nici nu mai stiu
de te iubesc
sau oboseala clipei
e doar o amagire
mai e un pic si se sfarseste lumea
(numaratoare inversa)
I don’t even know
whether I love you
or the moment’s fatigue
is a mere tease
there’s little left
and all ends
(countdown)
***
By Puiu Jipa (translation by Dana Neacsu)
Making distinctions is part of the fine art of justice – First published here: http://billmoyers.com/story/new-book-revelations-america-weinstein/.
Victims of sexual harassment, sexual assault and sexual abuse and their supporters protest during a #MeToo march in Hollywood on Nov. 12, 2017. (Photo by Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)
A new Book of Revelation is streaming into the collective psyche, chapter by chapter, verse by verse — a saga of men mauling, manhandling, exploiting, raping, battering and diminishing women, commandeering their lives, making them doubt themselves, driving them out of their jobs and even careers. I doubt that what we are seeing is simply a gush of headlines, a scandal du jour. Two or three scandals by media standards may qualify as a “trend,” but 10 or 20 or 50, complete with public meetings and multiple ethics investigations(however perfunctory they may turn out to be), are a whole culture trembling. The outpouring of women’s stories of male abuse is moving and powerful. Speaking for myself, I had no idea how many women have been humiliated, damaged and derailed as the result of a whole range of abuses. A man who is not humbled, ashamed, at his ignorance of this grotesquerie (however slight, however good-humored his ignorance may have been) is an ignoramus, or worse — a denier.
Rollback will not be total. Even a lot of Republicans who support Roy Moore’s Senate candidacy in Alabama are in the awkward position of saying, He’s a pedophile, but he’s our pedophile. Trump’s brag about pussy-grabbing couldn’t drive away his voters, as mall-cruising won’t drive many of them out of Moore’s camp. Whether we tremble on the brink of renewed amnesia or a breakthrough not to be rolled back we shall see. I think it stands a good chance of outlasting the 1991 prefiguration, when thanks to Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas the fact of sexual harassment, first circulated by women’s groups in the 1970s, burst into the national spotlight. The fact that the entertainment industry is one of the storm centers just about guarantees continued revelations.
Two things are happening at the same time but on different scales. One operates on the level of culture. It operates generally — it’s a generalization about how large numbers of men treat large numbers of women. (I omit the complication of the abuse of gay men, for example — so it would seem — at the hands of Kevin Spacey.) A huge cultural fact leaps out of the darkness. Many women step forward and bear witness. Many men “get it,” perhaps for the first time. Many refuse to get it because they have too much identity and impunity bound up with refusing to get it. At its most grotesque is the spectacle of which Joan Walsh writes trenchantly in The Nation: “A President Accused of Sexual Misconduct by 16 Women Endorses a Senate Candidate Accused of Sexual Misconduct by 9.” On Slate, William Saletan robustly dismantles the case for Roy Moore and in the process shows how asymmetrical is the political polarization of this abysmal hour.
Roy Moore is not Harvey Weinstein, but he is Roy Moore, which is bad enough. He does not deserve public office. Whatever Al Franken and John Conyers (who has stepped down from the position of ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee) may have done to some women, they are not Weinstein either. Neither is Louis C.K. All of it is bad. Some of it is criminal.
It is by chewing over, disputing and clarifying these categories, over time, that a culture — especially the segment of it that has benefited from the abuse — learns bitter truths.
The revelations are also, of course, resisted. As with all cultural change, there’s backlash. Those who were winners don’t relish losing. You don’t get a Reformation without a Counter-Reformation. You don’t get a civil rights movement without a Republican Southern strategy.
Beyond the general realization that a huge fact has burst up from underground, the second thing that’s happening is that specific women accuse specific men of specific abuses and crimes. This is where things get sticky. Because we have, and need, a concept of justice that enshrines individuals and a presumption of their innocence. Which means that cultural generalizations are justified and necessary, but accusations against individuals are something quite different.
Even in the law, assault varies in gravity. In New York, sexual harassment can take two forms. One is “quid pro quo harassment,” which:
[U]sually occurs when an employer or supervisor offers to trade an employment benefit for some kind of sexual favor. A common example is promising to promote a worker in exchange for going on a date with the boss. This type of harassment might also take the form of punishing an employee who rebuffs the supervisor’s advances.
