A new study from the University of Manitoba has shockingly claimed to have found that the Internet trolls we all know or love so well may not be very nice -- or particularly mentally healthy -- individuals in real life. The study tried to explore whether…
In this week’s episode of Moyers & Company, Bill asks Ian Haney López, author of Dog Whistle Politics, whether Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” comment could be construed as racially coded language. “I think it was,” Haney López says…
In the opinion of one transplanted Brit, it's a soap opera as inept as any other - and it doesn't live up to the new U.S. standard
The other night, rather behind the rest of the known planet and probably some parts still unknown – the deepest Amazon, say, where naked tribesmen agonize weekly over poor old Mary and Matthew – I sat down to catch up on my Downton Abbey.
It's mine by birthright, I suppose, as an Englishman in America, land of the free and home of the binge-watch. Beset with a small child, I had lost much of that free time, and thus fallen far behind – further even than the one-season lag the US must still endure. But perhaps I had enough in me to sync up in time for tonight's season-four finale on PBS.
Indeed, House of Cards may be America's weekend-killing addiction of the moment, but Downton, we are told, is worth it.
The Netflix political drama itself derives from a British series, a suave if aging shocker reanimated with American energy, camp and schlock-horror verve. In Downton, we have a living transplant, a stately if seductive fairytale playing out in the years around the first world war - a time of unchecked elite excess featuring frocks and frock coats that are really rather lovely ... or at least that's as far as I got.
This time around, two episodes was quite enough to remind me that America's love for this rotten show is drawn from the same well as that baseless love so many Americans maintain for the British royal family. You know it's not for you – in fact, it's rather silly. And you know it's not even worth an hour's attention on a Sunday evening, what with True Detective and soon, once again, Mad Men and Game of Thrones. Given the vigor of your own institutions, you know that, ultimately, it's beneath you.
But you watch it anyway.
America, you can do better than Downton Abbey.
You can do better TV, obviously. Where to start? At the beginning of the revolution, perhaps, with The Sopranos. Or with The Wire or Breaking Bad. Even with House of Cards, if you must. And, oh, how you must: at least half a million of you watched all 13 hours' worth of Frank Underwood's maneuvering last weekend.
I understand the need to binge. Oh, how I do. Before I became a parent, my wife was in New York and I was in London, and so I still had hour upon hour for such things. Back then, my entire social life seemed to revolve around Tony, Paulie, Carmela and Artie Bucco. I'd watch two or three episodes of the Sopranos each night and then call transatlantic to express my exhilaration, fear or both.
Surprisingly, I still got married, and once the resulting small child was safely asleep, we pitched into Mad Men, Orange Is the New Black and all the rest.
In such company, Downton Abbey is all show-off and no substance. It is little more than an enormous confidence trick played by writer Julian Fellowes, ITV and PBS on the world – and especially Americans, those suckers for something to talk about around the water cooler. If it looks good and the write-ups say it's good, it must be good. Right, America? Mustn't it even be ... grand?
Grand with what? Its ludicrous melodrama? With its stultifying lack of ambition beyond flogging the hoary old country-house potboiler of upstairs, downstairs and out over the hah-hah and back? Or with its script? With that insulting, inept, dashed-off, corned-beef hash of a script it force-feeds its hugely talented, entirely wasted cast?
It's a grand waste of time, is what it is, enough to leave David Chase, Matthew Weiner and a dozen other talented show-runners weeping into their martinis. Five seasons and Christmas specials – and counting? Big deal with NBC to rehash it all for the Gilded Age? For this?
America, you can do much better than Downton Abbey.
It thinks it's better than you, too. This is a show about class in the way that Britain is about class, which is the way in which America is supposedly not. And Downton is not just about the British class system. (If you want to read or see something about it, read or see The Shooting Party, quickly.) Downton is a product and expression of the British class system. A highly approving expression, a show of and for the 1%. And 99% of America doesn't need any more of that.
Downton's sickly harmony between nobs and proles is a ludicrous facade erected by an avowedly elitist Conservative life peer who is married to the daughter of a real one and once wrote a supposedly satirical novel called Snobs.
Poke this facade, even lightly, and it falls. The Granthams are top dogs. We are constantly told, by every character from Daisy the sweetly dim kitchen maid to the loveable old lord, that "times are changing". Cosmetic codswallop, I tell you. In Fellowes' world, which is the world of Britain's Conservative-led government, the times are not changing – and have not changed. Let the nobles lead, indeed.
Yet still the numberless hordes allow themselves to be cowed and babied, every Sunday night for five seasons and counting. And all while True Detective is on. It's extraordinary.
It's also extraordinary that I even made it through the season and a half that I did. I suppose it was because Downton, despite itself, kept offering consolations. However many times Fellowes allowed Anna the maid to comfort Cora or had Carson the butler offer lonely-hearts advice to Mary, there was always something to lull – or gull – me right back. A nicely delivered line here; a plausibly nasty edge to Thomas there. Or, tellingly enough for an angry but class-bound Brit, an opportunity to tell anyone and everyone I know that, back when I was in London, I used to work with the girl who became Lady Edith.
