If through the years you’ve read Point Of Viəw you know that events are not always what they seem to be. Our journeys back continue with the brutal days of eruptions that wracked Cleveland in the late 1960s. Unfortunately, Cleveland police, the Plain Dealer and others made the trip more dangerous to the community.

(When following links to back issues of Point Of Viəw, you should click on the Download button in the upper-right-hand corner of the Cleveland Memory Project screen for ease of reading.)

In October and November of 1969, I produced two issues of the newsletter—Plain Dealing From Bottom and The Masotti Report Or ‘Neville’s Novel’—that uncovered misdeeds of the Plain Dealer and problems with the official exam of the Glenville disturbances by the President’s Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.

The PD sank as low as a newspaper could with an “expose” that claimed Mayor Carl Stokes cleared two black bodyguards of gun charges. The two men were arrested on April 4, 1967, the day of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King. They were guarding Floyd McKissick, head of the Congress of Racial Equality. It was part of the peace-keeping Stokes pursued to maintain peace in Cleveland. Other cities were enduring racial conflict. There was no trust that the Cleveland police would do their job.

The PD belatedly published its “expose” well after the fact and when other media outlets, including the Press, had decided to ignore the incident as not worthy publication or exposure on TV. But not the PD and its brazen racist approach.

In the other issue, a special report about the President’s Commission with work done by the Civil Violence Center at Case-Western Reserve University, I found that staff members questioned the final report labeling it “Neville’s Novel,” to indicate their questioning of its final version as at least part whitewash.

Any student of American History understands the vital importance of free land. Free land is what made America great. Free land is why millions of emigrants left their ancestral homes and traveled thousands of miles to change their fortunes. America was great when borders were just lines on someone else’s maps. That lasted for about our first 100 years.

Making borders solid, building walls, is the opposite of making America great again.

(Please understand that I use the word free in free land fully recognizing that first peoples, as well as other European invaders occupied all the land that our government would later take by force and redistribute. Anyone disputing this view, please read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.)

Between 1848, the end of the Mexican-American war settled with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and 1963 with the Chamizal dispute, our southern border was literally fluid, set by the meanderings of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo del Norte. Our northern border with Canada has a longer history beginning with the 1783 Treaty of Paris and ending in with the eponymous Treaty of 1908. Historians will also tell you that we invaded both countries, more than once with the intent to push both borders back and make America even greater. Mexico and Canada (still part of Great Britain) weren’t having it and by the end of the 19th century, Manifest Destiny was a done deal.

William S. Burroughs is credited with the quote, “When you stop growing you start dying.” That is demonstrably true. There is no stasis for people or countries, and that scares the fuck out of a lot of Americans.

Francisco Cantú, writing in When the Frontier Becomes the Wall for The New Yorker, ledes:

On Election Day, 2018, residents of Nogales, Arizona, began to notice a single row of coiled razor wire growing across the top of the city’s border wall. The barrier has been a stark feature of the town’s urban landscape for more than twenty years, rolling up and over hilltops as it cleaves the American town from its larger, Mexican counterpart. But, in the weeks and months that followed, additional coils were gradually installed along the length of the fence by active-duty troops sent to the border by President Trump, giving residents the sense that they were living inside an occupied city. By February, concertina wire covered the wall from top to bottom, and the Nogales City Council passed a unanimous resolution calling for its removal. Such wire has only one purpose, the resolution declared—to harm or to kill. It is something “only found in a war, prison, or battle setting.”

Living in Tucson, barely an hour north of the border, I have become familiar with both sides of Nogales, crossing over the border to shop, attend meetings, take gifts or supplies to deported friends, or volunteer at a soup kitchen for migrants. In December, as I walked through the pedestrian crossing, I passed by uniformed soldiers transporting long ladders to one side of the port of entry, but I barely registered their significance. The militarization of the borderlands has become so commonplace that one often grows numb to its manifestations. It can seem distant until it reaches out to touch you. Only months later, as I watched images of the concertina wire proliferating on my social-media feeds, did I finally understand what those ladders had been for.

In “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America” (Metropolitan), the historian Greg Grandin argues that America’s urge to wall off its borders marks the death of our most potent myth—the galvanizing vision of men and women seeking freedom along a vast frontier, a space for reinvention, unburdened by society, history, and one’s own past. Since the very inception of our country, he writes, the presence of a frontier has “allowed the United States to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems, such as economic inequality, racism, crime and punishment, and violence.” The ever-shifting and expanding frontier also acted as a physical barrier against invasion; as a national-security buffer against foreign enemies, Native Americans, and Mexicans; and as a tenuous escape valve for freed slaves, European migrants, and discontented laborers from crowded Eastern cities.

America was last great, was last growing, when we still had that tenuous escape valve. Cantú continues:

In The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, the historian Greg Grandin argues that America’s urge to wall off its borders marks the death of our most potent myth—the galvanizing vision of men and women seeking freedom along a vast frontier, a space for reinvention, unburdened by society, history, and one’s own past. Since the very inception of our country, he writes, the presence of a frontier has “allowed the United States to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems, such as economic inequality, racism, crime and punishment, and violence.” The ever-shifting and expanding frontier also acted as a physical barrier against invasion; as a national-security buffer against foreign enemies, Native Americans, and Mexicans; and as a tenuous escape valve for freed slaves, European migrants, and discontented laborers from crowded Eastern cities.

…By the dawn of the twentieth century, with Native Americans dwindling in number and largely relegated to reservations, the frontier had been fully transformed into something romantic and beckoning—an entire way of life. It became, Grandin writes, “a state of mind, a cultural zone, a sociological term of comparison, a type of society, an adjective, a noun, a national myth, a disciplining mechanism, an abstraction, and an aspiration.” For the dominant white culture, the word meant freedom.

The frontier also provided a new way of understanding American identity, history, and politics. At the end of the nineteenth century, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced his “frontier thesis”—the idea that, in his words, “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” American identity hinged upon its perpetual expansion. Our democracy, Turner wrote, “came out of the American forest and it gained strength each time it touched a new frontier.” Expansion was thus a fundamental good and an integral part of what set us apart from Europe—it was the very thing that made America great. But on the frontier, Grandin reminds us, settlers won greater freedom for themselves only by “putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their liberty in opposition to the people of color they put down.”

“The End of the Myth” aims, in part, to reposition race-based violence to the center of the frontier narrative, exposing it as foundational to today’s “border brutalism.”

(That myth has driven Hollywood for more than a century as noted by Randall Munroe in Westerns.)

When we could no longer spread our real borders, we did what every country in history has done, we turned from nation building to empire building. Cantú begins the second section of his piece this way:

As settlement supplanted America’s physical frontier, a new project arose to extend Manifest Destiny beyond its former geographic limits. American imperialism provided the opportunity for “a new revolution,” Woodrow Wilson declared in 1901, a little more than a decade before ascending to the Presidency. During the Spanish-American War of 1898 and ensuing military campaigns in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, Americans had, in Wilson’s view, “made new frontiers for ourselves beyond the seas.” This form of expansion allowed a nation still recovering from the Civil War and Reconstruction to channel its aggression outward once more. Former Confederate soldiers were able to don the uniform of a newly unified country and earn patriotic recognition while still fighting to exert racial superiority over people of color. Letters sent home by soldiers enlisted in these campaigns, Grandin tells us, “are notably similar, lightheartedly narrating to family and friends how they would shoot ‘niggers,’ lynch ‘niggers,’ release ‘niggers’ into the swamp to die. . . .” Like those who had collected Native American scalps first as mercenaries and then as soldiers, these men learned that America’s new frontier was a place that could legitimatize a racist thirst for violence.

All of this more than academic for Cantú:

Because I served as a Border Patrol agent, from 2008 to 2012, Grandin’s account brought up more personal memories for me as well. Despite its white-supremacist roots, the Border Patrol has evolved into an agency where more than half of its members are of Latinx descent. Just as the military has long promised social mobility to immigrants and minority populations, the Border Patrol provides rare access to financial security and the privileges of full citizenship, especially for those living in rural border communities. In America, even at the individual level, citizenship politics often wins out over identity politics.

From there Cantú brings his experiences home:

As a member of the patrol, I never witnessed anything as straightforwardly depraved as the beatings, torture, rape, and murder Grandin describes. But I often heard romanticized stories of “the old patrol,” a lament for the days when agents had free rein across the borderlands, lighting abandoned cars on fire and “tuning up” smugglers and migrants at will. As young trainees, my colleagues and I were taken to storied places in the desert—a remote pass where earlier generations of agents were rumored to have pushed migrants from clifftops and hidden their corpses, a stretch of road where an agent had run over a Native American lying drunk and asleep on the road, an isolated patch of scrubland where agents had force-fed smugglers fistfuls of marijuana and turned them loose to walk through the wilderness barefoot and stripped to their underwear.

The forms of violence that I observed and was complicit in were subtler—the destruction of food and water caches, a pervasive attitude of dismissal and neglect, a persistent use of dehumanizing slurs. Grandin’s description of a McAllen, Texas, police force that came together in the nineteen-eighties to gleefully watch highlights of brutal interrogation sessions of migrants called to my mind a day when a senior officer burst into the computer room where I was gathered with a group of junior agents. He interrupted our work to project onto a screen at the front of the room photographs of a body he had just encountered in the desert. In the images, he was squatting, with two thumbs up and a broad smile, beside a dead man whose flesh had rotted from his bones after months under the unforgiving sun. It was meant to be, as Grandin observes about the videos of the McAllen interrogation sessions, “a bonding ritual used to initiate new recruits.”

Part of Grandin’s achievement in “The End of the Myth” is to situate today’s calls to fortify our borders in relation to the centuries of racial animus that preceded them. Donald Trump can be distinguished from his predecessors, Grandin argues, because of his willingness to meet conservative and nativist demands at their logical end point—by closing off instead of moving out. By contrast, his predecessors over the past four decades each found ways of channelling aggression outward by identifying new frontiers and promising boundlessness in a shrinking world. Reagan pursued anti-Communist wars in Central America by declaring it “our southern frontier”; George H. W. Bush saw the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and imagined “new markets for American products,” proclaiming that “in the frontiers ahead, there are no borders”; Clinton declared, as he signed NAFTA, that “this new global economy is our new frontier”; and George W. Bush launched a global war on terror with the promise to “extend the frontiers of freedom.” After America’s military failure in Iraq and its economic failure in the Great Recession, the nation’s first African-American President arrived in office at the precise moment when hatred was coming home from the fringes.

