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      in US Politics

      'Lynching was treated as a celebratory event': Adrian Younge on the history of US racism

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      “I’m sacrificing myself to deliver a message,” says the composer, multi-instrumentalist and now podcast-maker Adrian Younge. “We aren’t aware enough of black history, nor of the integral role black people have played in building America. There is an educational sterilisation going on and it’s my duty to make people understand that history of racism – something America has pioneered.”With more than 400 years to cover since US slavery began, Younge’s project to educate the public is a vast and complex one. Yet, speaking on a video call surrounded by analogue recording equipment in his LA studio, it is a story Younge believes he has spent his life and career building up to. “This is my What’s Going On project, my record talking about why we are in the place that we are in,” he says. “It’s as if James Baldwin hooked up with Marvin Gaye to make a record produced by David Axelrod. It’s psychedelic soul but it is very professorial at the same time. There’s so many layers to it.”Indeed, there are. The resulting project comprises a 26-track album, written, played and recorded entirely by Younge, entitled The American Negro, a four-part podcast – Invisible Blackness – hosted by Younge – and a short film, again written and directed by Younge himself.Racism is a learned behaviour, one America developed through building its nation on the backs of slave labourSuch auteurship could seem somewhat egotistical but Younge – a 42-year-old musician who has made his name in collaboration with the likes of Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Kendrick Lamar – sees it as necessary. “Pre-Covid, I was travelling the world performing and I was shocked at how little people understood about racism and its history,” he says. “Racism is a learned behaviour and one America developed through building its nation on the backs of slave labour and those economic gains. America is a slavocracy: it is a nation founded on bigotry, and those principles continue today. People might think racism no longer exists because there is no longer a slave system, but they don’t realise the laws that enabled the slave system still put us in a position where we have to jump over insurmountable handicaps to just become equal.”It is an incendiary argument and one that has found an increasing foothold in historical scholarship. The writer Edward E Baptist recently argued that the expansion of slavery during the first decades of American independence was foundational in enabling the country’s modernisation, while film-makers such as Ava DuVernay have convincingly plotted the continual subjugation of African Americans through the legal and penal system.While Younge’s album puts luscious orchestral arrangements and spoken-word interludes to use in creatively unfurling the development of structural racism in the US, it is through the podcast Invisible Blackness that he most comprehensively lays out his thesis. With guests including Public Enemy’s Chuck D, the trumpeter Keyon Harrold – whose son was recently in the headlines after being falsely accused of stealing an iPhone – and Digable Planets rapper Ladybug Mecca, Younge explores how his guests’ creation of socially conscious hip-hop influenced his own understanding of inequality. He also uses his previous career as a professor of law to authoritatively detail the origins of this American “slavocracy”.“I use the phrase of the show’s title to illustrate that we all have invisible blackness, this sense of ‘otherness’ inside us, because we are all descended from the first human being in Africa,” Younge says. “It all means that we are radically equal. And I have black radicals on the podcast, like Chuck D, to find out what he had to go through to educate others about this. We’re all looking at the past to understand what’s happening now, to inform people so they can ultimately make their own opinions with all the knowledge at their disposal.”Lynching was a form of bigotry porn: it is the galvanising of a group by emotion, rather than thoughtIt is a measured approach, yet not one without moments of visceral, emotional charge. Most strikingly, the cover art for The American Negro album is a black-and-white image of Younge being lynched, in the fashion of a “lynching postcard”. “Lynching was a form of bigotry porn: it is the galvanising of a group by emotion, rather than thought, as it’s easier to act without thinking,” he says. “Lynching was a celebratory event, one where people would pay to take ‘souvenirs’ like a thumb or an eyeball and they would then send each other postcards to say: ‘I was here’. So when you look at the album cover, which represents one of these postcards, I want to highlight how we were seen as the symbols of evil in America. And viewing the image now, we symbolise the American problem of racism. I want people to have a personal experience when they see it; I want them to see me as any other person of colour that can be killed with no judicial reprisal. I want people to see that I am real and I want them to see themselves in me.”It is a powerful image, one that calls up the horrors of history while referencing its grim modern iteration: filmed police brutality against people of colour. In fact, the May 2020 police killing of Minnesotan George Floyd occurred while Younge was at the beginning of recording his album. “George Floyd’s death didn’t affect the progression of the record at all and that’s what’s sad, right?” Younge says. “It’s the same thing; before that you had Eric Garner and before that, you had so many black people dying without judicial reprisal. That is what makes the world complacent towards the treatment of black people, because it’s so commonplace.”However, the global Black Lives Matter protests sparked by Floyd’s death did augur something different. “Part of me is happy that Trump was president because, while he has inspired more bigots, his lack of reaction to these police killings and white supremacy has also launched the greatest global protest that we’ve seen regarding race. He’s removed complacency,” says Younge. “I have two daughters and I see how young people are so much more woke than they were before now. There’s 12-year-olds on TikTok explaining racism because of him.”Despite the centuries of ingrained inequality laid out in Younge’s project, is it still possible to hope for a future change? “We’re in a better place now than we have been for decades,” he says. “America has been forced to acknowledge there is a problem but there is a deferred commitment to solving it. Our governments have the power to make those changes and so they need to make it happen – and soon.”Until then, Younge is keeping occupied. “Right now, I am the busiest I’ve ever been in my life,” he says, “but I’m doing something good and so it feels good. I’m giving so much of myself because this is an ongoing fight. This project is something that people could look back on 50 years from now and still have more to say.”The podcast Invisible Blackness is available now on Amazon Music. The American Negro by Adrian Younge is out on 26 February. More