But this time, in America, re-engaging, I was brought up short. What did it was this: the realization that in the world of Downton Abbey everyone, but everyone, knows their place. The lords, the servants. Branson the chauffeur, who being both Irish and a bit of a lefty should have known his from the start, despite his wholly unlikely success in marrying in. Even, I suspect, everyone behind the camera, down to whatever is the crew equivalent of the girl who lights the fires. Even the audience.
Obviously, this worldwide love for the Granthams, as much as that for the cursed Windsors, springs from all humanity's love of a good soap opera. That I get. In that case, the best that can be said for the soap that is Downton Abbey is, well, at least the sets don't wobble.
But those sets being the unyielding walls of a genuine stately home, Highclere Castle (which could never be in Yorkshire, let me tell you), built with the blood and sweat of others for the continuing profit of a gang of genuine aristocrats, the whole thing should make anyone remotely normal feel distinctly, queasily ill.
America, you can do so much better.
Or if you really think you can't, there's always Sherlock, I suppose.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Conservatives keep trying to use America's religious freedom as a way to limit everyone else's rights, especially women and LGBT
Last week, the Kansas House of Representatives passed a bill (pdf) that would have broadly legalized discrimination against gays and lesbians. Luckily, after national outrage, the bill was halted. But the fight isn't over: the bill's reliance on religious freedom to justify discrimination is a sign of right-wing efforts to come.
The bill's scope was impressive in its expansiveness: Kansans would have been able to legally refuse to provide just about any service to anyone whose relationship they dislike for religious reasons, and could have refused to provide services "related to" any relationship they dislike for religious reasons. The bill specifically enumerated adoption, foster care, counseling, social services, employment and employment benefits, as well as the general categories of "services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges", as permissible areas for discrimination.
In other words, under the bill, any individual Kansan could have hung a "No Gays, No Lesbians, No Dogs" sign on the door of his restaurant. Any individual Kansan could have refused to hire someone, serve someone a drink, rent someone an apartment, sell someone a pair of pants or accommodate someone at a hotel if that someone is gay. Any employer could even have refused to extend insurance coverage to a gay employee's husband or wife if he thinks same-sex marriage is wrong. Even government employees paid with everyone's tax dollars would have had carte blanche to discriminate – social workers don't have to work with gay couples, police officers don't have to come to the assistance of a gay person in need.
And if a gay person discriminated against by an individual or a private business decided to sue? They would not only lose, but under this bill, they would have had to pay the other side's attorney's fees.
This hateful backlash is, of course, a response to the increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage, and the fact that marriage equality's inevitability is finally dawning on conservatives. Virginia is the latest state to see laws against same-sex marriage fall, and it won't be the last. But situating the discrimination in religious liberty is about more than just homophobia: it's part of a larger right-wing strategy to allow those who hold particular religious beliefs to make the rest of us live according to their whims.
It's a tactic that well-funded conservative groups are bringing to the courts through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and it's their legal arguments that undoubtedly gave ammunition to the Kansas legislators. In more than 100 cases, a variety of organizations and employers are asserting their right to determine the healthcare their employees may access. The argument in many of the cases is a novel interpretation of religious liberty: that such liberty not only gives individuals the freedom to practice their own religions, but that for-profit companies have religious rights and are not obligated to abide by generally applicable laws if the owner of those companies believes that following the law forces him to pay for something he finds objectionable.
In the ACA cases, the objectionable matter is birth control – a good start, given the propensity of politicians and the courts to see women's reproductive health as less important, and more up for general political debate, than other aspects of basic health care. Religious owners of companies ranging from arts and crafts stores to car dealerships to cabinet makers all claim that because they think birth control is wrong, their employees should not be able to have it covered in their health care plans.
The logic is the same as that behind the Kansas law: religious freedom means the freedom to limit everyone else's rights.
Kansas legislators claimed that this law is about preserving the rights of religious folks to exercise their beliefs without state interference. But that's not the case: no one is forcing a religious individual to violate the tenets of their faith. Many people find same-sex unions morally objectionable, and that is their prerogative. Luckily, no state in the nation is forcing religious Christian men to marry each other. No state in the nation requires religious institutions to perform, promote or sanction same-sex marriage. No state in the nation makes it illegal to hold or express negative views on same-sex marriage.
The big violation of religious freedom at issue here is the requirement to live in reality – in a country where same-sex marriages exist, and where gay people exist, and where it's increasingly impermissible to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation. The Kansas law tried to give religious people who dislike homosexuality not only the right to live according to their beliefs, but also the right to exclude gay people from any facet of public life over which the religious have power.
Religious freedom is a cornerstone of the US constitution. The right to live and worship as we choose is a foundational American value, highlighted in the very first of the original amendments. But your freedom only extends as far as my nose. I shouldn't be allowed to refuse to help a Christian crime victim if I'm a Wiccan cop. I shouldn't be allowed to refuse to serve black patrons if I'm a white restaurateur whose sincere religious beliefs hold that black skin is the mark of Cain and therefore the races shouldn't mix. And I shouldn't be allowed to refuse to accommodate a lesbian guest if I'm a fundamentalist Christian hotel owner.