The second, more subtle and more common type of sexual harassment is called a hostile work environment. There are two ways in which an employer can create this situation. The first is by engaging in or allowing behavior that creates what a reasonable person would consider an intimidating, hostile or offensive environment. The second is by tolerating or encouraging conduct that unreasonably interferes with an employee’s ability to do his or her job.
Conduct that may lead to a hostile work environment based on sexual harassment varies from case to case, but common examples include:
- Sexually charged comments, whether verbal or written;
- Unwelcome physical touching; or
- Intimidating physical situations, such as blocking or trapping.
Under the New York State Human Rights Law (HRL), the offensive conduct must be severe or pervasive. In other words, a hostile work environment usually does not arise from a single stray remark. However, it could be found after a single instance of extreme conduct, such as a sexual assault, or after a long series of minor actions.
To return to the current cases in point, cruising the mall in search of teenage girls to “date” is not rape. Offering to drive a 16-year-old girl home and then touching her breasts, locking the door to keep her inside and bruising her while trying to push her head toward his crotch and trying to pull her shirt off, is assault, but under Alabama law it is not rape. Assault it sure sounds like. But the distinctions are real and they matter.
Liberals have been unnerved and upset about Al Franken’s conduct with women. However libertine was the general atmosphere on his 2006 USO tour, grabbing (or grabbing at) Leann Tweeden’s breasts and recording the moment was sexual aggression and reflected terrible judgment, for which he has apologized in a manner Tweeden accepted. Accusations of later butt-grabbing are also serious, but not conclusive. The demand that he resign presupposes guilt. Which is wrong. As Masha Gessen put it in The New Yorker, “Should Al Franken Resign is the Wrong Question.”
Many of Franken’s supporters have lived through three earthquakes overlapping in time, and the confusions among them are evident in the ambivalence that many express — even reconsiderations. The first quake was Hugh Hefner’s, saying We’re guys so it’s cool to revel in access to women’s bodies. The second was the Pill, which made Hefnerism look easy. But lo and behold, the principle of control over sex had an astonishing reverberation: The women’s movement, which said to men, Hey, not so fast, and to women, We get to own our bodies.
The sexism and misogyny found among Democrats is rightfully derided as hypocritical, since Democrats claim to stand for equality — of race, of sex, of sexual orientation and identity, of religion. But the sexism and misogyny (and racism and queerphobia) of Republicans these days is part of the brand, a rallying cry. There’s a self-described pussy-grabber in the White House. You’d have to conclude that a lot of the people who voted for him liked that about him, just as they liked the false crime statistics he tweeted about African-Americans, his description of Mexicans as rapists, and his smearing of all Muslims as potential terrorists. They like it all, because it’s all of a piece.
Our choices being less than optimum, they are nonetheless stark. As for me, I’m sticking with the hypocrites.
I’m with her. Censure the hypocrites. Scold them proportionately. And without rushing to punishment, re-examine gray areas. See how the hypocrites behave when their hypocrisy is exposed. As for the criminals, charge them. When they seek election as the people’s representatives — representing all sexes — cover them with shame and defeat them. In the light of such clarity as we can muster, dissolve the obscuring gray.
Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D. program in communications at Columbia University. He is the author of 16 books, including several on journalism and politics. His next book is a novel, The Opposition. Follow him on Twitter: @toddgitlin.
While millions of American poor children will soon find themselves further ostracized and closer in status to poor children everywhere, the thinning middle class will soon pay more in taxes to support the style of the upper class whose taxes will be reduced, the media, while not fake, continue to be distracted on various wrongdoings. Here’s what fell through the hole in the last week or so.
***
By DANA NEACSU: TheWeekHoleView Muses on Wrongdoings
In a devastating reality check, TPV finds itself alone in its commitment to net neutrality. And because we are nobody’s b*tich, it means we are alone. The reality hit us when FCC Chairman Ajit Pai revealed plans to his fellow commissioners to fully dismantle the agency’s Obama-era net neutrality regulations. It is a major victory for dollars, we mean, for the telecom industry’s CEOs and their offshore accounts.
What does Trump-appointed Pai mean to do?
Pai, like any good son of immigrants would do, intends to scrap the FCC’s core net neutrality rules, which prohibit internet service providers like Comcast or Verizon from blocking or slowing web traffic or negotiating paid deals with websites for “fast lanes” to consumers.
How would this affect TPV?
TPV will continue its irrelevant irreverence.
Now, can we talk less fancy? Can we restate Pai’s actions for the Whitman lover in all of us?
OK, try this. Pai intends to give us his hand if we give him our money. If we give ourselves to him or Trump, before preaching or law, he will stick with us until impeachment comes. Amen.
