Opinion
Fear factor: The cycle that drives assault weapon sales
The cause of gun control in the US is lost unless we address the underlying anxiety that makes people feel safer armed
The future of guns in our society may be better understood if we knew more about what they mean to people and why people buy them.
Fear is a major factor for many firearm purchases. Recent trends in gun sales suggest that many citizens are becoming more fearful: Gallup poll data suggest that Americans are more fearful, at near-record high levels, about big government, compared to big business or big labor. This fear overlays the long-term public fear of crime and terrorism.
Reactions to mass killings, particularly the shooting of first-graders at Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut, sparked a national debate about gun control. But that, in turn, has heightened fear about government's role in regulating assault weapons, especially popular semi-automatic models like the AK-47 and AR-15 that are bought and sold throughout both the US and the world.
Public reaction to the latest assault weapon massacre is disturbing in view of worldwide trends. Studies show that price increases for semi-automatic assault weapons reflect public moods and fears about social instability. According to author James Barr, in many countries, "The Kalashnikov index is effectively a futures market for violence." More than 80m AK-47s circulate between countries in predictable patterns that are associated with social instability.
The cost of this weapon doubled and tripled in Iraq and Afghanistan just before the US invasions of those countries. Afghan arms merchants are selling the model favored by Osama bin Laden for $2,000, while Syrians are paying more than $2,100. Demand and prices fall only when citizens believe that things are settling down.
The US has around 4m assault rifles – about 1% of the 310m firearms owned by Americans according to estimates from the FBI. It is critical to understand the symbolic meaning of this weapon in the context of recent skyrocketing sales.
Then, there's the United States' gluttonous assault weapons market: ravenous buyers across the country flooded gun stores and gun shows after the Newtown shooting. AR-15s and other assault weapons became more expensive as citizens became anxious about gun control and depleted supplies.
For example, in Kansas City, AR-15s that, a year ago, sold for about $400 have lately been fetching $925, with some assault rifle models selling for $1,500 or more. Large capacity magazines that sold for less than $20 are now fetching $100; in some places, bullets for these weapons are costing as much as $1 apiece. All of this at a time when the economy is bad and people are cutting corners just to get by.
The demand for assault rifles among people who, in many cases, had not previously owned or fired one can be attributed to the popular culture depictions of the weapon in movies, its numerous mentions in national and international news reports, and a paranoid narrative about government control of weapons and losing constitutional freedoms.
My two decades of research and analysis of news reports show that fear has become a staple of popular culture, ranging from fun to dread. This narrative is repeated as "the discourse of fear" – a pervasive communication or symbolic awareness – and with that comes an expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of everyday life.
Weapons in the United States create a paradox that engenders a cycle of fear: the more firearms are widely available and are used in crimes and incidents of mass-killing, the more media reports there are about gun crime, and that, in turn, leads people to buy more weapons like the AR-15. They do so not only to feel safe, but also to choose a side.
Owning a gun, especially a contested weapon, makes us direct participants in the battle. One gun industry analyst has observed that gun sales speak to the fact "that there are a lot of young men in the US who will never be in the military but feel that male compulsion to warriorhood."
The Friday after President Obama's first election was the largest ever day for gun sales. Much the same occurred four years later, when the volume of gun sales crashed the NICS (buyer identification system) twice upon his re-election. The FBI processing of nearly 2.8m background checks made November 2012 – the month of the presidential election – gunsellers' busiest month.
It is hardly news that the US is politically divided, but the empirical evidence of escalating stockpiling of semi-automatic weapons also suggests that the US is less socially stable. It is hard to see how this frenzy of fear that is driving a spike of emotional intensity over gun ownership will dissipate any time soon.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
How my mom's death changed my thinking about end-of-life care
By Charles Ornstein, ProPublica
This story was co-published with The Washington Post.
My father, sister and I sat in the near-empty Chinese restaurant, picking at our plates, unable to avoid the question that we'd gathered to discuss: When was it time to let Mom die?
It had been a grueling day at the hospital, watching 2014 praying 2014 for any sign that my mother would emerge from her coma. Three days earlier she'd been admitted for nausea; she had a nasty cough and was having trouble keeping food down. But while a nurse tried to insert a nasogastric tube, her heart stopped. She required CPR for nine minutes. Even before I flew into town, a ventilator was breathing for her, and intravenous medication was keeping her blood pressure steady. Hour after hour, my father, my sister and I tried talking to her, playing her favorite songs, encouraging her to squeeze our hands or open her eyes.
Doctors couldn't tell us exactly what had gone wrong, but the prognosis was grim, and they suggested that we consider removing her from the breathing machine. And so, that January evening, we drove to a nearby restaurant in suburban Detroit for an inevitable family meeting.
My father and sister looked to me for my thoughts. In our family, after all, I'm the go-to guy for all things medical. I've been a health-care reporter for 15 years: at the Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times and now ProPublica. And since I have a relatively good grasp on America's complex health-care system, I was the one to help my parents sign up for their Medicare drug plans, research new diagnoses and question doctors about their recommended treatments.
In this situation, like so many before, I was expected to have some answers. Yet none of my years of reporting had prepared me for this moment, this decision. In fact, I began to question some of my assumptions about the health-care system.
I've long observed, and sometimes chronicled, the nasty policy battles surrounding end-of-life care. And like many health journalists, I rolled my eyes when I heard the phrase "death panels" used to describe a 2009 congressional proposal that would have allowed Medicare to reimburse physicians who provided counseling to patients about living wills and advance directives. The frenzy, whipped up by conservative politicians and talk show hosts, forced the authors of the Affordable Care Act to strip out that provision before the bill became law.
Politics aside, I've always thought that the high cost of end-of-life care is an issue worthy of discussion. About a quarter of Medicare payments are spent in the last year of life, according to recent estimates. And the degree of care provided to patients in that last year 2014 how many doctors they see, the number of intensive-care hospitalizations 2014 varies dramatically across states and even within states, according to the authoritative Dartmouth Atlas.
Studies show that this care is often futile. It doesn't always prolong lives, and it doesn't always reflect what patients want.
In an article I wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2005, I quoted a doctor saying: "There's always one more treatment, there's always one more, 'Why don't we try that?' ... But we have to realize what the goals of that patient are, which is not to be in an intensive-care unit attached to tubes with no chance of really recovering."
That made a lot of sense at the time. But did it apply to my mom?
We knew her end-of-life wishes: She had told my dad that she didn't want to be artificially kept alive if she had no real chance of a meaningful recovery. But what was a real chance? What was a meaningful recovery? How did we know if the doctors and nurses were right? In all my reporting, I'd never realized how little the costs to the broader health-care system matter to the family of a patient. When that patient was my mother, what mattered was that we had to live with whatever decision we made. And we wouldn't get a chance to make it twice.
As my mom lay in the ICU, there was no question that her brain function was worrisome. In the hours after she was revived, she had convulsions, known as myoclonus, which can happen if the brain lacks oxygen. After that, she lay still. When the neurologist pricked her with a safety pin, she didn't respond. When he touched her corneas, they didn't reflexively move.
I began checking the medical literature, much like I do as a reporter. I didn't find anything encouraging. Studies show that after 72 hours in a coma caused by a lack of oxygen, a patient's odds of recovery are slim to none. I asked my writing partner in New York to do additional research. She, too, found nothing that would offer much hope.