Shifting American power structures make those happy with the earlier hierarchy increasingly uncomfortable. And that makes sense: if you're a middle-class white Christian in the United States, you're used to broader social norms both reflecting and revolving around your beliefs, values and experiences. As other groups gain recognition, rights and power, those who are uncomfortable with progress will come up with new and creative ways to maintain their hold on power.
That's what underlies the right-wing hostility to reproductive freedom: all over the world, access to family planning tools translates into social, economic and political gains for women. It's not about birth control; it's about gender equality, and how that equality undermines a conservative vision of an ideal male-led society and family. Societal acceptance of homosexuality poses the same threat: if a nuclear family can have two women heading it, there's not much of an argument for keeping women and men tied to restrictive, heterosexual gender roles.
Attempts to keep us straightjacketed into traditional roles, and the power structures that serves, is what's behind hostility to both women's rights and LGBT rights. The legal strategies to advance and scale back those rights have also gone hand in hand – the right to sexual privacy underlying the cases that legalized birth control and abortion also played in Lawrence v Texas, which invalidated a Texas law against sodomy. And now, the arguments presented in the ACA cases seeking to limit women's access to birth control are being used to push the envelope on discriminatory laws seeking to exclude LGBT Americans from public spaces, and situate them as second-class citizens – quite literally secondary to the comfort of those who would use religion as cover for bigotry.
The Kansas bill didn't become law because the forces behind it are losing. That's cold comfort to gay Kansans who were just issued a very clear "you are not welcome here" message from their elected officials. The Republican party, whose members have yanked the welcome mat out from under the feet of too many groups, should perhaps consider whether a strategy of alienation is a winning one. After all, are there many strong supporters of this law in Kansas who weren't already voting Republican? On the flip side, younger voters overwhelmingly support gay rights. And so do gay people – increasingly, so do their families and friends. A plan of aggressively antagonizing LGBT people is not a winning one.
The many of us who abhor blatant, legal discrimination are rightly incensed about even the fact that this law was ever put on the table. But we should also see it for what it is: just one piece of a much larger puzzle. The really crucial part – the legal backing for laws like this one – will be decided by the US supreme court very soon. If the court allows for as expansive interpretations of religious freedom as the anti-ACA plaintiffs have argued, expect to see more of these laws proposed and passed in the states. And then, segregating Friends of Dorothy won't just be in Kansas anymore.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
The US constitution's Bill of Rights is envied by much of the English-speaking world, even by people otherwise not enthralled by The American Way Of Life. Its fundamental liberties – freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom from warrantless search – are a mighty bulwark against overweening state power, to be sure.
But what are these rights actually worth in the United States these days?
Ask Cecily McMillan, a 25-year-old student and activist who was arrested two years ago during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Manhattan. Seized by police, she was beaten black and blue on her ribs and arms until she went into a seizure. When she felt her right breast grabbed from behind, McMillan instinctively threw an elbow, catching a cop under the eye, and that is why she is being prosecuted for assaulting a police officer, a class D felony with a possible seven-year prison term. Her trial began this week.
McMillan is one of over 700 protestors arrested in the course of Occupy Wall Street's mass mobilization, which began with hopes of radical change and ended in an orgy of police misconduct. According to a scrupulously detailed report (pdf) issued by the NYU School of Law and Fordham Law School, the NYPD routinely wielded excessive force with batons, pepper spray, scooters and horses to crush the nascent movement. And then there were the arrests, often arbitrary, gratuitous and illegal, with most charges later dismissed. McMillan's is the last Occupy case to be tried, and how the court rules will provide a clear window into whether public assembly stays a basic right or becomes a criminal activity.
New York is not the only place where the first amendment's right to assembly continues to get gouged by police and prosecutors. In Chicago, police infiltrators goaded three activists into making Molotov cocktails; the young men were then charged with terror crimes – charges of which they were acquitted by an Illinois jury last week. Now that North Carolina has erupted into enormous protests against its far-right state government, we can likely expect police there to seek creative ways, legal and otherwise, to stifle mass political participation.
The freedom to assemble remains strong – as long as you're a single person holding up your sign on a highway embankment or some other lonely spot. But the right to engage in real public demonstrations has been effectively eviscerated by local ordinances and heavy-handed police tactics like aggressive surveillance, "kettling" protestors with movable plastic barriers, arbitrary closures of public spaces and the harassment and arrest of journalists who would tell the tale.
It's not exactly one of our sexier inalienable truths, the freedom to assemble. It was supposed to be a done deal, a ho-hum "first-generation right" clinched long ago in our society, threatened only in places like Ukraine or Thailand while Americans raced forward developing new "positive" rights like the right to water, or internet access. But like other "negative" freedoms against state interference – freedom of religion and freedom from warrantless and invasive searches – the right to assemble is being challenged at a time when thousands of Americans are taking to the streets.
As our rights melt away, we have taken some solace in the nasty responses to Pussy Riot's punk-rock protests in Putin's authoritarian state. At least we're not like Russia, where free speech is policed and controlled by law.
