The U.S. Coast Guard is one of the five branches of the U.S. military—with the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—but since 2003 it has been organizationally part of the Department of Homeland Security.
The DHS budget is one of several being frozen or sequestered by the current government shutdown, which is now in its fifth week and the longest in history. Members of the Coast Guard are among the hundreds of thousands of federal workers not receiving pay.
A reader who is part of a Coast Guard family writes:
These are the men and women who are actually engaged in providing security to our country. These folks are literally first responders who create a virtual wall that we take for granted. Whatever we might think about airport security theater, there is no doubt about the amazing work done by the Coast Guard.
Now I've got a kid about to graduate from the Coast Guard Academy, plus I have been following the extraordinary efforts by communities, restaurants, churches, banks, insurance companies... and the Coast Guard itself, in an effort to support so many enlisted folks who are in serious trouble right now. My kid and her friends are fine but what's happening with many enlisted folks is simply horrible.
With that intro in mind, here's what I think is the core issue at hand: this shutdown is a Chickenhawk Shutdown. Like the Chickenhawk Nation, most people have no clue.
Congresspeople get paid. Retirees get paid. Active duty military get paid. IRS refund checks get processed (by people who expect to eventually get paid), and lots and lots of other services continue to be provided.
I'm stealing this notion from a friend who argues the problem is we don't actually have a shutdown. It's a semi-shutdown … a faux shutdown. The vast majority of the American public has no clue except maybe they've heard there's drama in Wash DC., or maybe they were on vacation but couldn't get in to see the Grand Canyon.
Too many people still accept the general idea that government doesn't do anything so who cares if they shut it down? (Some considerable number want to shrink it until you can drown it in the tub.) So when people hear there's a shutdown, and 90% see no impact, it just cements that misconception.
The reader then quoted a new article by the recently retired commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Paul Zukunft, in Proceedings, the magazine of the U.S. Naval Institute.The article is pointedly called “Breaking Faith,” and in it Zunkuft says:
While the Department of Defense realized a new highwater mark in its 2019 appropriation, the Coast Guard was excluded from that package and has yet to see its appropriation for 2019 that began on 1 October.
To add insult to injury, the Coast Guard is no longer “doing more with less,” but “doing all with nothing.”
I have served shoulder to shoulder with our service members during previous government shutdowns and listened to the concerns of our all-volunteer force. This current government shutdown is doing long-term harm and is much more than pablum to feed the 24-hour news cycle.
We are now in uncharted waters given its duration and the hardship its causing, particularly at many Coast Guard installations that reside in high-cost communities along the U.S. coastline where service personnel already live paycheck-to-paycheck to pay the bills….
Mission-essential training is being deferred with egregious implications for a service that has as its motto: Semper Paratus—Always Ready….
The U.S. Coast Guard is a “service like no other” with the exception that Coast Guard men and women place service above self, exactly as do each member of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.
Those three poignant words—service before self—on a grand scale need to guide our political leaders to avert the calamity confronting the world’s best coast guard.
Video doesn’t mean irrefutable truth, though time and again it’s offered as proof, as explanation. This weekend, controversy boiled over around a viral video of Kentucky Catholic high school students in Washington for the March for Life, appearing to mock Native Americans who’d participated in the Indigenous Peoples March. Then a second video emerged, muddling the clarity of the first. The incident, Julie Irwin Zimmerman writes, ended up a Rorschach test. What’s a productive lesson to take from all this?
As vicious cold and snow enveloped the eastern U.S., a reminder that individual record cold days during any given year don’t erase decades of rising averages: The average time, for instance, between the last frost of spring and the first frost of fall has increased in every region of the U.S. since the early-20th century. A reminder, also, that both planetary warming and local emissions can dramatically alter a region’s weather patterns, and an entire region’s identity and way of life.
Uncertainty reigns in the story of the Moscow Trump Tower project. The special counsel spokesperson issued a rare statement, disputing parts of a BuzzFeed News report that the president himself allegedly directed his then-personal lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow project. On Sunday, Rudy Giuliani, representing the President Donald Trump for free, appeared on TV to deny that Trump ever instructed Cohen to lie, while also saying discussions for the project may have stretched into November 2016, contradicting the president’s own statements (Giuliani later tried to walk back these comments).
Evening Read
(Image: Santi Visalli / Getty)
In a May 10, 1967 address before the Hungry Club Forum in Atlanta, where sympathetic white politicians would meet out of the public eye with local black leaders, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the gains made through the civil rights movement, but also of the “three major evils” imperiling such progress for black Americans. Racism was only the first of these evils.
→ Read King’s full speech here.
(Image: Clarence Williams / L.A. Times)
In the 90s, a white, Beverly Hills doctor named Sherman Hershfield had a stroke, began uncontrollably speaking in rhyme, started rapping at the Los Angeles hip-hop mecca Project Blowed, and in his 60s, became Dr. Rapp.
→ Read the full story here.
Have you tried your hand at our daily mini crossword (available on our website, here)? Monday is the perfect day to start—the puzzle gets bigger and more difficult throughout the week.
→ Challenge your friends, or try to beat your own solving time.
(Illustration: Araki Koman)
Dear TherapistEvery week, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions in the Dear Therapist column. Anna from Seattle writes:
For Christmas this year, my boyfriend surprised me with a ring. It’s sapphire and silver—beautiful. But it’s not an engagement ring. Without saying so outright, he made clear that it was just a ring. After dating for a few years, and living together for the past year and a half, I can’t help but be disappointed.
→ Read the rest, and Lori’s advice. You can write to Lori anytime at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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I am familiar with the ambiguities of video evidence—for example, through this piece I wrote from Israel more than 15 years ago, “Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura,” about the battle over the meaning of an inflammatory video there; or these two separate Twitter threads, first here then here, in the past few days from James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor for America magazine, about the meanings of the multiple videos from the confrontation on the National Mall this past weekend.
I now believe that the “meaning” or “truth” of this recent encounter is likely to remain as contested as anything in the al-Dura case. The more additional evidence comes in, the more clearly it is taken to “prove” one interpretation of the case, or its opposite. “You must not have seen the full videos” is meant to be a conclusory statement, either way.
The more I have looked the evidence—the many, many videos, and the many statements, and the many timeline-analyses, and the many interpretations—the more I have recognized what I believe to be its reality, and the more I have understood that many others won’t see it the same way. Thus I regret weighing in on the case at all—or saying anything more than what I originally intended, which was admiration for a statement by the mayor of Covington, Kentucky, reaffirming his community’s belief in openness and inclusivity. Saying more was a mistake, which I would undo if I could.
The heart of this mistake was forgetting the difference between what I think or believe or conclude, on the one hand, and what will be provable to others. Here is a set of points about that frontier, which I’m numbering so I can refer back and forth to them:
1) The young man who was most prominently displayed in the video from the confrontation has released a statement about his intentions, saying that they were entirely peaceable and respectful. All he meant to do by standing in front of tribal elder with a drum, Nathan Phillips, for several minutes was to prevent further confrontations.
You can read the statement here.
The statement describes many background aspects of the event, from this student’s perspective. As a factual point, it doesn’t mention that a large number of the young men present, including the one issuing the statement, had chosen to wear MAGA hats.
2) As a complementary analysis of what the overlapping videos of the event show, this extensive Twitter thread by Lisa Sharon Harper matches what I believe the videos show. Similarly with this long thread from TBQ. As with the al-Dura case, there are long, detailed chronologies “proving” completely opposite interpretations of events. My point is that the two chronicles I’m mentioning seemed consistent with what I thought the videos showed.
3) The mail that has come in has been voluminous, and in three distinct categories.
Much is outraged, personally abusive, and profane. I won’t give examples.
Some is impassioned and angry, but inclines toward offering a denunciation of the “rush to judgment” by media members, including me, in this case. I’ll give samples of them below.
The rest is in the vein of this following message, usually from Americans and others who mention that they are non-white. This one comes from a well-known American academic, of the Baby Boomer era. He writes:
Nathan Phillips deserves both respect and emulation. He stepped in to prevent violence. [According to Phillips’s interviews, he was trying to avoid conflict between the students and a taunting group known as the Black Hebrews.] And he kept his cool in difficult circumstances.
Nathan Phillips had seen that smug smirk before, he knew what it stood for, and he acted with courage, dignity and self-control.
We have all seen that smug smirk. It is often a prelude to worse.
I saw the smirk while weighing in for a high school wrestling match. It was followed by trash talk with racial invective. I saw the smirk while sitting in a McDonalds in Indiana. It was followed by a slow-walk staredown with filthy racist remarks. I saw the smirk in a diner in Tennessee. It was followed by a man emptying a salt shaker on my eggs, flipping the food in my face, and following me as I headed toward the parking lot. I saw the smirk on the face of a drunk off duty police officer in a bar in my home town. It was followed by chest bumping and a threat to beat me if I did not go back where I came from.In these instances, nothing too bad happened because others acted.
A referee told the wrestler to cut the crap and imposed constraints on violence in the match. The girlfriend of the young man in the McDonalds told him he was behaving like a jerk. A brave cashier slowed up the guy in the diner by insisting that he pay for his breakfast, giving me time to reach my car. A seasoned bartender tried to calm the drunk officer, then asked him to come back another night.Unfortunately, the teachers, parents, and students on the Mall did not intervene.
I hope that the MAGA wearing tomahawk-chopping smirking young men of Covington will think of what they want to stand for.
More realistically, this incident will make bad behavior slightly less likely in the future.
People contemplating bad behavior in an era of mobile phones with cameras and social media will have second thoughts.
And essays on the incident will prime third parties in similar situations to speak out.
I have known this person for a long time, have seen him in his full professional respect and success, and had never before heard from him about these experiences of growing up as an Asian American in a small town on the East Coast.
4) Similarly, on what this reader, from Canada, recognized in Nathan Phillips:
Start with bunch of students on the mall wearing the emblem of a president who… has openly mocked the memory of the atrocity committed against the Lakota at Wounded Knee. Then when an Indigenous elder, protesting that breach of faith, and the racism behind it, attempts to walk to the Lincoln Memorial, these young men stand in his way. They don't move.
It seems their excuse is that they didn't know enough to defer to an elder with a drum. I would invite them, and anyone who defends them, to consider a different situation.
Imagine a group of young secularists going into a church. They walk around, they comment on the funny wood seats and the kitschy glass art, and then the organ starts playing and the priest and crucifer and taperers come in and they just stand in the aisle. Smirking, if deer caught in the headlights could smirk. And they don't move. They just stand there, disrupting the service.
Would those who defend these young men’s behaviour toward an Indigenous elder even remotely consider not knowing what to do an excuse in a church? Leave aside that ordinary decent politeness dictates moving aside for people who want to come through, particularly in a public place.
If you go into a church, it behooves you to know enough to sit down or leave when the service begins. If you live on this continent, surely it is not too much to ask that by high school you have enough of an understanding of the Indigenous culture that you give space to an elder singing a drum song. If not knowing better excuses these young men, it merely places a double indictment on their teachers and parents for not teaching them anything about indigenous cultures.
5) In a similar vein, from a reader who says that she, too, saw something she recognized on the Mall:
As a woman, the thought of as many as 150 high school boys, wearing not their school colors, but dressed in in-your-face MAGA regalia, loaded onto buses to interject themselves into a debate, that I believe, should be between a woman and her doctor, fills me with terror.
The decision to have an abortion is not one women take lightly. In fact, it is often the most difficult one a woman will ever make. The teen-party excursions Covington Catholic organizes to oppose reproductive rights, trivializes the agony many women experience when making that choice.
There is enormous injustice everywhere in this world, and many causes Covington Catholic could take up that would teach their young men humility and the value of public service. That they have chosen this issue, one that will never affect them personally, speaks to an arrogance that will only perpetuate the suffering of others. It does not surprise me that these young men were so clueless about the feelings of those around them that looked different than them. It is what they have been taught
6) And, from a reader in Texas who is politically conservative:
Can you think of anything dumber than taking a bunch of Catholic parochial high-school boys to a political protest in Washington, DC?…
“Black Israelites,” an activist Indian pow-wow, and feminist-abortioniks on parade…WTF were the priests and parents thinking?
7) Now, from the “you have made a serious mistake” category. The next message had an extended forensic analysis of who-did-what-when, which I have abbreviated because it is covered in the threads mentioned in #2. This reader writes:
I'm a longtime Atlantic subscriber and read your recent blog posts on what supposedly transpired Friday evening at the Lincoln Memorial, when a group of high schoolers were apparently waiting for buses after the March for Life.
I was not there, but I think you've done those boys a great disservice by jumping into the media scrum condemning them. I urge you to watch the 2 hr. video shot by a member of the Black Hebrews sect for context:
https://youtu.be/UQyBHTTqb38. [JF note: yes, I have seen all of these. ]
What it shows is that much of the Covington group—minors, by the way—were subjected to at least an hour of racist, anti-Catholic, anti-gay taunts and rhetoric from the Black Hebrews contingent, including f-bombs and repeated racial insults directed at them, before Mr. Phillips and his friends ever showed up….
Who knows, since there was no dialogue beforehand, but it is clear that Phillips and co. initiated the encounter, as they headed straight for the boys and waded into the middle of group, cameras aloft the entire time. There is no apparent fear or concern on their part, and the boys did not approach and surround them. Phillips just wades into their space, drumming and chanting loudly in an unknown tongue.
It's hard to know what the boys made of this scene. Most seem to be ignoring it. Did some think it a reaction to their football chants? Or an aggressive act after the barrage of abuse from the Black Hebrews, some of whom appear to be following Phillips closely into the mass of boys, cameras rolling the whole time?
This is not what's been portrayed. These are kids, encountering professional agitators for an hour, who then appear to be joined by Phillips, who extends the confrontation by approaching the young group directly and invading their space, not vice versa. Did Phillips know what the Black Hebrews had been up to for the prior hour? Who knows, but it is obvious that Phillips is mischaracterizing the events, and few media outlets are truthfully describing the Black Hebrews' rhetoric.
The kids are restrained throughout. There's nothing hinting at violence, threats, epithets, anti-immigrant statements, or even cursing from them. Some act like silly HS boys because they're kids, apparently led by adults who don't plan trips well. All have been hanging around outdoors in the cold waiting, idle, for over an hour.
The school and chaperones deserve some criticism, however. They should have told the kids to leave the MAGA gear home; it was a March for Life, not a Trump rally. They should have coordinated bus pickups better. They should have had more chaperones apparently. And they should have moved the kids away from the Black Hebrews taunters and aggressors within minutes.
8) Similarly:
By now, we have all learned that the initial media reporting of the incident on the Lincoln Memorial has been covered inaccurately, and the rush to judge these high school kids (mostly because of their skin color, gender, and choice in hat attire) has carried the narrative into dark corners of our public discourse.
It is disheartening to see so many people in our media rush to condemn fellow Americans based on misleading cell phone video snippets. Is the obsession with our post-Charlottesville sensitivity that chronic that we are OK with resorting to social-media justice devoid of context and all of the facts?
This incident provides a real opportunity for someone like yourself, whose initial response on the Atlantic’s website remains posted as of this email, to engage in the broader discussion of the conversation we really need to have right now.