But couldn't my mom beat the odds? Harriet Ornstein was a feisty woman. At age 70, she had overcome adversity many times before. In 2002, weeks before my wedding, she was mugged in a parking lot and knocked to the pavement with a broken nose. But she was there to walk me down the aisle 2014 black eyes covered by makeup. She had Parkinson's disease for a decade, and in 2010 she suffered a closed head injury when a car backed into her as she walked down a handicapped ramp at the drugstore. Mom persevered, continuing rehabilitation and working to lead as normal a life as possible. Might she not fight through this as well?
Truth be told, I was already somewhat skeptical about physician predictions. Just last summer, my dad's heart stopped, and it took more than 10 minutes of CPR to revive him. Doctors and nurses said a full neurological recovery was unlikely. They asked about his end-of-life choices. Mom and I stayed up late talking about life without him and discussing the logistics of his funeral. But despite it all, he rebounded. He was home within weeks, back to his old self. I came away appreciative of the power of modern medicine but questioning why everyone had been so confident that he would die.
Also weighing on me was another story I wrote for the Los Angeles Times, about a patient who had wrongly been declared brain-dead by two doctors. The patient's family was being urged to discontinue life support and allow an organ-donation team to come in. But a nursing supervisor's examination found that the 47-year-old man displayed a strong gag-and-cough reflex and slightly moved his head, all inconsistent with brain death. A neurosurgeon confirmed her findings.
No one was suggesting that my mom was brain-dead, but the medical assessments offered no hint of encouragement. What if they were off-base, too?
Over dinner at the Chinese restaurant, we made a pact: We wouldn't rush to a decision. We would seek an additional medical opinion. But if the tests looked bad 2014 I would ask to read the actual clinical reports 2014 we would discontinue aggressive care.
A neurologist recommended by a family acquaintance came in the next morning. After conducting a thorough exam, this doctor wasn't optimistic, either, but she said two additional tests could be done if we still had doubts.
If more tests could be done, my dad reasoned, we should do them. My sister and I agreed.
On Friday morning, the final test came back. It was bad news. In a sterile hospital conference room, a neurologist laid out our options: We could move my mom to the hospice unit and have breathing and feeding tubes inserted. Or we could disconnect the ventilator.
We decided it was time to honor my mom's wishes. We cried as nurses unhooked her that afternoon. The hospital staff said it was unlikely that she would breathe on her own, but she did for several hours. She died peacefully, on her own terms, late that night 2014 my dad, my sister and I by her side.
I don't think anyone can ever feel comfortable about such a decision, and being a health reporter compounded my doubts.
I was fairly confident that we did what my mom would have wanted. But a week later, when I was back in New York and had some emotional distance, I wondered how our thinking and behavior squared with what I'd written as a reporter. Did we waste resources while trying to decide what to do for those two extra days? If every family did what we did, two days multiplied by thousands of patients would add up to millions of dollars.
Curious how experts would view it, I called Elliott S. Fisher. I've long respected Fisher, a professor of medicine at Dartmouth and a leader of the Dartmouth Atlas. The Atlas was the first to identify McAllen, Texas, subject of a memorable 2009 piece in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande, for its seemingly out-of-control Medicare spending.
I asked Fisher: Did he consider what my family did a waste of money?
No, he said. And he wouldn't have found fault with us if we decided to keep my mom on a ventilator for another week or two, although he said my description of her neurological exams and test results sounded pessimistic.
"You never need to rush the decision-making," he told me. "It should always be about making the right decision for the patient and the family. ... We have plenty of money in the U.S. health-care system to make sure that we're supporting families in coming to a decision that they can all feel good about. I feel very strongly about that."
Plenty of money? How did this mesh with his view that too much money is spent on care at the end of life? He said his concern is more about situations in which end-of-life wishes aren't known and cases where doctors push treatments for terminal illnesses that are clearly futile and that may prolong suffering.
"I don't think the best care possible always means keeping people alive or always doing the most aggressive cancer chemotherapy," he said, "when the evidence would say there is virtually no chance for this particular agent to make a difference for this patient."
I left the conversation agreeing with Fisher's reasoning but believing that it's much harder in practice than it is in theory. You can know somebody's wishes and still be confused about the appropriate thing to do.
The past few weeks have been the most difficult of my life. I hope what I learned will make me a better, more compassionate journalist. Most of all, I will always remember that behind the debate about costs and end-of-life care, there are real families struggling with real decisions.
Senior reporter Charles Ornstein is board president of the Association of Health Care Journalists and can be reached at charles.ornstein@propublica.org.
Have you had to make end-of-life care decisions? Share your experience below.
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Want to limit the influence of money in politics? Tax legislators who become lobbyists
To those who would argue that the notion of a perpetual motion machine is impossible, we give you the revolving door — that ever-spinning entrance and exit between public service in government and the hugely profitable private sector. It never stops.
Yes, we’ve talked about the revolving door until we’re red or blue in the face (the door is bipartisan and spins across party lines) but this mantra bears its own perpetual repetition, a powerful reason for our distrust of the people who make and enforce our laws and regulations.
Jesse Eisinger, writing at The New York Times, reports that on January 25, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid announced the appointment of Cathy Koch as his chief advisor on tax and economic policy. According to the Times, “The news release lists Ms. Koch’s admirable and formidable experience in the public sector. ‘Prior to joining Senator Reid’s office,’ the release says, ‘Koch served as tax chief at the Senate Finance Committee.’”
But, Eisinger notes, the press statement fails to mention Ms. Koch’s actual last job — as a registered lobbyist for GE. “Yes, General Electric,” he writes, “the company that paid almost no taxes in 2010. Just as the tax reform debate is heating up, Mr. Reid has put in place a person who is extraordinarily positioned to torpedo any tax reform that might draw a dollar out of GE — and, by extension, any big corporation.”
One other example cited in the Times article: Julie Williams, chief counsel for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — “and a major friend of the banks for years” — has been forced out of the OCC by its new boss and is joining Promontory Financial Group, “a classic Washington creature that is a private sector mirror image of a regulatory body.”
Promontory plays both sides of the field, helping financial companies hack their way through the bogs of regulation while simultaneously “helping” the OCC review said regulations — like the just abandoned Independent Foreclosure Review that essentially let the banks hire outside “experts” to decide who had been victimized by the banks’ abuse of mortgages. Result: not a dime to affected homeowners but $1.5 billion in consulting fees to Promontory and other companies like it.
And get this: as Julie Williams exits OCC for Promontory, she will be succeeded as chief counsel by Amy Friend, former chief counsel of the Senate Banking Committee but currently a managing director at — wait for it — Promontory!
It’s a wonder all of Washington doesn’t lie prostrate in the streets, overcome by vertigo from all the spinning back and forth. But while we’re at it, remember that this whirling frenzy isn’t limited to the federal government. There are revolving doors installed at the exits and entrances of every state capitol in the country. The temptation for officeholders to seek greener pastures in lobbying can be even greater in statehouses where salaries are small and legislative sessions infrequent.
A quick search of newspapers around the country reveals how pernicious the problem is. On February 22, the Los Angeles Times reported “the abrupt resignation” of State Senator Michael J. Rubio to take a government affairs job with Chevron: “As chairman of the Senate Environmental Quality Committee, Rubio was leading the charge to make California’s environmental laws more business-friendly and has introduced bills during his two years in office that affect the oil industry in his Central Valley district.”
A recent editorial in the Raleigh News & Observer points out that since the last session of the legislature there, Republican Harold Brubaker, former speaker of the North Carolina House; and Republican Richard Stevens, a ten-year veteran of the state senate, have become registered lobbyists: “Both men became experts in state spending by heading budget committees in their respective chambers… Top legislators-turned-hired-guns advising lawmakers sounds like an opening for well-funded interests to buy influence.”