But what might happen to a homegrown Pussy Riot in New York? If, say, a politically conscious hip-hop group plugged in their amps near the altar of Saint Patrick's cathedral in midtown Manhattan, you can bet that misdemeanor trespassing would only be the beginning. Given that US police often have such an easy time padding their charges – remember Cecily McMillan – it's conceivable that an American Pussy Riot could face resisting arrest and assaulting an officer as well. That's two years in jail, which is the same as the sentence handed down to Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.
For decades, any hint of a comparison between freedom-loving America and authoritarian Russia has been viewed as the whiny hyperbole. But anecdotes and hypotheticals aside, how do Russia and the US compare when it comes to that fundamental index of negative liberty? Namely, how many people does the state lock up?
The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. In 2012, the incarceration rate in the United States (707 per 100,000) was about one and a half times that of Russia (472) and over triple the peak rate of the old East Germany (about 200). The incarceration rate for black men in the US is over five times higher than that of the Soviet Union at the height of the gulag (pdf). These are of course different societies with different histories – but the brute fact of our hyperincarceration cannot be explained away.
Our clearly enumerated rights are supposed to guarantee our freedom, but in a landscape of extreme inequality – economic, racial and gender inequality – the letter of the law doesn't always amount to much. Changing this socioeconomic landscape requires mass mobilization – often raucous, often messy, and utterly vital to the health of any real democracy. With this channel of political activity overpoliced to the point of blockage, the result is a positive feedback loop of rising inequality and eroding freedoms.
Can this circuit be broken? The trial of Cecily McMillan could end in a lengthy prison term or it could end in probation. But such cases matter not just for the defendants, and not even just for our freedoms as ends in themselves. They matter for the future of the good life in the United States.
His party just caved on holding the debt ceiling ransom in exchange for gutting the Affordable Care Act and other nutty ideas. Aghast at just how badly their party fared in past such adventures, all the top Republican leaders in the House from Speaker…
If George Orwell and Laurie Lee were to return from the Spanish civil war today, they would be arrested under section five of the Terrorism Act 2006. If convicted of fighting abroad with a "political, ideological, religious or racial motive" – a charge they would find hard to contest – they would face a maximum sentence of life in prison. That they were fighting to defend an elected government against a fascist rebellion would have no bearing on the case. They would go down as terrorists.
As it happens, the British government did threaten people leaving the country to join the International Brigades, by reviving the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870. In 1937 it warned that anyone volunteering to fight in Spain would be "liable on conviction to imprisonment up to two years". This was consistent with its policy of non-intervention, which even Winston Churchill, initially a supporter, came to see as "an elaborate system of official humbug". Britain, whose diplomatic service and military command were riddled with fascist sympathisers, helped to block munitions and support for the Republican government, while ignoring Italian and German deployments on Franco's side.
But the act was unworkable, and never used – unlike the Crown Prosecution Service's far graver threat to British citizens fighting in Syria. In January 16 people were arrested on terror charges after returning from Syria. Seven others are already awaiting trial. Sue Hemming, the CPS head of counter-terrorism, explained last week that "potentially it's an offence to go out and get involved in a conflict, however loathsome you think the people on the other side are ... We will apply the law robustly".
People fighting against forces that run a system of industrialised torture and murder and are systematically destroying entire communities could be banged up for life for their pains. Is this any fairer than imprisoning Orwell would have been?
I accept that some British fighters in Syria could be changed by their experience. I also accept that some are already motivated by the prospect of fighting a borderless jihad, and could return to Britain with the skills required to pursue it. But this is guilt by association. Some of those who go to fight in Syria might develop an interest in blowing up buses in Britain, just as some investment bankers might be tempted to launder cash for drug dealers and criminal gangs. We don't round up bankers on the grounds that their experience in one sector might tempt them to dabble in another. (The state won't prosecute them even when they do launder money for drug gangs and terrorists, as the HSBC scandal suggests.) But all those who leave Britain to fight in Syria potentially face terrorism charges, even if they seek only to defend their extended families.
Last week a British man who called himself Abu Suleiman al-Britani drove a truck full of explosives into the gate of Halab prison in Aleppo. The explosion, in which he died, allowed rebel fighters to swarm into the jail and release 300 prisoners. Was it terrorism or was it heroism? Terrorism, according to many commentators.
It's true that he carried out this act in the name of the al-Nusra Front, which the British government treats as synonymous with al-Qaida. But can anyone claim that liberating the inmates of Syrian government prisons is not a good thing? We now know that at least 11,000 people have been killed in these places, and that many were tortured to death. Pictures of their corpses were smuggled out of Syria by the government photographer employed to record them. There are probably many more. That combination of horror and bureaucracy – doing unspeakable things then ensuring that they are properly documented – has powerful historical resonances. It haunts us with another horror, and the questions that still hang over the Allied effort in the second world war: how much was known, how much could have been done?
As no one else is now likely to act, and as the raid on the prison would probably have been impossible without the suicide bomb, should we not be celebrating this act of extraordinary courage? Had David Cameron not lost the intervention vote, and had al-Britani been fighting for the British army, he might have been awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.