Why is our culture OK with victimhood? Why is the media OK with deceiving viewers for the sake of being the first to report a story? Why is the media incapable of showing gratitude when proven wrong, and even more incredulous when an apology is warranted? The continued failure of writers and figures in the media to do this gives more ammunition to the voices who now view you and your ilk as illegitimate. As much as the media wants to bring down Trump (after creating him), the more people in the media flaunt their arrogance and refusal to be held accountable, the more average Americans buy into the “fake news” mantra. This story, along with the BuzzFeed story, proves it….
This incident involving these boys from Covington Catholic proves that our media culture is rancid with deception. Perhaps now is the time for someone like yourself to address it head on. After all, I can think of no better platform than the Atlantic. If I had given up entirely on her journalistic integrity, I wouldn’t be writing this.
***
9) I think about my own days as a high school student. I was 14 years old when Barry Goldwater got the GOP nomination for president, and—like most people in my home town, which gave him a majority—I was hoping for his (imagined) victory over LBJ. I even went to a nighttime Goldwater rally at Dodger Stadium, 60 miles away in Los Angeles, with a friend who was old enough to drive. There the organizers passed out T-shirts and bumper stickers that that said AU H2O—the chemical symbols for Gold Water, of course.
Southern California was brimming with racial tension in those days—it was less than a year before the Watts riots of 1965 in Los Angeles. The racial axis of the Goldwater-Johnson election was no mystery to anyone. Barry Goldwater got the GOP nomination just weeks after LBJ and his Democrats had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The only states Goldwater ended up carrying, apart from his home state of Arizona, were five from the old Confederacy: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. (This was the beginning of the switch from the old “Solid South” Democratic majority in such states, to the modern “Southern Strategy” voting pattern of the South as the GOP’s base.)
I was capable of a lot of activities, with my friends, that fill me with remorse in retrospect. Among the least of them is that we cheered, as teenagers, at the Goldwater rally the way some teenagers cheer at Trump rallies today.
If we’d encountered an older black or Latino protestor in the Dodger Stadium parking lot after the rally, while we were wearing our AU H2O T-shirts (knowing what those would symbolize to non-whites, at the time), would I have stood with a group of friends directly in the older man’s face and stared him down? I don’t think so, but there is no way to know. These tests come unannounced. We might have been capable of it—in those times, with those passions, with that cocksureness of young men in a group. Still I think someone would have broken it off and walked away.
My wife and I escorted or chaperoned many sports-travel or other school-group events with our sons, when they were teenagers. Would the parents and teachers we saw at these events have let this kind of confrontation go on, without stepping in or moving the kids somewhere else? Again, I don’t think so, but I can’t know.
10) On the ongoing challenge of distinguishing what we expect from what we perceive:
I'll preface this by saying in most ways, I'm as progressive as they come. I mean, I'm from [a big city] that went over 90 percent for Clinton—and I moved to Europe in part because I can't stand to live in Trump's America. (And yes, I'm woke enough to recognize a huge amount of privilege in that set of circumstances.)
But the longer version of the video I saw shows a different story, and I think that the "story" someone comes away with depends heavily on their notions going into it in the first place.
In the longer version of the video, the kids are in a big group, mostly sitting around talking, playing grabass, typical teen boy stuff while waiting for a bus. There's a group of black folks maybe 10 or 20 yards away, with signs and protesting and yelling something; in the video, there's enough commotion and indistinct background noise that much of what people are actually saying is unclear.
And there's Mr. Phillips, with his drum. He moves between the two groups, then walks slowly over more in the direction of the boys. Many of them get up, and then they start yelling stuff- again, indistinct. Some start clapping and many start jumping in time with the drum. The commotion intensifies. I personally think I hear someone yelling about a wall, but can't tell.
Now, the bigger point here is that depending on our paradigm going in, we're going to see different things in the video. Some people say that he moved "aggressively" towards the boys—that's plainly not true. But it's also not true that they "surrounded" him, as though he were just standing around and they moved to him; he plainly moves himself between the two original groups and then closer to them.
Perhaps the most telling part (for me) about seeing what we expect to see was this: The mother of one of the boys was reported to have contacted a media reporter and she claimed that the true instigators were the "Black Muslims" who were harassing the boys.
While I have no doubt that the black folks were yelling stuff, it's been more recently reported that they are a group known as the Black Hebrew Israelites. And in the video, they're plainly not getting in the boys' faces; they're standing around hollering stuff, but there's no aggression.
And the fact that a group calling itself "Israelites" is confused for Muslims strikes me as pretty telling. She saw what she expected to see.
So... what does anyone see in the video? A smirking face that typifies white privilege and white supremacy, or a kid who was there to peacefully protest and just held his ground? A noble veteran Native trying to promote peace, or a guy who instigated something trying to get a rise out of someone?
I'd prefer to remain anonymous... which alone tells us something, that I feel like I can't be identified, because I don't want to put up with having to defend my "weak centrist" position.
11) As this last note #10 suggests, the response to this episode strongly reminds me of the controversy over Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation for the Supreme Court. What people saw in that case, and who they believed, depended very heavily on what they had grown used to seeing over the years. Everyone recognized a pattern, but the patterns completely differed.
After Christine Blasey Ford and others accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct when he was a Georgetown Prep student about the age of the students in the National Mall video, the cleavage in reactions followed lines of intellectual and emotional imagination. Whose suffering and unfair treatment could each of us more easily envision: The person who said she had been attacked? Or the person accused of the attacking?
In the Kavanaugh case, of course this meant whether each person more fully empathized with Christine Blasey Ford, for the damage she said she had endured—or instead the suffering and (possibly) unfair reputational damage inflicted on the accused, Brett Kavanaugh. In the current case: Is it easier to imagine and identify with the disrespect inflicted on Nathan Phillips? Or with the social-media pillorying of the high-school boys?
12) I know what I, personally, believe to be the reality of that encounter on the Mall, and how it fits into patterns of American history. But I should have realized how contested and ambiguous it would be. In those circumstances, I should have quoted the statement from the Mayor of Covington and not said more. I regret doing otherwise, am sorry for the consequences, and will do my best to learn from and not repeat this mistake.
13) On Martin Luther King’s birthday I offer a closing quote not from him but from C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity. (I have encountered this in a citation from Andrew Sullivan, in his blogging days, quoting Hilzoy in hers.) Lewis wrote:
Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?
If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
In a short, viral video shared widely since Friday, Catholic high-school students visiting Washington, D.C., from Kentucky for the March for Life appeared to confront, and mock, American Indians who had participated in the Indigenous Peoples March, taking place the same day.
By Saturday, the video had been condensed into a single image: One of the students, wearing a “Make American Great Again” hat, smiles before an Omaha tribal elder, a confrontation viewers took as an act of aggression by a group of white youths against an indigenous community—and by extension, people of color more broadly. Online, reaction was swift and certain, with legislators, news outlets, and ordinary people denouncing the students and their actions as brazenly racist.
But as the weekend wore on, a new video cast doubt on the clarity the original had appeared to offer. This one was shot by members of a Black Hebrew Israelite protest group that had also gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where the incident took place. Over the hour-and-45-minute run time, members of the group mock and deride passersby of all stripes. According to a statement issued by Nick Sandmann, the Covington Catholic High School junior seen apparently intimidating the tribal elder in the original video, the students were also victims of harassment by the broader protest, and they had tried to defuse the situation by singing over the Black Hebrew Israelites. According to the statement, the encounter between Sandmann and Nathan Phillips, the Omaha elder, was a misunderstood moment taken out of context. Phillips, meanwhile, maintained that he and his companions felt threatened by the confrontation with the students, most of whom were white.
[Read: Video doesn’t capture truth]
Film and photography purport to capture events as they really took place in the world, so it’s always tempting to take them at their word. But when multiple videos present multiple possible truths, which one is to be believed? Given the new footage, some, such as the libertarian outlet Reason, said the students were “wildly mischaracterized.” Others, such as The Washington Post, tried to cast the matter more neutrally, concluding that the aftermath “seemed to capture the worst of America at a moment of extreme political polarization.”
But rather than drawing conclusions about who was vicious or righteous—or lamenting the political miasma that makes the question unanswerable—it might be better to stop and look at how film footage constructs rather than reflects the truths of a debate like this one. Despite the widespread creation and dissemination of video online, people still seem to believe that cameras depict the world as it really is; the truth comes from finding the right material from the right camera. That idea is mistaken, and it’s bringing forth just as much animosity as the polarization that is thought to produce the conflicts cameras record.
There’s an old dispute in film theory between form and content. For most people, the meaning of moving images seems to relate to the footage inside them—the people, settings, and events that the camera pointed at and captured. But in fact, the way those elements were selected, edited, and re-presented has an enormous impact on the way they are received and understood. In the case of the Lincoln Memorial encounter, neither the original video nor the new one explains what “really happened.” Instead, both offer raw material that can take on various meanings in different contexts.
Because the newer video of the Lincoln Memorial encounter is so much longer, some would contend that it offers clarity about how the conflict arose. But if you watch the video in its entirety, it’s hard to find much clarification. Instead, it offers a large quantity of raw material from the same time and place. That footage betrays just how easy it is to find provocative moments in an otherwise ordinary sequence of events.
For example: At one point, the Black Hebrew Israelite protester holding the camera engages with a woman who had pointed out that Guatemala and Panama are indigenous names with their own meaning, different from names such as Indian or Puerto Rico ascribed by Spanish conquistadors. “I am from Panama,” the cameraman claims, “so now I’m indigenous from Panama … We indigenous, so we out here fighting for you.”
As best I can tell, the speaker means to argue that allegedly being from Panama, a place host to some indigenous peoples that bears an indigenous name, aligns his interests with those of North American indigenous peoples who had assembled for the Indigenous Peoples March. To say that this is a spurious argument would be putting it mildly; it’s a bit like me, a white man who lives in Atlanta, home of the civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., arguing that my intentions are necessarily aligned with those of modern extensions of the black civil-rights movement, such as Black Lives Matter.
[Read: After the police brutality video goes viral]
That moment, which lasts less than a minute, could easily be extracted and shared on its own. It would make fine #content: Look at this protester trying to roll over his interlocutor with faulty reasoning! Look how she is lured in to making earnest arguments that bounce right off bad-faith interlocutors! There are dozens, hundreds of these latent, potential viral videos in the footage, all potential flash points for online controversy if selected and framed appropriately.
The Black Hebrew Israelites’ performance offers dozens of opportunities for similar brow furrowing, ranging from bemusing to derogatory. “A bunch of incest babies,” one of the Black Hebrew Israelites shouts at the amassing Catholic students at one point. When a passing black man attempts to defy the group, one of them responds, “You got all these dirty-ass crackers behind you, with a red ‘Make America Great’ hat on, and your coon ass wanna fight your brother.”
Via broadcast or on YouTube, it’s easy to organize those clips such that they indict the group of Black Hebrew Israelites and mar its intentions. That’s the same appeal that Sandmann made in his statement. He says that the African American protesters were saying “hateful things,” which inspired the group to sing school-spirit chants in an effort to drown them out. During this time, according to Sandmann, Phillips, the Omaha elder, waded into the crowd playing a drum. Sandmann and Phillips locked eyes—the most notable moment in the original, viral video. According to Sandmann, he only intended to defuse the situation, in part because he knew it was being recorded. But according to Phillips, the encounter was hostile—“hate unbridled,” he called it—and caused him and his companions to fear for their safety.
As the video and coverage of it proliferated, critics attempting to explain it searched for the truth in its content. “Viral Video Shows Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Surrounding Native Elder,” The New York Times reported Saturday. On Twitter, people raced to condemn the students, the school, and the Catholic Church. But a day later, when the longer footage emerged, those initial conclusions seemed less certain. “A fuller and more complicated picture emerged,” the Times reported on Sunday. But even then, the content was still seen as the place to search for the truth. The Times eventually landed on the same milquetoast conclusion that The Washington Post did, concluding “that an explosive convergence of race, religion and ideological beliefs—against a national backdrop of political tension—set the stage for the viral moment.”
Those parries will likely continue back and forth, with individuals, legislators, and media outlets each offering their own take on the original video and all the information that has seeped out from it since. But fewer will acknowledge the role of video itself in manufacturing real and actual effects, no matter how the surrounding circumstances motivated or contextualized them.
For Sandmann and his colleagues, their actual intentions and motivations seem vital to any account of what took place. But not only can we never really know what those were, they also don’t matter once the original video has been shot and shared. That short clip shows a young man with a smirk, wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, appearing to stare down a Native elder: Simply describing the scene, at this political and cultural moment, suggests a racist threat.
That’s not just because the internet makes it easy to come to simple and quick conclusions, and to spread those answers as truth before verification. It’s also because such an edit almost seems purpose-built to service that conclusion. It juxtaposes an almost perfect avatar for apparent white nationalism, MAGA hat and all, with the apparent cultural frailty of a brown-skinned victim carrying out an act of indigenous humility. Whether Sandmann and Phillips are telling the truth or not matters only marginally—the image and the clip take on a life of their own, reproducing a conflict that viewers have already been primed to seek out by the overall political situation and their place in it.
To understand just how susceptible images like this are to total reinterpretation, consider an alternative scenario. Imagine that instead of standing silently and seemingly smug, the teen had maintained a neutral countenance and then removed his MAGA hat from his head. Such an act would have been interpreted, almost universally, as a gesture of meekness and respect. Some would have overinterpreted it, no doubt, taking it as a sign that the student had shed not just the cap, a symbol of Trumpism, but all the ideologies bound up in that symbolic garment. And this interpretation would have cohered and spread no matter whether Sandmann really meant any of it or not. (I pointed out a similar feature in the Jim Acosta White House video, in which a small shift in the position of a camera could utterly change the apparent meaning of the resulting images.) The entire tenor of the viral moment would have flipped, and the students likely would have enjoyed being portrayed as meek heroes representing the tolerant promise of American youth.
Consider a change in framing or editing instead: Had the original clip been shot from the reverse angle, showing Sandmann and his classmates from the back, his MAGA hat visible but not his smirk, the meaning of the situation would have also changed. No longer does the student represent the worst stereotype of white intolerance, but now he becomes a mere prop for Phillips, whose drumming reads as both pacifist in its delivery and reception. My point is not to apologize for the students’ behavior, or even to explain it, but to underscore how a slightly different video might have convinced the very same viewers who censured the Covington Catholic students to reach exactly the opposite conclusion.
[Read: The great illusion of “The Apprentice”]
About a century ago, the Soviet formalist filmmaker Lev Kuleshov conducted a series of experiments with filmic montage. In the most famous one, he edited a short film consisting of short clips of various subjects: an actor’s expressionless face, a bowl of soup, a woman on a couch, a girl in a coffin. The same clips edited into different sequences produced different interpretive results in the viewer. The deadpan face of the actor appeared to take on different emotions depending on which image preceded or followed it—he appeared dolorous, for example, when seeming to “look at” the dead girl in the coffin. This effect of filmic editing has been called the Kuleshov effect, and it’s had an enormous influence on filmmakers including Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Francis Ford Coppola. It also forms the backbone of reality television, in which meaning is almost entirely produced in the editing room.