Florida, that inflamed big toe of American politics, is one of the worst offenders, even as the state debates a sweeping ethics reform bill that keeps in place a current law that prevents departing members from lobbying the legislature for a two-year “cooling off” period — but postpones for two years a similar ban on doing business with the governor and state agencies. Over the last two decades, the state has increasingly contracted government work — currently valued at $50 billion — to outside vendors.
Earlier this month, Mary Ellen Klas of The Miami Herald wrote, “The infusion of state cash into private and nonprofit industries has spawned a cottage industry of lobbyists who help vendors manage the labyrinth of rules and build relationships with executive agency officers and staff so they can steer contracts to their clients.”
“There are now more people registered to lobby the governor, the Cabinet and their agencies — 4,925 — than there are registered to lobby the 160-member legislature — 3,235.” Dozens of them are former legislators and staff members “as well as former utility regulators, agency secretaries, division heads and other employees.”
Former Florida House Speaker Dean Cannon retired last November and has set up a lobbying shop just a block from the state capitol in Tallahassee. And former Senate President Mike Haridopolos, now a lobbyist, “used his influence to get lawmakers to insert millions into the budget at the final stage of the budget process to pay for a state law enforcement radio system the agencies didn’t ask for, a juvenile justice contract that agency didn’t seek and the extension of a contract to expand broadband service in rural areas.”
You get the picture. In 15 states, according to the progressive Center for Public Integrity, “there aren’t any laws preventing legislators from resigning one day and registering as lobbyists the next… In the most egregious cases, legislators or regulators have written laws or set policy that helps a business or industry with whom they have been negotiating for a job once they leave office.” What’s more, in many of the 35 states that do have restrictions, “the rules are riddled with loopholes, narrowly written or loosely enforced.”
Which is why Glenn Harlan Reynolds, law professor, libertarian and head honcho of the political blog Instapundit, may be on to something. In a column for USA Today last month, he suggested, “…Let’s involve the most effective behavior-control machinery in America: The Internal Revenue Code.”
“In short, I propose putting 50% surtax — or maybe it should be 75%, I’m open to discussion — on the post-government earnings of government officials. So if you work at a cabinet level job and make $196,700 a year, and you leave for a job that pays a million a year, you’ll pay 50% of the difference — just over $400,000 — to the Treasury right off the top. So as not to be greedy, we’ll limit it to your first five years of post-government earnings; after that, you’ll just pay whatever standard income tax applies.”
The conservative Boston Herald endorsed the idea, comparing an ex-legislator or official’s connections and knowledge to intangible capitol and Reynolds’ scheme to a capital gains tax.
Imagine — conservatives and libertarians making a favorable comparison to the capital gains tax! This and that Russian meteor may be signs of the apocalypse. Just gives you an idea of how deeply awful and anti-democratic the revolving door is, no matter which side you’re on. That’s why it has to be slowed down if not completely stopped — and why we’ll keep talking about it.
Reprinted with permission from reports that on January 25, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid announced the appointment of Cathy Koch as his chief advisor on tax and economic policy. According to the Times, “The news release lists Ms. Koch’s admirable and formidable experience in the public sector. ‘Prior to joining Senator Reid’s office,’ the release says, ‘Koch served as tax chief at the Senate Finance Committee.’”
But, Eisinger notes, the press statement fails to mention Ms. Koch’s actual last job — as a registered lobbyist for GE. “Yes, General Electric,” he writes, “the company that paid almost no taxes in 2010. Just as the tax reform debate is heating up, Mr. Reid has put in place a person who is extraordinarily positioned to torpedo any tax reform that might draw a dollar out of GE — and, by extension, any big corporation.”
One other example cited in the Times article: Julie Williams, chief counsel for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — “and a major friend of the banks for years” — has been forced out of the OCC by its new boss and is joining Promontory Financial Group, “a classic Washington creature that is a private sector mirror image of a regulatory body.”
Promontory plays both sides of the field, helping financial companies hack their way through the bogs of regulation while simultaneously “helping” the OCC review said regulations — like the just abandoned Independent Foreclosure Review that essentially let the banks hire outside “experts” to decide who had been victimized by the banks’ abuse of mortgages. Result: not a dime to affected homeowners but $1.5 billion in consulting fees to Promontory and other companies like it.
And get this: as Julie Williams exits OCC for Promontory, she will be succeeded as chief counsel by Amy Friend, former chief counsel of the Senate Banking Committee but currently a managing director at — wait for it — Promontory!
It’s a wonder all of Washington doesn’t lie prostrate in the streets, overcome by vertigo from all the spinning back and forth. But while we’re at it, remember that this whirling frenzy isn’t limited to the federal government. There are revolving doors installed at the exits and entrances of every state capitol in the country. The temptation for officeholders to seek greener pastures in lobbying can be even greater in statehouses where salaries are small and legislative sessions infrequent.
A quick search of newspapers around the country reveals how pernicious the problem is. On February 22, the Los Angeles Times reported “the abrupt resignation” of State Senator Michael J. Rubio to take a government affairs job with Chevron: “As chairman of the Senate Environmental Quality Committee, Rubio was leading the charge to make California’s environmental laws more business-friendly and has introduced bills during his two years in office that affect the oil industry in his Central Valley district.”
A recent editorial in the Raleigh News & Observer points out that since the last session of the legislature there, Republican Harold Brubaker, former speaker of the North Carolina House; and Republican Richard Stevens, a ten-year veteran of the state senate, have become registered lobbyists: “Both men became experts in state spending by heading budget committees in their respective chambers… Top legislators-turned-hired-guns advising lawmakers sounds like an opening for well-funded interests to buy influence.”
Florida, that inflamed big toe of American politics, is one of the worst offenders, even as the state debates a sweeping ethics reform bill that keeps in place a current law that prevents departing members from lobbying the legislature for a two-year “cooling off” period — but postpones for two years a similar ban on doing business with the governor and state agencies. Over the last two decades, the state has increasingly contracted government work — currently valued at $50 billion — to outside vendors.
Earlier this month, Mary Ellen Klas of The Miami Herald wrote, “The infusion of state cash into private and nonprofit industries has spawned a cottage industry of lobbyists who help vendors manage the labyrinth of rules and build relationships with executive agency officers and staff so they can steer contracts to their clients.”
“There are now more people registered to lobby the governor, the Cabinet and their agencies — 4,925 — than there are registered to lobby the 160-member legislature — 3,235.” Dozens of them are former legislators and staff members “as well as former utility regulators, agency secretaries, division heads and other employees.”
Former Florida House Speaker Dean Cannon retired last November and has set up a lobbying shop just a block from the state capitol in Tallahassee. And former Senate President Mike Haridopolos, now a lobbyist, “used his influence to get lawmakers to insert millions into the budget at the final stage of the budget process to pay for a state law enforcement radio system the agencies didn’t ask for, a juvenile justice contract that agency didn’t seek and the extension of a contract to expand broadband service in rural areas.”
You get the picture. In 15 states, according to the progressive Center for Public Integrity, “there aren’t any laws preventing legislators from resigning one day and registering as lobbyists the next… In the most egregious cases, legislators or regulators have written laws or set policy that helps a business or industry with whom they have been negotiating for a job once they leave office.” What’s more, in many of the 35 states that do have restrictions, “the rules are riddled with loopholes, narrowly written or loosely enforced.”