That’s “Song of the Open Road.”
Open indeed, if you can pay Trump’s toll.
***
By DANA NEACSU: Pai’s Song of the Open Road
In an unpredictable move, Nebraska regulators are standing their ground and tell their northern neighbors they stink and they should all go the way Amherst went.
TPV asked
Why did the Nebraska Public Service Commission vote 3-2 to approve the route through the state for the Keystone XL pipeline, just days after the original Keystone Pipeline ruptured and dumped 210,000 gallons of oil into Amherst, South Dakota?
Nebraskans shrugged off their little shoulders and yawned. Finally, one scribbled down an answer: the Keystone XL pipeline will transport up to 830,000 barrels per day of crude from Canada and North Dakota to oil refineries on the Gulf Coast. And? TPV pressed.
That was a minor accident which happened at 6 AM, local time, when Amherstians were still sleeping or drinking their hot cup of Folger’s coffee and watching Good Morning America. That’s so bourgeois. Haven’t they heard of night shifts and early morning shifts? What’s next? Drinking lattes?
Oh, the answer made sense. TPV was afraid that by removing the last big regulatory hurdle for the oil project after years of bitter protests from environmentalists and landowners, Nebraskans actually thought about helping President Elephant Trophy Trump to make America Great Like Never Before, so Trophy Trump can finally bragg:
“Doomsday is on its way and comes because of U.S. energy dominance.”
***
By DANA NEACSU: Nebraska Helps Trump Make America a Yuge Oily Pond
Here we are a week later, and closer than ever to the end of the year. And what a year! In Africa, for instance, waves upon of waves of social movements are occurring almost simultaneously. TPV is referring to the trophy hunting of the white man’s colonization followed by the inner colonization of the indigenous coup. Here is how they all fell through the TPV hole during these past few days:
“China and Zimbabwe are all-weather friends,” according to a defence ministry report.
Mugabe may go but nothing will change in Zimbabwe. The dictatorship its people have accepted decades ago, will remain. As Mike Pence would say, that’s a coup, not a reform!
***
By DANA NEACSU: TheWeekholeView on How Not to Stage a Coup
What to do about a global info-and-disinfo pipeline, and who can do it?
Mark Zuckerberg’s original Facebook profile. (Photo by Niall Kennedy/ flickr CC 2.0)
Beginning in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and his companions made a historic contribution to the annals of alchemy: They converted the lust for human contact into gold. Facebook’s current net worth is more than $500 billion, with Zuckerberg’s own share tallied at $74.2 billion, which makes him something like the fifth-wealthiest person in the world.
What can be said about Facebook can also more or less be said of Google, Twitter, YouTube and other internet platforms, but here I’ll confine myself mainly to Facebook. What a business model! Whenever their 2-billion-and-counting users click, the company (a) sells their attention to advertisers, and (b) rakes in data, which it transmutes into information that it uses to optimize the deal it offers its advertisers. Facebook is the grandest, most seductive, farthest-flung, most profitable attention-getting machine ever. Meanwhile, according to a post-election BuzzFeed analysis by Craig Silverman, who popularized the term “fake news”:
In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement [industry jargon for shares, reactions and comments] than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News and others.
What has to be faced by those aghast at the prevalence of online disinformation is that it follows directly from the social-media business model. Ease of disinformation — so far, at least — is a feature, not a bug.
Zuckerberg presents himself (and has often been lionized as) a Promethean bringer of benefits to all humanity. He is always on the side of the information angels. He does not present himself as an immoralist, like latter-day Nazi-turned-American-missile-scientist Wernher von Braun, as channeled by Tom Lehrer in this memorable lyric:
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apolitical
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department!” says Wernher von Braun.
To the contrary, Zuckerberg is a moralist. He does not affect to be apolitical. He wants his platform to be a “force for good in democracy.” He wants to promote voting. He wants to “give all people a voice.” These are political values. Which is a fine thing. Whenever you hear powerful people purport to be apolitical, check your wallet.
There’s no evidence that in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard computer-savvy buddies devised their amazing apparatus and wrote the code for it, that they intended to expose Egyptian police torture and thereby mobilize Egyptians to overthrow Hosni Mubarak, or to help white supremacists distribute their bile, or to throw open the gates through which Russians could cheaply circulate disinformation about American politics. They were ingenious technicians who wholeheartedly shared the modern prejudice that more communication means more good for the world — more connection, more community, more knowledge, more, more, more. They were not the only techno-entrepreneurs who figured out how to keep their customers coming back for more, but they were among the most astute. These engineer-entrepreneurs devised intricate means toward a time-honored end, pursuing the standard modern media strategy: package the attention of viewers and readers into commodities that somebody pays for. Their product was our attention.