With Trump—the first President since the dawn of American imperialism to renounce the Turnerian call for rejuvenation through expansion—“America finds itself at the end of its myth,” Grandin asserts, and is finally being forced to confront “extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring.” The idea of the border wall has thus replaced the myth of American limitlessness, Grandin concludes, serving as “a monument to the final closing of the frontier.” For all that, Trump’s pledge to erect a “big, beautiful wall,” from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, serves many of the same purposes as the earlier expansionist rhetoric—the border remains abstract in the minds of most Americans, yet it represents a problem and a promise distinct enough to distract from more immediate and enduring social ills. A completed border wall, and the victory it would represent to many, is thus conveniently unattainable, allowing for the same fleeing forward that has always tugged at American history. After all, as Grandin shrewdly observes, “the point isn’t to actually build ‘the wall’ but to constantly announce the building of the wall.”

In the thesis sentence for his concluding paragraph, Cantú writes:

What makes the wall terrifying to so many who live along the border is, in part, the way it serves as an inescapable reminder of the brutalities and injustices that have long been unleashed upon the frontier. The very presence of a barrier represents a profound psychological, political, ecological, cultural, and spatial reordering.

Walls serve two, sometimes unequal but always simultaneous, functions: The keep some out and some in. We may argue one over the other, but we must consider and accept Cantú’s profound psychological, political, ecological, cultural, and spatial reordering.

I’ve crossed many borders many times. For most of them I needed only my driver’s license or my military ID. I didn’t even own a passport until around 1988 when I took a business trip to The Dominican Republic. If we acquiesce to erecting physical barriers we will only succeed in cutting off our own national oxygen.

Some 150 years ago we fought an bloody internal war to transform ourselves from a people where The United of America are to The United States of America is. That transition pissed off a lot of people. In many ways, I think they’re still pissed.

Bonus No. 1: One of the important, for me, aspects of reading The New Yorker is educational for me as a writer. Not only do I get to read the best writing, but I also get to continuously expand my vocabulary. Reading Peter Schjeldahl’s Joan Miró’s Modernism for Everybody was like that. I didn’t mark and particular part of the piece for consideration, but I did highlight a number of the words Schjeldahl used, beginning with this sentence: Neither of us had studied art history. We thirsted not for knowledge, which might have involved attending morning classes after talking all night, but for glory of some inchoate kind. Other words included:

I would soon drop out of school and work my way east, as a newspaper reporter, with a mad conviction that I knew what awaited me, a tyro snob, lacking only proper opinions.

But esteeming Miró proved more than O.K., because he figured as a major prophet of Abstract Expressionism, still the cynosure of American greatness, which felt like a birthright to me.

and:

His synthesis of painting and sculpture, being sui generis, had not led to developments by subsequent artists.

Ah, words…

Evolution has taught our brains to forget nearly everything our senses collect in a single day. Yes, I did notice the color of every single car I passed while driving to the grocery, but I couldn’t recall that list if my life depended upon it because my life doesn’t depend upon it. We notice that on which our lives depend or what we are thinking about.

This is why affirmations work for so many people. If I write: I will publish a novel by the end of the year, 25 times each morning, then I am more likely to do so because I am constantly keeping that goal at the top of my awareness.

Sometimes suggestions or events in our lives accomplish the same task. The classic is the admonition: Don’t think about dancing pink elephants. I’ve never meet anyone able to follow that direction. The dancing pink elephants are stuck in your head like a cute kitten GIF. Life changing events—like the death of a parent—stay with us much longer.

Nearly three years ago I lost my father and I continue to see him in little ways as I go about day. Before his death I most likely not have annotated James Marcus’ Family Medicine in my most recent copy of The New Yorker, but he did and I did.

Marcus’s tale of living with his aging and ailing father is almost clinical until the first section break where he writes:

Everything I have described so far seems to have happened to somebody else—to somebody else’s father. But the death of a parent happens to you, and, once it starts, it never stops. It dislodges everything. “Is he sick?” my friend Peter asked me a few days after my father drank from the invisible cup. “Or is he dying?” At that moment, it occurred to me with absolute certainty that he was dying, and I said so. I felt the truth of it, and also a terrible sense of disloyalty, as if I were abandoning my father.

I remember that exact moment in my own life. While my three younger siblings all live in the town where we grew up, I got the hell out of Dodge. I did so because of my father. Not because I was running away from him, but rather because he showed me in a hundred ways that there was a world beyond Marietta. I visited two or three times a year—Thanksgiving, Christmas and Father’s Day, but never to stay.

Since his death I have only been back, I think, twice, maybe three times and I have no desire to go back. I feel guilty about that, but without my father there I just don’t feel the pull. I love my siblings—they’re all wonderful people—but they have their own lives and their own families and their own demands. I’m just not part of that anymore.

Toward the end of his piece, Marcus writes about his father’s last days and again, as a son, I connected with his words.

My father’s health had attained a confusing state of equipoise. He wasn’t plunging toward death; he was in a holding pattern, and that meant he was no longer being treated. He had to go somewhere, but it wasn’t quite clear where he belonged—not among the sick in the hospital ward, but not among the healthy, happy, immortal beings down in the street. So he was sent, in an ambulance, to a rehab facility. There he endured a regimen of walking and standing and bending his arms for just a single day before coming down with double pneumonia. Another ambulance was summoned, and he returned to the hospital, where he was parked in a holding room downstairs. The room was dim. His body looked small and defenseless and on the verge of being abandoned—by whom, I wasn’t sure.

I no longer knew how afraid to be, how sad to be, how hopeful to be. Now, trying to remember those weeks, I see myself at my father’s bedside. He’s attempting to remove the oxygen mask that is strapped over his mouth, the elastic looped lightly behind his big, intelligent-looking ears. He’s not really present. Perhaps I’m not really present. Perhaps he wants to speak, or simply abhors the persistent pressure of the oxygen piped into his mouth and nostrils. He tries to claw off the plastic mask and I keep putting it back. “Dad, it needs to stay on,” I tell him. “You need to breathe.”

This isn’t the last thing I want to say to him. There are so many others: words of reassurance, gossip about Toscanini’s sex life, jokes from “Duck Soup,” the thousand and one sentiments that are seldom expressed by fathers and sons of a certain age, including the fact that I love him very much.

The final image I have of my father is not from his funeral, but rather of him sitting up in his hospital bed. He’s awake and, in that strange way I suppose the dying are, aware of the gathered family. I’d been in Marietta for a long weekend but the time came when I had to get back up the road to see my students the next day.

I kissed my father on the top of his head and told him that I loved him. I turned to leave but then Sherrie, my oldest sister-in-law called out to me: Jeff, he’s looking at you.”

I turned back around and he was. He didn’t say anything. In my imagination he didn’t need to. His gaze said everything.

Some years ago Sam Miller called me on the telephone. He was obviously playacting. He played the cautious caller. The very wealthy man was talking to a guy who wore patches on his clothes and eyeglasses at the time. He wasn’t sure he should talk to me, he said. He played as if he were fearful of what he was doing. He had a reason.

He invited me to dinner. Should he really do it, he seemed to continue his pretense. In the end it was an invite. I accepted.

The meet-up took place at Elsner’s in a back room that was apparently his to use as is pleased. He was with his wife, son and his companion and a surprise guest—Dorothy Fuldheim. So it had to be before 1989 when she died. She was known as a crusty TV woman, possibly the first woman anchor. Fuldheim once tossed hippie Jerry Rubin off her show as it was being shown. Gutsy.

I don’t remember much of what we talked about. But I remember Sam continued his playacting at the end. He warned me in fake mafia-type language that I shouldn’t make this public. It was a continued pretense of an unstated warning that I could suffer consequences.
One thing resulted from the meeting. Sam’s son, who ran a news counter in the Terminal Tower where Forest City had its headquarters, wanted to carry Point of View, the newsletter I published. I did bring issues of Point of View to him and sold a few copies, even some which called out Forest City.

There was another dinner.

One Friday night my wife and I went to Sand’s to get a bite to eat. The place was totally empty except for one booth. The receptionist who seated us took us to the very next booth. In the occupied booth was Sam, his wife and another man. Oh, Sam said, as he saw me, “The most inaccurate reporter in town.” I guess by this time I had really gotten under his skin. Sam and the Ratners of Forest City always made good targets. If you read the Plain Dealer obituary it appears he was loved and respected. That’s because through the years the PD paid homage to him and his gang but rarely looked behind the facade. That’s journalism in Cleveland. Sam’s best friends.

Here is just one of many Point of Viǝws [click on download to view, JH] that take Sam and his ilk to task.

We play a game with ourselves here in America. We pretend that propaganda is bad. We do so because propaganda, more correctly referred to as agitprop, was a Communist tool. But, they learned agitation and propaganda from us. We use the terms advertising and public relations and pretend there’s a Chinese wall between them and journalism. We suck at it.

That’s why I got a chuckle out of the choice made by the copy editor at The New Yorker who put this subhead on Jane Myer’s The Making of the Fox News White House: Fox News has always been partisan. But has it become propaganda? That’s a double whammy: first, all news is partisan, the only difference among outlets is to what degree do they try to hide the fact; and second, see above.

Myer’s story, however, has real appeal because her central question is who’s in charge: President Donald John Trump or Rupert Murdoch? She ledes:

In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message.

But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn’t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling with Administration officials, at one point hugging Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The pool report noted that Hannity was seen “huddling” with the White House communications director, Bill Shine. After the photo op, Hannity had an exclusive on-air interview with Trump. Politico later reported that it was Hannity’s seventh interview with the President, and Fox’s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as “fake news.”

I understand that the numbers here are all about access, but access is for lazy journalists. Yes, we all cultivate sources, but we don’t rely on officials sources because they are the ones most likely to spin their agenda and being denied access to official sources makes a journalist’s job more difficult, more of a challenge, but if you want easy, become a conservative radio commentator. I give Fox News credit for being upfront about being a shill and anyone who thinks Rupert Murdoch ever had any interest in journalism should take a close look at his track record in England. Even Murdoch, I don’t think, could have predicted where his organization has gone. Mayer continues:

The Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn’t do so now. “Fox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it’s morphed into something that is not even news,” she says. “It’s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.” The feedback loop is so strong, she notes, that Trump “will even pick up an error made by Fox,” as when he promoted on Twitter a bogus Fox story claiming that South Africa was “seizing land from white farmers.” Rubin told me, “It’s funny that Bill Shine went over to the White House. He could have stayed in his old job. The only difference is payroll.”

Murdoch had a vision in the beginning, Mayer writes:

Murdoch could not have foreseen that Trump would become President, but he was a visionary about the niche audience that became Trump’s base. In 1994, Murdoch laid out an audacious plan to Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton. Murdoch, who had been a U.S. citizen for less than a decade, invited Hundt to his Benedict Canyon estate for dinner. After the meal, Murdoch led him outside to take in the glittering view of the Los Angeles Basin, and confided that he planned to launch a radical new television network. Unlike the three established networks, which vied for the same centrist viewers, his creation would follow the unapologetically lowbrow model of the tabloids that he published in Australia and England, and appeal to a narrow audience that would be entirely his. His core viewers, he said, would be football fans; with this aim in mind, he had just bought the rights to broadcast N.F.L. games. Hundt told me, “What he was really saying was that he was going after a working-class audience. He was going to carve out a base—what would become the Trump base.”