From Sandmann’s statement to the Times’ walk-back, follow-up to the incident has focused on the larger circumstances, which are assumed to provide clarity. Sandmann claimed to offer a “factual account of what happened.” The Times admitted that the video excerpt had “obscured the larger context.” But there’s a problem: Understanding the larger context doesn’t really produce a factual account of what happened, as depicted in the original video.
Kuleshov’s disciple Sergei Eisenstein would eventually call editing, and montage in particular, the key formal property of cinema (the famous Odessa-steps sequence in his 1925 film Battleship Potemkin is the canonical example). These traits allow film to link together seemingly unrelated images, relying on the viewer’s brain to make connections that aren’t present in the source material, let alone the cinematic composition.
The power of editing comes from condensation, from film’s ability to compress events that unfold over a long period of time into one that takes place over mere moments. Today’s online video still relies on editing, of course, but even clips that appear uncut still participate in a version of the Soviet formalist project. Now the cameras inside the smartphones everyone carries produce a swarm of videos, many of which spread on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other venues. The result is a seemingly infinite set of possible perspectives, real or faked, truthful or manipulative, all clamoring to present their edited rendition of events in front of the eyes and minds that would gestalt meaning from them. Now the process of selection is collective—all those thousands and millions of video cameras in everyone’s pockets scrabbling for the first or best attention.
Watching the almost two-hour video of the Black Hebrew Israelites only drives the point home—there are piquant moments of conflict, but mostly expanses of empty time, marked by moments of incoherence or inaudible exchanges. If this counts as broader context, it certainly doesn’t explain the events of the Covington student and the Omaha elder. Instead, it just provides the raw material out of which that moment was forged.
It’s tempting to think that the short video at the Lincoln Memorial shows the truth, and then that the longer video revises or corrects that truth. But the truth on film is more complicated: Video can capture narratives that people take as truths, offering evidence that feels incontrovertible. But the fact that those visceral certainties can so easily be called into question offers a good reason to trust video less, rather than more. Good answers just don’t come this fast and this easily.
Every year, on the third Monday in January, people play their hand at the same game. “What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?” becomes an unwritten essay prompt for op-eds, a topic of speeches and sermons, a call to action, and a societal rebuke. In this annual pageant, there are few who would ever mark themselves as living in opposition to the legacy of King, even as they work to dismantle it.
It was only natural that Vice President Mike Pence would quote King in defense of President Donald Trump’s decision to continue the ongoing government shutdown until he receives full funding for a border wall. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was: ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy’,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, citing King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. “You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do: Come to the table in the spirit of good faith.”
Pence, of course, is doing only what the current version of the holiday demands. Across the ideological spectrum, politicians must seek to fit themselves under the aegis of the Kingian legacy. That means a contingent of Americans who surely oppose the positions King held in his life are compelled to contort him into something friendly. Columns must wield King to attack everything from “identity politics” to the very act of “politicizing” King’s life itself. Democratic presidential hopefuls must employ King in order to make the case that each of their disparate platforms is the natural heir to his legacy. The sound bites evoking King are stretched like skin over the bones of existing debate. The figure celebrated looks nothing like the leader who lived—and who was killed—but like a granite-chiseled modern founding father, a collection of axioms by which our age is defined.
But beyond those axioms, there are core truths to who King was, what he believed, and what he endorsed. He was not an unknowable sphinx who spoke only in maxims. The first truth is that King was a person who began his career as a very young man, and who changed, learned, and grew over the course of a challenging and often controversial career. He was once a boy known in his family as “ML,” a raconteur who fancied himself a ladies’ man. He was only 26 when he was recruited to lead the Montgomery bus boycott, and while still in his 20s he ran an advice column for Ebony magazine. The gulf between that man and the weary 39-year-old who in his 1968 “Drum Major Instinct” speech lamented that “we’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world” is an immense one.
The second truth about King springs naturally from the first: What he believed over the course of his life changed, and was affected by the course of the civil-rights movement and by his own development and experiences as a leader. Kingian nonviolence, the philosophy and strategy that is most widely associated with him, changed over the course of his life from a tactical activism to an all-encompassing worldview that brought him to decry poverty in India, housing discrimination in Chicago, and the Vietnam War. King’s crucible in the spotlight at the forefront of the movement even led him to directly challenge and critique former versions of himself, and those who sought to preserve him in amber. In 1967, for example, he defended his prescription of civil disobedience while also allowing that “there is probably no way, even eliminating violence, for Negroes to obtain their rights without upsetting the equanimity of white folks.”
That second truth makes some of the annual celebration of King an exercise in absurdity. Most modern memorials take stock of King around the “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963—likely his popular zenith in the eyes of white onlookers—and few bother to look beyond that speech or the contents of a few passages. Even fewer peer into his early or late years. They miss the fraught political landscape of his death, the “white backlash” that he warned about, and the ways in which his legacy was whitewashed from the very beginning as a way to blunt his more pointed economic and societal critiques.
The third point follows. There were several policies that King not only advocated for, but that he found were necessary to reverse the evils of white supremacy. He outlined these policies specifically, and often in full detail. He sought race-specific measures such as affirmative action, outlined support for universal jobs and housing guarantees in his “Freedom Budget,” and in speeches announced his support for universal health care. And while he did not necessarily advance a comprehensive view on immigration, he evinced a clear support for global citizenship and for America’s mandate to shoulder the burden of global antipoverty programs. In a 1964 speech in East Berlin, King made that position clear: “For here on either side of the wall are God’s children, and no man-made barrier can obliterate that fact. Whether it be East or West, men and women search for meaning, hope for fulfillment, yearn for faith in something beyond themselves, and cry desperately for love and community to support them in this pilgrim journey.”
The way the country memorializes King today, it might be seen as a matter of partisan bias or controversy to point out that Pence, the White House, and supporters of the Trump administration stand firmly against the policies that King wanted. But this is not really a matter of opinion. The administration has eschewed any attempts at universal health care, sought to end affirmative action as it is implemented, and has looked to walk back existing measures to ensure affordable housing; the president’s history as a public figure is tied to alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act for which King advocated; and Trump has referred to developing nations as “shithole countries.” Not only does the administration’s policy agenda come completely into conflict with King’s, it is rooted firmly in a conservative movement that built itself in opposition to King.
That Pence and other standard-bearers within this movement can regularly lean on King’s legacy is a consequence of how the civil-rights leader has been canonized. When President Ronald Reagan signed the holiday into law, in 1983—reversing his own objections to the holiday, and earlier ones to King himself—he signaled that America had accepted King in its pantheon of similarly revered leaders, people such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But in order to do so, King’s legacy had to be repackaged in a way similar to theirs. While in both of those cases, the truths about American slavery are conveniently stripped away, the popular history of King must erase these three truths about him. In that historical amnesia, the current political status quo operates, doomed to rediscover King only once a year.
Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.
“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.
“Where were they chanting about building the wall?” my son asked. His friends had begun weighing in, and their take was decidedly more sympathetic than mine. He wasn’t sure what to think, as he was hearing starkly different accounts from people he trusted. I doubled down, quoting from the profile of Nathan Phillips that The Washington Post had quickly published online, in which he said he’d been trying to defuse a tense situation. I was all-in on the outrage. How could the students parade around in those hats, harassing a man old enough to be their grandfather—a Vietnam veteran, no less?
By Sunday morning, more videos had surfaced, and I started looking for the clip that showed them chanting support for the wall. I couldn’t find it, but I did find a confrontation more complicated than I’d first believed. I saw a few people yelling terrible insults at the students before Phillips approached, which cast an ugly pall over the scene. I saw Phillips approach the students; I had believed him when he said he’d intended his drumming to defuse the tension, but I also wondered how a group of high-school students could have gleaned that when he didn’t articulate it in a language they might understand.
I hated the MAGA hats some of the kids were wearing, their listless tomahawk chops, the way some of their chanting mocked Phillips’s. But I also saw someone with Phillips yelling at a few of the kids that his people had been here first, that Europeans had stolen their land. While I wouldn’t disagree, the scene was at odds with the reports that Phillips and those with him were attempting to calm a tense situation.
As I watched the longer videos, I began to see the smirking kid in a different light. It seemed to me that a wave of emotions rolled over his face as Phillips approached him: confusion, fear, resolve. He finally, I thought, settled on an expression designed to mimic respect while signaling to his friends that he had this under control. Observing it, I wondered what different reaction I could have reasonably hoped a high-school junior to have in such an unfamiliar and bewildering situation. I came up empty.
Let’s assume the worst, and agree that the boy was being disrespectful. That still would not justify the death threats he’s been receiving. It would not justify the harassment of the other Covington Catholic student who wasn’t even in Washington, D.C., but who was falsely identified as the smirker by some social-media users. Online vigilantes unearthed his parents’ address and peppered his family with threats all weekend long, even as they were trying to celebrate a family wedding, accusing them of raising a racist and promising to harm their family business.
The story is a Rorschach test—tell me how you first reacted, and I can probably tell where you live, who you voted for in 2016, and your general take on a list of other issues—but it shouldn’t be. Take away the video and tell me why millions of people care so much about an obnoxious group of high-school students protesting legalized abortion and a small circle of American Indians protesting centuries of mistreatment who were briefly locked in a tense standoff. Take away Twitter and Facebook and explain why total strangers care so much about people they don’t know in a confrontation they didn’t witness. Why are we all so primed for outrage, and what if the thousands of words and countless hours spent on this had been directed toward something consequential?
If the Covington Catholic incident was a test, it’s one I failed—along with most others. Will we learn from it, or will we continue to roam social media, looking for the next outrage fix? Next time a story like this surfaces, I’ll try to sit it out until more facts have emerged. I’ll remind myself that the truth is sometimes unknowable, and I’ll stick to discussing the news with people I know in real life, instead of with strangers whom I’ve never met. I’ll get my news from legitimate journalists instead of from an online mob for whom Saturday-morning indignation is just another form of entertainment. And above all, I’ll try to take the advice I give my kids daily: Put the phone down and go do something productive.
Letters From the Archives is a series in which we highlight past Atlantic stories and reactions from readers at the time.
On April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy led a march of some 50 black protestors through Birmingham, Alabama. It was Good Friday. “We want to march for freedom on the day Jesus hung on the cross for freedom,” King said prior to the event. But their march was cut short. King and Abernathy, among many others, were arrested by city police for parading without a permit; the leaders were placed in solitary confinement.
This particular march was just one of a handful of demonstrations in Alabama that spring organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Civil-rights fighters picketed, used white-only libraries, and participated in sit-ins at white-only lunch counters. In response to the freedom movement, a blanket injunction was issued by Circuit Judge W. A. Jenkins Jr. prohibiting “every imaginable form of demonstrations including boycotting, trespassing, parading, picketing, sit-ins, kneel-ins, wade-ins and the inciting or encouraging of such acts,” the Associated Press reported. The April 11, 1963, article noted that King—“the behind-the-scenes director of the current movement”—and other SCLC organizers, who were told specifically not to demonstrate, were planning to defy the injunction and march anyway. “This [is] a flagrant denial of our constitutional privileges,” King declared.
While in jail, King was given a copy of “A Call for Unity,” an open letter written by eight moderate, white Alabama clergymen criticizing the demonstrations initiated by “outsiders” and urging negotiations instead. “We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized,” they wrote. “But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.” Using what he could find—the margins of the newspaper in which the statement was published, scraps of paper, his attorney’s legal pad—King wrote a letter in response to the religious leaders.
He not only clarified that the SCLC was invited by its local affiliate to Birmingham, but also explained that he could not “sit idly by” in his hometown of Atlanta as Birmingham fought for freedom. “Injustice anywhere,” he famously wrote, “is a threat to justice everywhere.” Certain promises had been made in negotiating sessions, such as the removal of “humiliating racial signs from stores,” King wrote; however, those promises had not been kept. There was no alternative but nonviolent direct action, which, King later noted, would never be “well-timed” according to the timetable of those who hadn’t experienced segregation: “For years now I have heard the word ‘wait.’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This ‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never.’” King expressed how disappointed he was in the clergymen and, more broadly, the white church and its leadership. “In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro,” King wrote, “I see white churches stand on the sidelines and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities … I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour.”
King’s letter, now widely known as “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” was published in a handful of newspapers and magazines, including The Atlantic, which printed it in August 1963 under the title “The Negro Is Your Brother.”
The letters from readers that The Atlantic printed in response were largely positive.
Having witnessed sit-in demonstrations in Knoxville, Tennessee, open-occupancy hearings in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a civil-rights demonstration in his hometown, Richard E. Gillespie of Phoenix, Arizona, agreed with King’s statement that “the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is … the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” Gillespie said King’s words had “indelibly imprinted themselves in my mind as a classic articulation of the motivation of the white moderate.”
A few readers put King’s ideas in conversation with other pieces from the August issue.
“Dr. King’s emphasis of the fact that the churches have not taken a stand on this matter of integration,” wrote Margaret G. Taber of Madison, New Jersey, “is a very sad one.” Taber applied King’s critique of religious institutions to Agnes Meyer’s article “The Nation’s Worst Slum,” also in the August 1963 issue of The Atlantic, in which she outlined how Washington, D.C., had neglected to give non-elite blacks work opportunities. Meyer’s point that “the black elite have not helped those of their poorer brethren,” Taber wrote, was “well taken.” But urging black communities to “raise [their] own standards” would not, Taber argued, “solve the problem.” She found her way back to King:
Few of our churches have preached that a person should be accepted as an individual regardless of color or race. Yet they should take the lead in urging acceptance of Negroes or Puerto Ricans or other minority groups.
In addition to “The Nation’s Worst Slum,” the August issue included a series called “Our Gamble in Space” about the potential moon landing. The juxtaposition “aroused an ironic reaction” in Frances Records Storms of Glasgow, Missouri, who took issue with the idea of “world prestige” that Franklin A. Lindsay emphasized would come with winning the space race in his article “The Costs and the Choices.”
“When the propaganda and rationalizations turn to national prestige, what can counteract Little Rock, New Orleans, Birmingham, Ole Miss, Medgar Evers?” Storms asked. He considered the moon landing the wrong priority: “How convincing is the argument of international one-upmanship or the iffyness of landing instruments or men on Mars in the context of human needs at home?” While the estimated $30 billion for the moon project “would not answer all of the questions raised by Agnes Meyer, by Dr. King,” Storms wrote, that money “plus a proportionate surge of human effort would go a very long way toward redressing the inequities existing for citizens of all colors in the United States.”
Finally, David K. Donald of Garden City, Michigan, thanked The Atlantic—“with all my heart as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant”—for printing the letter “for a larger impact.”
When President Donald Trump announced in a tweet that he was withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria, his abrupt decision kicked up one of the most thoroughly bipartisan maelstroms of condemnation in his first two years as president. Trump had telegraphed his intention for months, if not years, but the sudden declaration on December 19 went against the advice, and public pronouncements, of his own national-security team. Republican allies in Congress protested loudly. The widely respected defense secretary, retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, resigned in protest the next day. Within two days, another top U.S. national-security official followed Mattis out the door. On Sunday, in a television interview and in a newspaper op-ed, he laid out his dissent—and his fears for the future.