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      in US Politics

      'We're all part of the story': behind Will Smith's 14th amendment docuseries

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      Chances are it is the most influential amendment to the US constitution that you aren’t familiar with. Given its impact, it is astonishing how little the 14th amendment is discussed in public life. Americans can’t rattle it off like the first and second amendments – but its words have fundamentally shaped the modern definition of US citizenship and the principles of equality and freedom entitled to those within the country’s borders.Sitting at the crux of these key ideals, the 14th amendment is cited in more litigation than any other, including some of the US supreme court’s most well-known cases: Plessy v Ferguson, Brown v Board of Education, Loving v Virginia, Roe v Wade, Bush v Gore, Obergefell v Hodges. And because these noble notions are embedded in the 14th, it has the remarkable ability to generate both boundless hope (for the promises of that more perfect union aspired to in the constitution’s preamble) and crushing misery (for the failures to achieve such promises).The new six-part Netflix docuseries Amend: The Fight for America is a deep dive into the 14th amendment. Ratified in 1868, it gave citizenship to all those born or naturalized in the country and promised due process and equal protection for all people. Amend threads the amendment through the fabric of American history, from its origins before the American civil war to the bigoted violence of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, through the tumultuous years of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, right until today’s feverish debates over same-sex marriage and immigration. The show is a journey into America’s fraught relationship with its marginalized peoples, who have fought to fully be a part of the country.It’s heady stuff for sure, but portrayed with an eye toward educating and entertaining, employing a blend of performance, music and animation, in addition to the requisite experts and archival images. Acclaimed actors breathe life into speeches and writings of key historical figures: Mahershala Ali as Frederick Douglass, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Andrew Johnson, Diane Lane as Earl Warren, Samira Wiley as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Laverne Cox as James Baldwin, Pedro Pascal as Abraham Lincoln, and Randall Park as Robert F Kennedy, among many others.Amend is infotainment expertly done, with the host Will Smith’s affable yet engaged approach gently guiding viewers through moments joyful and difficult. Smith executive-produced the series with the Emmy-winning writer Larry Wilmore, who exhibited his skill at finding humor in dark moments as the “senior black correspondent” on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. “People just don’t know what the 14th amendment is,” Wilmore said to the Guardian. “The first, second and fifth are hogging up most of the oxygen. And yet the 14th has been the most resilient and durable. It’s doing a lot of heavy lifting, but a lot of light has not been shown on it.”Amend helps viewers appreciate the 14th amendment’s unwavering relevance by delving first into its origins. After the Emancipation Proclamation, some 4 million enslaved people were free – but they weren’t citizens, even after fighting to preserve the union during the civil war. The 14th amendment changed that, circumscribing citizenship and providing a roadmap for formerly enslaved people to fully actualize their economic, political and familial lives. It is the first appearance of the word equal in the constitution. “In a lot of ways, our country wasn’t founded in 1776,” said K Sabeel Rahman, a Brooklyn Law School professor. “It was founded by [Ohio representative] John Bingham and Congress passing the 14th amendment because that’s the modern constitution.”The system of labor, wealth and politics by which white southerners had defined themselves was crumbling – but they wouldn’t let it go easily. While citizens and terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan waged violence on black Americans, a popular, persuasive new medium helped propagate the mythologies of the lost cause – and it is partly why many aren’t familiar with the 14th amendment: “The former Confederacy got the final cut on the movie of civil war,” as Smith puts it, with films like Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation shaping the dominant historical narrative.The gauzy fantasy of the noble civil war, coupled with supreme court–sanctioned segregation, ensured the scourge of open racism endured for another century after the 14th amendment’s passage. The 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision ruled that “separate but equal” violated the 14th’s equal-protection clause, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banished Jim Crow segregation. But the calls to enforce the 14th can be heard just as loudly today as in the 60s and 70s: Amend’s third episode draws a tight parallel between the non-violent activism of the civil rights movement and last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, both eschewing moderate calls for patience in favor of Martin Luther King’s “fierce urgency of now”.“We have a set of ideals in this country, and we continue to fail to live up to them,” the activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham said to the Guardian. “Every single time the police shoot another unarmed black or brown or indigenous person, every single time an LGBTQ+ person is fired from their job or left houseless, every time immigrants are stripped of the rights that should belong to them, we are experiencing the gap between what is written and what is true. And the more we grapple with these challenging conversations, the more real we can get not just about the scale of the problem we have to fix but how exactly we can go about handling it.”The amendment is a lodestar for all claiming the constitutional right to be treated fairly. Women, with the help of then attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg, convinced the court in the 1970s that the 14th’s equal protection clause should apply to gender in the same way it is applied to race, both being immutable characteristics that don’t affect one’s ability.But women’s equality depends on control over their own bodies and the choice of when and whether to have children. In 1965, the right to privacy was established, founded on the 14th amendment’s due process clause, and this new concept was applied to Roe v Wade in 1973, which legalized abortion by determining that the decision to end a pregnancy belongs to the woman, not the state. “It’s an unfolding process,” said Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard law professor, of the 14th amendment extending to the right to abortion. “It may not seem obvious as a path, but that is the process of constitutional law.”Indeed, the 14th touches Americans’ most intimate moments. Its passage finally allowed formerly enslaved people to legally marry, and later it was applied to protect the right of interracial couples to marry in 1967 and the right of consenting adults to engage in intimate sexual conduct in 2003. Amend devotes one powerful episode to the story of Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff in the 2015 supreme court case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide and proved that marriage equality too was at the heart of the 14th. (Obergefell admits he had no idea what the 14th amendment was before his case.)More than 150 years after the passage of the 14th, many groups are still actively struggling to realize its promises. Immigrants have long devoted backbreaking labor to this country, only to see intolerant policies, racism and violence trample their dreams. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the only major federal legislation to explicitly stop immigration for a specific nationality, was the result of the supreme court putting fear and misguided claims of national security above the constitution’s expressly provided protections. Dehumanizing and criminalizing immigrant groups to deny their 14th amendment rights has been part of America’s playbook ever since. “We’ve just survived four years of a president who’s been openly racist and has targeted particular immigrant communities based on their race,” said Alina Das, the co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at NYU’s law school. “Equality under the law is something that the immigrant-rights community is still striving for in many ways.”After all, says Cunningham, “the biggest misconception [about the 14th] is that once it’s written on paper, the work is done. The truth, of course, is very different, and I think that Amend really pushes people to see past the veneer of American exceptionalism.” The show sadly but clearly illustrates how ignorance and hate have long fomented misunderstanding, anger, violence and inequality in America and how potently fear and intolerance have prevailed.But it is also just as clear who has the power to make the 14th amendment’s promise of an equal society a reality: not the courts, but we the people, ordinary folks taking to the streets, sacrificing our time, privacy, and sometimes safety, and doing the courageous, often unglamorous hard work of making sure its words have meaning for all of us. “We’re all part of the story of the 14th amendment, and it’s a continuing story,” Das notes. “And the documentary does a wonderful job of inviting people to be part of the living history of the amendment.” As Smith says at the conclusion of the series: “We have to choose to bring 14 to life.”“We’re giving an uplifting message here, not a dour or bleak one, said Wilmore. “There’s a lot of tough material here, but at the end of the day, we’re saying that this is what allowed the promise to happen – this document is the pathway for the promise.” More