Mayer adds:

Blair Levin, at that time the chief of staff at the F.C.C. and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, says, “Fox’s great insight wasn’t necessarily that there was a great desire for a conservative point of view.” More erudite conservatives, he says, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Bill Kristol, couldn’t have succeeded as Fox has. Levin observes, “The genius was seeing that there’s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.”

Much deeper in her article, Mayer hits the Federal Communications Commission and how it created a Fox-Friendly cesspool.

[Reed] Hundt, the former F.C.C. chairman, told me that “there have been three moves that have taken place in the regulatory and antitrust world” involving telecommunications “that are extremely unusual, and the only way to explain them is that they’re pro-Fox, pro-Fox, and pro-Fox.”

Last June, after only six months of deliberation, the Trump Administration approved Fox’s bid to sell most of its entertainment assets to Disney, for seventy-one billion dollars. The Murdoch family will receive more than two billion dollars in the deal, and will become a major stockholder in the combined company. The Justice Department expressed no serious antitrust concerns, even though the combined company will reportedly account for half the box-office revenue in America. Trump publicly congratulated Murdoch even before the Justice Department signed off on the deal, and claimed that it would create jobs. In fact, the consolidation is projected to result in thousands of layoffs.

In July, the F.C.C. blocked Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative rival to Fox, from combining with the Tribune Media Company. The F.C.C. argued that the deal would violate limits on the number of TV stations one entity can own, upending Sinclair’s hope of becoming the next Fox.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, went to court in an effort to stop A. T. & T.’s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN. Time Warner saw the deal as essential to its survival at a time when the media business is increasingly dominated by giant competitors such as Google and Facebook. Murdoch understood this impulse: in 2014, 21st Century Fox had tried, unsuccessfully, to buy Time Warner. For him, opposing his rivals’ deal was a matter of shrewd business. Trump also opposed the deal, but many people suspected that his objection was a matter of petty retaliation against CNN. Although Presidents have traditionally avoided expressing opinions about legal matters pending before the judicial branch, Trump has bluntly criticized the plan. The day after the Justice Department filed suit to stop it, he declared the proposed merger “not good for the country.” Trump also claimed that he was “not going to get involved,” and the Justice Department has repeatedly assured the public that he hasn’t done so.

However, in the late summer of 2017, a few months before the Justice Department filed suit, Trump ordered Gary Cohn, then the director of the National Economic Council, to pressure the Justice Department to intervene. According to a well-informed source, Trump called Cohn into the Oval Office along with John Kelly, who had just become the chief of staff, and said in exasperation to Kelly, “I’ve been telling Cohn to get this lawsuit filed and nothing’s happened! I’ve mentioned it fifty times. And nothing’s happened. I want to make sure it’s filed. I want that deal blocked!”

Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs, evidently understood that it would be highly improper for a President to use the Justice Department to undermine two of the most powerful companies in the country as punishment for unfavorable news coverage, and as a reward for a competing news organization that boosted him. According to the source, as Cohn walked out of the meeting he told Kelly, “Don’t you fucking dare call the Justice Department. We are not going to do business that way.”

How all this has played out can be seen by comparing Fox’s coverage of President Barack Hussein Obama’s eight years in office to Trump’s first two years.

As Murdoch’s relations with the White House have warmed, so has Fox’s coverage of Trump. During the Obama years, Fox’s attacks on the President could be seen as reflecting the adversarial role traditionally played by the press. With Trump’s election, the network’s hosts went from questioning power to defending it. Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor who co-directs the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, says, “Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.” The network has provided a non-stop counternarrative in which the only collusion is between Hillary Clinton and Russia; Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is perpetrating a “coup” by the “deep state”; Trump and his associates aren’t corrupt, but America’s law-enforcement officials and courts are; illegal immigration isn’t at a fifteen-year low, it’s “an invasion”; and news organizations that offer different perspectives are “enemies of the American people.”

Benkler’s assessment is based on an analysis of millions of American news stories that he and two co-authors, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, undertook for their 2018 book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics.” Benkler told me that he and his co-authors had expected to find “symmetric polarization” in the left-leaning and the right-leaning media outlets. Instead, they discovered that the two poles of America’s media ecosystem function very differently. “It’s not the right versus the left,” Benkler says. “It’s the right versus the rest.”

Most American news outlets try to adhere to facts. When something proves erroneous, they run corrections, or, as Benkler and his co-authors write, “they check each other.” Far-left Web sites post as many bogus stories as far-right ones do, but mainstream and liberal news organizations tend to ignore suspiciously extreme material. Conservative media outlets, however, focus more intently on confirming their audience’s biases, and are much more susceptible to disinformation, propaganda, and outright falsehoods (as judged by neutral fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact). Case studies conducted by the authors show that lies and distortions on the right spread easily from extremist Web sites to mass-media outlets such as Fox, and only occasionally get corrected.

Nothing, writes Mayer, has formalized the partnership between Fox and Trump more than the appointment, in July, 2018, of Bill Shine, the former co-president of Fox News, as director of communications and deputy chief of staff at the White House. She continues:

At the White House, Bill Shine, just as he did at Fox, defers to the man he calls “the boss.” When Trump became irritated by the White House press corps, Shine acted as his enforcer. Disregarding the norms protecting press freedom, he tried to strip the aggressive CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta of his White House pass; he also attempted to “disinvite” the CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins from covering a Rose Garden event. She had annoyed the President earlier that day with a question about Michael Cohen.

Shine also berated Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the Times, after hearing—inaccurately—that Baker, at a summit in Buenos Aires, had laughed when Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinz? Abe, congratulated Trump on his “historic victory” in the midterm elections. Baker declined to comment, but a colleague of his witnessed Shine pulling Baker aside from the press pool. Shine poked a finger in his face and demanded to know if he’d laughed at Trump. The incident was settled amicably after Baker sent Shine an audio recording proving that the accusation was false. But Shine’s attempt to police a veteran reporter was reminiscent of the culture of intimidation at Fox News.

Cracks, however, writes Mayer, are appearing in the facade:

A source close to Trump says that the President has been complaining that Shine hasn’t been aggressive enough. Late last year, Trump told the source, “Shine promised me my press coverage would get better, but it’s gotten worse.” The source says, “Trump thought he was getting Roger Ailes but instead he got Roger Ailes’s gofer.”

Ailes, who became the CEO of Fox News in 1996, left that position to become an advisor to the Trump campaign in 2016. That shift plays prominently in Mayer’s conclusions.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic veteran of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, went on Fox regularly for more than ten years. In November, 2017, he had a heated on-air exchange with a Fox host, Melissa Francis, about the Republican tax bill. When Francis hectored him, accusing him of merely repeating talking points, he vowed on the air never to return. “It was always clear that this wasn’t just another news organization,” Rosenberg told me. “But when Ailes departed, and Trump was elected, the network changed. They became more combative, and started treating me like an enemy, not an opponent.” With Shine joining Trump at the White House, he said, “it’s as if the on-air talent at Fox now have two masters—the White House and the audience.” In his view, the network has grown so allied with the White House in the demonization of Trump’s critics that “Fox is no longer conservative—it’s anti-democratic.”

After Fox completes the spinoff of its entertainment properties to Disney, the news channel will be part of a much smaller company, under the day-to-day supervision of Lachlan Murdoch. Like Rupert, Lachlan is a conservative, but there’s talk around Fox that he may want to bring the news network closer to the center-right. The biggest test yet of Fox’s journalistic standards is the impending showdown over Mueller’s findings. For two years, the network has been priming its viewers to respond with extraordinary anger should the country’s law-enforcement authorities close in on the President. According to Media Matters, in the first year after Mueller was appointed Hannity alone aired four hundred and eighty-six segments attacking the federal criminal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election; thirty-eight per cent of those segments claimed that law-enforcement officials had broken the law. In recent weeks, Hannity has spoken of “a coup,” and a guest on Laura Ingraham’s program, the lawyer Joseph diGenova, declared, “It’s going to be total war. And, as I say to my friends, I do two things—I vote and I buy guns.”

Jerry Taylor, the co-founder of the Niskanen Center, a think tank in Washington for moderates, says, “In a hypothetical world without Fox News, if President Trump were to be hit hard by the Mueller report, it would be the end of him. But, with Fox News covering his back with the Republican base, he has a fighting chance, because he has something no other President in American history has ever had at his disposal—a servile propaganda operation.”

Fox will continue to have our president’s back only as long as there is money to be made. Everyone at Fox knows that. The question is: does anyone in the Oval Office know that?

Just as we saw the survivors of the Parkland mass shooting take control of their future, so too are we seeing the next generation—inspired by Greta Thunberg—take to the steps of their school and their legislators to say that they will not sit politely by while the adults trash their future. Social Media has given those too young to vote a political voice like none known before.

Nader, in Who will Displace the Omniciders? writes:

Citizens challenging the towering threat of climate crisis should never underestimate the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuel corporations. Real engagement with the worsening climate disruption means spending more of our leisure hours on civic action. The fate of future generations and our planet depends on the intensity of these actions.

This was my impression after interviewing Dahr Jamail, author of the gripping new book, The End of Ice, on my Radio Hour. Jamail, wrote books and prize-winning articles, as the leading freelance journalist covering the Bush/Cheney Iraq war and its devastating aftermath. For his latest book, Jamail went to the visible global warming hot spots to get firsthand accounts from victims of climate disruption. His gripping reporting is bolstered by facts from life-long specialists working in the regions he visited.

Readers of The End of Ice are taken on a journey to see what is happening in Alaska, the mountain forests of California, the coral reefs of Australia, the heavily populated lowlands of South Florida, the critical Amazon forest, and other areas threatened Continue Reading »

Other than one attempt in Dr. Dru Evarts’ undergraduate Review and Critique class at Ohio University in the early ’80s, I’ve never tried to understand dance. My own skills are abysmal and Safety Dance really speaks to me. (As much as I enjoy the Glee version, the stellar choreography is just wrong.) The professional world is very different.

Joan Acocella, writing in What Went Wrong at New York City Ballet for The New Yorker, sets the stage:

On the dance stage, human beings place themselves before us much as, in old Italian frescoes, souls came before God: without words, without excuses, without much covering of any kind. They are more or less as they were when they came out of their mothers: flesh and energy, now with the addition of skill. That composite stands for what they are as moral beings, and what, in consequence, they tell us the world is. The better the dancer’s first arabesque penché—the more exact, the more spirited, the more singing its line—the more he or she will embody the promise of the ancient Greeks, lasting at least up to Keats, that beauty, truth, and virtue are inseparable, that we live in a good world.

That’s the fantasy, the tale we tell our children when dance companies perform The Nutcracker for the zillionth time. That is the fantasy that our children hold in their dreams, the fantasy of dancing on the stage and being magical. The magic, however, can be dark.