Brett McGurk coordinated the U.S.-led coalition of more than 60 nations that fought the Islamic State terror group and gave international legitimacy to American involvement in a war-torn country where Iran and Russia were making headway. He was one of the rare Barack Obama appointees to keep his job in the Trump administration, but he came with an impeccable Republican pedigree.
Soon after finishing a clerkship for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a conservative icon, McGurk went to Iraq and worked as a lawyer for the Coalition Provisional Authority. He joined President George W. Bush’s national-security team and stayed on after President Obama’s election, winning enough confidence that the Democrat nominated him as ambassador to Iraq in 2012. He withdrew his nomination after a leaked racy email drew attention to his affair in Baghdad with a reporter, whom he had married by the time of his nomination.
In 2015, President Obama named McGurk the presidential envoy to the global coalition against the Islamic State, and he stayed in that role under Trump. The veteran diplomat had planned to leave his post in mid-February, according to the Associated Press, but he expected U.S. direct engagement to continue for at least several more months. “Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished,” he told reporters at a State Department briefing on December 11. “It would be reckless if we were just to say, ‘Well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now.’”
Barely a week later came Trump’s withdrawal announcement, quickly followed by McGurk’s resignation, effective December 31. He joined a group of foreign-policy experts at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, one of his new colleagues, called him “the consummate professional diplomat,” which sounded like an endorsement of his resignation and a subtle rebuke of Trump’s abrupt announcement.
Trump took to Twitter to attack McGurk, pointing out that the diplomat was an Obama appointee and bashing him as a “grandstander” since he had simply moved up his exit by six weeks. The president added that he did not know McGurk, his own point man in the fight against the Islamic State.
[Read: The U.S. isn’t really leaving Syria and Afghanistan]
Now McGurk is taking his case to the American public. He says that even with a slightly elongated withdrawal timetable, Trump’s decision has damaged U.S. strategic interests and national security.
“Only Russia and Iran hailed Trump’s decision,” McGurk wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that appeared in Sunday’s print edition. “Whatever leverage we may have had with these two adversaries in Syria diminished once Trump said we would leave.” The diplomat wrote that America’s strategic rivals now face little constraint on their military buildup in Syria. Israel, the United States’ closest ally in the region, must step up air strikes to fend off Iranian threats along its northeastern border.
Safety is more assured, though, for Bashar al-Assad because “without us, any chance of upending this mass-murdering dictator, propped up by Iran and Russia, is a pipe dream,” McGurk wrote. U.S. partners are reopening embassies in Damascus and moving closer to Assad, hoping to “dilute Russian, Iranian and Turkish influence in Syria.”
The expected power vacuum may come back to haunt the United States, much as it did after the withdrawal from Iraq, McGurk forecasted. “The Islamic State and other extremist groups will fill the void opened by our departure, regenerating their capacity to threaten our friends in Europe—as they did throughout 2016—and ultimately our own homeland,” he wrote. While defeating the terror group was Trump’s professed goal, the former diplomat said, “his recent choices, unfortunately, are already giving the Islamic State—and other American adversaries—new life.”
McGurk also went on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday for one of his first, if not his first, television appearances since leaving the government, aside from a recorded Atlantic event earlier this month. He argued that Trump’s disruption of the status quo was unnecessary.
[Watch: Atlantic Exchange featuring Brett McGurk, Graeme Wood, and Jeffrey Goldberg]
“In this campaign in Syria since 2015, we’ve had two Americans killed in action,” he said. “We built this campaign plan to answer for those who believe that we should not be overinvested in these conflicts. Americans are not fighting; we built a force of 60,000 Syrians to do the fighting. American taxpayers are not spending money on civilian stabilization or reconstruction costs; the coalition is doing that. So it was a sustainable campaign plan.” (A note on Syrian reconstruction funding: The State Department had $230 million budgeted for that purpose, but the Trump administration canceled the spending in August, according to CNN. McGurk helped secure a commitment of $300 million from allies, with one-third of the money coming from Saudi Arabia.)
McGurk also defended himself against Trump’s charge that his resignation was political, pointing out that he worked under Bush, Obama, and Trump. “I’ve served all three administrations,” he said. “I’ve worked on policies that I fully supported. You work on policies here in the government that you might not support. You argue your case. In this case, I think the entire national-security team had one view, and the president in a conversation with [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan just completely reversed the policy.”
If the president can’t be persuaded to reverse his reversal, McGurk added, then the departing U.S. troops should not be given new goals to accomplish while they withdraw. “We cannot add additional missions onto our force while they are trying to withdraw under pressure,” he said, “because withdrawing under pressure from a combat zone is one of the most difficult military maneuvers we can ask our people to do.”
McGurk added that a Turkish military push into Syria would result in a humanitarian disaster for America’s Kurdish allies, who have borne the brunt of the campaign against the Islamic State. But in his op-ed, he dismissed Trump’s latest tweeted proposal, a 20-mile safe zone, as an impractical last-minute idea. He fears what is to come.
“Believe me, there’s no plan for what’s coming next,” he said on CBS. “Right now, we do not have a plan.”
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who’s representing President Donald Trump for free, is keeping up his public-relations war on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. In a pair of appearances on Sunday-morning talk shows, he stuck to the playbook: Attack Mueller’s credibility, and insist that all of Trump’s statements and actions were legal. Giuliani admits a fair amount but always insists that no crime was committed.
The president’s attorney once again said that discussions about a Trump Tower Moscow project may have continued as late as November 2016, contrary to the president’s previous statements that he had nothing to do with Russia, where he had long sought to do business. On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Giuliani said talks may have gone on “as far as October, November” 2016. That matches his statement last month that Trump’s written answers to Mueller’s questions “covered up to November 2016.”
[Read: Rudy Giuliani for the defense]
This is the timeline that first landed Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, in legal trouble. Cohen originally testified to Congress that talks had ended by January 2016, before the GOP primary, and he has since said in court filings that he lied to stay consistent with Trump’s “political messaging.”
That false testimony was the subject of BuzzFeed News’ contested report last week that alleged Trump had directed Cohen to lie. The story went unconfirmed by other journalists and, in a rare rebuke, was challenged by the special counsel’s spokesman, who said, “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.” (In a story Sunday on Giuliani’s comments, the news outlet said it continues to stand by its reporting.)
After Giuliani said BuzzFeed should be “sued” and “under investigation”—though any government probe would likely violate the First Amendment—he addressed the details of the story and conceded that Trump may have talked with Cohen about his testimony, though not to plan a lie.
“As far as I know, President Trump did not have discussions with [Cohen about his testimony], certainly had no discussions with him in which he told him or counseled him to lie,” Giuliani said on CNN’s State of the Union. “If he had any discussions with him, they’d be about the version of the events that Michael Cohen gave them, which they all believed was true.”
“And so what if he talked to him about it?” Giuliani added, seeming to argue that Trump could not have told Cohen to lie, because the president didn’t independently remember the details of Russian negotiations but instead depended on Cohen for the timeline. “Michael Cohen was the guy in charge of this,” Giuliani said. “President Trump was running for president. So … you go to Michael Cohen, you say, ‘Michael, what happened?’”
Cohen is expected to testify again before both houses of Congress, beginning February 7 with an appearance before the House Oversight Committee. Representative Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who this month took charge of the House Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’s Face the Nation that he’s “given Michael Cohen a date that we’d like him to come in, either voluntarily or, if necessary, by subpoena.” Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who’s the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on NBC that he and Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, got Cohen to agree to a public hearing.
Warner also dismissed Giuliani as a spokesman for a client whose account keeps changing. “I almost feel bad for him,” the senator said. “He keeps having to readjust his stories as more facts come out.”
[Read: House Democrats shift their focus from collusion to leverage]
Democrats have charged that Trump misled Americans about his pursuit of business in Russia, but Giuliani quibbled over semantics to deflect that criticism.
In July 2016, then-candidate Trump tweeted that he had “ZERO interests in Russia” and said he had nothing to do with the country. In an October debate with Hillary Clinton, he said, “I don’t deal there. I have no businesses there. I have no loans from Russia.” About a week before his January 2017 inauguration, he tweeted in capital letters that “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA—NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”
Cohen’s continued discussions with Russians about a Trump Tower Moscow, and the letter of intent Trump himself signed in October 2015, seemed to contradict those claims. However, Giuliani argued that there was nothing incongruent about Trump’s statements, since the “project … never went anywhere,” he said on NBC. “There was one letter of intent that was nonbinding. That’s the whole thing. So I don’t know if you’d call it a project even.”
The defense lawyer characterized the Trump Tower Moscow letter as an “active proposal” that did not constitute a deal or a business. He compared it to the proposals under consideration by his security consultancy, which continues to develop lucrative contracts abroad while Giuliani represents the president for free, drawing ethics criticism, since foreign governments may see him as a conduit to the Oval Office.
“It’s like my business,” Giuliani said. “I make proposals to do security work, probably got six of them out right now. If you were to ask me what countries am I doing business in, I’d just tell you the two I’m doing business in. Not the other six, because I may never do business there.”
[Read: Why didn’t Trump build anything in Russia?]
In addition to defending Trump legally and politically, the former federal prosecutor also continued to sow doubt about the special counsel’s ethics. He claimed that Mueller’s team is pressing witnesses to lie about Trump and Russia. Jerome Corsi, a conservative conspiracy theorist, claims that the prosecutors are offering him leniency if he pleads guilty to lying about his conversations concerning WikiLeaks and hacked emails with the Trump confidant Roger Stone during the campaign.
“I have the documents. It was leaked to me,” Giuliani said on CNN. “They gave him a script. If he reads from the script, no jail. If he doesn’t read from the script, he gets maybe five years in jail.”
Giuliani decried Mueller’s treatment of Paul Manafort, the former Trump-campaign chairman who was convicted of tax fraud last year before he pleaded guilty to conspiracy and witness tampering. In November, the special counsel’s office said Manafort broke his plea agreement by continuing to lie to investigators. While awaiting sentencing, he’s been jailed alone due to his high profile, but Giuliani sees a strong-arm tactic by Mueller: “He’s got the man in solitary confinement now for six months, and he keeps questioning him and trying to pressure him to say things that are not true.”
Giuliani also defended Trump’s cryptic call last week for law enforcement to investigate Cohen’s father-in-law, which critics see as threatening to use government resources to intimidate a witness. Giuliani claimed that Cohen was lying to protect his father-in-law from prosecution, which justified an attack.
“That is a defense to a criminal accusation,” Giuliani said on CNN. “And if we can’t do that, we’re not in America.”
On the subject of whether the Mueller probe should be overseen by William Barr, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Representative Schiff said the answer is no. The House Intelligence Committee chairman said senators should vote against Barr’s confirmation because of two statements he made about the probe during last week’s hearings.
First, Schiff said, Barr “would not commit to following the advice of ethics lawyers if they urged him to recuse himself” from overseeing the investigation. Jeff Sessions had taken ethics officials’ advice and recused himself, outraging Trump. Barr did say that Sessions was right to recuse himself, breaking with Trump, but he also said it was an “abdication of his own responsibility” to commit in advance to following the recommendation of ethics officials. “I will seek the advice of the career ethics personnel,” Barr said Tuesday, “but under the regulations, I make the decision as the head of the agency as to my own recusal.”
[Read: Bill Barr breaks with Trump on the Mueller probe]
Schiff also objected to Barr’s position on releasing Mueller’s final report. The nominee said in his opening statement that “it is very important that the public and Congress be informed of the results of the special counsel’s work. For that reason, my goal will be to provide as much transparency as I can consistent with the law.” However, under questioning from Democratic senators, he would not commit to publishing the report or even sending it to Congress. “I don’t know, at the end of the day, what will be releasable,” he said at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, pointing to possible issues with executive privilege. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted that while the committee’s top Democrat, Senator Dianne Feinstein, seemed to find his position reasonable, others in her party might not. Schiff falls into that camp.
“Either one of those ought to be reasons not to confirm him,” Schiff said, “but the combination of both should be completely disqualifying.”
Time and again, traditional hand-drawn films have upended the family-friendly, CGI-filled, box-office-hit formula heralded by Pixar and Disney. Persepolis (2007), for instance, brings to life Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir about growing up during Iran’s bloody Islamic Revolution. Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988) also draws from a true story, intricately illustrating the toll of mass conflict by focusing on two young siblings in Japan during the last months of World War II. Released in 2018, the Taiwanese film On Happiness Road, which won a Golden Horse for Best Animation Feature and is a contender for an Oscar nomination in the same category, is a new addition to this lineage of hand-drawn classics.
Following the works of Satrapi and Takahata, the writer and director Sung Hsin-yin’s debut feature film traces the recollections of its protagonist Lin Shu-chi over several decades of Taiwanese history. Given tense cross-Straits relations and mainland China’s aggressive attempts at claiming self-governed Taiwan as its own, it’s little surprise that Sung lost investors over her movie’s historical specificity—for instance, its use of Taiwanese Hokkien dialogue alongside Mandarin Chinese. But while Sung is certainly dedicated to recreating the details and textures of everyday life in Taiwan, spurring reflection among local audiences, the power of On Happiness Road also lies in its nuanced depiction of fantasy and memory, and how these dual forces can shape notions of family and cultural identity.
The film begins years after Chi, raised by working-class parents in Taipei, has moved to New York City. When On Happiness Road opens, Chi’s marriage is falling apart, her home is in disarray, and she only ever sees her beloved family and childhood home in her dreams. Her current life in the U.S.—a place she once saw as a vibrant utopia promising political freedom and personal fulfillment—has essentially become a surreal nightmare, one where she regularly loses her sense of who and where she is. It’s during these listless adult years when Chi receives news of her grandmother’s death, which spurs her trip back to Taiwan. Through a series of encounters with old friends, family, and her grandmother’s spirit, Chi finds herself reflecting on her past hopes and experiences, which weave in and out of her present-day reality.
On the surface, Sung’s playful, pastel-hued animations seem to undercut the seriousness of Chi’s recollections—many of which center on the protagonist’s grade-school years as Taiwan transitioned to democratic rule in the 1980s, after nearly 40 years of martial law under dictator Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government (known as KMT). But this tonal contrast is precisely what gives Chi’s childhood memories so much weight. In one flashback scene, for instance, Chi and her classmates learn that Chiang formed his political resolve while observing fish swimming upstream. As the school children recite this propagandic passage from the KMT-written, standardized textbook, the fish surge up from the pages, whirling around a dazzled Chi. It’s a beautiful but unsettling sequence—one that demonstrates how state narratives can seem exciting, even romantic, to students who are just beginning to form their identities as citizens.
Early on in her childhood, Chi views her working-class father through a similarly magical lens: In one memory, Chi is rescued from a ferocious dog by her dad, who transforms into a heroic prince with a crown and fluttering cape. But this admiration is short-lived. As soon as Chi begins grade school, she’s subjected to the government’s efforts to promote Chinese nationalism. Not only does Chi’s teacher dismiss Taiwanese popular culture as “vulgar,” but she also threatens to fine students who speak Taiwanese Hokkien (the primary language at home) in the classroom instead of state-mandated Mandarin Chinese. Little Chi carries these lessons home, where she heckles her father’s poor Mandarin skills and later scoffs at his love for Taiwanese comedy. These scenes of her father’s fall from grace in Chi’s eyes are bitter but brief, reenacting the tragically ordinary ways in which children internalize oppression and direct it toward loved ones.