Sounds like a nifty win-win. The user gets (and relays) information, and the proprietor, for supplying the service, gets rich. Information is good, so the more of it, the better. In Zuckerberg’s words, the goal was, and remains, “a community for all people.” What could go wrong?
So it’s startling to see the cover of this week’s Economist, a publication not hitherto noted for hostility to global interconnection under the auspices of international capital. The magazine’s cover graphic shows the Facebook “f” being wielded as a smoking gun. The cover story asks, “Do social media threaten democracy,” and proceeds to cite numbers that have become fairly familiar now that American politicians are sounding alarms:
Facebook acknowledged that before and after last year’s American election, between January 2015 and August this year, 146 million users may have seen Russian misinformation on its platform. Google’s YouTube admitted to 1,108 Russian-linked videos and Twitter to 36,746 accounts. Far from bringing enlightenment, social media have been spreading poison.
Facebook’s chief response to increasingly vigorous criticism is an engineer’s rationalization: that it is a technological thing — a platform, not a medium. You may call that fatuously naïve. You may recognize it as a commonplace instance of the Silicon Valley belief that if you figure out a way to please people, you are entitled to make tons of money without much attention to potentially or actually destructive social consequences. It’s reminiscent of what Thomas Edison would have said if asked if he intended to bring about the electric chair, Las Vegas shining in the desert, or, for that matter, the internet; or what Johannes Gutenberg have said if asked if he realized he was going to make possible the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. Probably something like: We’re in the tech business. And: None of your business. Or even: We may spread poison, sure, but also candy.
This candy not only tastes good, Zuckerberg believes, but it’s nutritious. Thus on Facebook — his preferred platform, no surprise — Mark Zuckerberg calls his brainchild “a platform for all ideas” and defends Facebook’s part in the 2016 election with this ringing declaration: “More people had a voice in this election than ever before.” It’s a bit like saying that Mao Zedong succeeded in assembling the biggest crowds ever seen in China, but never mind. Zuckerberg now “regrets” saying after the election that it was “crazy” to think that “misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election.” But he still boasts about “our broader impact … giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote.”
Senators as well as journalists are gnashing their teeth. Hearings are held. As always when irresponsible power outruns reasonable regulation, the first recourse of reformers is disclosure. This is, after all, the age of freedom of information (see my colleague Michael Schudson’s book, The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945–1975). On the top-10 list of cultural virtues, transparency has moved right up next to godliness. Accordingly, Sens. Amy Klobuchar, Mark Warner and John McCain have introduced an Honest Ads Act, requiring disclosure of the sources of funds for online political ads and (in the words of the senators’ news release) “requiring online platforms to make all reasonable efforts to ensure that foreign individuals and entities are not purchasing political advertisements in order to influence the American electorate. (A parallel bill has been introduced in the House.) And indeed, disclosure is a good thing, a place to start.
What to do? That’s the question of the hour. The midterm elections of 2018 are less than a year away.
Europeans have their own ideas, which make Facebook unhappy, though it ought not be surprising that a global medium runs into global impediments — and laws. In September the European Union told Facebook, Twitter and other social media to take down hate speech or face legal consequences. In May 2016, the companies had “promised to review a majority of hate speech flagged by users within 24 hours and to remove any illegal content.” But 17 months later, the EU’s top regulator said the promise wasn’t good enough, for “in more than 28 percent of cases, it takes more than one week for online platforms to take down illegal content.” Meanwhile, Europe has no First Amendment to impede online (or other) speech controls. Holocaust denial, to take a conspicuous example, is a crime in 16 countries. And so, consider a German law that went into effect on Oct. 1 to force Facebook and other social-media companies to conform to federal law governing the freedom of speech. According to The Atlantic:
The Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, or the “Network Enforcement Law,” colloquially referred to as the “Facebook Law,” allows the government to fine social-media platforms with more than 2 million registered users in Germany … up to 50 million euros for leaving “manifestly unlawful” posts up for more than 24 hours. Unlawful content is defined as anything that violates Germany’s Criminal Code, which bans incitement to hatred, incitement to crime, the spread of symbols belonging to unconstitutional groups and more.