Such thoughts, however, are unlikely to have occurred to Alexandra Waterbury, a nineteen-year-old model and a former student of the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet’s affiliate academy, on the morning of May 15, 2018. She woke up in the apartment of her twenty-eight-year-old boyfriend, Chase Finlay, a principal dancer at N.Y.C.B., who was away at the time, and thought to check her e-mail on his computer. What she found on the screen was a series of photographs of women’s private parts, including her own, plus a brief clip of her having sex with Finlay.

According to the complaint in a lawsuit that she later filed, there were text messages, too. Finlay, sending someone a photograph of Waterbury naked, asked, “You have any pictures of girls you’ve fucked? I’ll send you some… ballerina girls I’ve made scream and squirt.” The exchanges included several participants, notably two other N.Y.C.B. principals, Amar Ramasar and Zachary Catazaro, and a young donor, Jared Longhitano. “We should get like half a kilo”—of cocaine, one assumes—?“and pour it over the… girls and just violate them,” Longhitano wrote to Catazaro and Finlay. “I bet we could tie some of them up and abuse them like farm animals.” “Or like the sluts they are,” Finlay rejoined. “Yeah,” Longhitano wrote back. “I want them to watch me destroy one of their friends. And they know they’re next. I bet we could triple team.” Finlay also reported that he had just “fucked a 20-year-old ballerina and her sister! That was my first threesome with family members. It was incredible!” In another thread, a former student at the ballet school thanked Finlay for sending a picture of himself and Waterbury engaged in a sex act: “I can’t stop looking at Alex’s tits lol.”

Waterbury got herself a lawyer, Jordan K. Merson, one of the attorneys who had just obtained a settlement in which Michigan State University agreed to pay five hundred million dollars to young gymnasts molested by Larry Nassar. Merson sought a settlement for Waterbury, but N.Y.C.B. refused, and there the matter appeared to rest, until the end of August, when the company announced that Finlay had resigned, and that it had suspended Ramasar and Catazaro after receiving allegations of “inappropriate communications.” A week later, Waterbury’s lawyer filed a lawsuit seeking compensatory and punitive damages for the pain and humiliation she had suffered, together with the damage to her reputation and, therefore, to her job prospects. Soon afterward, Ramasar and Catazaro were fired. (A lawyer for Finlay called the claims “distorted and inaccurate,” and Catazaro’s lawyer said that he would be seeking to have the complaint dismissed. Longhitano declined to comment, and a lawyer for Ramasar argued that one of the women had consented to having her photographs shared.)

Not something any parent wants for their child and all of that is only some 700 words into Acocella’s 4,300-word piece. Reading it all will not be comfortable, but necessary.

Bonus No. 1: Debunking the myth that anti-Zionism is antisemitic

Bonus No. 2: Ilhan Omar and the weaponisation of antisemitism

I’ve never contemplated suicide any form of self harm, but I’ve known friends who did and I know far too many who were successful. The point-of-view can be so different that understanding, entering the minds of people who would end their lives, is nearly impossible. Donald Antrim attempts to chronicle his own journey beginning on a Friday in 2006.

Antrim, writing in Everywhere and Nowhere: A Journey Through Suicide for The New Yorker, begins on the roof of his apartment building in New York:

I was not on the roof to jump. I was not there to kill myself. I was there to die, but dying was not a plan. I was not making decisions, choices, threats, or mistakes. I was, I think—looking back now—in acceptance. It was a relinquishing, though at the time I would not have been able to articulate it. I did not want to die, only felt that I would, or should, or must, and I had my pain and my reasons. If you have had this illness, then you’ve had your reasons; and maybe you’ve believed, or still believe, as I have, that it would be better for others, for all the people who have made the mistake of loving you, or who one day might, if you were gone.

Depression, hysteria, melancholia, nervousness, neurosis, neurasthenia, madness, lunacy, insanity, delirium, derangement, demonic possession, black humors, black bile, yellow bile, the black dog, the blues, the blue devils, a brown study, the vapors, a funk, a storm, the abyss, an inferno, Hell, a pain syndrome, stress, an anxiety disorder, lack of affect, an affective disorder, a mood disorder, panic, loneliness, bad wiring, a screw loose, a mercurial temperament, irritability, schizophrenia, unipolar disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, borderline personality disorder, laziness, pain, rumination, grief, mourning, malingering, unhappiness, hopelessness, sadness, low spirits, invalidism, despondency, dysthymia, detachment, disassociation, dementia praecox, neuralgia, fibromyalgia, oversensitivity, hypersensitivity, idiocy, an unsound mind, cowardice, obstinacy, apathy, recalcitrance, spleen, a broken heart, battle fatigue, shell shock, self-pity, self-indulgence, self-centeredness, weakness, withdrawal, distraction, distemper, a turn in the barrel, a break in a life narrative, bad thoughts, bad feelings, coming undone, coming apart, falling apart, falling to pieces, willfulness, defiance, thoughts of hurting oneself or others, the thousand-yard stare, craziness, rage, misery, mania, morbidity, genius, suicidality, suicidal ideation, aggression, regression, decompensation, drama, breakdown, crackup, catatonia, losing one’s mind, losing one’s shit, losing one’s way, wasting away, psychic disorganization, spiritual despair, shame, raving, the furies, a disease, an enigma, a tragedy, a curse, a sin, and, of course, psychosis—suicide, in the past and in our time, has been called many things. Whatever terms we use, whatever the specific nature of their origins and progress, our so-called mental illnesses are themselves traumatic and stigmatizing. They isolate us from others.

That litany—depression to psychosis-suicide—gripped me. I’ve been sad: over a breakup, or losing a job, but nothing that might be described by any of those words. How do we wrap our heads around a malady with so many synonyms? What saved Antrim, what enabled him to come out the other side and write this piece, were his friends. He continues:

I opened the door to the stairs, stepped through, and drew the bolt behind me. For months, Regan and others had told me that I wasn’t well, that I needed to get better. What did they mean, better? When had I been better—?when had that been? I imagined that I would be in the hospital, in hospitals, for a very long time. I’d been seeing my psychotherapist, on the Upper East Side, as well as, for prescriptions, a psychiatrist who was connected to a Brooklyn hospital. In the winter, he’d prescribed a benzodiazepine, Klonopin, for the daily panic and terror that began after I delivered the finished manuscript of “The Afterlife” to my publisher. Sometime around the New Year, my heart started pounding. I checked my pulse over and over with a watch, hour after hour, day after day. Regan assured me that my heartbeat was normal, but I contradicted her, and then asked for reassurance. I paced, and every night at two, three, four o’clock, woke up sweating. Waking was sudden—the new dark day. My gut seized, and I rolled into a ball. I felt as if my body were burning. But I was also cold and shivery. I’d tried antidepressants, years before, unsuccessfully, and again, also unsuccessfully, during the months leading up to the day on the roof: S.S.R.I.s, which target the mechanisms that control the neurotransmitter serotonin; an S.N.R.I., which affects both serotonin and norepinephrine levels; Wellbutrin, a dopamine enhancer; and Lamictal, a mood stabilizer developed to treat epilepsy, and now also used to treat a broad range of clinical psychiatric conditions. Klonopin is a strongly sedating drug with a long half-life. Like other drugs in the benzodiazepine family—Valium, Ativan, and so on—it is addictive; its effects are systemically transformative. Over time, I adapted to a schedule, one little yellow pill, four times a day, a schedule around which, over the winter and into the spring, I organized my worsening days and nights, counting down the hours and minutes to each new pill.

The pills, of course, were prescribed by a psychiatrist, of whom there is no shortage in New York. He continues:

I recall a visit to the psychiatrist in his office. Leaving the house for any reason was scary and difficult; I felt, walking out of the building and down the sidewalk, as if I could not make it to the corner, and often I didn’t. My legs were heavy, and trembled; out on the street, the pain in my chest became sharper and more crushing. I told the doctor that I thought the Klonopin might be making things worse.

I remember that he was sitting at his desk. He sketched a picture on a piece of paper. It was a picture of crossing perpendicular lines with a waveform running along the horizontal axis, a graph showing a sine curve. The sections of curve below the horizontal axis he labelled “depression,” and the area above the axis “anxiety.” The doctor explained that benzodiazepines might worsen depression but help with anxiety, and that I seemed to have more anxiety than depression, and that there should be a middle ground. He pointed to the picture. It was an explanation for a child. He was trying to reach me, to get through to me. Why couldn’t I understand? His voice was insistent, and I could hear, and feel, that he wanted the session to end. Agony and anxiety. I told the doctor that I understood the drawing, but nonetheless believed that the medication itself was a problem.

Antrim lives. There is no posthumous epilogue. He concludes his essay with:

I remember where I was when Anne picked up the phone. I was on the little sofa in my living room. I told her about the Klonopin and the Ativan, Regan and the roof, the infantilizing doctor and the Brooklyn ward; and I promised her that I was not thinking of hurting myself, though dying was my only thought. I was lying, of course. I couldn’t bring myself to do otherwise. What would I be admitting to? I insisted that I did not need a hospital.

She said that I sounded sick. She told me to come to Columbia Presbyterian. They’d take care of me, she said; they’d help me get better. She told me that it was dangerous for me to stay out on my own, that I’d be safe in the hospital, and that I needed treatment. What did she mean, treatment? I told her that I would consider what she was saying. She then gave me the phone number of a colleague in private practice, another Columbia doctor, whom I’ll call Dr. T. “Everyone respects her,” Anne told me.

Dr. T.’s office was on the Upper West Side, in the Nineties, near Central Park, on the ground floor, facing the street. Diplomas hung on the wall above a desk. Freud’s works, the Hogarth Press Standard edition, sat in their faded blue jackets behind glass doors in an antique bookcase, and a fainting couch for patients in analysis was spread with kilim rugs, a touch taken straight from Freud’s Vienna consulting room. Everything looked secondhand. The doctor sat in a corner, near the window, writing notes on a pad. I sat in the middle of the room, in a red armchair. The upholstery was frayed and tearing. The doctor warned me that I was in danger, and that damage and harm would accrue and intensify. She meant brain damage. She told me that if I stayed out of the hospital I would die.

Later that week, on a Friday, I called a car and asked the driver to take me to 168th Street and Broadway. On the drive, I phoned Regan, my father, and my friends, and told them that I was going to Columbia Presbyterian.

I felt calmer in the car than I had at home. I breathed more easily. It was a clear day. I remember the drive up the West Side Highway. The Hudson River was on the left, and I could see the George Washington Bridge ahead in the distance. The trees in Riverside Park were green. I hadn’t planned. I’d taken some things—my keys, some cash, but not much else. I’d stopped writing and reading long before, and hadn’t bothered with a book.

The car pulled up in front of a building made of stone. I saw doctors, nurses, and ambulances. There was the emergency room. I paid the driver, got out of the car, and walked toward the entrance.