Which is why Glenn Harlan Reynolds, law professor, libertarian and head honcho of the political blog Instapundit, may be on to something. In a column for USA Today last month, he suggested, “…Let’s involve the most effective behavior-control machinery in America: The Internal Revenue Code.”
“In short, I propose putting 50% surtax — or maybe it should be 75%, I’m open to discussion — on the post-government earnings of government officials. So if you work at a cabinet level job and make $196,700 a year, and you leave for a job that pays a million a year, you’ll pay 50% of the difference — just over $400,000 — to the Treasury right off the top. So as not to be greedy, we’ll limit it to your first five years of post-government earnings; after that, you’ll just pay whatever standard income tax applies.”
The conservative Boston Herald endorsed the idea, comparing an ex-legislator or official’s connections and knowledge to intangible capitol and Reynolds’ scheme to a capital gains tax.
Imagine — conservatives and libertarians making a favorable comparison to the capital gains tax! This and that Russian meteor may be signs of the apocalypse. Just gives you an idea of how deeply awful and anti-democratic the revolving door is, no matter which side you’re on. That’s why it has to be slowed down if not completely stopped — and why we’ll keep talking about it.
Reprinted with permission from Bill Moyers.
["Business Woman With A Piggy Bank Isolated On White" on Shutterstock
What lies behind religious homophobia
The anti-gay rhetoric of religious leaders like Cardinal Keith O'Brien often masks deep-seated fears about their own sexuality
I approached a director at Channel 4 back in 2000 with a proposal for a documentary on homosexuality and the Roman Catholic church. I had a simple pitch. "I want to show why my church is so anti-gay."
"And why is your church so anti-gay?," came back the obvious question. "Because it is so gay," I replied.
A furrowed brow invited further exposition. I then spelt out the logic. We interviewed clerics and ex-seminarians in the UK, US and Rome and uncovered a huge irony: the very institution that teaches that the homosexual orientation is "intrinsically disordered" attracts gay candidates for the priesthood in numbers way in excess of what one would expect, based on numbers in society at large. One seminary rector based on his own experience told me the number was at least 50%.
Gay Catholics like me will appreciate another irony with the news of Cardinal Keith O'Brien's resignation: that the very man whose trenchant rhetoric on the subjects of gay adoption and marriage has been brought down by accusations of improper same-sex behaviour from no less than four men who crossed his path in the 1980s, either as a seminary rector or as archbishop of Edinburgh. His decision not to participate in the papal conclave is not to be taken as an admission of guilt and he contests the accusations made against him. Nevertheless, it does raise some general questions about a possible relationship between the tone of anti-gay rhetoric and the identities of those who engage in such high-octane language on same sex attraction.
For our programme, Queer and Catholic, we interviewed two men from the English College in Rome who had fallen in love while training for the priesthood. In seminary they had tried to have open and frank discussions about homosexuality but were told by staff and many fellow students alike that this was not the done thing.
In the TV interview, one of them reported on the fact that it was frequently the very men who were out and about in Rome engaging in casual sexual acquaintances in the Monte Capitolino, a nearby park, who were often the most vehemently homophobic in the seminars on sexual ethics.
Building on this, the lesbian writer on queer theology, Elizabeth Stuart, in a fascinating deconstruction of "liturgy queens", made the observation that in her experience it was more often than not the very closeted clergy who deployed an almost neurotic obsession with the size and length of the altar cloth and ecclesiastical protocol as "their own way of dealing with their demons". We have to be careful of a simplistic reductio ad absurdum here. Love of aesthetics in liturgy does not automatically prove anything about one's sexual orientation. But I think Stuart had a point.
Of course, "inverted homophobia" as it has come to be known, doesn't only occur inside the Church of Rome. Colorado evangelical preacher Ted Haggard, married and father of five children, spent years assuring that LGBT individuals would be getting their fair share of hellfire and brimstone before his (male) lover spilled the beans. Republican Senator Richard Curtis, an opponent of gay rights legislation, had the misfortune to be caught with a young man on camera inside an erotic video store. Then there was George Rekers, Baptist minister and leading light of the Family Research Council, who had sloped off on a not-so-secret European holiday with a younger man.
The knee-jerk reaction is to scream "hypocrite", but I take a more measured view. The coming to light of these tales is a positive development. "Methinks the lady doth protest" is a well worn cliche, but from here on in, those who seek to cover their own guilty tracks by the uncharitable nature of their words know that a watching public is getting wiser to some of the unfortunate mind games that have been played out over the decades.
In the future, when as a gay Catholic I hear a senior cleric describing my orientation in hostile and uncompromising language, I might just want to ask a poignant question: is this really about me, or is it more about you?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Bradley Manning: 1,000 days in detention and secrecy still reigns
The WikiLeaks suspect's prosecution has been conducted with a complete absence of transparency – with worrying implications for free speech
On Saturday Bradley Manning will mark his 1,000th day imprisoned without trial. In the course of those thousand days, from the moment he was formally put into pre-trial confinement on 19 May 2010 on suspicion of being the source of the WikiLeaks disclosures, Manning has been on a long and eventful journey.
It has taken him from the desert of Iraq, where he was arrested at a military operating base outside Baghdad, to a prison tent in Kuwait. From there he endured his infamous harsh treatment at Quantico Marine base in Virginia, and for the last 14 months he has attended a series of pre-trial hearings at Fort Meade in Maryland, the latest of which begins next week.
For the small band of reporters who have tracked the prosecution of Private First Class Manning, the journey has also been long and eventful. Not in any way comparable, of course; none of us have been ordered to strip naked or put in shackles, and we have all been free to go home at night without the prospect of a life sentence hanging over us.
But it's been an education, nonetheless. Though we are a mixed bag – a fusion of traditional outlets such as the Washington Post and Associated Press and new-look bloggers such as Firedoglake and the Bradley Manning support network – we have been thrown together by our common mission to report on the most high-profile prosecution of an alleged leaker in several decades.
There's something else that binds us – disparate though our reporting styles and personal politics might be – and that's the daily struggle to do our jobs properly, confronted as we are by the systemic furtiveness of the US government. It's an irony that appears to be lost on many of the military lawyers who fill the courtroom at Fort Meade. A trial that has at its core the age-old confrontation between a government's desire for confidentiality and the public's need to know, is itself being conducted amid stringent restrictions on information.
None of the transcripts of the court martial procedure have been released to us. No government motions to the court have been published. David Coombs, Manning's lead lawyer, has had to plead to be allowed to post his defence motions, and when he has been granted permission he has often been forced to redact the documents to an almost comical degree.
The most egregious example of this over the past 1,000 days was the moment in January when the military judge, Colonel Denise Lind, issued her ruling in an Article 13 motion brought by Manning's defence. This was the complaint that the soldier, while at Quantico, had been subjected to a form of pre-trial punishment that is banned under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
It was an important moment in the narrative arc that is the Bradley Manning trial. Technically, Lind had the power to dismiss all charges against the soldier; she could have, though none of us expected that she would, let him walk out of that court and into freedom. (In the end she knocked 112 days off any eventual sentence).
The accusations contained in the Article 13 also went to the heart of the defence case that Manning has singled out for unfair and at times brutal treatment. During the testimony, Manning himself gave evidence, standing inside a 6ft by 8ft (180cm by 240cm) box that had been drawn on the floor of the courtroom to replicate the dimensions of his cell. He recalled such humiliating details as the routine he was required to follow when he needed toilet paper. Standing to attention at the front bars of his cell, he was ordered to shout out to the guards who kept him under 24-hour observation: "Lance Corporal Detainee Manning requests toilet paper!"