On Happiness Road tracks young Chi’s disassociation from her family’s working-class Taiwanese identity through the girl’s daydreams. When a wealthy classmate, the son of Taipei’s mayor, brags about an overseas trip to Disneyland, Chi sees fireworks bursting against a violet sky. When her Amerasian friend Betty describes the exploits of her absent father, a U.S. Air Force pilot (likely a Vietnam War veteran), a plane jets across Chi’s line of vision. Meanwhile, the tales recounted by Chi’s own family—anecdotes rooted in Taiwan’s rural Liugui district and the mountainous Hualien region—are no match for the allure of America. At home, when Chi asks her father for a story, he fondly tells her about a trip he took as a boy to see Taiwan’s first escalator. But Chi visualizes this momentous encounter with modern technology as a montage of simple, static images; her father, at the center of these bare landscapes, looks like a bobbing dolt of a boy. Unable to imagine this story with the same rich detail as those of her classmates, Chi responds, “What’s the big deal? I want stories about some place really far away, like America.”
Even as the U.S. comes to represent the pinnacle of romance, freedom, and self-fulfillment for Chi, On Happiness Road is careful to juxtapose this fantasy with real life. When Betty gifts her a “Hisshey’s” (Hershey’s) bar, 8-year-old Chi takes a bite, transforms into a princess, and soars over a land adorned with neon lights, confetti, and Christmas trees. It’s like a Proustian moment in reverse, where the taste of American chocolate launches her into a dream that eventually comes true. Nearly two decades later when Chi finally arrives in New York, she meets her future husband Tony while standing in front of a Christmas tree; there’s almost a fairy-tale quality to the scene. But, making small talk, Chi tells him that in Taiwan, “We didn’t celebrate Christmas, but we sure made a lot of Christmas ornaments.” Chi explains that stay-at-home mothers would assemble holiday trinkets for extra money—a subtle hint at how Taiwan’s rapid industrialization was fueled in part by American reliance on cheap labor. Now in the country of her dreams, she’s no longer a wide-eyed child dreaming about sweets.
When Chi eventually reunites with her family in Taiwan, On Happiness Road makes clear that this journey also doesn't have the same enchanted sheen that her memories do. In Taipei, she struggles to communicate in Hokkien, and those in her neighborhood hardly recognize her. Worst of all, Chi is troubled to find that while she can afford a middle-class life in the U.S., her parents have quietly been struggling. Her father has broken his leg at work and is forced to collect a meager pension; her mother gathers recyclables for money to supplement their income. Chi is viscerally confronted by this economic reality when she opens her family’s refrigerator. Her eyes widen in horror; her hand flies up to cover her nose. Depicted in harsh detail are shelves of rotting produce—browned vegetables, moldy fruit, old containers of food. Since when did mom start to live like this, Chi wonders, and how come I never found out until now? It’s a devastating moment, where she finally sees just how out of touch she has been with her parents’ lives. But On Happiness Road argues for the necessity of examining the realities, rather than the romances, of homecoming.
Clear-eyed examination is often painful, especially when Chi reckons with the false and destructive narratives she absorbed about her family as a child. On Happiness Road captures this struggle best through the relationship between Chi and her grandmother. As a child, Chi learns that her grandma is Amis—one of 16 officially recognized indigenous tribes in Taiwan—through a betel-nut vendor, who jeers, “Only savages and loose women chew betel nuts.” Unable to shake that idea of her grandma as a “savage,” Chi returns home and finds herself imagining her Ahma as a demon-eyed monster who slashes several chickens in one fell swoop. At school, Chi’s classroom recites a sanitized account about ethnic Chinese colonization and “civilization” of indigenous people in Taiwan; Chi visualizes granny, in her native dress, hopping into the textbook to behead a Chinese merchant. Beset with anxiety, Chi later dreams about losing a rose while escaping from Ahma, who has taken the form of a Maleficent-esque dragon.
One day, at the dinner table, little Chi summarizes this learned logic: If Ahma chews betel nuts and slays chickens, then she must be a savage who decapitates humans. But Chi’s grandmother rejects the power of such entrenched stories. “People can call us whatever they want,” she declares. “To survive, we must eat.” She then plops a piece of her home-cooked chicken into her granddaughter’s bowl. With that, Sung’s debut feature offers a simple, yet potent, reminder that identity should not be at the mercy of racial epithets, or government propaganda, or the kind of candy one eats. Rather, identity is also nourished by everyday practices of love, care, and remembrance. Once Chi understands this, her fairy tale shifts, too: The once-terrifying dragon plants a kiss on her head and returns her lost rose. As a film rendered in evocative, hand-drawn visuals, On Happiness Road crystallizes a truth about fantasy and memory: They can be unreliable and harmful, instilling fear or confusion about who we really are. But they also allow us to work out conflicting ideas about family, self, and belonging; sometimes, they can be tools for healing.
Over the next decade, more than 400 large dams will be built on the Himalayan rivers—by India, China, Nepal, Bhutan, and Pakistan—to feed the region’s hunger for electricity and its need for irrigation. New ports and thermal power plants line the coastal arc that runs from India, through Southeast Asia, to China. India and China have embarked on schemes to divert rivers to bring water to their driest lands: Costing tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, they are the largest and most expensive construction projects the world has ever seen. At stake in how these plans unfold is the welfare of a significant portion of humanity. At stake is the future shape of Asia, the relations among its nations.
This post is adapted from Amrith’s new book.The Indian subcontinent is the crucible of the monsoon. In its simplest definition, the monsoon is “a seasonal prevailing wind.” There are other monsoons, in northern Australia and in North America; none is as pronounced, as marked in its reversal between wet and dry seasons, as the South Asian monsoon. More than 70 percent of total rainfall in South Asia occurs during just three months each year, between June and September. Even within that period, rainfall is not consistent: It is compressed into just 100 hours of torrential rain across the summer months.
Despite a vast expansion in irrigation since 1947, 60 percent of Indian agriculture remains rain-fed, and agriculture employs about half of India’s population. Unlike China, unlike most large countries in the world, India’s population will continue to be predominantly rural until the mid-21st century. No comparably large number of human beings anywhere in the world is so dependent on such intensely seasonal rainfall. In the first decade of the 20th century, the finance minister in the imperial government declared that “every budget is a gamble on the rains”; more than a century later, the leading environmental activist Sunita Narain reversed the terms but retained the substance of the observation: “India’s finance minister is the monsoon,” she declared.
Climate is woven into the fabric of Indian social, economic, and political thought in a way that it is not (or is no longer) elsewhere. In the late 20th century, that claim would have raised hackles among scholars of South Asia; it might still do so today. A fundamental assumption of modernity was that we had mastered nature. The notion of India in thrall to the monsoon would seem to perpetuate a colonial idea of India’s irredeemable backwardness. To emphasize the power of the monsoon would be to portray Indian lives as so many marionettes moved by a climatic puppet master. That is how this story would have been understood a generation ago.
But now, alarmed by the planetary crisis of climate change, a reminder of nature’s power has different implications. This is not a story of geography as destiny. It is a story of how the idea of geography as destiny provoked, from the mid-19th century on, a whole series of social, political, and technological responses within and beyond India.
[Read: China wants to build ‘sponge cities’]
The South Asian monsoon has effects far beyond South Asia. We know this, at least in part, because of climate research undertaken in India in the 20th century. Sir Gilbert Walker, a pioneer of global climate science, wrote in 1927 that “the climate of India is of special interest, not merely as that of the greatest tropical region in the British Empire, but also because it seems to have been designed by nature with the object of demonstrating physical processes on a huge scale.” That sense of scientific opportunity, combined with the pressing material need to understand the monsoon, inspired a century of study in India. Charles Normand, Walker’s successor as head of the Indian weather service, insisted that the monsoon is “an active, not a passive, feature in world weather.”
Subsequent research has confirmed his view—the Asian monsoon is entwined with many aspects of the global climate. It has an important influence on global atmospheric circulation. The future behavior of the South Asian monsoon has implications for the whole world. Arguably no other part of the global climate system affects more people, more directly.
The breakthroughs in tropical meteorology of the late 20th century shed new light on the scale and complexity of internal variability in the monsoon on multiple timescales—from the quasiperiodic impact of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation system to the tropical-weather fluctuation pattern known as the Madden-Julian Oscillation. In recent years, the focus of scientific research has been on how the effects of anthropogenic climate change interact with the monsoon’s natural variability in dangerous and unpredictable ways.
The most fundamental forces driving the monsoon are the thermal contrast between the land and the ocean and the availability of moisture. Climate change affects both of these drivers of wind and rain. The warming of the ocean’s surface is likely to augment the amount of moisture the monsoon winds pick up on their journey toward the Indian subcontinent. But if the ocean surface warms more rapidly than the land, which appears to be happening in equatorial waters, this would narrow the temperature gradient that drives the winds, and so weaken circulation. Put simply, many climate models predict that the first of these processes will predominate: “Wet gets wetter” as a result of greenhouse-gas emissions. They predict, that is to say, that the moist monsoon lands will see an increase in rainfall.
But the monsoon is an intricate phenomenon, as meteorologists have long known. It is increasingly clear that monsoon rainfall is affected not only by planetary warming but also by transformations on a regional scale, including the emission of aerosols—from vehicles, crop burning, and domestic fires—and changes in land use. The urgent challenge for climate science is to disentangle and to understand these global and regional influences on the behavior of the monsoon. And so far, the monsoon has proved much harder to capture in models than, say, global temperatures.
The availability of detailed records of climate and rainfall in India—which themselves are a product of the history of Indian meteorology going back to the efforts of Henry Blanford and his colleagues in the late 19th century—have allowed scientists to reconstruct in detail the monsoon’s behavior over the past 60 years. The picture these data present is complex, and in some ways surprising. Average summer rainfall over India has declined by around 7 percent since 1950. The cause of this downward trend in rainfall lies in the pattern of India’s development since independence. Its explanation, that is to say, lies in the province of economic history.
In the late 1990s, research vessels observed exceptionally high concentrations of aerosols in the northern Indian Ocean. Satellite images showed a stain that spread across the Indo-Gangetic Plain and over the Indian Ocean—researchers called it the “brown cloud,” an accurate, if not a poetic, description of the haze. Between January and March 1999, a large team of investigators set out to understand this brown cloud, taking readings from their base at the Kaashidhoo Observatory on one of the most remote islands of the Maldives. The project was led by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, an Indian oceanographer based at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California. One of the scientists involved was the Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who around the same time also coined the term Anthropocene, referring to a new geological epoch in which human activity is the most important influence on Earth’s physical processes.
[Read: A foreboding similarity in today’s oceans and a 94-million-year-old catastrophe]
The project found that the haze was a noxious composite of sulfate, nitrate, black carbon, dust, and fly ash, as well as naturally occurring aerosols including sea salt and mineral dust. Three-quarters of the composition of the brown cloud could be attributed directly to human activity, especially concentrated along the densely populated Indo-Gangetic Plain and northwestern India. In this region, where up to 80 percent of the population remains rural, and where many rural families continue to be deprived of electricity, much of the black carbon is produced by domestic burning of biomass—wood, crop residue, dung, and coal— used primarily for cooking. Open crop burning accounts for the rest. The stoves used in households are inefficient and combustion is incomplete, producing large amounts of soot.
Apart from their likely effects on regional climate, these emissions also poison human bodies. By one estimate, more than 400,000 premature deaths each year in India can be attributed to indoor pollution. Black carbon combines, in the brown cloud, with sulfates and other aerosols—and the Indo-Gangetic Plain bears an additional burden in this respect, as a result of pockets of intensive industrial and extractive activity. Since the late 19th century, the Indo-Gangetic Plain has been the core region of India’s extractive industries, built around the rich coal and mineral deposits in the Chota Nagpur region. Further along the Yamuna River, the Delhi region is one of India’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas, and its largest in absolute terms. Emissions have increased exponentially since the 1970s as India’s population has grown, as its economy has expanded, as inequalities within and among regions have widened. The Indo-Gangetic Plain suffers from a double pathology: The sulfur, carbon, and nitrogen-dioxide emissions that accompany energy-intensive growth are combined with the black carbon that comes from the use of cheaper, dirtier fuels by millions without access to electricity.
All this is shifting the monsoon’s patterns. Aerosols absorb solar radiation, allowing less of it to reach Earth’s surface. This cools the land, diminishes the temperature contrast between the land and sea, and weakens the atmospheric circulation that sustains the summer monsoon. Changes in circulation over the Indian subcontinent in turn affect the tightly integrated air-sea interaction that binds the Asian continent with the Indian Ocean, a system that already contains plenty of internal variability. Because of the way the Asian monsoon is linked to other parts of the planet’s climate, it is possible that aerosols over South Asia have global consequences. When all these effects are coupled with the impact of global warming on the ocean and the atmosphere, the instabilities multiply. Far from counteracting the effect of greenhouse gases in any simple sense, the impact of aerosols complicates them.
A further driver of regional climate change is rapid changes in land use. Over the past 150 years, forest cover over most parts of Asia has declined dramatically. The intensification of agricultural production in India, and the use of more water for irrigation, has affected the moisture of the soil, its capacity to absorb or reflect heat. Crops reflect more solar radiation than forests, which tend to absorb it; the greater reflexivity of land planted with crops makes it cooler, once again weakening the temperature differentials that drive circulation and rainfall. The tropical meteorologist Deepti Singh points out that climate models have often failed to predict the monsoon’s behavior in part because they are too abstract to take into account the “complex topography, temperature, and moisture gradients in the region that can influence the monsoon circulation.” The models omit, that is, precisely the details of landscape and microclimate that the meteorologists of a century earlier were so deeply interested in, which they depicted in their detailed local and regional maps of India’s climate.
We are left with the most bitter of ironies. Many of the measures taken to secure India against the vagaries of the monsoon in the second half of the 20th century—intensive irrigation, the planting of new crops—have, through a cascade of unintended consequences, destabilized the monsoon itself. When the geographers of the early 20th century wrote of “monsoon Asia,” they saw the monsoon as sovereign—it shaped the lives of hundreds of millions of people, who waited on its every move. Monsoon Asia means something quite different now, when the monsoon’s behavior, increasingly erratic, responds to human intervention.
This post is adapted from Amrith’s new book, Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History.
Editor’s Note: Every Monday, Lori Gottlieb answers questions from readers about their problems, big and small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Dear Therapist,
For Christmas this year, my boyfriend surprised me with a ring. It’s sapphire and silver—beautiful. But it’s not an engagement ring. Without saying so outright, he made clear that it was just a ring. After dating for a few years, and living together for the past year and a half, I can’t help but be disappointed. To make matters worse, when I went to the store to get the ring resized, the clerk kept congratulating me and asking me all about my fiancé.
I wasn’t expecting to get engaged over the holidays—my boyfriend has also said he doesn’t want to propose on a holiday, or my birthday, or some other occasion so that he won’t “ruin it” if the marriage goes badly. We’ve talked about marriage and getting engaged, but he also says he thinks we still have some things to work on in our relationship. I’ve tried to advocate for myself and tell him that I have my own timeline and expectations, but that I’m willing to give him the time he needs.