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      in US Politics

      Saturday Night Live: Regé-Jean Page hosts, cast use Cruz news for boos

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      We open on a Las Vegas talk show, Oops, You Did it Again. Hosted by Britney Spears (Chloe Fineman), who we all know from her “upbeat Instagram videos and the word ‘conservatorship’”, the show is a forum for public apologies.After a much-deserved potshot at Justin Timberlake, Spears welcomes her first guest: Ted Cruz (Aidy Bryant). Sporting cornrows and drinking a piña colada, the Texas senator, who this week got caught vacationing in Cancún amid his state’s energy crisis – and who blamed the whole thing on his young daughters – admits “I’m in a little bit of hot water, which is something I’m told people in Texas don’t have.”Next, Spears welcomes New York governor Andrew Cuomo (Pete Davidson), begrudgingly apologizing for “the nursing home stuff”. It pains him to eat crow, and he reaches breaking point after learning that “bird bitch” Mayor Bill DeBlasio thinks he should be investigated. Still, at least Cuomo’s not as pathetic as Cruz, whose sympathy he harshly rebuffs: “Do not. Associate yourself. With Me. I am a man. You are a clown. If you mess with me, I will send you to a clown hospital. And when you die, I will not count your body.”Last up is Mandalorian actor Gina Carano (Cecily Strong), let go from the Disney show for, among other things, comparing criticism of conservatives to Nazi persecution. She huffs and puffs about cancel culture and asks why Disney has the right to take the moral high ground: “Have you heard Brer Rabbit’s accent on the Splash Mountain ride?” This is a fair point, but having it come from Carano feels way off. Regardless, even she wants nothing to do with Cruz, telling him, “Do not. Associate yourself. With me.”The show gets points for going with an original setup for the cold open, as well as its mercilessness towards Cruz. That said, the cast constantly breaking hampers things. Nothing is that funny.Our host is Bridgerton actor Regé-Jean Page. After a quick Ray Jay Johnson reference that I assume went over his fans’ heads, he fends off the female cast. They’re all obsessed with the sexual dynamo he plays on the hit Netflix costume drama, although Aidy Bryant assures him, “We definitely have other sketch ideas where you aren’t just being an extremely hot sex man.” SNL has shown a tendency to over-rely on hosts’ hotness – see the recent Jason Momoa and Jennifer Lopez episodes, both dire.On Actor’s Spotlight, two black British actors – Kingsley Ben-Adir (Page) and Daniel Kaluuya (Chris Redd) – join Ice Cube (Kenan Thompson) to discuss their new movies. Cube tries to get in on the critical love by pretending he’s British too, claiming, “Me name’s not Ice Cube in Britain, it’s Coldy Squares.” No one buys it until Hugh Grant (Alex Moffat) shows up and recognizes him from the old neighborhood.After a short rap from Ego Nwodim, Davidson and musical guest Bad Bunny about going crazy during quarantine, a barroom game of pool is interrupted when a player puts on Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver’s License. The dudes all make fun of the song, but eventually reveal they’re huge fans. In-depth discussions of the convoluted backstory and reminiscences of their own heartbreak lead to the male cast joining for “the bridge of our lives”.Next, Page interviews for a job at an ad company that works on spec, creating slogans for brands that didn’t ask. Disastrous examples include “Charmin – Use after you poop!”, “Legos – Bet you can’t eat just one and!” and “Netflix – We have porn now!”. Funny as the ads are, and good as the interaction between Page and Beck Bennett’s aloof boss is, the funniest bit is a recurring gag in which Bowen Yang’s harried assistant hands the two strange notes which read “We’re losing millions”, “They have your daughter”, “Your mom is topless in the lobby” and, simply, “Hi”. A bit overstuffed, this zany pre-filmed segment is still one of the best of the season.Bad Bunny takes the stage alongside Rosalía for a steamy duet on La Noche de Anoche. On Weekend Update, Colin Jost kicks things off by hammering Cruz, noting “if you hate Ted Cruz, this is a pretty fun week … and if you like Ted Cruz, well, you’re probably Ted Cruz.” Michael Che notes that the winter storm brought “the most snow seen in Texas since Michael Irvine’s Super Bowl party”.Jost welcomes “relationship expert” Davidson to discuss the “first and hopefully last” Valentine’s Day of the pandemic. Davidson recounts spending the holiday watching the Britney Spears doc with his mom, which convinced him to finally move out and get his own place.“My mom is a lot like this show,” he explains. “No matter what I do, I’m never asked to leave.”After taking a few more digs at Cruz and Cuomo (as well as making a joke about Israel only vaccinating its Jewish populace that’s sure to generate backlash), Che welcomes Jessie Rauch (Heidi Gardner), a community activist who wants to discuss food insecurity. She doesn’t get the chance, as Che can’t get over the fact she’s dressed like Freddy Krueger. I’m not sure what the point or punchline of this was, but Gardner’s silly charm keeps it from totally tanking.A History Channel show looks at sea shanties. A whaling crew sings one, quickly revealing no one knows what they’re doing and they’re all doomed: “Yoho, we’ll never go home/ We’re stuck out here and we’re all alone!” The funniest bit is a brief aside wherein the crew describe to a new sailor their various “sea wives” – a whale’s blowhole, a blanket stuffed into a barrel, two jellyfish tied together, and their hands.A get together between new neighboring families, one white, the other black, sees them engage in a grace-off, trying to one-up each other through gospel. You keep waiting for things to take a dark or awkward turn but everything stays surprisingly sweet. Kudos to Bennett, who shows off some seriously impressive dancing.On the set of Bridgerton, Page and a costar are set to film a sex scene but the intimacy coordinator is out sick. Her replacements are two dirtbags (Davidson and Mikey Day) who have no idea what they’re doing or even what the show is about – they seem to think it involves incest. The set up promises something edgy or risqué, but unfortunately it just meanders.Bad Bunny returns and performs Te Deseo Lo Mejor. Wrestling fans will get a kick out of him proudly sporting the WWE 24/7 Championship belt, which he recently won. I imagine non-wrestling fans will just be confused.The last sketch of the night is a music video set in a grocery store, in which a dopey trio of ironic white rappers keeps getting interrupted and shamed for not wearing masks. It ends with them tasered and tackled by the manager.There was a noticeable patchwork quality to most of the sketches tonight, but that wasn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it led to a lot of unexpectedly funny moments. It also made excellent use of Page’s musical abilities and Bad Bunny’s decent comic chops, the end result a lively, enjoyable episode. More

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      in World Politics

      Can Chinawood Win Soft Power for Beijing?

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      With movie theaters closed all over the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hollywood studios had little reason for celebration over the past year. In business for over a century, Universal Pictures (founded in 1912), Paramount (1912), Warner Bros. (1923), Walt Disney (1923) and Columbia Pictures (1924) now have an extra reason to be concerned. In 2020, China took over Hollywood’s crown as the world’s biggest movie market, with a revenue of $3.2 billion, 84% of which came from domestic sales.

      Foreign-Language Entertainment Is Having Its Soft-Power Moment

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      Is this new status enough for China? Probably not. New blockbusters will soon rebalance these numbers, but soft power — the ability to seduce people from all over the world through culture — takes time to build up. Soft power also brings lasting income to its country of origin in terms of products and services, like tourism for example. When in 1934, Walt Disney began work on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” other film studio chiefs derided the project as “Disney’s Folly,” since adults, not children, were considered to be primary consumers. These executives forgot that children watch films over and over again and want all the related merchandise. “Snow White” went on to become the first film in history to gross $100 million, selling 400 million tickets from 1937 to 1948.

      Welcome to Chinawood

      These are just numbers. Disney’s greatest achievement was making his creations into lucrative vehicles of US culture for decades to come. That is what China wants to achieve. It has been taking similar steps ever since farmer-turned-entrepreneur Xu Wenrong began building Hengdian World Studios in the 1990s. Known as Chinawood, it became the largest outdoor film studio in the world and one of China’s biggest domestic tourist attractions, offering historic film sets, a resort hotel and live performances. Marketing itself “China’s tourism and performing arts capital,” Chinawood attracts thousands of TV shows and film productions every year.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Also, since fewer than 40 foreign films are allowed to take a bite of this massive market due to a strict quota system, Chinawood also houses foreign productions like “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” a Hollywood-Chinawood co-production (these escape quota restrictions), starring the likes of Brendan Fraser and Jet Li, grossed over $400 million worldwide in the first 21 weeks of its release.