As for the United Kingdom, Facebook has not responded to charges that foreign intervention through social media also tilted the Brexit vote. As Carole Cadwalladr writes in The Guardian:
No ads have been scrutinized. Nothing — even though Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council think tank, asked to testify before the Senate intelligence committee last week, says evidence of Russian interference online is now “incontrovertible.” He says: “It is frankly implausible to think that we weren’t targeted too.”
Then what? In First Amendment America, of course, censorship laws would never fly. Then can reform be left up to Facebook management?
Unsurprisingly, that’s what the company wants. At congressional hearings last week, their representatives said that by the end of 2018 they would double the number of employees who would inspect online content. But as New York Times reporters Mike Isaac and Daisuke Wakabayashi wrote, “in a conference call with investors, Facebook said many of the new workers are not likely to be full-time employees; the company will largely rely on third-party contractors.”
Suppose that company is serious about scrubbing their contacts of lies and defamations. It’s unlikely that temps and third-party contractors, however sage, however algorithm-equipped, can do the job. So back to the question: Beyond disclosure, which is a no-brainer, what’s to be done, and by whom?
For one thing, as the fierce Facebook critic Zeynep Tufekci notes, many on-the-ground employees are troubled by less-than-forceful actions by company owners. Why don’t wise heads in the tech world reorganize Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (which existed through 2013)? Through recent decades, we have seen excellent organizations of this sort arise from many professional quarters: scientists — nuclear scientists in particular, lawyers, doctors, social workers and so on. Ever since 1921, when in a short book called The Engineers and the Price System the great economic historian Thorstein Veblen looked to engineers to overcome the venality of the corporations that employed them, such dreams have led a sort of subterranean, but sometimes aboveground, life.
The Economist is not interested in such radical ideas. Having sounded an alarm about the toxicity of social media, The Economist predictably — and reasonably — goes on to warn against government intrusion. Also reasonably, it allots responsibility to thoughtless consumers, though while blaming the complicit victims it might well reflect on the utter breakdown of democratic norms under the spell of Republican fraudulence and insanity:
[P]olitics is not like other kinds of speech; it is dangerous to ask a handful of big firms to deem what is healthy for society. Congress wants transparency about who pays for political ads, but a lot of malign influence comes through people carelessly sharing barely credible news posts. Breaking up social-media giants might make sense in antitrust terms, but it would not help with political speech — indeed, by multiplying the number of platforms, it could make the industry harder to manage.
Not content to stop there, though, The Economist offers other remedies:
The social-media companies should adjust their sites to make clearer if a post comes from a friend or a trusted source. They could accompany the sharing of posts with reminders of the harm from misinformation. Bots are often used to amplify political messages. Twitter could disallow the worst — or mark them as such. Most powerfully, they could adapt their algorithms to put clickbait lower down the feed. Because these changes cut against a business model designed to monopolize attention, they may well have to be imposed by law or by a regulator.
But in the US, it’s time to consider more dramatic measures. Speaking of disclosure, many social scientists outside the company would like Facebook to open up more of its data — for one reason among others, to understand how their algorithms work. There are those in the company who say they would respond reasonably if reformers and researchers got specific about what data they want to see. What specifically should they ask?
Should there be, along British lines, a centrally appointed regulatory board? Since 2003, the UK has had an Office of Communications with regulatory powers. Its board is appointed by a Cabinet minister. Britain also has a press regulation apparatus for newspapers. How effective these are I cannot say. In the US, should a sort of council of elders be established in Washington, serving staggered terms, to minimize political rigging? But if so, what happens when Steve Bannon gets appointed?
Columbia law professor Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, advocates converting Facebook into a public benefit or nonprofit company. The logic is clear, though for now it’s a nonstarter.
But we badly need the debate.
The Economist’s conclusion is unimpeachable:
Social media are being abused. But, with a will, society can harness them and revive that early dream of enlightenment. The stakes for liberal democracy could hardly be higher.
The notion of automatic enlightenment through clicks was, of course, a pipe dream. What’s more plausible today is a nightmare. It is no longer a decent option for a democracy — even a would-be democracy — to stand by mumbling incantations to laissez faire while the institutions of reason are shaking.