When you think of the attempt by the British battalion in the Spanish civil war to defend a place they called "Suicide Hill", with the loss of 225 out of 600 men, do you see this as an act of terror – a suicide mission motivated by an extreme ideology – or as a valiant attempt to resist a terror campaign?
Sue Hemming claims it is "an offence to go out and get involved in a conflict", but that is not always true. You can be prosecuted if you possess a "political, ideological, religious or racial motive" for getting involved, but not, strangely, if you possess a financial motive. Far from it: such motives are now eminently respectable. You can even obtain a City & Guilds qualification as a naval mercenary. Sorry, "maritime security operative". As long as you don't care whom you kill or why, you're exempt from the law.
I expect that's a relief to Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary who now chairs parliament's intelligence and security committee, where he ramps up public fears about terrorism. For several years he was chairman of ArmorGroup, whose business was to go out and get involved in conflict. The absence of one word from the legislation – financial – ensures that he is seen as a scourge of terrorism, rather than an accomplice. The British fighters in Syria should ask their commanders to pay them, then claim they're only in it for the money. They would, it seems, then be immune from prosecution.
Talking of which, what clearer case could there be of the "use or threat of action ... designed to influence the government ... for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause" than the war with Iraq? Tony Blair's ministers were, of course, protected by crown immunity, but could they have experienced no flicker of cognitive dissonance while preparing the 2006 act?
Whatever you might think of armed intervention in Syria, by states or citizens, Hemming's warning illustrates the arbitrary nature of our terrorism laws, the ring they throw around certain acts of violence while ignoring others, the risk that they will be used against brown and bearded people who present no threat. The non-intervention agreement of 1936 was not the last elaborate system of official humbug the British government devised.
• Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com
It’s well known that people of color are overrepresented in America’s prisons relative to their share of the population. But a recent study finds that they make up an even larger share of the populations of private, for-profit prisons than publicly…
The World Health Organisation published its World Cancer Report on Monday. It is a hefty document of 800 pages which warns of a "tidal wave" of cancer facing the world over the next 20 years. The media reaction to this news on the whole has been sadly, but perhaps predictably, sensationalist.
Ignored is the report's conclusion that only half of the 24m cases projected by 2035 may be preventable. Ignored is the conclusion that the main reasons for this increase are population growth and increased life expectancy. Instead, the focus has almost exclusively centred on other factors contributing to preventable cancers, and then very selectively.
The report identifies several major sources of preventable cancer; they include smoking, infections, alcohol, obesity, radiation and air pollution. Of those sources, infections, radiation and air pollution have been set aside and discussion has zeroed in on the narrow subset of what are being described as "lifestyle choices". Because to talk about air pollution or infections or radiation would require a discussion of wealth inequalities, of living conditions, of asymmetry of information, of destructive environmental choices. And all that is too difficult.
Even in discussing smoking, alcohol and obesity, the actual recommendations of the WHO are ignored. They talk of more money going into early detection, of regulating food and drink manufacturers more tightly, of a tax on sugared drinks, of clearer labelling on alcohol, of incentives on banning smoking in public places. But the responsibility of manufacturers not to make unhealthy products and market them aggressively and the responsibility of the state to regulate big business are being airbrushed out of the report. Such ideas are not fashionable. Red tape and corporate responsibility are enemies of enterprise and contrary to economic growth.
Instead, the focus is on the facile concept of personal responsibility and the blaming of the individual; a subset of a subset of a subset of what the report talks about. I lost my father to cancer. He didn't smoke or drink or eat processed food. But why should that matter? Why are we getting into the discussion of defending some sick people and not others? Why are we painting ourselves into the corner where one of the biggest global killers, somehow, becomes the fault of the affected?
In an environment where more and more of us are living in tiny hutches within urban environments, breathing in polluted air, working longer and longer hours of sedentary jobs, with poor access to quality information, exercise space or fresh produce, bombarded 24/7 by advertising telling us to eat and drink the wrong thing, it is a ludicrous position to say that multi-billion corporations and the state can wash their hands of all consequences by telling us "you should have been healthier, you know".
Naturally, personal choices and responsibility for one's own lifestyle matter greatly. There may be a warped logic in, essentially, scaring people into making better choices. But a naive and selective reading of such a complex and detailed report lets much bigger culprits off the hook and avoids important conversations. It encourages the belief that one can protect oneself from this "tidal wave" by putting out their fag and wearing a snorkel and, if they don't, drowning was their own fault.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Coke's Super Bowl ad tugged at our heartstrings with its diverse US portrait, but the goal is to get minorities hooked on soda
My favorite Super Bowl commercial last night was Coca-Cola's #AmericaIsBeautiful. The spot, shot with an Instragram-filter aesthetic, featured a multi-lingual rendition of "America the Beautiful" sung by children and illustrated with a diversity of New Americana scenes: a cowboy riding his horse, kids at the movies, teenagers on surfboards at dawn and breakdancing at dusk, headscarf-wearing young women buying food from a cart in Chinatown, two men in yarmulkes looking upon the newly-built Freedom Tower, a same-sex couple roller skating and hugging their daughter. I admit it, I teared up a bit.
