like dropping a pebble in the ocean – particularly given the Tea Party's inroads into Congress and the Republican hold on state legislatures. With one lone vote, we can't expect Seattle to collectivize Starbucks and Amazon anytime soon.
But her election does show that not only was she not afraid to be a socialist, people were not afraid of electing one. It's not just that socialism is coming into fashion; people are finding out that maybe they've been socialists this whole time and didn't know it.
Contrary to popular belief, Americans don't have an innate allergy to socialism. Milwaukee has had several socialist mayors, and there's currently an independent socialist in the US Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont. In 1920, Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V Debs won nearly 1m votes. In fact, some historians argue that the liberal achievements of the New Deal, such as Social Security, were the result of pressure from the growing popularity of the Socialist and Communist Parties. The achievements of the labor movement, such as the eight-hour work day, are the result of the agitation of radical unionists.
Senator Joe McCarthy and FBI Director J Edgar Hoover were successful in undoing a lot of that progress with their witch hunts. And it was easier during the most tense moments in the Cold War for the right to malign socialists, even if they were opposed to Soviet-style authoritarianism. The mere word brought to mind images of bread lines and secret police. American capitalism always looked good by comparison. Besides, no one likes a traitor.
But not only has the quality of American economic life vastly declined since the fall of the Berlin Wall, that horrific image doesn't exist anymore. Further, millennials, a demographic acutely and adversely affected by the economic downturn, have little to no memory of the hammer and sickle, and when one thinks where socialism exists in the world, they don't think of Russia, they think of social democracies like Denmark. Even Switzerland, a country most closely associated with the banking industry, is considering a universal basic income.
Without the ideological duel with the Soviet Bear, Americans are better able to understand socialism for what it really is: a system that ensures that wealth can provide food, housing, education and basic needs for the population. And more and more people – out of work, in debt and feeling betrayed by the promises of market capitalism – see that as a good thing.
It isn't just the Fox News anchors of the world who try to denounce any progressive economic policy as dreaded socialism. The American left has also had aversion to go all-in with the term. The 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle were called "anti-corporate", rather than "anti-capitalist" as similar protests Europe were called, broadly stating what activists were against, but not putting forth what kind of alternative economy they wanted to create. Occupy Wall Street, for all its progress in reigniting a conversation about economic equality, marked the ascendence of a brand of anarchist rhetoric that turned its back on unions and sought to avoid making demands on the state.
However, there's been a realignment. OWS did rekindle interest in Marxist theory. Even the business press is quick to unveil the inequality that exists as a result of financial deregulation. It's not a coincidence that in the airport town of SeaTac, near Seattle, voters approved a $15 per hour minimum wage, in part inspired by the recent wave of fast-food worker strikes. Kshama Sawant's ascendence signifies a movement that is tired of the same market solutions to every economic problem, which is the basic platform of both major American political parties.
Of course, people like Sawant have her enemies. Already, scruffy anarchists have taken to the Internet to denounce any socialist group for engaging with the corporate state and seeking reform of a broken system. Such an approach places ideological purity over the needs of actual people. Besides, the "in-the-streets" insurrectionists are largely fueled by testosterone, so nothing threatens them more than a smart, confident woman.
The great hope is not just that Sawant brings about new, progressive policies in Seattle, but that it inspires others like her; that it allows people to see that being labeled a socialist these days should be taken as a compliment.
Francis is the poster pope for progressives. But canonizing a genocidal missionary like Junípero Serra epitomizes the Catholic history problem.
He is a pin-up for liberals and progressives, "the obvious new hero of the left". So says the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland of Pope Francis, and it's true that most of the surprises have been good ones.
His statements denouncing capitalism are of the kind that scarcely any party leader now dares to breathe. He appears to have renounced papal infallibility. He intends to reform the corrupt and scheming Curia, the central bureaucracy of the Catholic church. He has declared a partial truce in the war against sex that his two immediate predecessors pursued (while carefully overlooking the rape of children) with such creepy fervor.
It's worth noting that these are mostly changes of emphasis, not doctrine. Pope Francis won't devote his reign to attacking gays, women, condoms and abortion, but nor does he seem prepared to change church policy towards them. But it's not just this that spoils the story. There is a strange omission that puts the pope on the wrong side even of John Paul II. It's his failure so far to engage with or even acknowledge the past horrors over which the church has presided.