TPV is no Mark Twain, but the Trumps are all the Innocents Abroad could have been and more. Where Twain chronicles the first American organized tour of Europe, TPV chronicles Trump, the put-upon simpleton, a gullible victim of flatterers and “frauds,” and an awe-struck admirer of Russian ex-KGB royalty. Here is a sample of what happened during this pan-Asian Trumpism:
By DANA NEACSU: TheWeekholeView Travels Abroad
if it did not exist
tomorrow
if everything stopped today
and life would go forward
without the idea of time
I would love you without return
and your skin would always shine
and I would be someone else
or an apricot
(Perpetuum nobile)
dacă n-ar exista
mîine
dacă s-ar opri totul azi
și viața ar merge înainte
fără ideea de timp
te-aș iubi fără întoarcere
și pielea ta ar străluci mereu
și eu aș fi altcineva
ori un zarzăr
(perpetuum nobile)
By Puiu Jipa: perpetuum nobile (translated by Dana Neacsu)
Though signs are coming about an imminent change in our power structure, the democratic process is tedious and often frustrating. Trump himself, the guy at the head of our American version of Monopoly, apparently had to find the hard way that he would not be able to play Louis IX, dispensing decisions in criminal or civil investigations. For instance, he cannot dispense with Muller’s services in the Russia investigation. Until then:
***
By DANA NEACSU: TheWeekholeView Fakes Frustration
In his rather tight briefs, Marquel scratched his head slowly and read the Times article More Women Say Harvey Weinstein Sexually Assaulted Them. Uncomfortable, or just needing to pee, he thought #metoo as he recalled his years with Harvey Weinstein.
The shame and embarrassment. Always being hit on with nowhere to go. Marquel was rejected by the women who, also, barely believed him. He would leave their trailer and could hear them giggling,
“Oh that’s just Marquel.”
And there was no old boys network, or none that he knew of. Harvey was the only old boy Marquel knew.
Marquel had been hit on since childhood. He felt like a piece of meat. When Harvey invited him up to his room for a drink, what could he say?
“You’ll never make it in this town without me,” Harvey told him.
They talked story lines. Casting. Different cameras and lenses. But it was mostly about sex. #Harvey liked to watch. Marquel getting himself off. Marquel hanging naked upside down, having conversations with #Harvey similarly hanging from another bar.
So recently with every other #metoo going public, so did Marquel.
I wrote a letter to Harvey, reminding him of our early days, signing it #metoo. No reply. I felt like just a piece of meat once again. I hate being objectified.
Except in bed of course.
But then I read about the $32 million. I may be a piece of meat, but I’m not a stupid piece of meat. I’m filet mignon, not brisket.
I called up Harvey’s lawyers.
“I want my $32 million. Harvey treated me like shit. Watched me do everything I could think of.”
“What do you mean you could think of?” asked the shyster.
“Well I’m not the most creative guy, but I could always come up with something. Harvey watched like an eagle.”
“I don’t understand. You thought these things up?” asked the ambulance chaser.
“I hate to tell you but Harvey hasn’t had an original idea since he cast Rosie O’Donnell as a child finding God exists.”
“Wide Awake. What a bomb,” said the mouthpiece. “But you want $32 million for things you came up with? Did he force you to do all that?”
Now I was furious. “Nobody can force me to do anything. Just give me my $32 million. Or I’ll sue. “
“Well it might not be quite that high but we’ll send you a check.” Said the legal eagle.
I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. I got the check. I went out and I bought myself some brisket. You might wonder why I’m disclosing all when I’m risking the payout.
Ha.
Marquel can’t be bought for thirty two dollars. But I still deposited the check and bought the brisket. I looked at the plate, felt a certain solidarity, and thought,
“#me too.”
***
BY MARQUEL: Weinstein’s Rolling Down. Someone’s Has to.
For the last nine months our world has known one big, unstoppable harassment caused by Trump. Here are other noted examples of how banal and pervasive sexual harassment is in our society, as they fell through the recent TPV-dug holes.
1. Eminem raps about Trump-chic harassment at BET Hi-hop awards.
2. Not wanting to be undone, Hollywood uncovered its own Harvey hurricane, as in
Stop weinstein-ing me or I’ll cut off your harvey.
3. Remembering his own sexual adventures in harassment, Woody Allen defended the disgraced producer:
Harvey never made any inappropriate advances to adopted minors, shouldn’t that count for something?
4. Keeping up the sexual debate, more than 200 women told The Los Angeles Times that James Toback, 72, duped them into meetings in which he’d pleasure himself, sometimes by grinding against them.
5. Not to be forgotten, Trump accused Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice” who originally accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in 2007, of falling behind and ignoring her own lawsuit. As a result, Trump took his own deposition and served himself with a subpoena related to the incident.