So my fellow reporters and I awaited with intense interest Lind's judgment, though also with some trepidation. We'd sat through the spectacle of Lind reading out to the court her rulings, and it wasn't a pleasant experience. The judge has a way of reading out her decisions at such a clip that it is almost impossible to take them down even with shorthand or touch typing.
In the event, Lind spent an hour and a half without pause reading out a judgment that must have stretched to 50 pages, at a rate that rendered accurate reporting of it diabolically difficult. No copy of the ruling has – then or now – been made available to the public, presumably on grounds of national security, even though every word of the document had been read out to the very public that was now being withheld its publication.
Such is the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the Bradley Manning trial. Why does it matter? It matters to Bradley Manning. The soldier is facing charges that carry the stiffest punishment available to the state short of killing him. (They could technically do that to him too, but the prosecution has made clear it will not seek the death penalty). If found guilty of the most serious charge – "aiding the enemy" – he could be confined to military custody for the rest of his life with no chance of parole, a prospect that makes the past 1,000 days look like a Tea Party.
The least Manning deserves is stringent fairness in his prosecution, and stringent fairness cannot exist in the absence of openness and transparency. As a British appeal court judge wrote in a recent case brought by the Guardian to protest against excessive courtroom secrecy: "In a democracy, where power depends on the consent of the governed, the answer must lie in the transparency of the legal process. Open justice lets in the light and allows the public to scrutinise the workings of the law, for better or for worse."
There's a much bigger reason why the cloak-and-dagger approach of the US government to this trial should be taken seriously. America doesn't seem to have woken up to this yet, but the prosecution of Bradley Manning poses the greatest threat to freedom of speech and the press in this country in at least a generation.
The "aiding the enemy" count essentially accuses Manning of handing information to Osama bin Laden as a necessary consequence of the act of leaking state secrets that would end up on the internet. When one of the prosecution lawyers was asked whether the government would still have gone after Manning had he leaked to the New York Times instead of WikiLeaks, she unhesitatingly replied: "Yes".
If that's not a threat to the first amendment, then what is? This prosecution, as it is currently conceived, could have a chilling effect on public accountability that goes far beyond the relatively rarefied world of WikiLeaks.
That's something worth contemplating as Bradley Manning enters his second 1,000 days sitting in a cell. Looked at this way, we're sitting in the cell with him.
The educational charities that do PR for the right-wing ultra-rich
Billionaires control the political conversation by staying hidden and paying others to promote their brutal agendas
Conspiracies against the public don't get much uglier than this. As the Guardian revealed last week, two secretive organisations working for US billionaires have spent $118m to ensure that no action is taken to prevent manmade climate change. While inflicting untold suffering on the world's people, their funders have used these opaque structures to ensure that their identities are never exposed.
The two organisations – the Donors' Trust and the Donors' Capital Fund – were set up as political funding channels for people handing over $1m or more. They have financed 102 organisations which either dismiss climate science or downplay the need to take action. The large number of recipients creates the impression of many independent voices challenging climate science. These groups, working through the media, mobilising gullible voters and lobbying politicians, helped to derail Obama's cap and trade bill and the climate talks at Copenhagen. Now they're seeking to prevent the US president from trying again.
This covers only part of the funding. In total, between 2002 and 2010 the two identity-laundering groups paid $311m to 480 organisations, most of which take positions of interest to the ultra-rich and the corporations they run: less tax, less regulation, a smaller public sector. Around a quarter of the money received by the rightwing opinion swarm comes from the two foundations. If this funding were not effective, it wouldn't exist: the ultra-rich didn't get that way by throwing their money around randomly. The organisations they support are those that advance their interests.
A small number of the funders have been exposed by researchers trawling through tax records. They include the billionaire Koch brothers (paying into the two groups through their Knowledge and Progress Fund) and the DeVos family (the billionaire owners of Amway). More significantly, we now know a little more about the recipients. Many describe themselves as free-market or conservative thinktanks.
Among them are the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Hudson Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Reason Foundation, Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, Mont Pelerin Society and Discovery Institute. All pose as learned societies, earnestly trying to determine the best interests of the public. The exposure of this funding reinforces the claim by David Frum, formerly a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, that such groups "increasingly function as public relations agencies".
One name in particular jumped out at me: American Friends of the IEA. The Institute of Economic Affairs is a British group that, like all the others, calls itself a free-market thinktank. Scarcely a day goes by when its staff aren't interviewed in the broadcast media, promoting the dreary old billionaires' agenda: less tax for the rich, less help for the poor, less spending by the state, less regulation for business. In the first 13 days of February, its people were on the BBC 10 times.
Never have I heard its claim to be an independent thinktank challenged by the BBC. When, in 2007, I called the institute a business lobby group, its then director-general responded, in a letter to the Guardian, that "we are independent of all business interests". Oh yes?
The database published by the Canadian site desmogblog.com shows that American Friends of the IEA has (up to 2010) received $215,000 from the two secretive funds. When I spoke to the IEA's fundraising manager, she confirmed that the sole purpose of American Friends is to channel money to the organisation in London. She agreed that the IEA has never disclosed the Donors' Trust money it has received. She denied that the institute is a sockpuppet organisation: purporting to be independent while working for some very powerful US interests.
Would the BBC allow someone from Bell Pottinger to discuss an issue of concern to its sponsors without revealing the sponsors' identity? No. So what's the difference? What distinguishes an acknowledged public relations company taking money channelled by a corporation or a billionaire from a so-called thinktank, funded by the same source to promote the same agenda?
The IEA is registered with the Charity Commission as an educational charity. The same goes for Nigel Lawson's climate misinformation campaign (the Global Warming Policy Foundation) and a host of other dubious "thinktanks". I've said it before and I'll say it again: it is outrageous that the Charity Commission allows organisations that engage in political lobbying and refuse to reveal their major funders to claim charitable status.
This is the new political frontier. Corporations and their owners have learned not to show their hands. They tend to avoid the media, aware that they will damage their brands by being seen to promote the brutal agenda that furthers their interests. So they have learned from the tobacco companies: stay hidden and pay others to do it for you.
They need a network of independent-looking organisations that can produce plausible arguments in defence of their positions. Once the arguments have been developed, projecting them is easy. Most of the media is owned by billionaires, who are happy to promote the work of people funded by the same class. One of the few outlets they don't own – the BBC – has been disgracefully incurious about the identity of those to whom it gives a platform.
By these means the ultra-rich come to dominate the political conversation, without declaring themselves. Those they employ are clever and well-trained, with money their opponents can only dream of. They are skilled at rechannelling public anger that might otherwise be directed at their funders: the people who tanked the economy, who use the living planet as their dustbin, who won't pay taxes and demand that the poor must pay for the mistakes of the rich. Anger, thanks to the work of these hired hands, is instead aimed at the victims or opponents of the billionaires: people on benefits, trade unions, Greenpeace, the American Civil Liberties Union.
The answer, as ever, is transparency. As the so-called thinktanks come to play an ever more important role in politics, we need to know who they are working for. Any group – whether the IEA or Friends of the Earth – that attempts to influence public life should declare all donations greater than £1,000. We've had a glimpse of who's paying. Now we need to see the rest of the story.
Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
What do we owe our veterans? Osama bin Laden shooter's story isn't unique
Jonathan Rue: Thousands of veterans have problems going back to civilian life, but it will take more than money to fix the issues.
Esquire magazine caused quite a stir on Monday when it published an extended interview with the US Navy SEAL who shot and killed Osama bin Laden.