I kept expecting—and this is perhaps a result of my own ignorance—that Antrim would reference his writing somehow important in his recovery. Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps that is for another essay.

Bonus No. 1: Is the Labor party’s abortion policy a vote winner? Who cares, it’s the right thing to do.

There is a certain irony that an Air Force brat like Rachel Van Horn, who retired after 21 years in the Army Reserves only to sign-up for a three-year civilan tour in a war crafted by the oil-field service company excutive-come-Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney, would find peace in a solitary life among the well heads of Western Oklahoma.

In Iraq, Van Horn was present at a suicide bombing that murdered 25 people. Like so many others embroiled in our longest war, Van Horn changed. Ian Frazier, writing in The Oil-Pumping Adventures of Rachael Van Horn for The New Yorker, chronicles that change. There is much in his fine writing and his portrait of Van Horn—Frazier refers to her by her first name because it seems wrong to call her Van Horn, because she is now a celebrity in northwest Oklahoma, and everybody calls her Rachael—that you should read, but I marked three passages in particular that spoke to me. The first was:

“When I first started pumping, I had this idea that I was going to reform the oil field,” she said. “But I failed, just like we failed in Iraq. We keep going into these countries thinking we’re going to change them, and they change us, make us barbaric instead. But I keep trying anyway. My daughter’s husband is Ethiopian-American, so my granddaughter is half black. When I hear oil-field people using racial epithets, I tell them about my son-in-law and my granddaughter. I want them to know that they can’t assume anything, because most Oklahomans don’t have those ignorant opinions. I want people to know we’re more diverse out here than you might think.”

Someone (maybe Gandhi Ji, but unconfirmed—neither Bartlett’s nor The Oxford lists the quote) said that we must Be the change that we wish to see in the world. Van Horn lives that ideal, in more ways than one. Shortly after talking about her son-in-law and her granddaughter, she touches on being a single woman in a world that feels uncomfortable about her choice.

“So I’m basically single,” she went on, “and what really irritates me is when people assume that I must be a lesbian. It would be totally fine if I was, but I’m not. People think that Evelyn is, too, and she’s not, either. You can be a pumper, and do the kind of work that women don’t usually do, and still be attracted to guys. I also get asked if I feel safe living alone. I answer that I have neighbors I can depend on, and my dog is a great watchdog, and if there’s one issue where I’m far to the right politically it’s guns. I know how to shoot, and I have a gun in every room in my house, including the bathroom.”

This final passage brought a much earlier image to my mind, one that I at one time thought I would have like to emulate: that of Jack Kerouac’s 63 days on top of Desolation Peak. Van Horn continues:

“I love the people I work with in my Convention and Visitors Bureau job,” Rachael said. “But pumping wells, working alone, is my meditation. Because there can be some danger, I’m completely present when I’m doing it, and that’s relaxing. I usually come in from pumping calmer than when I went out.

Good on you Ms. Van Horn. Good on you.

In the Age of Mueller the sins of our foreign-service fathers have plopped down in our homes and instructed us a bit on how the rest of the world has come to live under Pax Americana. Spies and counterspies, misdirection and lies, disinformation and propaganda have all been visited upon us with far more effect than any childish fake news tropes.

Our own Federal Bureau of Investigation—FBI does sounds so much more benign, doesn’t it?—has investigated us and attempted to influence us through operations like COINTELPRO and the terrorist threats ginned up like that which recruited, handled, supplied and directed the clueless young men arrested in 2012 here in Cleveland. Then there are all the political opposition research groups that routinely influence our local, state and national elections, like that which prompted Donald John Trump Jr., to ejaculate: If it’s what you say I love it.

We’re kind of OK with such shenanigans when we do them to ourselves; when we keep it in the family. But let some outsider be so rude as to interfere in our business and we wet our pants. Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow, in Private Mossad for Hire for The New Yorker, school us on just how deep foregign influence really goes. Meet Psy-Group: an Israeli private intelligence company.

Psy-Group’s slogan was “Shape Reality,” and its techniques included the use of elaborate false identities to manipulate its targets. Psy-Group was part of a new wave of private intelligence firms that recruited from the ranks of Israel’s secret services—self-described “private Mossads.” The most aggressive of these firms seemed willing to do just about anything for their clients.

The hook for this tale involved healthcare-for-profit (a lot of profit) and a small hospital in California’s San Joaquin Valley but goes back to the ’70s:

when a former prosecutor named Jules Kroll began hiring police detectives, F.B.I. and Treasury agents, and forensic accountants to conduct detective work on behalf of corporations, law and accounting firms, and other clients. The company, which became known as Kroll, Inc., also recruited a small number of former C.I.A. officers, but rarely advertised these hires—Kroll knew that associating too closely with the C.I.A. could endanger employees in countries where the spy agency was viewed with contempt.

In the two-thousands, Israeli versions of Kroll entered the market. These companies had a unique advantage: few countries produce more highly trained and war-tested intelligence professionals, as a proportion of the population, than Israel. Conscription in Israel is mandatory for most citizens, and top intelligence units often identify talented recruits while they are in high school. These soldiers undergo intensive training in a range of language and technical skills. After a few years of government service, most are discharged, at which point many finish their educations and enter the civilian job market. Gadi Aviran was one of the pioneers of the private Israeli intelligence industry. “There was this huge pipeline of talent coming out of the military every year,” Aviran, who founded the intelligence firm Terrogence, said. “All a company like mine had to do was stand at the gate and say, ‘You look interesting.’?”

Aviran was formerly the head of an Israeli military intelligence research team, where he supervised analysts who, looking for terrorist threats, reviewed data vacuumed up from telephone communications and from the Internet. The process, Aviran said, was like “looking at a flowing river and trying to see if there was anything interesting passing by.” The system was generally effective at analyzing attacks after they occurred, but wasn’t as good at providing advance warning.

Aviran began to think about a more targeted approach. Spies, private investigators, criminals, and even some journalists have long used false identities to trick people into providing information, a practice known as pretexting. The Internet made pretexting easier. Aviran thought that fake online personae, known as avatars, could be used to spy on terrorist groups and to head off planned attacks. In 2004, he started Terrogence, which became the first major Israeli company to demonstrate the effectiveness of avatars in counterterrorism work.

When Terrogence launched, many suspected jihadi groups communicated through members-only online forums run by designated administrators. To get past these gatekeepers, Terrogence’s operatives gave their avatars legends, or backstories—often as Arab students at European universities. As the avatars proliferated, their operators joked that the most valuable online chat rooms were now entirely populated by avatars, who were, inadvertently, collecting information from one another.

Aviran tried to keep Terrogence focussed on its core mission—counterterrorism—but some government clients offered the company substantial contracts to move in other directions. “It’s a slippery slope,” Aviran said, insisting that it was a path he resisted. “You start with one thing and suddenly you think, Wait, wait, I can do this. Then somebody asks if you can do something else. And you say, ‘Well, it’s risky but the money is good, so let’s give it a try.’?

Spies got to spy, right? Especially citizen of the country you’re working in threaten the spy’s own nation. Much further on Entous and Farrow continue:

Psy-Group had more success pitching an operation, code-named Project Butterfly, to wealthy Jewish-American donors. The operation targeted what Psy-Group described as “anti-Israel” activists on American college campuses who supported the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, known as B.D.S. Supporters of B.D.S. see the movement as a way to use nonviolent protest to pressure Israel about its treatment of the Palestinians; detractors say that B.D.S. wrongly singles out Israel as a human-rights offender. B.D.S. is anathema to many ardent supporters of the Israeli government.

In early meetings with donors, in New York, Burstien said that the key to mounting an effective anti-B.D.S. campaign was to make it look as though Israel, and the Jewish-American community, had nothing to do with the effort. The goal of Butterfly, according to a 2017 company document, was to “destabilize and disrupt anti-Israel movements from within.” [Emphasis mine, JH] Psy-Group operatives scoured the Internet, social-media accounts, and the “deep” Web—areas of the Internet not indexed by search engines like Google—for derogatory information about B.D.S. activists.

No bullets, bombs or renditions were involved, but Psy-Group had other ways:

Yaakov Amidror, a former national-security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also became an adviser to Psy-Group on Butterfly. Before accepting the position, Amidror said recently, he spoke to Daniel Reisner, Psy-Group’s outside counsel, who had advised five Israeli Prime Ministers, including Netanyahu. “Danny, is it legal?” Amidror recalled asking. Reisner responded that it was. While active Israeli intelligence operatives aren’t supposed to spy on the United States, Amidror said, he saw nothing improper about former Israeli intelligence officers conducting operations against American college students. “If it’s legal, I don’t see any problem,” Amidror said with a shrug. “If people are ready to finance it, it is O.K. with me.”

Legal, of course, can be a very squishy concept; especially when the line between competitor and enemy is hazy and the bread crumbs inevitably lead to 2016 and the election of President Donald John Trump as 45th President of the United States of America, but this isn’t about the Russians. This is about the fanboys who were in awe of what the Russians had done.

Russia’s operation in the U.S. convinced Tamir Pardo, the former Mossad director, and others in Israel that they, too, had misjudged the threat. “It was the biggest Russian win ever. Without shooting one bullet, American society was torn apart,” Pardo said. “This is a weapon. We should find a way to control it, because it’s a ticking bomb. Otherwise, democracy is in trouble.”

Some of Pardo’s former colleagues took a more mercenary approach. Russia had shown the world that information warfare worked, and they saw a business opportunity. In early 2017, as Trump took office, interest in Psy-Group’s services seemed to increase. Law firms, one former employee said, asked Psy-Group to “come back in and tell us again what you are doing, because we see this ability to affect decisions that we weren’t fully aware of.” Another former Psy-Group employee put it more bluntly: “The Trump campaign won this way. If the fucking President is doing it, why not us?”

Entous and Farrow continue:

o capitalize on this newfound interest, [Psy-Group’s vice president of business development Royi] Burstien started making the rounds in Washington with a new PowerPoint presentation, which some Psy-Group employees called the “If we had done it” slide deck, and which appeared similar to the one that Nader saw. Titled “Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Campaign—Analysis,” the presentation outlined the role of Web sites, avatars, and bots in influencing the outcome of the election. In one case highlighted in the slide deck, pro-Trump avatars joined a Facebook page for Bernie Sanders supporters and then flooded it with links to anti-Hillary Clinton articles from Web sites that posted fake news, creating a hostile environment for real members of the group. “Bernie supporters had left our page in droves, depressed and disgusted by the venom,” the group’s administrator was quoted as saying. As part of the presentation, Burstien pointed out that Russian operatives had been caught meddling in the U.S.; Psy-Group, he told clients, was “more careful.”

Psy-Group’s post-election push into the U.S. market included a cocktail reception on March 1, 2017, at the Old Ebbitt Grill, near the White House, “in celebration of our new D.C. office.” The next day, an article in Politico briefly mentioned the gathering and described Psy-Group as a multinational company with “offices in London, Hong Kong and Cyprus.” There was no mention of Israel; Burstien thought it would be better for business to play down the Israel angle.