      Is this enough to make Chinawood a new soft power? The answer is, probably not. Because Chinawood productions face a similar challenge as all the other blockbusters shot in the country, these films often lack creativity, self-criticism, audacity and freedom. Take the recent historical war drama, Guan Hu’s “The Eight Hundred,” for example. The film — at $470 million, 2020’s top-grossing production — pushed China to the number one spot in global box office revenues. However, most of this profit comes from China itself and not international markets. While European and US theaters still struggle to open because of COVID-19, even without the pandemic, it’s hard to say that such productions could help the Chinese film industry overseas.

      “The Eight Hundred” was abruptly pulled from a scheduled premiere at the Shanghai Film Festival in 2019 without an explanation. A version shorter by 11 minutes later opened in theaters, with much fewer scenes involving Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces. Besides likely censorship, what may explain the little impact the film had internationally, as the film critic Tony Rayns suggests, is that while avoiding the “rabid China-is-top-dog quality of the Wolf Warrior movies,” its “spirit is resolutely neo-nationalist,” with “all the bombast and jingoism of the current moment.”

      Hollywood became an effective soft powerhouse not only because of million-dollar budgets and top-quality products, but also thanks to creative freedom. For instance, Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989) and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979), both masterpieces, were expressly critical of US military intervention in Vietnam. The films are also on the patriotic side, with American values overemphasized. However, by criticizing America’s own culture and politics, the films are far from being hard-power propaganda.

      Hard Power Interference

      The Communist Party of China (CPP), on the other hand, interferes directly in cultural productions. According to a report by James Tager, PEN America’s deputy director of Free Expression Research and Policy, since 2011, the CCP’s Central Committee issued a statement declaring the “urgency for China to strengthen its cultural soft power and global cultural influence.” As Louisa Lim and Julia Bergin write in The Guardian, the party is trying to “reshape the global information environment with massive infusions of money” with the aim being to “influence public opinion overseas in order to nudge foreign governments into making policies favorable toward China’s Communist Party.”

      The official People’s Daily once declared, “we cannot be soft on soft power,” calling for culture must be exported in order to strengthen China’s international stance. Chinawood is part of this effort, which includes $10 billion spent annually on public diplomacy, in contrast with $2 billion allocated by the US Department of State in 2018. Soft power works well when China opens hundreds of Confucius Institutes to spread its language and culture around the world. What doesn’t work is when the same party severely punishes Chinese ethnical minorities, like the Muslim Uighurs facing persecution in Xinjiang.

      China already has an important cultural soft power: its art, poetry, painting, sculpture and pottery, from the early imperial dynasties to the 20th century, coveted by museums and collectors around the world. It succeeds because the state hard power doesn’t interfere significantly with it. But when it comes to contemporary culture — films, games, TV shows and apps like Tik Tok — Chinese hard power seems to impose harmful control. That’s not how soft power works. It needs freedom and self-criticism to produce genuine and seductive art.

      George Orwell once said that “Journalism is printing what someone does not want printed; everything else is public relations.” The phrase also pertains to the arts and the entertainment industry. When President Xi Jinping says that “the stories of China should be well told, voices of China well spread and characteristics of China well explained,” by “well” he probably means “positive.” That is definitely not how one wins soft power for the long term.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Rush Limbaugh, influential rightwing talk radio host, dies aged 70