And I braced myself for the predictable right-wing outrage. But perhaps those of us who care about inequality and racism should be angry, too. Coca-Cola's diversity ad wasn't purposed just to celebrate the reality of a multi-ethnic America. It was to sell soda to rapidly-expanding but vulnerable populations, even if that means contributing to serious health problems, exploiting divides in class and education, and exacerbating racial inequality.
The genius of the Coca-Cola company is that they made the racial aspect of soda marketing work in their favor with this ad. Conservative indignation came immediately, and Twitter exploded with objections to the spot. "We speak ENGLISH here, IDIOTS" pretty much sums up the complaints. Twitter, of course, is a great democratizer, and it's easy to find some idiot saying just about anything. But right wing politicians and media got on board, too. Former GOP Congressman Allen West called the commercial "truly disturbing", and opined:
If we cannot be proud enough as a country to sing American the Beautiful in English in a commercial during the Super Bowl, by a company as American as they come – doggone we are on the road to perdition.
One writer on the conservative website Breitbart.com said Coke used an iconic song to "push multiculturalism down our throats", promoting a scenario in which "the United States of America is no longer a nation ruled by the Constitution and American traditions in which English is the language of government." It's easy to laugh at conservative bigotry and historical ignorance. The United States has always been a multi-lingual country.
English itself was an important from colonizers. Spanish has long been the predominant language in many parts of the United States, and many Spanish-speaking folks became Americans because the borders moved, not because they did. Most Americans today are the descendants of immigrants who certainly did not speak the languages native to the piece of land on which we now reside. And when you see someone get mad at multi-lingualism, it's obvious you're watching a racist fly their flag. Coca-Cola knew exactly what it was doing with this commercial. It knew it would inflame white conservatives, but, more importantly, it knew the commercial would align Coke with Latinos and other quickly-growing groups in the United States. So Coke expands its market share and promotes its product while endorsing a vision of a diverse, multi-cultural America. What's the harm?
Unfortunately, the harm lands squarely on the bodies of kids and families with few resources. Educated, affluent white Americans are drinking less soda than they were a few years ago, and soft drink makers now rely largely on "heavy users" – those who drink several sodas every day – to keep their businesses booming. Heavy users tend to be in lower-income areas – places New Orleans, Louisiana and Rome, Georgia. Coke is trying to expand that model. Long dominant in Latin America – that region is Coke's second-largest market – the company has been trying to capture the Latino market in the United States through target marketing. That is, of course, how businesses operate. But Coca-Cola's model depends on consumers who drink significantly more soda than average – a habit that comes with a series of serious health consequences – and on targeting children, who will (ideally) be life-long Coke drinkers. Expanding populations mean new consumers.
American soda companies expanded abroad decades ago, and Coke has been especially aggressive at marketing its products to lower-income consumers who have enough extra cash to spend on a sugary indulgence. A crisis of conscience at his role in expanding Coke into impoverished Brazilian favelas caused one Coca-Cola executive to try and reign in the company's practices; he was fired for his efforts. Coke has long been successful in Mexico, where it operates its largest independent bottling plant. That country is not only the second-highest soda consumer in the world, right behind the United States, but now has the world's highest obesity rates (sinking the US to number two). In response to serious public health issues driven by soda consumption, Mexico recently implemented a plan to tax soda. Soda companies have launched a large-scale offensive against both the tax and any criticisms of soda. In the United States, efforts at securing more "heavy users" are especially pernicious when directed at Latino communities. One in four Latino households in the US is food insecure, compared to one in 10 white households. Of the top 10 US counties with the highest rates of food insecurity, nine are predominantly Latino.
Malnutrition rates are twice as high among Hispanic children as non-Hispanic children in the United States. Hispanic children are also more likely to be overweight or obese. Nearly 12% of Hispanic adults have diagnosed diabetes – by comparison, only 7% of non-Hispanic white Americans have diagnosed diabetes. Within Mexican-American and Puerto Rican populations, diabetes rates climb above 13%. African Americans, also target "heavy user" consumers for soda companies, have diabetes rates that hover around 12%.
Perhaps most disturbingly, younger Latinos face higher rates of developing diabetes than any other group: Latina girls born in 2000 have a more than 50% chance of developing the disease in their lifetime. Marketing to low-income and of-color populations works. In one study focused on New York City, researchers found that the proportion of African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who drank more than one soda every day was more than twice the proportion of whites. People living in households with income 200% of the poverty line or below were more likely to be regular soda drinkers than people in wealthier households. African-American New Yorkers were more than three times as likely as whites to drink soda frequently; Mexican-Americans were 2.9 times as likely, and Puerto Ricans were 2.4. It makes sense: Soda is a cheap treat that also provides energy and calories. It's accessible just about anywhere. You can drink it just about anywhere. A low-wage worker needing to fill their belly or a kid looking for something tasty or a mom looking to treat her kids and feed herself on the run don't have to go further than the drive-thru or corner bodega, and doesn't have to invest much, in picking up a soft drink. But that doesn't mean we should be applauding soda companies, even if their ads tug at our heartstrings and our liberal values. It means consumers should have more affordable options, corporate advertising of unhealthy food should be regulated more tightly and Americans should be collectively enraged at our obscenely low wages and lack of a comprehensive social safety net – the things that create unhealthy, perverse incentives for consumers. It means we should cast a critical eye when soda companies fly the flag of diversity, when, in fact, their product contributes to stark racial inequalities.