In fact, the reception was part of Psy-Group’s campaign to shape perceptions about itself. The image it projected was mostly bluster; the company’s “new D.C. office” consisted of a desk at a WeWork on the eighth floor of a building across the street from the White House.

The story does not end well for Psy-Group but other groups, like Black Cube, are still very much in business. Entous and Farrow conclude:

Some Psy-Group veterans expressed regret that the firm had closed. “Had the company still been open, all this so-called negative press would have brought us lots of clients,” one said. Despite embarrassing missteps, which have exposed some Psy-Group and Black Cube operations to public scrutiny, a former senior Israeli intelligence official said that global demand for “private Mossads” is growing, and that the market for influence operations is expanding into new commercial areas. In particular, the former official cites the potentially huge market for using avatars to influence real-estate prices—by creating the illusion that bidders are offering more money for a property, for example, or by spreading rumors about the presence of toxic chemicals to scare off competition. “From a free-market point of view, it’s scary,” a former Psy-Group official said, adding that the list of possible applications for avatars was “endless.” Another veteran of Israeli private intelligence warned, “We are looking at the tip of the iceberg in terms of where this can go.”

All that Captain Edward John Smith ever saw was the tip. The piece could not end with a more chilling metaphor.

Bonus No. 1: If the Greens don’t do something radical they will be on 10% primary vote UNTIL THE END OF EARTH.

Bonus No. 2: Automation: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

Although we may never really know the story, here is what I found some 50 years ago. I was tipped by someone to check with the County Coroner about the death certificate on James Chapman. Get the actual autopsy, I was advised. Both the Press and Plain Dealer were reporting Chapman as a hero because he aided police on the night of the Glenville uprising.

It seemed important to the newspapers to report on an African-American who helped police that night.

I went to the coroner’s office and got the autopsy. It reported abundant powder burns on the fatal wound of the 22-year old Chapman. Pathologists say that means the shot was near point-blank range.

The suggestion was that he was with police so he couldn’t have been shot by a sniper’s bullet. However, that fact was never made public before I reported it.

The issue below was a special insert Feb. 16, 1970 to a regular issue—Vol. 1, No. 14 about the takeover of St. John’s Cathedral by two priests—Fr. Robert Begin and Fr. Bernie Meyer. They were dragged from the altar by Cleveland police.

And we wonder why the Cleveland police force is still a big problem.

The rest of the story appears below the fold… Continue Reading »

When I’ve found myself in discussions about the American flag and how Americans have fought and died for that flag, I like to call bullshit. Americans don’t fight and die for the flag, they offer their lives for what the flag represents—Liberty. And the guarantor of that liberty is not the flag, but our Constitution. Burn and deface all the flags you want, we’ll make more.

Threaten our Constitution and you’d better run because without our Constitution, without its 7,591 words (including signatures) parceled into seven articles, 21 sections and 27 glorious amendments. I’m the kind of person who carries a pocket copy of our Constitution in my shoulder bag, but sadly, most Americans know little of our founding document beyond the first three words and a vague, colloquial understanding of the First, Second and, maybe, Fifth amendments.

So, when I first read about Heidi Schreck’s play What The Constitution Means To Me, I was both proud and flabbergasted. Proud because so many people were flocking to see her show and flabbergasted because so many people were flocking to see her show. Since my first reading, it seems that Schreck is everywhere including on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and on Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

Michael Schulman, however, writing in Heidi Schreck Takes the Constitution to Broadway for The New Yorker, started me off.

There was much in Schulman’s piece that I found instructive and enlightening, but this passage near the middle concerning the Ninth Amendment gave me pause. Schulman writes:

The constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who was Barack Obama’s legal mentor at Harvard Law School, heard about the show from his eleven-year-old granddaughter and went with his family in December. “I thought, This is something that needs a huge audience,” he told me. “When most people—including, I have to say, some of my colleagues and former colleagues—talk about the Constitution, they display a strange ignorance about the way it hangs together, and particular clauses, and what they do and do not mean. There was nothing of that sort here. I assumed that maybe somewhere in her life she had done a deep study of constitutional law, because what she said was extremely on target.” Tribe was particularly impressed by Schreck’s analysis of the Ninth Amendment, which, he said, “a number of contemporary scholars don’t really understand.” It reads, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” As Schreck explains onstage:

This means that just because a certain right is not explicitly written in the Constitution, it doesn’t mean you don’t have that right. The fact is there was no possible way for the framers to put down every single right we have—the right to brush your teeth, sure you’ve got it, but how long do we want this document to be? Here’s an example: When I was a little girl, I had an imaginary friend named Reba McEntire. She was not related to the singer. Just because the Constitution does not proclaim the having of imaginary friends as a right, does not mean I can be thrown in jail for being friends with Reba McEntire.

Schreck told me that she was attracted to the amendment’s poetry: “It’s shrouded in mystery. It’s talked about only in terms of metaphor, and it doesn’t actually mean anything legally, exactly.” In explaining it, Justice William O. Douglas invoked “penumbras” and “emanations.” Justice Antonin Scalia once admitted, “If my life depended on it, I couldn’t tell you what the Ninth Amendment was.”

Now, if this statement from Scalia—the champion of originalism, the view that judges should attempt to interpret the words of the Constitution as they were understood at the time they were written—doesn’t give you pause, then you’re not paying attention.

Salute our flag, but revere, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

I couldn’t resist because I am sooo tired of seeing books at the library with titles that begin The Girl. (I’m almost as tired as I am of seeing the plethora of James Patterson with… books.) The appropriation is particularly galling because Stieg Larsson, author of The Millennium Trilogy died before he could enjoy the popularity of his trilogy.

America knows who Roger Stone is and his tattoo may be the best-known skin art on the planet. (If Stone’s grinning Nixon doesn’t turn people off from getting their own tattoos, I don’t know what could.) But in writing about Stone, however, Jeffrey Toobin tied Stone with another figure of whom I hand no knowledge: Jerome Corsi, a a right-wing author… who, without formal connections to the Trump campaign, went on a transatlantic quest for dirt. (Corsi is also a hometown boy born in East Cleveland, Ohio.)

Toobin, in Roger Stone’s and Jerome Corsi’s Time in the Barrel for The New Yorker, writes:

Stone and Trump have long avoided defining themselves by party politics. Indeed, for many years it wasn’t clear which party Trump belonged to, and during his 2000 flirtation with a Presidential run he considered doing it as a third-party candidate. This was in line with Stone’s belief that Trump’s real adversary, both then and now, was “the deep state”—a term with a hazy definition. “It’s what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex,” Stone told me, “but it’s broader than that. It’s the intelligence agencies, the entire national-security apparatus, and it doesn’t change, regardless of who is President.” Stone elaborated on the definition in his foreword to a new book, “The Plot to Destroy Trump: How the Deep State Fabricated the Russian Dossier to Subvert the President,” by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, an American writer who lives in England. Stone refers to the “two-party duopoly” that brought about “endless wars” in the Middle East and “the erosion of civil liberties” at home. “The Republicans and the Democrats, the elites of both parties, were working together, the Bushes and the Clintons, whose policies and truths were largely indistinguishable,” he writes. Trump represented a rejection of the deep state’s hegemony, and now, according to Stone, the deep state was fighting back: “We are witnessing the beginning of the collapse of an illegitimate effort to reverse what the Deep State could not do in the 2016 election.”

I don’t know who first coined the phrase The Deep State, but in The Internet Age, the term works. The term is certainly far more frightening than Eisenhower’s Military-Industrial Complex or the older—and I think much more descriptive—old boys club. Corsi fully embraces the scary bit because the scary bit sells books. You only have to run down his bibliography to quickly grasp which side of his bread is buttered. (My favorite title is Where’s the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President. How do you get 392 pages out of that?)

Toobin continues:

The turning point in Corsi’s career came in 2004, when Kerry ran for President. Corsi teamed up with John O’Neill, who served with Kerry in Vietnam, and they rushed out a deeply misleading book, called “Unfit for Command,” which accused Kerry of falsifying and exaggerating his Navy combat record as a commander of a Swift boat. “John Kerry would like many people today to view his service in Vietnam as one of honor and courage,” the authors wrote. “But the real John Kerry of Vietnam was a man who filed false operating reports, who faked Purple Hearts, and who took a fast pass through the combat zones.” As the Kerry campaign temporized about whether to ignore the slurs or respond to them, the book reached No. 1 on the Times best-seller list. Douglas Brinkley, a Presidential historian at Rice University, who wrote “Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War,” told me, “Corsi’s book is filled with falsehoods, a fake history masquerading as some kind of truth. It was an unvetted attack document, a political hit job—but the important point is that it worked. Kerry never figured out how to respond to it, and he lost. So the book created a niche and fuelled other false narratives, like the birther movement, with Obama.”

The world that Stone and Corsi inhabit exists in the rabbit hole Alice missed. In his penultimate paragraph Toobin writes:

To date, Mueller’s court filings have created a narrative that, although compelling, is distinctly postmodern in its sensibility. Individual stories often head in different directions and only sometimes intersect. The Russians helped Trump, and the Trump people lied about the Russians. But why did so many people lie to Mueller and the other investigators? Were they lying to cover up crimes—or were they lying simply because they are liars? The Watergate scandal was like Shakespeare—a drama that built to a satisfying climax. The Russia story is more like Beckett—a mystifying tragicomedy that may drift into irresolution. Did Trump collude, and did he obstruct justice? Mueller may never have the answers.

When liars lie because that’s what they do, can there ever be satisfaction?

Bonus No. 1: Peter Dutton and the dumb, cruel lie

Voting rights became a problem for men of European descent in the United States on the 3rd of February 1870 when Iowa became the 28th state to ratify the 15th amendment to our Constitution which granted the voting franchise to all citizens, regardless of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Women had to wait another 50 years.

The 15th did not settle matters. Neither did the 19th nor the 26th amendments. The mere fact that we retain the Electoral Collage, the last vestige of slavery in our system, speaks to the level that European-American men have gone to retain as much power and control as possible.

In 1965 Congress passed the Voting Rights Act which sought to correct a century of abuse. European-American men thought they could make President Barack Hussein Obama a one-off and when he was reëlected in 2012, they lost their collective minds and using his victory as proof, took Shelby County v. Holder all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States and won a 5-4 decision; effectively ending the changes put in place by the 1965 act.

There is, as Jelani Cobb argues in The House Takes on America’s Voting-Rights Problem for The New Yorker, a direct and bright line from that decision to the election of President Donald John Trump. Cobb ledes:

The crisis of democracy that has attended Donald Trump’s Presidency has visibly manifested itself in challenges to the free press, the judiciary, and the intelligence agencies, but among its more corrosive effects has been the corruption of basic mathematics. Since the 2016 election, Trump has periodically rage-tweeted about an alleged three million non-citizens whose ballots delivered the popular-vote majority to Hillary Clinton. His fulminations were a fanciful extension of the Republican Party’s concern, despite all evidence to the contrary, that American elections are riddled with voter fraud. The math does, however, support a different number—one that truthfully points to how American democracy is being undermined.