The shooter, his pseudonym throughout the 15,000 word article, recounts the raid in gripping detail, but it's his comments on his life and struggles after leaving the Navy that have provoked the strongest reactions. The shooter's struggles will shock readers, most of whom likely aren't familiar with the terms of military service and the benefits conferred after that service ends.
In September 2012, the shooter left the Navy after 16 years of honorable service. Over multiple combat deployments, the shooter racked up injuries, lost a lot of friends, and watched his marriage fall apart. He's struggled with suicidal thoughts and finding a steady job that doesn't require carrying a gun (i.e. private security contracting).
Regrettably, nothing the shooter has experienced makes him unique. Thousands of combat veterans, not just the special operations forces, have experienced these same problems transitioning back to civilian life. Coping with the tens of thousands of veterans who suffered mental or physical injuries and reintegrating them into society will be one of America's greatest challenges in the 21st century.
As Bronstein tells it, the US Navy and a grateful nation gave the shooter nothing upon leaving the military, "No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family". This also does not make the shooter unique: 83% of all military veterans separate from the military before serving 20 years, which means they are not entitled to a pension, nor to remain on Tricare, the military's health insurance. But, here's the thing: the shooter, like all service members, undoubtedly knew this when he made the decision to leave just four years shy of earning a lifetime of benefits for himself and his family.
Inexplicably, in the original online version of the story, Esquire omitted the fact that the shooter isn't completely without health care. Like all combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, the shooter is eligible to receive five years of health coverage from the Department of Veterans Affairs. If he has service related injuries, which the article strongly implies, he can file a disability claim and potentially receive free care for the rest of his life.
Not even Esquire's print version of the story is correct, however, as medical care is also available to those of us without service related disabilities. In most cases, we simply have to pay modest co-pays for health services at VA medical centers. These co-pays are completely reasonable, but unlike equivalent civilian plans, veterans don't pay a monthly or annual premium. His family, however, will not be eligible for the same health coverage.
By virtue of his status as the man who killed the most infamous US outlaw, the shooter's story will garner a lot of attention and sympathy. It should also prompt Americans to pause and reflect after 11 years of war: What do we owe our veterans? Is the military a profession or a public service?
Answering these questions is a prerequisite to reforming the military compensation and retirement system.
The current trajectory of military personnel costs is unsustainable. One report succinctly describes the problem:
"If personnel costs continue growing at [the current] rate and the overall defense budget remains flat with inflation, military personnel costs will consume the entire defense budget by 2039."
According to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf), these expenditures have grown more than 90% – 30% above the rate of inflation – since 2001. Tricare has fueled spiraling costs. From 2001 to 2012, health care costsrose over 170% (pdf), from $19bn to $53bn.
In addition to paying 1.5m active duty military, the Department of Defense is also responsible for 1.9m retirees at a cost of $50bn per year. The military retirement system has not changed in over 100 years.
Unlike social security or Medicare, military retirees begin collecting their generous pensions immediately upon retirement. Because 76% of retirees leave the service in their 40s, most pensions are paid to people who likely will live for 40 years, twice as long as the service they rendered. But, 83% of service members, mostly those enlisted men and women who have fought hardest and endured the worst, will, like shooter and me, not serve long enough to get a pension.
We're operating an all-volunteer, professional military force using conscription era personnel policies.
Since 2001, support for the troops mostly has meant yellow ribbon bumper stickers, care packages, or well-meaning, if awkward, "thanks for your service" banalities from acquaintances and strangers. Our elected leaders didn't ask us to pay any price or bear any burden. Instead, they gave us tax cuts and encouraged everyone to go shopping while we sent some, but not all our sons and daughters to war, over and over and over.
So, what do we owe our veterans? Is the military a public service? Or is it a profession that demands compensation and benefits above and beyond what we pay civilians? Should we treat our special operations forces differently than other veterans? And what do we owe these brave citizens in retirement?
Maybe we should start by showing a bit more thoughtfulness when making decisions of war and peace; considerably more diligence prosecuting the wars we've decided to wage; and demanding an efficient, comprehensive system of care for those veterans who return injured.
Ensuring these things requires more than a war tax and a "thanks for your service" nod. While throwing money at the problem may assuage our guilt, it won't solve the problem.
Barack Obama is pushing gun control at home, but he's a killer abroad
President Obama's appeals to respect human life in the US are at odds with his backing for drone strikes in foreign parts
On 27 January CBS aired an interview with the newly inaugurated President Barack Obama and his outgoing secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, during which the president faced accusations that under his watch America had retreated from its key role in world affairs. "The biggest criticism of this team," said the interviewer," has been [that there is] an abdication of the United States on the world stage, sort of reluctance to become involved in another entanglement."
Obama interrupted. "Well, Muammar Gaddafi probably does not agree with that assessment," he said. "Or at least if he was around, he wouldn't agree with that assessment." Quite. Gaddafi, to whom the US authorised $15m worth of arms sales in 2009, is not around because he was murdered by a mob shortly after being sodomised by a bayonet following his ousting by US-led Nato bombardment. In the minutes between the sodomising and the summary execution there just wasn't time to reflect on US foreign policy.
The day after the interview was screened, Obama met with the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association and the Major County Sheriffs' Association. The president, fresh from boasting about having Gaddafi "smoked", wanted to discuss how to stop guns getting into the wrong hands, bolster the forces of law and order, and stem violence in US cities.
Over the last few weeks there has been a distinct incongruity – to say the least – between the agenda Obama is promoting at home and the one he defends abroad. His justification for targeted killings and drone strikes in foreign parts, prompted by his nomination of a CIA director, has coincided with his advocacy for stiffer gun control and appeals to respect human life following mass shootings. The result is an administration raising life and death issues in its actions and pronouncements but being unable to talk with any moral authority or ethical consistency on either.
In short, the credibility of a president in challenging lawless social violence in US cities is fundamentally undermined when he has his own personal kill list in violation of international law to terminate enemies elsewhere.
"The diplomatic historian traces foreign affairs as if domestic affairs were offstage disturbances," writes Walter Karp in his book The Politics of War. "The historian of domestic politics treats the explosions of war as if they were offstage disturbances. Were that true, we would have to believe that presidents who faced a mounting sea of troubles at home have nonetheless conducted their foreign policy without the slightest regard for those troubles – that individual presidents were divided into watertight compartments, one labelled 'domestic' and the other 'foreign'."
Yet that is precisely how the Obama administration appears to have compartmentalised its response to violence and its victims. One moment the Obamas are mourning the tragic loss of Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old girl who attended his inauguration. She was shot less than a mile from their Chicago home while sheltering from the rain in a park. The first lady, Michelle Obama, who attended Hadiya's funeral on Saturday, said, through a spokeswoman: "Too many times, we've seen young people struck down with so much of their lives ahead of them."
The next, his administration is maintaining a stony silence over the murder of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old American born in Denver who was killed by a drone in Yemen in 2011. His father, Anwar (also American), was an Islamist cleric – killed by a drone a few weeks earlier. When asked about the incident during the election campaign, Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary and senior adviser to Obama's re-election campaign, essentially blamed Abdulrahman for having the kind of dad the US wanted to kill. "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the wellbeing of their children."