6. And as an afterthught, Trump then tweeted,
“I’ve known Harvey Weinstein for a long time. I’m not at all surprised to hear all these accusations. We often bragged and compared notes, when we met.”
7. And, the wining tweet is:
The shocks are not normal, and order will not be restored: first published here http://billmoyers.com/story/unending-state-emergency/
It’s old news that Donald Trump abuses reason, knowledge, decency and dark-skinned people. You can’t tear your eyes away. You can already write tomorrow’s story:
Today the vicious, deranged freak-show star trashed Enemy A, picked a fight with Failed Insider B, invited unconstitutional action C, insulted population D, declared his intent to abrogate Agreement E or make war on Country F, and denied facts G through Z. Fill in the blanks.
If you are paying attention, each one of his assaults on decency, intelligence and knowledge will feel urgent, ridiculous or both. Each day he threatens grave damage to actual human beings and the rest of Planet Earth, and each day he demonstrates his incapacity to do anything but inflict more damage. But some readers and viewers have erected walls to protect themselves from appreciating the damage, while many others think that what he just said is just the sort of thing you’d expect him to say; or isn’t as bad as expected; or sounds like what he said last week, and so is, like it or not, normal.
Even some of our best journalists continue to scavenge the rubble of everyday politics looking for signs of normalcy and “presidentialness.”
You want to jack up your eyebrows permanently. You will feel tempted to offer, as a prologue or a follow-up to each item of news, You won’t believe this. And your task as a journalist is to convey what he just said so that the reader or viewer willbelieve that he did say what he just said, and will be able to take the measure of it, to know how it was wrong, or incoherent, and why; to know that it was founded on ignorance and falsehood, and in what ways. Making intelligible the everyday nonsense without losing the sense of the ways in which it is nonsense is the tallest of journalistic orders. And to reveal not only what he just said but what he just did, or just let happen, is a task for more journalists than can be found in the entire United States of America.
Whether you are a journalist or a citizen of some other kind, if you lose your capacity to be shocked, you have come untethered from the real shocking world in which meaning is steadily mangled. If you lose your ability to feel disgusted, you have lost your moral purchase. So in order to remain alive to the world, you must hold on to your vulnerability. You must, every day, pause the thought that you’ve heard this story before. You must feel, every day, the pain and contempt that is the gross domestic and international product of this travesty of government — let alone democratic government.
How can you tear your eyes away without renouncing every value you hold dear? But if you don’t tear your eyes away, how do you convey the true magnitude of the menaces unfolding 24 hours a day?
If you are a journalist, it is your duty to disturb — not by exaggerating, not by refusing “balance,” but by refusing to cut corners. You must consider a maniac a maniac. You must agree to be unnerved. Failure to be unnerved is a sign of impairment. Failure to disturb is a failure at your job, which is to excavate and sort through the facts in such a way as to help citizens act as they are bound to act — to restore, as best we can, the health of the republic.
Part of journalism’s challenge at this insane moment is to overcome one of its cardinal principles. It abhors “old news.” So it must struggle to get a grip on the most important news, which surely includes the ugliest, and is always, in a way, “old.” This is because the ugliest news is news that continues, that goes on happening, that fans out into more than one trajectory at a time — news that rolls on in cascading sequences that, by prevailing standards, decline in news value. It’s the initial event that seizes the headlines — the rest is aftermath, mop-up, “old news.” Next will come “breaking news.” This just in… The assumption, possibly accurate, is that once the event has been catalogued in collective memory, it loses its tensile strength, and we stop paying attention.
This distortion of our collective experience is so ordinary as to escape much notice. But the consequences of the original news, the “story,” go on shaping life regardless of who pays attention.
The killer opened fire for a few minutes but the wounded, if they survive, remain wounded, their families and friends suffer their injuries, the trauma goes on. The factories shut down, people take to drugs and drink, and the recently unemployed get worse — less secure, less meaningful — jobs. The poor lose health insurance and then get sick and cannot afford treatment. Homes get seized for nonpayment of impossible loans, neighborhoods crumble, community networks break down. Wildfires burn, and ruins smolder, and the lost are found — or not — but a community expires. The hurricane moves on and the rubble remains, the power is off at the hospital, the medicines run out. The bombs fall, the wedding party was blown up, and the survivors tell stories about what happened and talk about what to do next.