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      Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host whose nastily personal and bigoted riffs on the daily news won millions of devoted fans and altered the landscape of American media and politics, has died, according to his wife, Kathryn.Limbaugh, 70, had been diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer a year ago.“Losing a loved one is terribly difficult, even more so when that loved one is larger than life,” Kathryn Limbaugh said on his eponymous radio show, now in its fourth decade. “Rush will forever be the greatest of all time.”At the height of his influence in the mid-1990s, Limbaugh commanded a daily radio audience of millions, known as “dittoheads”, who tuned in to hear him dissect the sins of the Bill Clinton administration and wage battle against the “commie libs” he accused of plotting to destroy the country.In a 1995 Mother Jones cover story, the late columnist Molly Ivins singled Limbaugh out as a bully and called him a “major carrier” of “plain old nastiness in our political discussion”, describing the typical Limbaugh listener as a young white male without a college degree but with a firm sense that the world had done him wrong.“Limbaugh offers him scapegoats,” Ivins wrote. “It’s the ‘feminazis’. It’s the minorities. It’s the limousine liberals. It’s all these people with all these wacky social programs to help some silly, self-proclaimed bunch of victims.”The formula was wildly successful, and pointed the way for media organizations such as Fox News to satisfy the demand for opinion content that seemed devilishly honest if you identified with it – and hate speech if you did not.Limbaugh may have created something much bigger by contributing to a style of politics that, three decades after the Rush Limbaugh show was first syndicated, produced the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.Trump, who awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, midway through a State of the Union address a year ago, called into Fox on Wednesday to praise Limbaugh and mark his death.He was a “fantastic man” and a “fantastic talent”, the former president said. “Whether [people] loved him or not, they respected him.”The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, hailed Limbaugh as a “generational media trailblazer”. Former vice-president Mike Pence said “he made conservatism fun”. Senator Ted Cruz called him “a tireless voice for freedom and the conservative movement”.But not every elegy was as fond. “Rush Limbaugh helped create today’s polarized America by normalizing racism, bigotry, misogyny and mockery,” tweeted the gun safety advocate Shannon Watts. “He was a demagogue who got rich off of hate speech, division, lies and toxicity. That is his legacy.”Limbaugh was born and raised in Missouri, his father a former pilot and mother a homemaker. He worked as a disk jockey in high school and hosted radio programs in increasingly large markets in Pennsylvania, Missouri and California before landing a national gig at WABC.Limbaugh did not find his brand as a conservative lightning rod and iconoclast until 1987, when the Federal Communications Commission repealed a 1940s-era rule mandating that radio stations allot equal airtime to both sides of any controversial issue.That meant Limbaugh could go on at indefinite length, and even critics conceded his extraordinary ability to do so, hosting a three-hour radio show filled with breathless ranting, daily. In a televised spinoff, Limbaugh did what he usually did – sit in front of a microphone, smoke cigars and rant – but with the added thrill for viewers of watching the spittle fly.Limbaugh is credited with helping to invent a new style of communication, the modern talk radio format – and, as critics would have it, a new means of amplifying hatred, laying the groundwork for a conservative media sphere that would culminate 30 years later in Pizzagate and QAnon.Limbaugh was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame and National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame.In 2003, he entered treatment after becoming addicted to the painkiller OxyContin following back surgery.He spent time off air and his career appeared to be idling before a comeback in the Obama years and then his full rehabilitation in the eyes of Trump and his supporters.Like Trump, Limbaugh offered listeners a blend of grievance politics, cruel humor, arrogant showmanship and privileged smugness that Trump showed could win much more than ratings wars.The style and the political pose established Limbaugh as godfather of generations of angry white men in the media, many of them on Fox News: Bill Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and their descendants, not to mention the conspiracy-minded networks that are challenging Fox for supremacy.Limbaugh insisted that racism was dead. He compared Chelsea Clinton, then 13, to a dog, and made fun of the labor secretary Robert Reich, who suffered bone disease as a child, for being short. He launched effusively sexist tirades, like this one quoted in a 1990 New York times piece:
      We know that women in groups – same office, same dormitory, same barracks – eventually have synchronized menstrual cycles. We also know that there is this thing called PMS, and we know that it turns a woman into a hellion. We know that PMS has been used as a defense against a charge of murder.”
      Ivins faulted Limbaugh as a bully in her Mother Jones profile.“He consistently targets dead people, little girls, and the homeless – none of whom are in a particularly good position to answer back,” she wrote.“Satire is a weapon, and it can be quite cruel. It has historically been the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful. When you use satire against powerless people, as Limbaugh does, it is not only cruel, it’s profoundly vulgar.” More