But now, with this ring, I wonder whether that’s still in the cards. I can’t imagine him getting me two rings in the same year, given that this is the first piece of jewelry he’s ever bought me. I’m worried he’s finding new ways of putting off our engagement without having to talk to me about it.
So this is my question: Is my disappointment unreasonable? I definitely feel the pull of marriage while I am still young enough to have children. I also know that I love my boyfriend and am dedicated to making our relationship work long-term. Am I disappointed because he hasn’t picked me yet, or because I have real fears about the longevity of our relationship?
Any advice or thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
Anna
Seattle
Dear Anna,
Often patients in therapy will come in and tell me something that happened, then follow the story with, “Is it okay to be mad about this, or am I overreacting?” or “I know I shouldn’t be sad, but …” And what I always tell them is this: Your feelings are your feelings. You can pretend that they don’t exist, but they’ll still be there anyway. Listen to them—they’ll give you useful information.
This is true of your disappointment. Instead of questioning it or hiding it from your boyfriend, use it to guide you. Think of your disappointment as a sign that says pay attention. Let your disappointment highlight what needs clarity—in this case, how you’re both feeling about your future together.
It seems that there are two conversations you need to have to get this clarity: one with your boyfriend and one with yourself. It sounds like you and your boyfriend have had some conversations about your future together, with you expressing your desire to get married and him explaining that he feels you two have some things to work on first. You don’t say what they are, but are you clear about the issues that need to be worked out between you? Do you share his concerns? And if so, what are you doing to work on them together?
I ask these questions because you’ve told your boyfriend that you’re “willing to give him the time he needs,” but it’s important that you two talk about what this time is being used for. I wonder how these conversations have gone so far. An unproductive way to have this conversation goes something like, “I feel like we have things to work on, so I’m not ready yet”—but there are no specifics about what’s not working or what steps you two might take (say, couples therapy) to move forward. Another unproductive way to have this conversation goes something like, “It’s not the relationship that needs work, it’s such-and-such about you.” In that conversation, there’s no consideration of what he might need to do to improve things between you. If you haven’t talked about what his concerns are and what you’re both doing to work them out, now is the time to deepen that conversation with as much specificity as possible.
You may also want to learn more about what associations you both have with marriage. For you it may signify safety, trust, and commitment, and for him it might signify something entirely different. If you get curious about what it’s like for him to contemplate marriage, you may learn that his hesitancy is less about his not “picking you” and more about his own struggle. For instance, although he says he wants marriage, perhaps it also terrifies him. Maybe he feels he can’t live up to whatever idea he has in his head about the role of “husband.” Maybe he worries that he’d be the one to disappoint you. Maybe he didn’t see a loving marriage in his own home growing up, and now he worries about making a mistake or the marriage not lasting. You may want to understand more about his fear of “ruining” a holiday or birthday if the marriage goes south. I can understand not tying an anniversary to another holiday in order to make the anniversary distinct and special, but in your boyfriend’s mind, he’s already preparing for the possibility that the marriage won’t work out. There’s more to learn about each other here: for you, what else might be going on with him; and for him, what it’s like for you to love him and live with him and get a ring from him—but not know whether you’ll be spending your future together.
Meanwhile, there’s a conversation you need to have with yourself. It’s a hard one, because the part of you that loves your boyfriend and wants to spend your life with him probably doesn’t want to sit down with the part of you that might bring up something painful or anxiety provoking. Often when people don’t get what they want in a relationship, they give the other person an ultimatum: If you don’t propose by X date, I’m leaving. But these ultimatums tend to backfire, because either you’ve pressured someone into marrying you, or the pressure has pushed that person away. Instead, the person you need to set boundaries with is yourself. How long are you willing to tolerate his ambivalence? At what point will you tell the part of you that’s willing to wait that waiting is taking too long—that you need to move forward and free yourself up to meet someone who wants what you do? The more open you are to this internal dialogue, the more likely you’ll be to do more than simply wait and see what your boyfriend does.
As a result of these dialogues, you may decide to go to couples therapy with your boyfriend, or you may see a therapist yourself to help navigate your feelings and learn to communicate more effectively in the relationship. Whatever you decide to do, these two conversations are a positive first step.
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.
Natural disasters are equalizing forces. Fires torch the homes of the rich and the poor alike. Hurricanes destroy cruise ships as well as decade-old cars. Earthquakes level cities, affecting everyone within. But natural disasters are also polarizing forces. Income and wealth shape who gets hit; how much individuals, insurers, nonprofits, and governments are willing and able to help; and who recovers, as well as to what extent.
That dynamic is now evident in Paradise, California, after the Camp Fire, much as it was in Houston after Harvey, Puerto Rico after Maria, New Jersey and New York after Sandy, New Orleans after Katrina, and so many places after so many other disasters, small and large. Across the country, two of the most potent forces in American life—climate change, which portends more frequent and more violent natural disasters, and social stratification—are colliding. And the former stands to make the latter far, far worse.
The Camp Fire was all-consuming, incinerating much of the town of Paradise in mere hours. After breaking out in early November, it burned for more than two weeks, killing at least 86 people, destroying some 14,000 homes, and causing roughly $17 billion in insured losses. It was the most destructive wildfire in California history, and one of the worst natural calamities to hit the United States.
[Read: The American South will bear the worst of climate change’s costs]
Chelsea West, a registered nurse, was working a shift at the Feather River Hospital when the fire hit. “I was looking outside the window, seeing the smoke and thinking how strange it was that there was a fire in November,” she told me. “Within 15 minutes things changed—the wind was really strong and we were seeing pieces of charred leaves falling on our campus, not just pieces of ash but things that were still burning.” She helped evacuate the hospital, then got pinned down in flames as she tried to flee with some of her colleagues.
“It was pitch black at eight in the morning,” she said. “You’re just in hell. It’s like the fire is eating everything around you. Every moment I thought it could not get worse, and it kept getting worse, like a bad dream. I was trying not to run to conserve my oxygen.” She and the small group she was with barely escaped.
Although disasters like the Camp Fire seem to strike indiscriminately, in the aggregate that is not quite the case. Cheaper homes built without strong foundations or storm windows tend to be less safe during tornadoes and hurricanes. Floods hit low-lying neighborhoods the hardest, and low-lying neighborhoods are often low-income neighborhoods. In California, the extremely high cost of housing has encouraged building in and migration to certain fire-prone areas. This is to say: The country’s built landscape means that lower-income families are often the most vulnerable to disasters.
When a disaster strikes, the evacuation often stratifies on class lines, too. People with very low incomes, the disabled, and the elderly are less likely to have technologies that might alert them of a fire speeding their way or a hurricane about to bear down. In part for this reason, the average age of those who died in the Camp Fire was estimated at 71.
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Leaving itself sometimes imposes a significant cost—gas, missed work, hotel rooms—that the wealthier can bear but the poor might not be able to. Hurricane Katrina hit in late August, when many lower-income families were waiting on first-of-the-month checks to pay their bills. Many could not afford to get out. In later surveys, respondents explained that, “The hurricane came at the wrong time, we were waiting for our payday” and that “money was hard to come by.”
After the disaster, during the recovery, communities tend to pull together, with the trauma of loss shared across social divisions. That is certainly true in Paradise and the nearby town of Chico, which has absorbed many of the families whose homes burned down. “Everybody knows somebody who was devastated, and everybody is helping,” said Alexa Benson-Valavanis, the chief executive officer of the North Valley Community Foundation. “The despair is so immense, but the other side of that is how people are helping.”
Yet the recovery is also when a disaster’s polarizing effect becomes acute: Private and public aid in many cases accrues to the haves more so than the have-nots. “Disasters are increasing the disparity in terms of people’s homes, their income, their access to services,” said Brad Kieserman, the vice president for operations and logistics at the American Red Cross, which remains on the ground after the Camp Fire. “Disasters, for most communities, exacerbate already existing issues, which is why we often see in shelters what what we sometimes refer to as ‘the least, the last, and the lost.’ The people who had the least, who were the last to get services, who were already at the end, who were lost beforehand, especially financially.”
Chaos and uncertainty fuels this stratification. The Camp Fire interrupted town services and caused a mass internal displacement, with families crowding into makeshift shelters, setting up tents in church parking lots, doubling up with friends, and occupying any empty hotel rooms, motel rooms, and housing units. For many evacuees, it was unclear who was offering what to whom, or what was guaranteed or even tentatively provided by the government.
Making matters worse, the people trying to coordinate resources had often lost their homes or cell phones or computers or cars in the fire. “There was no real clarity on what options were available,” said Tom Tenorio, the executive director of the Community Action Agency of Butte County. A person he works with had become homeless, he said. “She was advised to get a Small Business Administration loan. And she was wondering: ‘Why on earth would I want to get an SBA loan?’”
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Income determined who stayed and who left, in part. “People who were able to leave, many of them are gone,” said Audrey Denney, an expert on agriculture and education and recent congressional candidate now helping with the recovery effort. Research from prior disasters has shown that, as a general point, this is what happens: After a disaster, the rich leave and the poor remain. Poverty rates climb by “one percentage point in areas hit by super-severe disasters,” one recent study found. “That suggests that people who aren’t poor are migrating out or that people who are poor are migrating in.”
For those staying, life often gets harder, with fewer jobs and increased expenses. For renters and the unstably housed in Paradise and Chico, the fire has given way to a dire housing crisis, with spiked rents, no vacancies, and surging demand. “I’ve lived in the same rental house for years,” said Denney. “My 90-year-old landlord who lives in Sacramento called me yesterday and said, ‘I’m getting the house appraised to sell.’” She said that she might have to try to live with friends, or potentially move away from the area.
The poor have been the hardest hit. Two months after the disaster, there are still hundreds living in shelters. “We have people who are trickling down into the ranks of the homeless,” said Laura Cootsona, the executive director of the Jesus Center, a homeless shelter in Chico. “We’re already a relatively low-cost area in California terms, and there’s nowhere for them to go. Most of the surrounding areas also have housing challenges and inadequate housing for the poor.”
At a national level, research shows that government aid might widen wealth inequality in the wake of disasters, by helping the well-off more than the poor. “The more FEMA aid a county receives, the more unequal wealth becomes between more and less advantaged residents, holding all else constant, including local hazard damages,” researchers Junia Howell and James Elliott recently found.
Disasters also in some ways increase the inequality between communities, not just within them. Richer communities have more philanthropic dollars at the ready, for instance, and stronger tax bases to finance rebuilding. “The community itself—this rural community, this lower-income community, with a lot of retired folks—is going to have to pick up a lot of the slack,” said Benson-Valavanis, talking about Paradise and Chico. “A lot of the need is going to be met by our local nonprofits and philanthropy. That’s a daunting realization when, of course, none of us were prepared for a disaster of this magnitude.”
At an international level, the effect is perhaps strongest and clearest. Lower-income countries are more vulnerable to climate-change linked natural disasters, less capable of mitigating the fatal effects of such disasters, and more likely to have their growth paths damaged by such disasters.
It need not be so—particularly not in the United States. Legislators could rework federal disaster aid to ensure that more assistance goes to low-income families and communities. They could help make communities more resilient to climate change, which would act as a powerful kind of stimulus, and might make the poor less vulnerable to begin with. And they could exert themselves to reduce income inequality to prevent yet more extreme stratification as climate change takes hold. For now, though, disasters remain a potent force of polarization, sorting the haves from the have-nots.
The Sundance Film Festival always marks the beginning of an exciting new year in cinema just as the previous awards season lumbers to a conclusion (the 2019 Oscar nominations will be announced just days before Sundance starts on January 24). Two years ago, Jordan Peele’s Get Out premiered at the festival and quickly became one of the most talked-about movies of 2016. Last year, a slew of hits including Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, RBG, and Three Identical Strangers took off at Sundance, presaging a hot summer at the box office for documentaries. The 2019 festival promises similarly resonant nonfiction films, along with the usual mix of directorial debuts and intriguing new talent.
Perhaps the splashiest upcoming movie is also one of Sundance’s longest entries. Leaving Neverland, a four-hour examination of two child-molestation accusations against the late Michael Jackson, is certain to revive the storm of controversy that first engulfed the now-dead singer in 1993. Decades later, two men (now in their 30s) recount allegations of sustained abuse by the singer, which the Jackson estate has already denied. The film, directed by Dan Reed, will air on HBO in April in two parts, but its subject matter will undoubtedly dominate headlines from the first screening on.
Where’s My Roy Cohn? (Altimeter Films)Several other Sundance documentaries are taking aim at notorious real-life figures. Ursula Macfarlane’s Untouchable digs into the history of the disgraced mega-producer Harvey Weinstein and how he leveraged his power in the movie industry to protect himself from charges of sexual harassment and assault. Matt Tyrnauer’s Where’s My Roy Cohn?, titled after a reported Donald Trump quote, profiles the infamous attorney’s relationships with Joseph McCarthy and Trump, casting Cohn as an avatar for this era of American politics. Alex Gibney’s The Inventor sums up the rise-and-fall story of Elizabeth Holmes and her blood-testing company, Theranos, which collapsed in 2018 after its founder was charged with massive fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Though documentaries have dominated Sundance lately, the U.S. Dramatic Competition section has, in recent years, identified major new directors such as Desiree Akhavan, Damien Chazelle, Robert Eggers, Ryan Coogler, and Benh Zeitlin. Many of these entrants are young, up-and-coming artists who’ve made only one or two features. Already this year, buzz has started to emerge around the Chinese-born, American-raised director Lulu Wang and her second film, The Farewell. The movie stars Awkwafina as a Chinese American woman returning to China after her grandmother is diagnosed as terminally ill—a fact that’s kept secret from the matriarch. Wang, who based the film on a story she told on This American Life, said she wanted to use The Farewell to explore the intergenerational nuances of her family.
Other dramas in competition include Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency, about a prison warden (Alfre Woodard) struggling with her work on death row; Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy, written by Shia LaBeouf, which semi-autobiographically recounts LaBeouf’s life as a child actor and his fraught relationship with his father; Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a story of a man (Jimmie Fails) struggling to reclaim his family home in the rapidly gentrifying city; and Rashid Johnson’s Native Son, a modern reimagining of Richard Wright’s novel starring Ashton Sanders (Moonlight) as Bigger Thomas.
Native Son (Bow and Arrow Entertainment)
Big Time Adolescence (American High)On the comedy side, Jason Orley’s Big Time Adolescence stars Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson as a charismatic college dropout who becomes a bad influence on a listless suburban teenager. Paul Downs Colaizzo’s Brittany Runs a Marathon has Jillian Bell (Idiotsitter) playing a messy New Yorker trying to pull her life together by preparing for a big race, and Hannah Pearl Utt’s madcap Before You Know It unravels a long-held family secret on the set of a soap opera.
Some of Sundance’s most memorable recent debuts were works of horror, including Hereditary and The Witch. Genre movies to look for this year include Pippa Bianco’s Share, in which a teenage girl tries to solve the mystery of a disturbing video featuring herself that she doesn’t remember filming, and Julius Onah’s Luce, in which a married couple find out their adopted Eritrean son (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) has a dark secret in his past. There’s also Dan Gilroy’s out-of-competition movie Velvet Buzzsaw, starring his past collaborator Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler) as an art dealer who starts buying paintings that come to life and kill people. That film will premiere on Netflix a week after Sundance begins, and it looks like an appropriately zany start to the new movie season.