Coke's targeting of Latino and other immigrant populations is about as progressive as RJ Reynolds marketing menthol cigarettes to African-Americans or Phillip Morris hawking Virginia Slims to women – that is, not very. Before we applaud Coke's advertising diversity, we should ask: do we really want Coke to diversify?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
First off , I don't know if Woody Allen abused his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow and nor do you. I only know what I am inclined to believe and what the reasons are. Those reasons are, in fact, opinions. Some are to do with this particular case, some with the way that victims of abuse are routinely dismissed, some with the way Hollywood operates. Some are to do with the films he makes – the texts themselves – and some with the context: the context in which so many perpetrators walk free. That context is changing.
When the custody battle between Farrow and Allen took place in 1992, social media was not around. Right now online, especially on Twitter, many people are absolutely certain that Allen is guilty. Just as they are absolutely certain that Amanda Knox is guilty, just as they will be absolutely certain that what I am saying here is wrong. There is not a lot of nuance in Hashtag Justice. There is a hashtag #IBelieveDylanFarrow.
This is destroying Allen's reputation as much as the explosive custody case did at the time. It is worth reiterating that the judge, Elliott Wilk, found the evidence of abuse against the seven-year-old Dylan "inconclusive" and doubted that Allen could ever acquire "the insight and judgment necessary for him to relate to Dylan appropriately". He damned his parenting his skills, saying he did not qualify as "an adequate custodian for Moses, Dylan or Satchel". He also talked about the way he isolated Soon-Yi Previn from the rest of her family, leaving her with "no visible support system".
Was this part of the grooming he used to cover up abuse of Dylan? I don't know, but clearly for most people he crossed over a boundary with his relationship with Soon-Yi.
Such boundary crossing is, as we know, not uncommon for the rich and powerful and nor is Hollywood Babylon the only institution to shrug it off. The Golden Globes award Allen was recently given for lifetime achievement seems to have activated the Farrow family. Dylan's open letter is harrowing, and given more power coming via the writer Nicholas Kristof, who is not only a friend of the family but also a brilliant campaigner for the rights of women and girls. We know that it takes immense bravery to speak out. We know that false allegations do happen, but rarely. We know that the reality of child abuse is that we continue to ignore the victims.
In Britain, a weird kind of post-Savile displacement occurred where the victims were again "disappeared". Discussion moved on to the institutions that had housed this abuse – all of them – and then focused on the management of the BBC. Right now there are ongoing trials of old men charged with rape and abuse. These are necessary, however uncomfortable. For the alternative is what we are seeing online: kangaroo courts where people not in possession of many facts are not doing the real victims any favours. Someone tweets "#IBelieveDylanFarrow because it wouldn't be the first time a film-maker guy rapes little girls". No it wouldn't. I assume this is a reference to Roman Polanski.
Polanski, it is important to note, was arrested, charged, made a plea bargain and fled the US when it look like he might be imprisoned. The man is a genius, which is why I wanted to interview him some 20 years ago. Since then, attitudes have changed – and I have changed my attitude, too. I now think I should not have given him publicity. I now think I got it wrong. But with Polanski there is no doubt of his guilt.
With Allen there is doubt and probably always will be. His detractors use his films as evidence; his fans refuse to give them up. Actually, the great Joan Didion's takedown of his characters all living in self-absorbed, privileged adolescence still hits home. The old questions are asked again, though we already know the answer: can great art be made by the immoral or the amoral? Of course, history provides the evidence again and again.
As I said, I am inclined to stand alongside Dylan's howl of pain but it is untenable to think that any justice is served for victims by tweeting opinion as fact. Due process, the law, is slow and complicated, but we are waking up gradually to the fact that we must listen to the voices of victims. But justice is key here. Because so many victims have been ill-served by the system for so long, there is a void into which rush the certainties of online mobs.
It is easier to see that Hollywood has been complicit in child abuse than to address the shaming and blaming of victims closer to home. Indeed, home is exactly where most children are abused. And where we really don't want to look. If Dylan Farrow's letter helps other people speak up and get justice, she has done something heroic.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Of all the arrows fired at Gov. Chris Christie over the years, the one that inflicted the deepest wound came not from a rival, but from an ally. David Wildstein, by all accounts, was thrilled to be part of the governor’s inner circle. He was known…
The president should be talking about guns (and gun control) a lot more. This goes way beyond horrific school shootings
President Obama opened his remarks at McGavock High School in Nashville, Tennessee with a brief mourning of the death of a student there on Tuesday, the day of his State of the Union speech. Obama mentioned gun violence once in his address to the nation. Again yesterday, the bulk of his speech was about education policy, not gun control.