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      in US Politics

      Rush Limbaugh obituary

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      Rush Limbaugh, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer, virtually created the style of political “shock jock” radio that made him so influential. His broadcasts, featuring attacks on opponents as purveyors of what we now call “fake news”, became the template for television’s Fox News, and at its peak played a huge part in Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” of 1994, which recaptured the House of Representatives from Bill Clinton’s Democrats.Limbaugh set the tone for the internet age of politics, calling women’s rights activists “feminazis”, referring to HIV/Aids as “Rock Hudson’s disease” and claiming “environmentalist wackos” were “a bunch of scientists organised around a political position”.He argued that the existence of gorillas disproved evolution, characterised both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) and the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019) as “false flag” operations organised by leftists, and accused the Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe of allowing the Charlottesville rioting in 2017 to worsen in order to boost his presidential ambitions. “Have you ever noticed how composite sketches of criminals always look like [the black activist] Jesse Jackson?” he asked his listeners.When he cut off callers on air, he would play a vacuum cleaner noise, shouting “caller abortion”. His listeners, whom he dubbed “ditto-heads” ate it up, while those who were offended often tuned in to express their disgust. In recent years the independent fact-checking site PolitiFact consistently rated Limbaugh high in terms of “pants on fire” untruths, and just as consistently at zero on truths.Limbaugh (pronounced “LIM baw”) was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, into a family of conservative judges that included his father, whose name was also Rush. His mother, Mildred (nee Armstrong), was the family clown, and encouraged “Rusty” in his love of radio. He did poorly at school, then quit Southeast Missouri State University after a year and found a job with a radio station in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, as “Bachelor Jeff Christie”, but was fired after he told a black caller he claimed to find difficult to understand to “take the bone out of your nose and call again”.He was then fired from a nighttime show in Pittsburgh when new management took over. In Kansas City his morning current affairs talk show on KUDL then an evening talk show on KFIX both ended in sackings for what he described as differences with management; at this point he considered himself a “moderate failure”.He married Roxy McNeely, a radio sales executive, in 1977; they divorced in 1980.By then Limbaugh was working with the Kansas City Royals baseball team in group ticket sales and special events, and in 1983 he married Michelle Sixta, an usherette in the Royals’ Stadium Club. That year he returned to radio with KMBZ in Kansas City, but again got fired for being controversial, in part about the local Chiefs football team. However, one consultant who had enjoyed his KMBZ style suggested him as a candidate to replace the equally controversial Morton Downey Jr on KRBK in Sacramento, California, to which Limbaugh moved in 1984. At KRBK Limbaugh began to attract attention. In 1987, during the Ronald Reagan era, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required users of the public airwaves to allow equal time if they broadcast political opinion. This opened the floodgates to the likes of Limbaugh, and in 1988 he moved to WABC in New York, which became the flagship for a 56-station network broadcast of his show, scheduled, unusually for talk, at midday. By 1990 he had five million listeners.Another godsend for his show was the election of Clinton in 1992, the year in which Limbaugh began a syndicated TV programme produced by the future Fox News boss Roger Ailes. Limbaugh’s deeply personal anti-Clinton campaigning was so effective that when Gingrich and the Republicans re-took the House, they made him an honorary member of the Republican caucus. He and Sixta had divorced in 1990, and in 1994 he married Marta Fitzgerald , an aerobics instructor. He told an interviewer he struggled with love because: “I am too much in love with myself.”The TV show ended in 1996, but on radio Limbaugh went from strength to strength. He now lived in Palm Beach, Florida, where he produced his radio show from his “southern command” centre. In 2003 the sports network ESPN hired him as an analyst on their Monday Night Football broadcast team, but a few weeks into the season he upset viewers by saying that the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated “because the media is very desirous that a black quarterback do well”.It was an especially odd remark given that one-third of the league’s starting quarterbacks were black; that year one of them, Tennessee’s Steve McNair, would be joint winner of the league’s Most Valuable Player award. Limbaugh resigned three days later. The following Monday he admitted to an addiction to prescription drugs, including OxyContin.He was divorced from Marta in 2004, and for the next two years was linked romantically to the CNN anchor Daryn Kagan. In 2006 Limbaugh was arrested on his return from a trip to the Dominican Republic, where he had bought viagra with a false prescription. Although charges were dropped, WBAL in Baltimore became the first station to ditch his show.The George W Bush years seemed to stretch him; he said the US torture of prisoners in 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was “no worse than what happens at a Skull