Late Night (FIlmNation)Sundance is full of other big-ticket works premiering out of competition. In Joe Berlinger’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Zac Efron plays Ted Bundy, though the film is told from the perspective of the serial killer’s longtime girlfriend, Liz (Lily Collins), who refused to acknowledge the truth about him. Nisha Ganatra’s Late Night, written by Mindy Kaling, stars Emma Thompson as a legendary talk-show host whose program is upended when she hires her first female staff writer. Gavin Hood’s Official Secrets features Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun, a British whistleblower who tried to expose an illegal U.S.-U.K. spying operation in the months before the start of the Iraq War. The actor Chiwetel Ejiofor makes his directorial debut with The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, a heartwarming biopic about William Kamkwamba, a Malawian 13-year-old who used wind power to save his family from famine.
Many more premieres, docs, and competition features will screen over the next two weeks in Park City, Utah, but each year at Sundance, audience hype yanks a film from the shadows. Though Netflix’s and Amazon’s recent strategy of making expensive acquisitions at the festival tailed off last year, major indie studios such as Fox Searchlight, A24, and Neon are still primed for bidding wars, perhaps hunting for a surprise box-office sensation (last year’s was Ari Aster’s Hereditary, a small-scale family-horror film that became one of A24’s highest-ever grossers).
It’s worth noting that since Hollywood produces fewer mid-budget movies, directors are making the leap from indies to blockbusters more quickly. Coogler premiered his directorial debut at this festival only six years ago and was soon snapped up by the Marvel machine. This talent pipeline is significant, given that 40 percent of films at this year’s Sundance (45 movies total) were directed by a woman, and 36 percent (40 movies) were made by people of color—numbers well above those in the studio world at large. The industry’s next big filmmakers could very well make their name here in the coming weeks, and the artists chosen by the festival paint a thrilling picture of Hollywood’s future.
Sofri um aborto em março de 2018. E foi muito doloroso. A gestação já havia passado das 12 primeiras semanas mais delicadas, que foi quando contamos para grande parte dos familiares e amigos sobre a chegada do nosso segundo filho. Ansiosa, fiz o exame que permite descobrir o sexo do bebê logo no comecinho da gravidez. Um menino. Até então, todos os exames perfeitos. Mas, no final da décima terceira semana, numa ultrassonografia de rotina, sem sentir nenhum sintoma, descobrimos que o feto estava morto.
O que veio depois disso foi um longo processo de espera (minha médica recomendou a chamada “conduta expectante” – esperar o aborto acontecer naturalmente). E também de incompreensão, de luto. Nunca na vida me senti tão cansada, física e emocionalmente. Acho que estou cansada até hoje. A princípio, é um acontecimento absolutamente natural, mas que duvido que alguém, em algum momento, fique feliz em revisitar. Quando tudo isso aconteceu, eu já era mãe de uma menininha, que hoje tem dois anos. A gente toca a vida. E, para tocar a vida, a gente tenta esquecer.
O problema é quando os anunciantes não deixam.
Sete meses depois do meu aborto espontâneo, ou um mês depois daquela que seria minha data prevista de parto, caso a gravidez tivesse sido bem-sucedida, recebi um e-mail da Pampers. Ou melhor: mais um e-mail da Pampers. Um e-mail que furou o bloqueio da minha caixa de spam, que jogava todos os outros e-mails da Pampers em um limbo digital nunca acessado, em algum canto dos servidores do Google.
O assunto era esse: “Ainda tem tanto para descobrir sobre seu bebezinho”. Meu bebezinho que não chegou a nascer.
Mães são um bom negócioQuando fiquei grávida pela primeira vez, me dei conta do interesse voraz das empresas de dados sobre as informações das gestantes. Mulheres que, ao estarem esperando uma nova pessoa chegar ao mundo, se tornam, aos olhos dos anunciantes, um pote de ouro pronto para ser convertido em fraldas, roupinhas e brinquedos.
Monitorando nosso comportamento na rede – leituras, buscas, likes e mesmo mensagens e e-mails trocados – as redes sociais automaticamente nos enquadram em um perfil de “grávida”, mesmo quando a gente ainda não tenha contado a novidade para ninguém.
No modelo de negócios atual da internet, em que pessoas são cada vez mais transformadas em “alvos” para anunciantes, estima-se que identificar uma grávida vale pelo menos 15 vezes mais do que atingir uma pessoa que não espera um bebê. Essa estimativa vem de um cálculo da socióloga americana Janet Vertesi, que em 2014 tentou esconder sua gravidez do mercado de dados na internet.
Para uma mulher que quer preservar sua privacidade, não existe a opção de simplesmente ‘sair’ deste mercado.Durante o experimento, Vertesi se esforçou para não demonstrar que estava grávida na internet – nem em conversas particulares, nem em buscas no Google, nem em compras. Para navegar, ela usava apenas o Tor, browser que permite navegação totalmente anônima. Para falar com amigos e famílias, só cartas. Enquanto tentava comprar, em dinheiro, cartões de presente da Amazon suficientes para adquirir um carrinho de bebê (sem precisar revelar seus dados para a empresa), o marido de Vertesi foi informado de que sua ação era considerada suspeita e poderia ser informada às autoridades caso ele insistisse.
A conclusão de Vertesi no seu estudo é clara: para uma mulher que quer preservar sua privacidade, não existe a opção de simplesmente “sair” deste mercado – que inclui não apenas redes sociais, mas também bancos, operadoras de cartão e grandes empresas de varejo. Não quando o custo de saída, em termos de energia e tempo, é tão alto.
Somos mais alvo de vigilância comercial por sermos mulheres e por sermos mães. O custo dessa discriminação aparece quando ela limita nossas oportunidades, exibindo para nós apenas o conteúdo que os anunciantes acham que pode nos interessar, e começa a determinar a forma como lidamos com assuntos tão nossos, tão íntimos. Assim que eu descobri a primeira gravidez, fui bombardeada com propagandas do tipo “mamãe sarada” e “reconquiste seu marido após o filho” no Facebook, como se esses fossem os únicos assuntos interessantes para mim, e logo minha timeline ficou monotemática. Me tornei mãe, e a internet, que mostra conteúdo levando ao extremo nossos próprios interesses, passou a exibir quase que exclusivamente conteúdos relacionados a mães e bebês.
Depois que virou bit não tem voltaFui eu mesma que informei, voluntariamente, pelo site da Pampers, a data prevista do parto da minha segunda gravidez. Fiz isso porque a empresa oferece uma ferramenta gratuita de escolha de nomes de bebês, que permite salvar uma lista e compartilhar essa lista com alguém. Mesmo sendo uma pessoa relativamente bem-informada sobre o mercado de dados digitais e crítica a esse mercado, eu aceitei ceder meus dados para a Pampers para poder utilizar essa ferramenta. Hoje, me sinto um pouco boba por ter feito isso, mas, infelizmente, depois que virou bit, não tem volta.
A Pampers automaticamente começou a usar as três informações que compartilhei (meu primeiro nome, a data prevista do parto e meu e-mail) para me enviar informações semanais sobre a minha gestação. Lembro-me vagamente de ter visto algum desses e-mails na minha caixa postal assim que a gravidez foi interrompida. Entrei no site procurando alguma forma de reportar meu aborto – outros sites e aplicativos para gestantes oferecem esse serviço e, dada a sensibilidade do tema, normalmente o botão é bem fácil de encontrar. Não foi o caso. Mandei uma mensagem para o “Fale Conosco” fazendo essa sugestão, coloquei a Pampers na caixa de spam, não pensei mais no assunto. A gente toca a vida, lembra?
Até que o último e-mail furou o filtro de spam. “Ainda tem tanto para descobrir sobre seu bebezinho”. Foi difícil. De novo.
Empresas de dados precisam formar ou contratar equipes formadas por mulheres, capazes de incorporar essas questões nos produtos e ações de comunicação.Achei que era o momento de, finalmente, retirar meus dados do serviço. E aí percebi que, para me descadastrar de uma newsletter que eu nem lembro se assinei (no meu perfil, a caixa para “receber updates” está desmarcada), a Pampers pede meu nome, número de telefone e endereço completo. E exige duas semanas de prazo para finalizar a ação. Como se eu estivesse pedindo um grande favor de não ser mais importunada com e-mails de acompanhamento de uma gestação e uma infância que não aconteceram.
Resolvi revisitar o limbo digital onde foram parar os e-mails da Pampers para mim. São dezenas, da 24ª à 40ª semana de gestação. No meio deles, e-mails contando quantos pontos eu tinha acumulados no site de fraldas, para ganhar muitos prêmios. No momento, claro, tenho zero pontos.
Empresas de dados que lidam com gestantes precisam criar consciência sobre as altas taxas de aborto – um tema que já é tabu – e adaptar as suas ferramentas para a realidade. Precisam formar ou contratar equipes de desenvolvimento formadas por mulheres, capazes de incorporar essas questões nos desenhos de produto e ações de comunicação. E enxergar além do potencial de mercado para pensar nas pessoas por trás das contas de e-mail.
E nós, mulheres, precisamos lembrar que o mercado de dados não é nosso aliado. Precisamos proteger nossos dados. Precisamos nos proteger.
The post Como a Pampers estragou o meu dia com uma promoção para o bebê que eu perdi appeared first on The Intercept.
Much of the U.S. political system was flummoxed two weeks ago when a brand new 29-year-old congressperson made a seemingly radical proposal on “60 Minutes.”
Here’s what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said that wound everyone up: The U.S. should tax income over $10 million per year at a top rate of 60 or 70 percent.
Republicans responded by shamelessly lying about what this meant, pretending that Ocasio-Cortez was advocating a tax rate of 70 percent on all income. Some older Democrats, such as House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, adopted the standard Democratic tactic of cowering in fear before a deceptive Republican onslaught, like abused dogs.
The hullabaloo was understandable: Ocasio-Cortez’s forthright advocacy demonstrated that American politics, against the odds, can sometimes be about what Americans want. After the “60 Minutes” episode aired, The Hill commissioned a poll that found that 59 percent of registered voters support raising the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent. The idea, The Hill wrote, even receives “a surprising amount of support among Republican voters. … 45 percent of GOP voters say they favor it.”
However, the only surprising thing about this Republican support was that The Hill found it surprising. For the past 40 years, polls have uniformly shown that there is essentially no constituency for cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans or corporations — and a huge constituency for raising them.
Two prominent political scientists, Martin Gilens at the University of California, Los Angeles and Benjamin Page at Northwestern University, have carefully studied the U.S. political system and demonstrated with charts and tables what most of us believe intuitively: If you don’t have money, you don’t matter. Or as Gilens and Page put it, “Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all. By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy.”
The last 40 years of U.S. tax policy have been the most striking demonstration imaginable of this assertion. Americans have never, in living memory, been adverse to higher taxes on the rich. Nonetheless, the top marginal tax rate for the federal income tax plunged during the Reagan administration, from 70 percent to 28 percent, and has since only inched back up to 37 percent.
Chart: Moiz Syed/The Intercept
Republicans, many Democrats, and well-paid television journalists have browbeaten Americans for years with tales of how raising taxes on the wealthy would obliterate the U.S. economy. But the historical fact is that the economy has thrived with top rates of 80 percent or higher. In fact, as tax rates have come down, so has the rate of economic growth.
The top marginal corporate tax rate likewise dropped precipitously under Reagan, from 46 percent to 34 percent. Thanks to Trump’s 2017 tax bill, it’s now down to 21 percent.
Chart: Moiz Syed/The Intercept
But it did not matter; the top marginal rates continued to fall.
Gallup began regularly polling on this question in the early 1990s. Support for raising taxes on the rich has generally fluctuated between 60 and 70 percent, with around 10 percent wanting to cut them.
An even higher percentage of Americans, usually in the high 60s, have wanted to raise taxes on corporations. Instead, the top corporate marginal rate stayed constant at 35 percent from 1995 onward. Finally in 2017, after years of expensive lobbying, Trump and the GOP did the exact opposite of what Americans wanted, and slashed the top corporate rate almost in half.
All in all, the polling numbers are strikingly constant: Big majorities of Americans have always wanted to make the rich pay more. It’s one of the most popular political positions imaginable, with only teeny-tiny minorities calling for tax cuts for the country’s millionaires.
Even more remarkably, as Gilens determined in a recent book, even the well-to-do at the 90th percentile of household income – currently, that’s about $175,000 per year — strongly support higher taxes on the rich. Are there any Americans who don’t like the idea?
Yes.
It’s notoriously difficult to poll the super-wealthy. There aren’t many, by definition. They’re tough to find. And they’re generally not interested in divulging their political views to pollsters.
There have only been a handful of successful attempts in U.S. history. A recent one is the Survey of Economically Successful Americans, which questioned over 100 Chicagoans with a net worth of $10 million or higher. As Gilens and Page describe in another book, these multimillionaires are far more economically conservative than the general public, including on taxes. For instance, 52 percent of ordinary Americans told pollsters that the government should “reduce inequality by heavy taxes on the rich.” The Chicago study found that just 17 percent of the rich liked the sound of that.
Source: Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It
By contrast, taxes can be raised, repeatedly and significantly — as long as they fall hardest on the poor. The tax on gas went up during the 1980s and early 1990s, from 4 cents a gallon in 1981 to 18 cents in 1993, or about 200 percent in constant dollars. Gilens points out that this was a rare tax policy strongly opposed by low-income Americans but viewed with equanimity by the more affluent.
So yes, people are still allowed to vote every two years or so. But money votes, too, far more voluminously, and via lobbying and campaign contributions, it votes every day. For decades everyday Americans have had little influence on how their country is run.
But this hasn’t always been true in U.S. history, and no rule of nature says it has to stay this way forever. The ferocious pushback against Ocasio-Cortez demonstrates the fear at the top that one day many other politicians will decide it’s in their interest to side with the vast majority of Americans.
The post With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Americans Finally Have a Politician Who Agrees With Them About Taxes appeared first on The Intercept.
Ramiro R. Ramírez remembers his grandmother, when he was a young child, planting a red rose bush to mark the gravesite of Nathaniel Jackson, his great-great grandfather. With time, the rose bush vanished, like the wooden cross marking Jackson’s death in 1865. But Jackson’s legacy was not forgotten, nor that of his wife Matilda Hicks, an emancipated slave who forged a life with Nathaniel, a white man and son of a plantation owner.
The interracial couple, along with their eldest son Eli Jackson and six other children, fled a racist South and persecution under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, searching for acceptance and peace. Joined by 11 other former slaves, in five covered wagons, they set out from Alabama for a new life in Mexico, where slavery had been outlawed. When they arrived in 1857 at the Rio Grande, they decided to settle in Texas, since a lack of Spanish would be less of an impediment there. And Mexico was just across the river, a short boat journey to safety if they ever needed to escape.
The families living on Jackson Ranch in the small town of Pharr, near McAllen, Texas, prospered, with many of the African-American men and women marrying into local Tejano and Mexican families. And the ranch became an important outpost on the Underground Railroad, where Matilda and Nathaniel would spirit escaped slaves across the river to freedom in Mexico.