From the destruction of the Cathars to the Magdalene laundries, the Catholic church has experimented with almost every kind of extermination, genocide, torture, mutilation, execution, enslavement, cruelty and abuse known to humankind. The church has also, at certain moments and places across the past century, been an extraordinary force for good: the bravest people I have met are all Catholic priests, who – until they were also crushed and silenced by their church – risked their lives to defend vulnerable people from exploitation and murder.
It's not just that he has said nothing about this legacy; he has eschewed the most obvious opportunities to speak out. The beatification last month of 522 Catholics killed by republican soldiers during the Spanish civil war, for example, provided a perfect opportunity to acknowledge the role the church played in Franco's revolution and subsequent dictatorship. But though Francis spoke at the ceremony, by video link, he did so as if the killings took place in a political vacuum. The refusal in July by the four religious orders that enslaved women in Ireland's Magdalene laundries to pay them compensation cried out for a papal response. None came. How can the pope get a grip on the future if he won't acknowledge the past?
Nowhere is the church's denial better exemplified than in its drive to canonise the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, whose 300th anniversary falls on Sunday. Serra's cult epitomizes the Catholic problem with history – as well as the lies that underpin the founding myths of the United States.
You can find his statue on Capitol Hill, his face on postage stamps, and his name plastered across schools and streets and trails all over California. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II, after a nun was apparently cured of lupus, and now awaits a second miracle to become a saint. So what's the problem? Oh, just that he founded the system of labour camps that expedited California's cultural genocide.
Serra personified the glitter-eyed fanaticism that blinded Catholic missionaries to the horrors they inflicted on the native peoples of the Americas. Working first in Mexico, then in Baja California (which is now part of Mexico), and then Alta California (now the US state of California), he presided over a system of astonishing brutality. Through various bribes and ruses Native Americans were enticed to join the missions he founded. Once they had joined, they were forbidden to leave. If they tried to escape, they were rounded up by soldiers then whipped by the missionaries. Any disobedience was punished by the stocks or the lash.
They were, according to a written complaint, forced to work in the fields from sunrise until after dark, and fed just a fraction of what was required to sustain them. Weakened by overwork and hunger, packed together with little more space than slave ships provided, they died, mostly of European diseases, in their tens of thousands.
Serra's missions were an essential instrument of Spanish and then American colonization. This is why so many Californian cities have saints' names: they were founded as missions. But in his treatment of the indigenous people, he went beyond even the grim demands of the crown. Felipe de Neve, a governor of the Californias, expressed his horror at Serra's methods, complaining that the fate of the missionized people was "worse than that of slaves". As Steven Hackel documents in his new biography, Serra sabotaged Neve's attempts to permit Native Americans a measure of self-governance, which threatened Serra's dominion over their lives.
The diverse, sophisticated and self-reliant people of California were reduced by the missions to desperate peonage. Between 1769, when Serra arrived in Alta California, and 1821 – when Spanish rule ended – its Native American population fell by one third, to 200,000.
Serra's claim to sainthood can be sustained only by erasing the native peoples of California a second time, and there is a noisy lobby with this purpose. Serra's hagiographies explain how he mortified his own flesh; they tell us nothing about how he mortified the flesh of other people.
In reviewing Hackel's biography a fortnight ago, the Catholic professor Christopher O Blum extolled Serra for his "endless labor of building civilization in the wilderness". He contrasted the missionary to "the Enlightened Spanish colonial officials who wanted ... to leave the Indians to their immoral stew". "The Indians there not only went around naked much of the year – with the predictable consequence of rampant promiscuity – but were divided into villages of 250 or fewer inhabitants ... ready-made for the brutal petty tyrant or the manipulative witch doctor". The centuries of racism, cruelty and disrespect required to justify the assaults of the church have not yet come to an end.
I would love to see the pope use the tercentenary on Sunday to announce that he will not canonise Serra, however many miracles his ghost might perform, and will start to engage with some uncomfortable histories. Then, perhaps, as Jonathan Freedland urges, I'll put a poster of Francis on my wall. But not in the bedroom.
• Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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