Nearly two million fewer African-Americans voted in the 2016 election than did in 2012. That decline can be attributed, in part, to the fact that it was the first election since 2008 in which Barack Obama was not on the ballot and, in part, to an ambivalence toward Clinton among certain black communities. Civil-rights groups and members of the Congressional Black Caucus point to another factor as well: 2016 was the first Presidential election since the Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision, which eviscerated sections of the Voting Rights Act. Suppressive tactics, some old, some new, ensued—among them, voter-roll purges; discriminatory voter-I.D. rules; fewer polling places and voting machines; and reductions in early-voting periods. After an election in which some two million Americans went missing, the Administration concluded that three million too many had shown up at the polls.

The Republican Congress made up of (nearly all) European-American men thought the court’s decision in Selby was just dandy. The 116th Congress—dominated, in either numbers or power, by European-American males is much less impressed. Cobb continues:

[During the week of 11 February], with these events in mind, a hearing on H.R. 1, the For the People Act, took place in the House of Representatives. Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, the new chair of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, referred to the bill, in his opening remarks, as “one of the boldest reform packages to be considered in the history of this body.” He added, “This sweeping legislation will clean up corruption in government, fight secret money in politics, and make it easier for American citizens across this great country to vote.” That statement was not partisan hyperbole. The bill is a broad, imaginative, and ambitious set of responses to the most pressing challenges facing American democracy, many of which preceded the 2016 election, but almost all of which were brought into sharper focus by it.

Resolutions, of course, are not bills, they cannot become law., As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) clarified for Seth Meyers, a resolution is a declaration, an intentional vision document. Of course, we’ve had great success, beginning in 1776, with declarations.

Bonus No. 1: Ta-Nehisi Coates—The Power of Invisibility Is Dissipating.

Bonus No. 2: Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook: Mueller Edition.

As part of the undergraduate magazine journalism sequence at Ohio University I took a number of graphics and play-layout classes. As an editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich—may Billy’s name be cursed for all eternity—I worked closely with our in-house artist and designer John Pressello and learned a great deal from John’s experience and instruction.

As editor, however, I retained a great deal of control over the look of my book. At other publishing houses I had less control and had to often fight with my artists to make sure that each page was readable. Ralph Nader sees the same kinds of fights continuing today.

Nader, writing in Unleashed Graphic Designers–Art over Function, explains:

Many readers object to illegible print in contemporary print newspapers and magazines. In today’s print news, legible print is on a collision course with flights of fancy by graphic artists.

Admittedly, this is the golden age for graphic artists to show their creativity. Editors have convinced themselves that with readers’ shorter attention spans and the younger generation’s aversion to spending time with print publications, the graphic artists must be unleashed. Never mind what the ophthalmologists or the optometrists may think. Space, color, and type size are the domain of liberated gung ho artists.

There is one additional problem with low expectations for print newsreaders: Even though print readership is shrinking, there will be even fewer readers Continue Reading »

The above is known as The First Law of Holes. There will always be those who—like the Sackler family—believe they can actually increase profits by providing the solution to the problem they created, when the better solutions would be to stop digging, to stop making the problem worse. But where’s the profit in that?

Forget industrial and information as adjectives for the age we live in. We live in an age where fossil-fuels—coal, petroleum and flammable gas—literally fueled aa population explosion that not only threatens humanity, but the very planetary ecosystem that we depend upon for life.

I remember Paul Hawken introducing his talk at a recycling conference I attended in the early ’90s with a 10-minute video similar to this. His point was that we are the virus threatening our planet. The bit that he left out was that without fossil fuels we would not be the threat we were.

We have dug a very deep hole using fossil fuels and we need to stop digging. We need to go cold turkey. We need to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

So when I read stories about how we can maintain our fossil-fuel habit if we just rely on further technology—like injecting particles into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space—I just want to smack someone.

That’s how I feel about Boyan Slat and his Ocean Cleanup Project.

Carolyn Kormann, writing in A Grand Plan to Clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for The New Yorker, ledes:

In May, 2017, a twenty-two-year-old Dutch entrepreneur named Boyan Slat unveiled a contraption that he believed would rid the oceans of plastic. In a former factory in Utrecht, a crowd of twelve hundred people stood before a raised stage. The setting was futuristic and hip. A round screen set in the stage floor displayed 3-D images of Earth; behind Slat, another screen charted the rapid accumulation of plastic in the Pacific Ocean since the nineteen-fifties. Slat is pale and slight, and has long brown hair that resembles Patti Smith’s in the “Horses” era. He was dressed in a gray blazer, a black button-down, black slacks, and skateboarding sneakers, which he wears every day, although he doesn’t skateboard. Onstage, he presented plastic artifacts that he had collected from the Pacific during a research expedition: the back panel of a Gameboy from 1995, a hard hat from 1989, a bottle crate from 1977. “This thing is forty years old,” he said in Dutch-inflected English. “1977 was the year that Elvis Presley left the building for good, presumably.” The audience laughed. Slat then held up a clear plastic dish, filled with shards of plastic. “The contents of this dish are the actual stomach contents of a single sea turtle that was found dead in Uruguay last year,” he said. A picture of the dead turtle flashed on a screen behind him.

Then Slat made his pitch. In the next twelve months, he and a staff of engineers at the Ocean Cleanup, an organization he founded in 2013, would build the system they had designed, assemble it in a yard on San Francisco Bay, then set sail with it, travelling under the Golden Gate Bridge and out into the Pacific. Slat’s destination was the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, midway between California and Hawaii, an area within what is known as the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone. The patch is not, as is often believed, a solid island of trash but a gyre, twice the size of Texas, where winds and currents draw diffuse floating debris onto a vast carrousel that never stops.

The setting was futuristic and hip… A round screen set in the stage floor displayed 3-D images of Earth… Slat is pale and slight, and has long brown hair that resembles Patti Smith’s in the “Horses” era. He was dressed in a gray blazer, a black button-down, black slacks, and skateboarding sneakers, which he wears every day, although he doesn’t skateboard…. Fucking spare me. To steal a line from Sully, Can we get serious now?

This is how Kormann ends the first section of her piece:

The Monday after the announcement, Slat arrived at the Ocean Cleanup’s headquarters, an airy, modernist office in Delft. He was in high spirits. “We were at peak enthusiasm,” he told me later. Online donations were rising, [emphasis mine, JH] and his in-box was full of congratulatory notes. His first meeting of the day was with his top engineers. They did not look cheerful. The lead engineer said that they had been running some new tests. They had not properly accounted for the power of “wave drift force”—the accelerating energy of the surface waves absorbed by the device—which would cancel out the drag of the anchors. The design would not work. Slat recalls the engineer saying, “We’re going to have to do it slightly differently.” There were some possible solutions, the engineer said. How about losing the anchors, allowing the device to race after the trash? Slat grew very quiet. “It was a bit stressful,” he said. “Like, whoops.”

Whoops. Feckin’ whoops?

Kormann shifts gears and begins to detail how we got here. She begins in 1941 when two British chemists, V. E. Yarsley and E. G. Couzens, published an article in Science Digest that imagined “a dweller in the ‘Plastic Age.’ ” 2019 looks nothing like the utopia of a world of color and bright shining surfaces they envisioned. Their imaginations did not grasp that what they would build was The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that other scientists would have to clean up their mess.

One of the pioneers of plastic-pollution research, and of conveying the findings in tangible images, was Charles Moore, a horticulturist and oceanographer who, in the nineteen-nineties, observed an alarming amount of garbage in the sea while sailing between California and Hawaii. Moore began taking researchers to the gyre, dragging nets alongside his catamaran and cataloguing the contents. In 2001, Moore published the results of his studies: there was six times more plastic in the gyre, by mass, than there was zooplankton, the base of the food chain. Moore—charmingly grumpy, often with a map of the gyre and a dish of plastic shards in hand—went on to discuss the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on the “Late Show with David Letterman,” “The Colbert Report,” and “Good Morning America.” The image of the patch proved resonant, if misleading. Soon people were saying that you could walk on it and even spot it from outer space.

In fact, most of what Charles Moore found was not large pieces of debris but microplastic—the tiny fragments that remain when the sun breaks down the larger hunks, and which the scientist and former U.S. marine Marcus Eriksen has called “the smog of the sea.” In 2008, Moore hosted Eriksen and an ocean-policy analyst named Anna Cummins on one of his expeditions; the two got married and later co-founded a nonprofit called the 5 Gyres Institute, which made research expeditions all over the world. In 2014, Eriksen, Moore, and seven other co-authors published their findings in the online journal PLOS One: more than 5.2 trillion particles of plastic were swirling in the planet’s oceans, and, in time, much of it would be ingested by ocean dwellers and by creatures that eat fish, including people.

Since then, numerous studies have shown that microplastic is everywhere—in the melting ice of the Arctic, in table salt, in beer, in shrimp scampi. A study last year found traces of it in eighty-three per cent of tap-water samples around the world. (The incidence was highest in the United States, at ninety-four per cent.) A major concern of scientists is that chemical toxins in the microplastics may leach off during digestion, gradually building up in animal and human tissues. Judith Enck, a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama, told me, “Where we are on plastics is where we were fifteen years ago on climate change. We’re just beginning to get the picture.”

And single-use/limited-life plastics continue to be made, sold and tossed. We could depend upon recycling, particularly recycling in China, to save our butts, right?

In 2017, the Ocean Conservancy joined with industry heavyweights to announce that they were fund-raising for investments in recycling companies in Southeast Asia. The initiative grew into an investment-management firm, Circulate Capital, to which companies such as PepsiCo, Dow, Unilever, and Coca-Cola have pledged more than a hundred million dollars. Some efforts to ban the production of single-use plastics are succeeding—and not just in countries like Kenya, which addressed its litter crisis in 2017 by decreeing that anyone caught producing, selling, or even carrying a plastic bag could go to prison for four years or face a fine of up to forty thousand dollars. In October, the European Union advanced a directive to roll out bans on single-use plastics like plates and cutlery. In the United States, thanks to a campaign led by Eriksen and Cummins, microbeads—the exfoliating plastic sprinkles common in toiletries—became illegal in 2018. New York City has banned most polystyrene food containers. Straws, thanks in part to the turtle video, have become a favored cause: California has restricted their use, and Starbucks plans to phase them out altogether by 2020. Lego is introducing a new plant-based form of plastic.

Lego bricks are not the problem.

I was not surprised to read that Slat is an admirer of another part of the problem.