In other words, the important news is not a rivulet flowing through a bounded channel from Point A to Point B. It is more like the sea, endlessly in motion in every direction. The most serious news continues to play out, if less dramatically, less shockingly, than at the desperate moments when the shots first rang out, the fire raged, the factory gate slammed shut, the hurricane first made landfall, the would-be president first opened his mouth about Mexicans. In the nearly 12 months through which we have staggered, day by horrific day, journalists have done well to catch the man making no sense. Yet the challenge remains. How do you tell a story you may think you’ve already told even as the story continues to unfold in its unruly way?
So as not to let this piece lapse into a chronicle of failure, here are some excerpts from a fine example of journalism that rises to the occasion: Ed Morales’ report on Puerto Rico in The Nation:
As Donald Trump’s rule-by-disinformation strategy intensifies, three weeks after Hurricane Maria, a reeling Puerto Rico is becoming more of a sideshow for his callous stereotyping and ruthlessness. He is subjecting the island’s citizens to layers of anguish, at once revealing the resourcefulness of a sturdy rural culture and the banality of government by public relations. Puerto Ricans, meanwhile, are suffering that all-too-human affliction: the desperate need to connect.
One of the enduring images from Puerto Rico in the wake of Maria is people crowded together near outposts of cable or wireless companies, trying to get a signal so they can communicate. By now most people know that their friends and loved ones have survived; that they may in some cases have water but almost never electricity; that they may need precious medications, or may have stood on line at their local pharmacy for hours to get them; that they may have lost all or part of the roof to their home. Survivors have seen their neighborhoods strewn with the carcasses of dead trees, discarded mattresses and refrigerators; have spent hours trying to get cash out of the few working ATMs in their area or — now a less common complaint — waiting in a gas line.
Sustaining contact on an island littered with fallen power lines and cell-phone towers is difficult, and it contributes to a pervasive feeling of disconnection and chaos. This island is full of people suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Imagine finally reaching the remote mountaintop home of a close friend or relative, who sits there with a municipal government–issued packet of crackers, applesauce and bottled water, looking up at you watery-eyed and saying, “I was wondering whether you even wanted to talk to me anymore.”…
Amazingly, the anxious civility that has permeated the island kept us all safe, and I maneuvered the painstaking miles through a torrent of headlights, fading cell signals, flooded roadways and yawning potholes. The landscape had become an unrecognizable blur of fallen trees, twisted highway signs and mangled electrical wires. Landmarks had become distorted and useless, while entire communities that had been previously invisible now emerged, ghostlike. There was no light anywhere, just a full moon that seemed to swallow all of Route 66….
In his sociological classic, Deciding What’s News, published in 1979, Herbert J. Gans itemized what he called “enduring news values” — the unwritten, often unthought elements of a story that elevate it to prominence. Disasters loomed large in his accounting. Some disasters are social, some are natural, but all represent violent breaks from what came before. The rupture is, by definition, a sign of the extraordinary. Something has been torn asunder. The event can be pinpointed, assigned a who, a what, a where and a when, if not a why. So later we can speak of “after Vietnam” and “after Charlottesville,” with the place-name doubling as the time when a specific, bounded experience “took place.”
Gans noted, too, that after a time — usually no more than a few days — the emphasis in the reporting of a disaster shifts from the damage caused to the restoration of order. The restoration of order is not necessarily a happy ending but it’s a happier one, an exercise in not only social but mental management. It affords a sense of what we have come to call closure. The streets are drained, the rubble cleaned up, the National Guard withdrawn, the patients moved from the dysfunctional hospital, the surviving victims outfitted with their prostheses. We can move on.
But there are millions who can’t move on. Thus Ed Morales’ sum-up of the financial situation after Hurricane Maria: “…the relief designated for Puerto Rico comes in the form of roughly $5 billion in loans…a cruel joke for a territory already drowning in debt.”
One rupture of order follows another. Don’t expect order to be restored. All systems failed. That is the story. It must be told, and refreshed, and followed, and followed anew.
Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D. program in communications at Columbia University. He is the author of 16 books, including several on journalism and politics. His next book is a novel, The Opposition. Follow him on Twitter: @toddgitlin.
 |
The biggest story in the news nowadays is not Trump’s little fingers, made to fit the Twitter character-list.
The biggest story is how could Woody Allen ever believe that Ronan is his son? I mean, look, his son, made with Mia Farrow, former Ms. Frank Sinatra, brought down Harvey Weinstein. That’s all I meant. |
 |
***
By DANA NEACSU: Ronan, Who?