The fact that McGovock was itself the site of a gun fatality only gave a glancing emphasis on the firearm policies he says he is trying to move forward. The setting perhaps emphasized just as much the futility of the rhetorical gesture. President Obama needs to talk more about gun policies in this country, but he has to do it differently. As horrific as school shootings are, gun violence problems in America are far wider than just in our classrooms.
In the five years of Obama's presidency, mass shootings have been the one reliable catalyst for a presidential push on our nation's uniquely liberal firearm laws. He broke a three-year streak of non-engagement on the issue in January 2011, after the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and 17 other people in Tucson, Arizona, giving one speech and writing one op-ed calling for more legislation. Then, the White House was for the most part silent for another 10 months, until Newtown. That tragedy brought a flurry of urgent officials pleas: 18 sets of remarks in five months, according to C-SPAN. After that, another season of silence, until the Naval Yard shootings in September 2013.
I understand that Obama has vowed to do what he can to limit access to guns "with or without" Congress, but it's clear that his administration sees mass shootings as their best leverage to accomplish the more substantial changes that come with new federal regulation. It's equally clear that it isn't working. I have some suggestions for a shift in emphasis.
Perhaps the White House believes the deaths of children are the most sympathetic emotional wedge. Fine. If you look at the data, Obama should have been talking about gun control legislation in the Senate twice a day, as 215 children died in the 99 days the Senate was in session last year. As many have argued, Americans are becoming numb to gun violence. If it's the scale of a tragedy that might inspire Congress, the murder of, say, three or more, then he should have hammered at them about once every two and half hours, the entire year. Over 12,000 people, adults and children, died from gun violence in 2013 – about 30 a day.
I suppose another aspect of mass shootings that makes them, in theory, the best bet for Congressional actions is that we assume that anyone who plans a massacre is, by most definitions, crazy. No one wants crazy people to have guns, right?
There are numerous different proposals that try to prevent the definably mentally ill from obtaining firearms, indeed, one of Obama's "without Congress" proposals to curb gun access is an expansion of the ways a "lawful authority" can report on an individual who is prohibited by federal law from owning a gun. This is a step forward, to be sure, though the rule also gives the impression that the current background check system (National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS) is working at all – and that the prohibited category is a useful screen.
First of all, using the NICS is voluntary – only 13 states use it for all commercial gun purchases (leave alone the gun show loophole for now). States that report to the database have incredible latitude as to what they include: some states limit the time period of the reporting (letting those with older sign of trouble slip through), some states narrowly define "mentally ill".
The patchwork of laws about reporting means that of all those denied a gun purchase because of a NICS search, even after the Virginia Tech shootings prompted a tightening of the reporting and search laws in many states, less than 2% of individuals run through the NICS database are turned down for mental health reasons. This is almost certainly an under-representation. What's more, evidence implies that many of mentally ill who are determined to get firearms will wind up "jurisdiction shopping". After Virginia started reporting its mental health records to NICS, 378 of the 438 those denied guns because of a Virginia mental health record were trying to purchase a firearm in another state.
So I have a radical suggestion: cede to the gun control lobby that bad actors who want weapons cannot be stopped – perhaps especially the mentally ill ones. Instead of focusing on how to stop a "bad guy with a gun", see what we can do to stop the guy in the mirror with a gun: a majority of gun deaths are suicides, as I have noted repeatedly. (And will undoubtedly repeat again.) This actually opens up the debate about gun regulation rather than narrows it, because recent research has shown that any reduction of gun ownership in a population decreases the number of suicides overall: looking at the years between 2000 and 2009, the study authors found that for each percentage point the portion of gun owners in a population goes down, suicides decrease by at least half a percent.
Many assume that focusing on preventing gun suicides falls under laws keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, but most people who commit suicide do not meet even the lowest bar for gun ownership prohibition set by federal or state laws: previous documentation of violence to self or others.
Two-thirds of suicides do not have a contact with a mental health profession in the year leading up to the attempt. Another set of studies found that only 24% of those that attempt suicide go on to another attempt. Suicide ideations are also fleeting; 25% of suicide attempts are based on less than five minutes consideration. What's more, those who commit suicide by firearm are the least likely of all attempts to have a record of mental illness – the most likely, it follows, to attempt suicide because of temporary crisis and moment of desperation. But 85% of those who attempt suicide by firearm will never see the other side of that crisis.. Firearm suicide beats the next most effective means (hanging) by a margin of 16%.
The math is easy: if you somehow (a waiting period, sophisticated gun locks) kept guns out of 10% of the over 19,000 in 2010 that died from a firearm suicide – if you forced the determined to use next most effective method – then about almost 600 of them would get another chance at life. And 76%, over 400 of them, would decide they'd stick around.
That's over 15 tragedies the size of Newtown's that could be prevented but weren't, and weren't mourned as the tragedies they all were. To put it in Obama-moved-to-speak math (18 speeches for each Newtown-sized group of deaths): would Obama be willing to give a speech on gun control 250 times a year, just about every day?
I don't know if such a consistent appeal would work on Congress. Would it work on you?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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