and Bones initiation”, perhaps forgetting that Bush and his father were both members of that Yale University secret society. But just as Clinton had been a godsend, so Barack Obama seemed to inspire Limbaugh to new heights of partisan venom. Apart from claiming that Obama was foreign-born, he accused the president of allowing ebola into the US in revenge for African slavery. When Republicans rallied in the 2010 midterm elections, Limbaugh again reaped much of the credit.In 2008 he had signed an eight-year $400m contract with the Cumulus broadcasting company, and in 2013 he moved his home station to New York’s WOR. After signing a four-year extension in 2018, his income that year totalled $84.5m, second only to one of the original, non-political, fellow shock jocks, Howard Stern. In 2010 he married for the fourth time, to Kathryn Rogers, a party planner. Elton John sang at their wedding reception for a reported $1m fee.In 1992 Limbaugh wrote, with John Fund, The Way Things Ought to Be. Both it and the 1993 sequel, See, I Told You So, were bestsellers. In 2013 he wrote the first in a series of six children’s books featuring a character called Rush Revere – named after the Americn patriot Paul Revere – who goes back in time to have adventures during the American revolution.In 2017, after the ascension to the presidency of his Palm Beach neighbour Donald Trump, Limbaugh joined Trump in suggesting that dire warnings about the possible impact of Hurricane Irma in Florida were fake news designed to push “a climate change agenda”. He quickly became an object of derision when he had to evacuate his home before the storm hit.In January 2020 he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer; he announced it on air the following month, the day before he received the presidential medal of freedom from Trump. Nevertheless he failed to throw his full backing to Trump’s attempts to overturn the election result; he accused the president’s lawyers of failing to support their claims of voter fraud with evidence.He is survived by Kathryn. • Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, broadcaster, born 12 January 1951; died 17 February 2021 More

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      in World Politics

      Super Bowl Fans Tackle Poetry

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      On January 20, a star was born in Washington, DC, during the inauguration of the 46th president of the United States — a 78-year-old white man taking over from a 74-year-old sore loser. Before the swearing-in, an unknown 22-year-old black female strode up to the podium. She embodied the Democratic Party’s commitment to identity politics. With her expressive voice, she recited a rap-influenced poem celebrating the new dawn that would emerge after the nation’s weathering of hurricane Donald. (“Dawn” and “weathered” followed by “belly of the beast” and the metaphor of wading a sea were among the stale images that appeared in the early lines of the poem).

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      The art of poetry, long neglected in US culture, has now emerged from the shadows of cultural neglect. On February 7, it reached a pinnacle as the same young poet was invited to occupy the nation’s most prestigious stage and bask in the bright, intense spotlight of the Super Bowl. After starring in President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Amanda Gorman has become the new face and the fluid voice of a newly hopeful America, a nation run by aging white men who demonstrate their youthful spirit by promoting diverse young talents charged with renewing the veneer of political hyperreality.

      The Super Bowl halftime show featured a video clip of Gorman performing her poem, “Chorus of the Captains.” Her recital was accompanied by the kind of dramatic orchestral score typical of patriotic political ads. Its emotional crescendo rose to a climax as Gorman spoke these lines:

      “Let us walk with these warriors,
      Charge on with these champions,
      And carry forth the call of our captains!
      We celebrate them by acting with courage and compassion,
      By doing what is right and just.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Charge on:

      Move forward with speed and physical force, even if it means crushing anything that stands in the way, one of the primary virtues taught to all Americans, encouraged to act quickly and never worry about the consequences

      Contextual Note

      What could be more appropriate than the verb “charge on” for a poem celebrating a sport with a reputation for addling the brains of its players? Americans have largely positive associations with the idea of charging, whether the object charged is the enemy lines or a commodity being purchased. Americans are happy when their iPhones are fully charged and their cars supercharged. On the other hand, being charged with a crime evokes negative associations, unless it’s spectacular enough a crime to propel the subject from obscurity to fame. For many Americans, anything that makes people famous must be good.                                                                                                                                   

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      The heroes Gorman names are warriors, champions and captains. They have the perfect American profile: assertive and aggressive but kind. They radiate the authority that incites their followers to “carry forth” their “call.” Gorman may have been thinking of former President Donald Trump, whose troops carried forth his call as far as the Senate chambers in January. Gorman recognizes what makes Americans resonate, especially those convinced that what they are doing “is right and just.”