On the one hand, we should not be surprised. These contradictions are inherent in the tension between the position to which he was elected and the forces that elected him. For all the global investment in Obama – peaking early, stratospherically and ridiculously, in the Nobel peace prize just nine months after he was voted in – he was elected to represent the interests of the most powerful and well-armed nation on Earth at a time of war. Murder was in the job description of the office he applied for and won to great fanfare. For all the claims of him becoming a great role model for young black men, he was always going to be responsible for the deaths of more innocents than Biggie and Tupac combined.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, between 2004 and 2013 drone strikes have killed up to 893 civilians (including 176 children) in Pakistan, 178 civilians (including 37 children) in Yemen, and 57 civilians (including three children) in Somalia (while these started under Bush they were accelerated under Obama). According to the New York Times, his ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, complained to colleagues that "he didn't realise his main job was to kill people", a colleague said.
But Obama was returned to office by the votes of – among others – blacks, Latinos, youth and the poor, the very people and communities most likely to be blighted by gun violence. Michelle Obama came to Hadiya's funeral after considerable pressure had been applied by black communities in Chicago and nationwide. Since the shootings of children at Sandy Hook elementary school Obama has led an audacious push to galvanise a majority, in the country and in Congress, for tougher gun controls.
The unfortunate timing has highlighted the discrepancy between his foreign and domestic policies, exposing them not only as hypocritical but deeply tragic. While shop windows all around Obama's Chicago home hang posters saying "Stop killing people", the man they sent to the White House is doing precisely the opposite. Having shown his ability to rally human empathy to progressive causes at home, he then fails to recognise the common humanity of the innocents he is killing abroad.
"[America can be] a moral power," said Martin Luther King – on whose Bible Obama swore in as president – during the Vietnam war. "A power harnessed to the service of peace and human beings, not an inhumane power unleashed against defenceless people." That's as true on the streets of Chicago as it is in the border regions of Pakistan.
Twitter: @garyyounge
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
The web is dead. Long live the web!
Forget the website, the page and the visit – the dominant metaphor for the future of the internet is the time-based stream
The communications theorist Marshall McLuhan observed that "we look at the present through a rear-view mirror". And that "we march backwards into the future". Amen. Remember the horseless carriage? Not to mention the fact that we still measure the oomph of a Porsche 911 in, er, brake horsepower.
But the car industry is a ferment of modernism compared with the computer business. When the bitmapped screen and the Wimp (windows, icons, menus, pointer) interface first surfaced in the early 1970s at Xerox Parc, its geeks searched for a metaphor that would make this new way of relating to computers intelligible to human beings. So they came up with the "desktop" on which were displayed little images (icons) of documents and document folders, just like you'd find on an actual desktop. Well, on the desktop of an efficient bureaucrat anyway.
But then they ruined everything by putting a trash can on the desktop. And Bill Gates & Co compounded the offence when they released Windows 95, which also had a start button on the desktop. The result was that, for a time, when most of the world's computer users wanted to switch off their machines they had to press start. Even the car industry thought that was weird.
The problem with metaphors is that they are double-edged swords (as it were). On the one hand, we need them because they help us make sense of the new, which is where the horseless carriage, "coachbuilt" limousines etc came from. Metaphors "carry explanatory structures from a familiar domain of experiences into an other domain in need of understanding or restructuring", as the theorist Klaus Krippendorff has written.
But at the same time as they help us make sense of something, metaphors also constrain our thinking by locking us into the past. When the web first appeared in 1991, for example, the obvious metaphor was that of a global library – a vast treasure house of digital artefacts held in repositories (sites) that could be accessed by anybody.
And the metaphor for a web page was, just that: a page – a static object that could be accessed by a distant reader. But in fact the time when web pages were static objects has long gone. Most web pages nowadays are generated on the fly by servers pulling stuff from their databases and dispatching it across the net for assembly by the recipient's web browser. And a webmail page is in effect a virtual computer (powered by JavaScript) in which you do your email.
So although the web has changed out of all recognition in two decades, our underlying metaphor for it probably hasn't changed that much. And this has the downside that we're effectively blind to what is actually happening, which is that we are moving from a world of sites and visits to one that is increasingly dominated by streams. The guy who articulates this best is a Yale computer scientist named David Gelernter.
The title of his latest essay on the subject – "The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It" – conveys the basic idea. "The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a time-based worldstream," he writes. "This lifestream — a heterogeneous, content-searchable, real-time messaging stream — arrived in the form of blog posts and RSS feeds, Twitter and other chatstreams and Facebook walls and timelines. Its structure represented a shift beyond the 'flatland known as the desktop' (where our interfaces ignored the temporal dimension) towards streams, which flow and can therefore serve as a representation of time.
"It's a bit like moving from a desktop to a magic diary: picture a diary whose pages turn automatically, tracking your life moment to moment… Until you touch it and then the page-turning stops. The diary becomes a reference book: a complete and searchable guide to your life. Put it down and the pages start turning again."
Gelernter thinks that this diary-like structure is supplanting the spatial one as the dominant metaphor for cyberspace and he may well be right. At any rate, he's not the only geek thinking like this. The social media expert Danah Boyd has also written perceptively along the same lines. As a metaphor, it certainly provides a way of making sense of the attractions of Facebook – now dominated by its timeline technology – and of Twitter, especially as seen through a stream-browser such as Hootsuite. So it will do for now, so long as we remember John Locke's warning: that metaphors "must be made use of to illustrate ideas that we already have, not to paint to us those which we yet have not". He wrote that in 1796.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Do U.S. drone kills need an oversight board? How would it work?
Do US drone kills need an oversight board? How would it work? (+video)
Should the US establish some sort of secret court to conduct judicial oversight of drone strikes used to kill terror suspects? That’s an idea that’s been discussed for some time in Congress and in Washington national security think tanks. It’s acquired new salience because of Thursday’s Senate…
Can Fox News break its fatal embrace with irrelevance and the Republican party?
After a decade of phenomenal ratings growth, America's leading conservative media brand faces a crisis of ideological identity
Recent headlines about Fox News have given liberals gleeful Schadenfreude: Dick "Landslide" Morris, gone. Ratings the lowest in since 2001. Roger Ailes practicing the kind of pre-emptive paranoia (buying up the domains for bizarre iterations of a biographer's name) that inevitably accompanies Nixonian delusions of infallibility and hubristic defeat.
To be sure, the departure of Sarah Palin generated a certain degree of wistful nostalgia: she was a bouffanted, bedazzled punching bag as much as she was a folksy aphorism-mangler, as well as a black hole for dropped "g's" and common sense.
Some observers have taken these events as proof of the ongoing GOP implosion and signals of their devolution from opposition party to regional grandstanders and designated spoilers. This theme has been echoing ever since the channel's election night coverage unfolded as an action movie-level collision between reality and Karl Rove's ample and admittedly daunting forehead.
But such prognostications suffer from buying into the logic that has until now been a part of the formula that made Fox such an overwhelming success: Fox = Republican party. The network's rating grew an astounding 570% from 1999 to 2009.
The marriage between the network and the party has been almost entirely beneficial to both entities. Working together – brazenly, even explicitly so – has been a force multiplier for the GOP brand and message. It's not really a surprise that as the linked swimmers have started to go against the current of history, their connection puts them both at risk of drowning.
On the surface, the question appears to be: who will let go first? Jettisoning Morris and Palin suggests that Fox is loosening its grip and attempting to edge away from the Tea Party-based ideological rigor that weighed down the GOP in 2012. But almost simultaneously, Republicans have been speaking publicly about breaking away from their dependence on the network. As one strategist told Buzzfeed:
"Fox is great. But those viewers already agree with us … How else are different demographics going to get to know you if you never reach out to them?"