At the ranch, a multiracial community of tolerance thrived. Now 70, Ramírez and other descendants of the Jackson family are fighting to save their family’s legacy and the gravesites of Nathaniel and Matilda, which could be destroyed by a border wall up to 30 feet high, one of the first sec
tions of President Donald Trump’s wall slated to go up. This stretch would include not only a steel and concrete wall, but also a 150-foot-wide “enforcement zone” — an all-weather road and surveillance towers — that is slated to be built straight through the family cemetery in the coming year.
“They’re going to cut right through the heart of it,”Ramírez said of the Eli Jackson Cemetery, where Nathaniel and Matilda are buried. “We don’t know if they’re going to exhume the bodies or just run right over them. And we’re doing everything we can to stop it.”
Photo: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Intercept
But Ramírez and his family face a tough battle. A provision under the 2005 Real ID Act gives the secretary of Homeland Security unilateral authority to waive any federal law that would impede construction of the border wall, and exempts the wall from compliance with such laws as the Antiquities Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, which would normally require public hearings regarding the destruction of important historical, archeological, and burial sites, many of which now sit in the border wall’s path. Two waivers have already been filed by DHS to build walls nearby, but not yet on the segment of the border in Hidalgo County, which includes the Eli Jackson Cemetery and the Jackson Ranch Chapel and Cemetery. Both hold Jackson family ancestors. But the Eli Jackson Cemetery is more endangered, said Ramírez, because it lies adjacent to the levee where the wall will be built, which means that the enforcement zone south of the levee wall will run right through the cemetery. The other cemetery is far enough from the levee to not be harmed directly, he said. But it will be behind the wall, cut off from the rest of Texas.
In 2018, the Trump administration received $1.6 billion to build 33 miles of wall in the Rio Grande Valley, which encompasses the four border counties at the southernmost tip of Texas — Starr, Hidalgo, Cameron, and Willacy. In October and November, U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued two contracts worth $312 million to a Texas-based construction firm, SLSCO, to build the first 14 miles through Hidalgo County near the cemeteries. Reports in the local newspaper that construction could begin as early as February sent a shock of alarm through the many descendants of the Jackson clan, said Sylvia Ramírez, Ramiro’s sister.
Sylvia said that despite their efforts to speak with officials at CBP, the agency overseeing the wall’s construction, they’ve received no response about the fate of the cemeteries. The family was further troubled when CBP announced that it would hold no public meetings on the wall’s construction — only online webinars. Sylvia said she posted a question online during the Q&A portion of the October 30 webinar, asking about the fate of the cemeteries and their relatives buried there. “They seemed to be unaware of the cemeteries in the area,” she told me. “They said they’d try to work with us, but I felt like they were only trying to appease me.”
Rattled by CBP’s lackadaisical response, Sylvia, Ramiro, and other Jackson family descendants hired a lawyer, who sent out a detailed letter to CBP in November with the geographical coordinates of the cemeteries holding their ancestors. “The Jackson Family is determined to protect the sacred gravesites of their ancestors and the historic Jackson Ranch Church from the negative impacts of the border wall,” the family wrote. “The building of the wall should not be undertaken until an exhaustive analysis is completed. The stakes are too high.”
Photo: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Intercept
But as of mid-January, the family had still not received a response from CBP. “We are just waiting and worrying,” Sylvia said. Trump’s announcement that he might call a “national emergency” and have the military quickly build the wall has caused further panic. “I feel like we’re ants under the heel of the government,” she said. “Just struggling to have our voices heard.”
Right now, Sylvia told me, they’re lacking even the most basic of information: When will construction begin?
In the last year, the agency has held only general information and invitation-only meetings with landowners and their legal representatives and done little public outreach in Spanish, which many residents speak in the Rio Grande Valley. Sylvia said that she had one brief phone call with a Border Patrol spokesperson at the request of a congressman, but beyond that, no members of the Jackson Family have been contacted by CBP about its plans. “He made it clear that it was going to happen,” she said of the Border Patrol representative she spoke with. “And the only input we’d have is whether the gate would remain open during the day, or we’d have an access code.”
Creating more confusion, during the October webinar, CBP released a map showing that a waiver had been filed for the segment of border wall that will go through the cemeteries. But there was no notice in the Federal Register that a waiver for that section had been filed. In mid-December, a CBP spokesperson confirmed this. “The area … is not part of the RGV 02/03 waiver,” Carlos Diaz, a CBP spokesperson, said by email. This could indicate that construction will not begin as soon as February on that segment, but Diaz confirmed that construction could start as early as next month on nearby tracts of land.
Photo: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Intercept
Recently, I met with Ramiro, Sylvia, and other members of the family outside the small, white clapboard church at the Jackson Ranch and Cemetery. Ramiro, a horse breeder and psychologist, said he’d spent any spare hours he could muster rebuilding and maintaining the chapel, which was founded in 1874 by Nathaniel and Matilda’s son Martin and became the first Methodist Church in the region. The chapel held services until 2008, when it was flooded. Since the construction of the wall was announced, Ramiro has been working diligently to have the deed transferred to a newly created nonprofit trust run by the family that will care for the chapel and the cemetery, a registered Texas historic landmark.
“This is not just about the past, but also our future,” said Ramírez. He showed me his own granite headstone, which already stands next to his father’s gravesite in the shadow of the church. “It’s really upsetting knowing that I, my wife, and my children will be here one day with a wall between us and the rest of the country. If the wall goes up, I don’t think the church will survive,” he said, because a gate will block the road, which requires an access code from DHS. “We don’t know how people will be able to get in and out, and no one talks to us from the government.”
We climbed into Ramiro’s King Ranch double-cab pickup and bumped down a dirt road less than a quarter mile to the Eli Jackson Cemetery, where Nathaniel and Matilda are buried. Both graves are now unmarked, Ramiro told me, and their exact locations within the cemetery were lost after his grandmother died. “I know they are both here,” he told me scanning the cemetery, which holds at least 150 graves. “I just don’t know where.”
Photo: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Intercept
The tall grass and mesquite trees have run wild in the decades since he was a boy, obscuring many of the old gravesites dating back to the 1800s. Ramiro wants to locate their burial sites, and he and the family plan to rehabilitate the cemetery.
What many don’t realize in the rest of the country, Ramiro said, pointing toward the levee at the edge of the cemetery, is that the border wall is being built not on the river, the effective border with Mexico, but on the levee, which is about a mile in from the Rio Grande. “Then they want a 150-foot-wide enforcement zone south of the wall,” he said. “And that worries me.”
Ramírez has good cause for concern. During the first bout of border wall building in neighboring Cameron County a decade ago, at least one small historic ranching cemetery was bulldozed. That stretch of steel 18-foot fencing was built right on top of the gravesites, which probably dated back to the late 19th or early 20th century, according to Gene Fernandez, site manager of the Brownsville Museum and a local historian. Fernandez said Cameron County alone has anywhere between 100 and 120 hidden or forgotten ranching cemeteries.
Of the burial sites that were bulldozed, Fernandez described it as a small family plot, containing three or four burials. He does not know who they were, he said. “When the advance team was out there doing the earth moving, a local man told them there were some old burials there, a family plot, and the guy in charge just blatantly said, ‘We don’t have it on our map.’ And that’s as far as it went,” Fernandez said.
In 2008, Ned Norris Jr., chair of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona, testified during a congressional hearing that a similar incident had happened on ancestral land during the construction of a border barrier. “Fragments of human remains were observed in the tire tracks of the heavy construction equipment,” said Norris. “Imagine a bulldozer parking in your family graveyard, turning up bones. This is our reality.”
Curious to learn more about what happened in Brownsville, I tracked down the local man, and he confirmed what Fernandez had told me, though he asked me not to use his name because he fears retaliation. He said the bulldozing of the burial sites in Brownsville had happened in June 2009. “The contractor said he had no knowledge of the burial sites on his map when I told him about it. They just kept building.” He said he did not remember the names of the people who were buried there, but that there were once wooden crosses there. The crosses had disappeared by 2009, he said, though there were still empty glass votive candles around the gravesites.
Kiewit, the company in charge of the construction in 2009, declined to comment, referring the request to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Fernandez, who is also chair of the Cemeteries Committee for the Cameron County Historical Commission, said the destruction of the burial site in Brownsville is the only such incident he’s aware of, and it happened “before I was active down here.” Fernandez says he now serves as a liaison on a CBP border security committee to make sure no other historic graves are destroyed.
In Cameron County, some historic cemeteries have already ended up behind the wall in the roughly mile-wide strip of land between the Rio Grande and the steel and concrete barrier — what many locals now call “no man’s land.”
Photo: Nathan Lambrecht/The Monitor via AP
Three generations of Juan Jose Gonzalez’s family are buried in the Santa Rosalia Cemetery, which dates back to the 1800s and is now behind an 18-foot border fence in Brownsville.
“The wall is very intimidating,” said Gonzalez. “People think they can’t go there because it’s not safe, or it’s Mexico. And if they are undocumented, they won’t take the chance because there are Border Patrol agents roaming around and visible at all times.”
Gonzalez, a local middle school teacher, started the Santa Rosalia Cemetery Preservation Society two years ago to make sure the cemetery was not forgotten behind the imposing barrier. He said he encourages relatives to visit their loved ones there, despite the wall. “I tell them it’s safe to go, it’s OK.”
But now he’s worried that their access to their loved ones at the cemetery could be cut off. For the last decade, there has been a gap in the wall where a road leads to the cemetery’s entrance. CBP is building a large metal gate there now, which concerns Gonzalez. “I haven’t spoken with CBP myself, but I’ve heard they may keep it open during the day, but close it at night,” he said. “No one really knows.”
Sylvia Ramírez fears something similar will happen to her ancestors at Jackson Ranch and the Eli Jackson Cemetery. They’ll be walled off from their descendants, or even worse, their graves desecrated to make way for Trump’s wall. “We’re not under any illusion that we can stop it,” she said. “But maybe if there’s enough of us, we can still make some noise and slow it down.”
In Hidalgo County, the historic cemeteries the Jackson clan is fighting to save have a better chance than most, because they are so well-documented. Roseann Bacha-Garza, a historian with the University of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, has been piecing together the history of Jackson Ranch and its importance in the Underground Railroad during the Civil War era. “This history is so little known and not enough attention has been paid to it,” said Bacha-Garza. “Most Americans have no idea that the last land battle of the Civil War actually happened here — and a month after the war was technically over. The waters of the Rio Grande were considered neutral territory, because of Mexico, and the Union could not blockade the Confederacy, some of who were flying Mexican flags on their ships. Tejanos fought here, the U.S. Colored Troops too,” she said.
Four years ago, Bacha-Garza and other scholars at the university launched a program called the RGV Civil War Trail Project to document important cultural artifacts and history in the region. So far, they’ve created a series of bilingual podcasts and a tourism guide of Civil War history in the area, a history that is now being taught in the schools for the first time. “We’ve developed a curriculum and lesson plans and been working with teachers, so they can take their students on field trips up and down the 200-mile Civil War Trail in the Rio Grande Valley,” she said. “We’re trying to instill community pride and uncover the past so that children can get a sense of their cultural heritage.”
The trail largely follows the present-day Military Highway, which runs east and west along the border. In the Civil War era, it was a well-trodden route between Fort Ringgold in rural Starr County and Fort Brown in the busy port city of Brownsville, which was used by both Confederate and Union troops.
Photo: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Intercept
Jackson Ranch was an important stopping point along the way. Nathaniel Jackson was a loyal Unionist. Another member of the community, Abraham Rutledge, fought as a partisan ranger for the Confederacy. Cemeteries from these old ranching communities, like Jackson Ranch, dot both sides of the Military Highway along the river.
Bacha-Garza said she’s deeply saddened by the idea that Jackson Ranch and other historical sites they’ve mapped in the last four years will soon be behind a border wall.
The story of Jackson Ranch should be better known, she said. During a tumultuous time in America’s history, when brother fought against brother, people of different races and religions formed a vibrant mixed community on the Texas border that still flourishes. “It’s very important regional history,” she said. “And this heritage will be cut off from us.”
This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, where Melissa del Bosque is a Lannan reporting fellow.
The post Trump’s Border Wall Would Destroy Historic Gravesites in South Texas appeared first on The Intercept.
Joe Crowley, the longtime New York congressperson who was unseated in a primary by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, remains extraordinarily popular among both Democrats and Republicans in the House, making him K Street’s biggest whale for 2019. Among the closest to landing him, according to sources familiar with Crowley’s post-congressional employment journey, is the video game industry’s lobby group, known as the Entertainment Software Association.
Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and Ubisoft are only some of the members of the ESA. Politico first reported on Monday that Big Console is among the potential landing spots for Crowley. The former New York congressperson has also had early discussions with two other groups, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and Hogan Lovells, according to the report.
A spokesperson for the ESA said that Big Console is “not commenting on the search process. However, we will make an announcement when the time is appropriate.” The video game industry’s top legislative concerns involve rules around data privacy — they collect an awful lot of data — as well as intellectual property, patent law, and net neutrality regulations.
The new occupant of Crowley’s former New York congressional seat has made regular use of the platform most popular with gamers, Twitch, which is largely ignored by other politicians. She called into a Donkey Kong stream Saturday night to raise funds for trans rights.
Here’s @aoc talking about how Nintendo 64 was the best system. She’s on @twitch helping to raise money for trans kids. pic.twitter.com/cJIfUif1mv
— New Super Blood Wolf Moon Bros. U Deluxe (@GenePark) January 20, 2019
Several outgoing members of Congress have already made their way through the revolving door. Republican Jon Kyl, a longtime senator-turned-corporate-lobbyist-turned-senator-turned-corporate-lobbyist, returned to his previous lobbying job. And former Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lamar Smith now work for Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
Earlier this month, House Democrats unveiled H.R.1, a sweeping anti-corruption bill aimed at curtailing the role of money in politics, regulating foreign and domestic lobbying, and expanding voting rights, among other proposals.
As an entrenched incumbent who raked in corporate cash, Crowley faced accusations of engaging in nepotism and enriching those close to him for years. Ocasio-Cortez made corporate cash and Crowley’s Wall Street support central to her campaign, and she won in part by rejecting corporate donors and relying on grassroots organizing instead. Crowley, boss of the Queens machine, has not given up the reins back home. This fall, he was reelected Queens County Democratic Chair by voice vote at a private meeting in an Elmhurst diner.
Even before entering office, Ocasio-Cortez began to give rare insight into some of the lesser-known effects of money’s role in politics. She slammed a bipartisan Congressional orientation last month for including lobbyists but no labor leaders. “Our ‘bipartisan’ Congressional orientation is cohosted by a corporate lobbyist group. Other members have quietly expressed to me their concern that this wasn’t told to us in advance,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “Lobbyists are here. Goldman Sachs is here. Where’s labor? Activists? Frontline community leaders?”
Heads of major trade associations routinely pull salaries that are seven, sometimes eight, figures. Oftentimes, they do not register as lobbyists, as the grunt work of roaming the halls of Congress is left to lower-level staff.
The post Could Joe Crowley End Up Being a Lobbyist for Big Console? appeared first on The Intercept.
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