Slat is an admirer of Elon Musk. “He understands how human psychology works, just like the Ocean Cleanup,” Slat said. “We don’t say, ‘Ban all the plastic’—we sort of provide an alternative that’s better, that’s exciting, that fits into a world view that you can be excited about.”

Kormann continues, finally injecting sanity into her story.

Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental studies at New York University and the author of the book Is Shame Necessary?, believes that Slat’s success goes beyond “technological solutionism,” or the “TED Talk obsession.” “We always love the idea of cleanups more than we love the idea of prevention, or mitigation,” she said. “We love treating illnesses more than we do preventing them. But our affinity for simplistic solutions isn’t innate; they’re narratives we’ve been sold.” [Emphasis mine. JH]

Imagine. Sold. Right here in River City.

Jacquet couldn’t be more right.

Bonus No. 1: A random selection of nice things according to our lovely readers (you)

Bonus No. 2: Solar-Powered Water Wheel Cleans Baltimore Harbor.

Bonus No. 3: Break Free From Plastic.

I’ve always thought the term whistle-blower odd. I get sports reference, but the difference between calling a foul on a player and exposing gross malfeasance in a government office or corporate boardroom, for me, spans a grand canyon. In English, at least, the phrase has only been around for 49 years. Yet the concept in the United States reaches back to our beginning.

Sheelah Kolhatkar, writing in The Personal Toll of Whistle-Blowing for The New Yorker, tells the story.

The first documented whistle-blowing case in the United States took place in 1777, not long after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when a group of naval officers, including Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven, witnessed their commanding officer torturing British prisoners of war. When they reported the misconduct to Congress, the commanding officer charged Shaw and Marven with libel, and both men were jailed. The following year, Congress passed a law protecting whistle-blowers, and Shaw and Marven were acquitted by a jury.

To frame her story in the near past, Kolhatkar begins with an FBI informant. She ledes:

On the morning of September 17, 2009, Darren Sewell left his office at Freedom Health, the Tampa health-insurance company where he was a vice-president, and climbed into his Chevy Tahoe. He drove to Sonny’s BBQ, a restaurant nearby, where he picked up barbecue sauce for the sandwich he had brought for lunch. Then he continued on until he reached a drab stretch of road lined with gas stations and scraggly palm trees, where he pulled into a parking lot and waited, as discreetly as possible, to meet his FBI handler.

Sewell, a physician, was thirty-four years old, six feet four inches tall, and broad-shouldered, with an earnest smile and barely perceptible dimples. He was born with one eye slightly crossed, and it still drifted when he was tired or feeling stressed; strangers sometimes found it disconcerting, but his quick wit and easy sense of humor usually dispelled any tension.

Sewell had evidence that his company was ripping off millions of dollars from the federal government through the Medicare Advantage program and the FBI was interested. Kolhatkar continues:

Medicare Advantage, on which Freedom’s business focused, was part of a trend toward the privatization of health care. President Lyndon Johnson created the first national health-care program in 1965, after fierce political battles, when he signed the Social Security Act Amendments. The law established a fund to provide health-insurance coverage, known as Medicare, to Americans over the age of sixty-five, and to provide coverage to the poor through a sister program, Medicaid. “No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years,” Johnson said at the signing ceremony, in Independence, Missouri, noting that eighteen million Americans were seniors, many with low incomes. “No longer will young families see their own incomes, and their own hopes, eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents, and to their uncles, and their aunts.” Johnson gave the first Medicare card to former President Truman.

I am fond of saying that there are four areas of government that ought never to privatized: the armed forces, justice, education and healthcare. Sewell’s story is the perfect case for my position. Kolhatkar writes:

Len Nichols, a professor of health policy at George Mason University, who served as a health-policy adviser during the Clinton Administration, told me. “Medicare Advantage is a long-standing part of the Republican strategy of privatizing Medicare.” The Advantage plans competed for patients with one another, and with traditional Medicare; they began offering perks such as health-club memberships, dental coverage, and rebates. And all this market competition would encourage better services and more preventive care, driving down costs. At least, that was the idea.

Have these economic theories ever worked?

Over the next six years, Sewell, Ed Ortega (his FBI handler) and Freedom Health would dance the dance with ten-of-millions of dollars swirling in the wind. While Kolhatkar tells the factual story, her telling of the human story is far more compelling.

Go. Read.

Bonus No. 1: What Americans Think About Reparations And Other Race-Related Questions.

Bonus No. 2: The Reparations Primary.

I was introduced to the Bernard Cornwell through the series of videos starring Sean Bean as Cornwell’s best known character, Richard Sharpe, while I was laid up with a rather nasty flu. The videos led me to the books—I own a complete set—and many cycles of reading and watching and reading the rest of Cornwell’s oeuvre.

At present, I am deeply immersed in Cornwell’s Last Kingdom books (which have also been translated to the small screen on Netflix).

For my money, Cornwell is the finest writer of historical fiction I know and, since I’m obsessed with my own historical novel at present, I’ve made a study of what and how Cornwell does what he does. While he hasn’t (yet) written a book on writing, he does provide a brief essay: Writing Advice, on his website.

Much of the essay is generic, but I am particularly interested in what he has to say about his specialty, but he doesn’t say much. Only this:

…understand that your job is not to be an historian, but to be a storyteller, and if you take the trouble to find out how stories are told, you can hugely improve your luck.

That is all. To paraphrase Hillel: Be a storyteller, not a historian. The rest is just explanation. Go and study.

For me that has been a hard lesson. For a time I contemplated being a dual major—Journalism and History—but my complete failure at learning foreign languages convinced me to stick with a History minor. Because of that background, I too easily allow the historian in me to interfere with my storytelling. That sucks. A lot. But I keep getting up and teasing Calliope out of the shadows because, Cornwell concludes:

In the end you have to write the book. Do it, remember that everyone began just like you, sitting at a table and secretly doubting that they would ever finish the task. But keep at it. A page a day and you’ve written a book in a year! And enjoy it! Writing, as many of us have discovered, is much better than working.

I think that Cornwell is a tad bit to optimistic there. I still think that Mosley’s sentiment is more in my vein.

The act of writing is a kind of guerrilla warfare; there is no vacation, no leave, no relief. In actuality there is very little chance of victory. I am, I fear, like that homeless man, likely to be defeated by my fondest dreams.

But he too is, in the end, hopeful and writes:

But then the next day comes, and the words are waiting. I pick up where I left off, in the cool and shifting mists of morning.

We can do no more than that.

Bonus No. 1: Real-time cruising on the River Avon, from Tewkesbury to Comberton Quay.

One of the central themes of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ bellwether feature The Case for Reparations is that a rising tide ain’t shit if the boat your sitting in has been cratered by two hundred fifty years of slavery; ninety years of Jim Crow; sixty years of separate but equal and thirty-five years of racist housing policy. This will be the political issue of 2020.

Briahna Gray, writing in Beyond the Rising Tide: Reparations for Slavery Have to Be More Than a Symbol for The Intercept, makes her case:

When hip-hop radio host Charlamagne tha God asked Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris if they had a “specific agenda” for black Americans on his show, “The Breakfast Club,” earlier this month, it was clear that neither did.

[Update on 4 March—watch Bernie Sanders on The Breakfast Club. Bernie talks reparations at timemark 18:41 and bounces the ball of the rim.]

“I have a specific agenda for the American people,” started Booker. But for Charlamagne, and many other black Americans, a generalized American agenda isn’t a substitute for a plan that specifically addresses the needs of black folks.

“They always say a rising tide lifts all boats,” Charlamagne interrupted, “but we don’t really see that in our communities.”

Charlamagne elaborated on this idea during his interview with Harris: “I think when it comes to black people in America, Democrats, for whatever reason, when you ask them … usually we get that whole ‘rising tides raise all boats’ or ‘all Americans’ rhetoric, and I think black people just want to hear specific things for them, and I always wonder, ‘Why are people afraid to say what they would specifically do for black people?’”

Is there a third-rail aspect to reparations? Are we as a nation morally incapable of addressing the two hundred fifty years of slavery; ninety years of Jim Crow; sixty years of separate but equal and thirty-five years of racist housing policy?

Or, is our cupidity too strong, too pervasive, too capitalist?

Gray does go to Bernie—and in the 4 March video he again trots out his college credentials (and they are good credentials) from 50 years ago; plus he has Nina Turner, a women I have great respect for—but still.

The problem isn’t that universal or economically driven programs can’t significantly close the racial wealth gap. It’s that the means-tested programs backed by the Democratic Party simply don’t go far enough.

Sen. Bernie Sanders was buffeted repeatedly by criticism that he didn’t do enough to connect with black Americans in the course of his 2016 presidential run. Much of that criticism was fair. But Sanders’s failure was in articulating how his policies would benefit black Americans, not in advancing policies that would benefit us.

Prior to the 2016 election, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who ultimately voted for Sanders, wrote, “Sanders’s basic approach is to ameliorate the effects of racism through broad, mostly class-based policy — doubling the minimum wage, offering single-payer health-care, delivering free higher education. This is the same ‘A rising tide lifts all boats’ thinking that has dominated Democratic anti-racist policy for a generation.”

But the Democratic Party has never backed anything approaching the redistributive goals contemplated by Sanders’s 2016 agenda. The party’s economic plan has historically focused on economic mobility, “access” to “opportunity,” and removing barriers to participating in a capitalist economy. Child care programs, paid sick leave, and job training initiatives are promoted as strategies to ensure that all Americans can participate in what most Democrats see as a fundamentally functional system.

Two-Thousand-Twenty must be different. Gray continues:

[P]oliticians like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren challenge the system itself, because they view it as fundamentally inequitable. Leftists support traditional interventions that meaningfully ease the burdens of those struggling under capitalism. But they also seek to change the fact that profits in this country currently flow disproportionately to a privileged few at the very top — at the expense of wage growth for the workers whose labor generates those profits. As Sanders argues, if 90 percent of profits go to the top 1 percent, having technical “access” to the 1 percent isn’t enough; the system itself must change.

This structural approach is a game changer for African-Americans. Because the value of wealth compounds, capitalism rewards the historical possession of wealth; the ability to invest today is worth more than the ability to do so in the future. That being the case, how can black Americans, first enslaved and then legally barred from participating in capitalism for the overwhelming majority of this country’s history, begin to catch up without a systemic adjustment to the system?

The answer is we can’t. There will be no racial equality under capitalism.

It would take an estimated 228 years for black Americans to earn as much wealth as white Americans possess today, at which point blacks still would not have drawn even, because whites would presumably have accrued more wealth during that time as well. Simply put, closing the racial wealth gap demands a systemic approach.

And that systemic approach is what I’ll be looking for in 2020.

Bonus No. 1: COMMENTARY: Will Reparations Become Democrats’ Campaign Theme?

Bonus No. 2: Real-time narrowboat trip from Droitwich to Ladywood top lock.

Bonus No. 3: The new elite’s phoney crusade to save the world–without changing anything