No matter who may be trying to end the marriage first, extricating themselves from the relationship won't be graceful: the habits of mental cohabitation are too difficult to break. Witness the coverage of Benghazi, where conservative outrage on the channel remains strident and forceful and in harmony with Republican officials, despite the willingness of most of the country to move on to matters closer to home. It's a positive feedback loop that spirals into irrelevance: Republicans pursue a conspiracy that only Fox viewers believe, based on reports only Fox airs, and new information gets hammered into a shape that fits the existing narrative.
And then, there are topics such as Obama's reliance on drone strikes. Here, libertarians and Obama opponents might find common cause with liberal civil rights activists, but the network's coverage is hamstrung by its Republican-led Obamacentric myopia. Rather than attack the notion of drone strikes on American citizens as in and of itself an alarming escalation in the always-suspect "war on terror", Sean Hannity and other hosts decry "Democrat hypocrisy" on the matter. Here's Hannity a colorful, typical outburst:
"Democrats, specifically Barack Obama, spent the first four years of his presidency literally just butchering George Bush day in and day out. Remember Gitmo and the vicious attacks the left hurled at Republicans? Well, it sure seems as if the shoe is now on the other foot when word of a confidential Justice Department memo leaked out that concludes that the US government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be 'senior operational leaders' of al-Qaida or 'an associated force'."
I can assure Sean that there are some liberals who have carried their protests against Bush's policies (if not their "literal butchering" of him) right through to protests against Obama's expansion of them. I share a masthead with one! There's another who has the show opposite you on MSNBC. She's probably not available to go on your show, granted, but booking one of the 24 congressional Democrats who've protested the administration policy might pay off with an expanded group of allies, if not viewership.
That is, if Hannity's and the other Fox personalities' rather sudden interest in extra-judicial executions stemmed from a genuine concern about civil rights issues and not blind rage at the ascension of a popular Democratic president, and at the movement of the country leftward at the same pace and with the same apparent inevitability as continental drift.
This rage unites Fox and the Republicans more firmly than any conscious strategy and lies at the heart of the problem facing them both: it's not that they work together so much as they have the same goals. To be sure, Ailes has always been conscious of ratings and he's a businessman at his core, but the ratings have been so good for so long that ideology has animated decisions about programming. This applies not just to Fox, but to an entire industry of self-consciously conservative news outlets whose allegiance to the same set of ideas is undoing their worth as both news outlets and party platforms.
When we think of conservative media, Fox has so dominated that it is a synecdoche for the enterprise – an attitude that extends to outlets that properly should be competitors. Bloggers and radio talk show hosts, emerging properties such as the Daily Caller and Breitbart, take their cues from and feed themselves Fox. Working not just in ideological concert but even in an institutionally orchestrated manner (remember the big Caller scoop about Obama's "other race" speech?), they dilute their individual credibility even as they successfully propagate the message.
There is such a thing as liberal bias in the mainstream media, but it has a different expression – it is less of a concerted effort – because there is something spooky and conspiratorial about the way conservatives regard the very idea of media, and perhaps information more broadly: it is not a neutral element, ever. Everything is evidence for or against an idea. And because there is broad agreement on what ideas are best, there is no incentive to compete in a marketplace of ideas and no comprehension of why that might be necessary and useful.
This socialist paradise is falling apart.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Pop culture's past is growing faster than its present
I can now listen to music that was never aimed at me, from a time and a place I have no connection with – and even nearly enjoy it
Just before Christmas, I saw the early-80s Boston hardcore band Mission of Burma in a Shoreditch cellar, playing to a crowd of young people barely born this century, typically too inarticulate to explain exactly what had led them to a room I expected to be peopled exclusively by nostalgic fortysomethings. Last week, I enjoyed Roscoe Mitchell, saxophonist of the 60s free-jazzers the Art Ensemble of Chicago, at another Dalston hangout, alongside 17-year-olds and septuagenarians. From where I am standing, the traditional demographics of music consumption seem to be dissolving. Although, admittedly, where I am standing is just by the gents' toilets in a succession of the hippest venues in western Europe.
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CD reissues of unknown gems, and the internet-driven mass availability of everything instantly, mean pop culture's past is growing more rapidly than its present. Our sassiest sons and daughters are beyond our command, foraging far from whatever is drip-fed to them by broadcast media, and digging all manner of cross-generational guff. Your 12-year-old niece thinks that Searching for Sugar Man bloke, who had been working as a builder since 1971 until some hipster doofus put him in an arthouse documentary, is exactly the same as Bob Dylan because she discovered them both, for better or worse, on the same illegal download site, free of any illuminating cultural context or critical commentary.
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I've spent this week listening to a new, commercially available, download of a previously unreleased 1975 album by a lost Chicago metal band called Medusa, rescued from mouldy master-tapes of the group's only session, found abandoned in the drummer's basement, where perhaps they should have stayed. I don't know if I really like First Step Beyond, but it's fascinating to my saturated palate because it shouldn't be here. First Step Beyond's decontextualised Neanderthal heaviness confuses itself and everyone who comes into contact with it, like a caveman in a Disney film who gets transported to 60s suburbia, takes a dump in Mom's Tupperware and wears her diaphragm as a hat. The fact remains, the instant availability of everything ever means I am consuming something that was never aimed at me, from a time and a place I have no connection with, and yet I am nearly enjoying it.
Not everyone is buying into the theory of the kaleidoscoping of culture. Last year I curated a selection of the 20 best standups working today for a show called The Alternative Comedy Experience. It aims to be an alternative to the more straightforward fare of shows such as Live at the Apollo, and is. I went for a meeting with the channel's marketing people, who had not watched any of the 12 episodes, but were principally, and understandably, concerned about how to sell this strange product to their target audience of 18- to 32-year-olds, whose loyalty to the channel encourages advertisers to fund it.
Identifying the youngest performers in the programme, marketing wondered if they could be profiled in info-outlets popular with 18- to 32-year-olds, their faces stamped on to hallucinogenic plant food tablets, or perhaps grafted on to the bodies of the stars of the pornographic films that all young people stream continuously to their mobile phones. When I was in a double act during the early 90s, when comedy was first the new rock'n'roll, our live audience was composed exclusively of children, which was a godsend, as the fact that their parents had to accompany them sometimes pushed our live crowds up into triple figures. Nonetheless I floated to marketing the idea that, in my more recent experience of comedy, the availability of clips of our show's quality turns on YouTube meant their audiences needn't, and didn't, follow delineated demographic lines. And I suggested that younger people might not necessarily be looking to consume product manufactured by content providers of solely their own age group. But talk soon moved on to the show's coruscating liberal satirist Paul Sinha's appearance on the daytime quiz show The Chase, and whether this could be a way of getting our programme profiled in Puzzler magazine.
Meanwhile, check me out! I've had my headphones on while writing this and I am coming round to First Step Beyond. Now I'm grooving my near 45-year-old ass around in my office chair to Medusa's nine-minute Transient Amplitude, which sounds like a thin no-budget Hawkwind with two bicycle lights replacing the psychedelic light show, and a dead frog on a string instead of a massive naked dancing woman. (Hawkwind, by the way, are a once-despised 70s group loved only by hippy grandads whom young people are now encouraged to admire as space-rock pioneers.)
Indeed, this Transient Amplitude growler makes me think these Medusa cats might be quite good after all. I don't know if I'm allowed to like them, but there doesn't seem to be anyone in any position of authority telling me I shouldn't, so I am going to anyway. The guitar is all over the place though, wandering randomly between the speaker channels, like marketing people searching for demographic certainties in an age where everything that ever was is suddenly available to everyone.
The Alternative Comedy Experience begins on Comedy Central on 5 February at 11pm
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