      The acts ascribed to Gorman’s heroes convey a spirit of charity, generosity and solidarity. The first is a former Marine who, in all probability, unthinkingly followed the dictates of his government to engage in mortal combat with people he knew nothing about, but, having survived, responded to the needs of his community by “livestreaming football for family and fans.” Super Bowl spectators will be sensitive to the value of this gesture. Like any good entertainer, Gorman clearly understands the profile of her audience.

      The second hero is a teacher who does things that help students “succeed in life and in schools.” Nothing is more American than success. It’s a competitive world and everyone is called upon by their captains to pursue success, even though only a few will attain it, and fewer still by the age of 22. Fortunately, it’s a humiliation most Americans courageously learn to live with.

      Then Gorman introduces the nurse, whose self-abnegation proves that “even in tragedy, hope is possible.” Actually, speaking as a literary critic, it isn’t. In tragedy, hopes are introduced only to be dashed. Characters in great tragedies who express the conviction that “hope is possible” will be disappointed, unless, as in Macbeth, their hope is that the guilty king will die in the final act. Aristotle taught us that the poignant poetry we associate with tragedy inspires pity and fear, not hope. 

      Perhaps Gorman thinks the American tragedy is different, as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “Last Action Hero,” where the film’s hero, a child, hopes that Hamlet will kill his cruel uncle, inherit the throne, remove everything that’s rotten in the state of Denmark (“drain the swamp” as Trump would put it), and stabilize the country for decades to come. That is a “consummation devoutly to be wished,” far better than Hamlet’s submission to the “special providence” he sees “in the fall of a sparrow.” And it avoids having to accept the idea that “the rest is silence.”

      Historical Note

      Apart from rare examples of epic poetry, from Homer and Virgil to Milton, in which mature poets with powerful voices and incredible stamina produced monumental literary productions for the glory of their nations, poetry has always been a poor man’s art. Even great poets never sought to make a living from poetry. The immensely influential Arthur Rimbaud wrote all his poetry before the age of 20 and then went off to traffic arms in the desert.

      For most great poets, writing and eventually publishing poetry required a serious loyalty to the tradition and a radical sense of self-effacement. Poetry is the one literary discipline whose only expected reward was a handful of motivated and respectful readers, one or two of which might be suitably rich, patrons inclined to encourage the poet’s production. “Professional poets, who write beautiful and rhythmic words for a living, almost always have day jobs that pay the bills,” according to Bangladeshi poet Zubair Ahmed. Successful poets, he tells us, “are writing in defiance of market forces, driven by the love of their craft.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      American culture has rarely honored its poets. Walt Whitman was a journalist who made a splash with his poetry by creating verse recognizable as coming from the national voice, distinguishing American poetry from the British tradition. Robert Frost, the closest thing to a professional poet, made his mark as a New England voice. Carl Sandberg was a Chicago poet and Langston Hughes a black Harlem bard. These examples highlight the importance of branding for success or celebrity in the US. T.S. Eliot, arguably the most influential and respected of American poets, chose a more purely aesthetic path and ended up as a British poet, having changed his nationality and found his place in a more broadly European tradition.

      Most recognized poets earned their reputations slowly and most often painfully. Amanda Gorman is the product of contemporary celebrity culture, where the talented have no time to waste in their quest to impose their brand. This is the world of “American Idol” and “America’s Got Talent” in which budding young talents, strong on well-honed technique, a sense of personal image and the ability to duplicate stylistic features associated with commercially successful standards of quality, compete to be applauded by seasoned professionals. With the right amount of luck, some become immediate cultural commodities.

      Gorman may be the first to do it with poetry. Frost was an old man when John F. Kennedy invited him to his presidential inauguration in 1961. Maya Angelou was nearly 65 when Bill Clinton followed Kennedy’s example and invited a poet to his inauguration. Democrats now feel impelled to invite a poet to boost their image as aesthetes, something no Republican president has bothered to do. 

      Gorman demonstrated her personal self-belief and her commercial acumen by getting a spot at the Super Bowl. She did it in the way any celebrity would do. Jack Coyle, in an article for Associated Press, explains: “Shortly after the inauguration, she signed with IMG Models, an agency that represents supermodels, tennis star Naomi Osaka and playwright Jeremy O. Harris. This week, she covers Time Magazine, in an interview conducted by Michelle Obama.” As a young practitioner of letters, Gorman may have noticed that the initials of “poetry reading” are PR. 

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      American Kompromat review: Trump, Russia, Epstein … and a lot we just don't know

      by

      Craig Unger’s new book has already made headlines, in this newspaper and elsewhere, because of a charge from an ex-KGB colonel, Yuri Shvets, that Donald Trump has been a KGB asset for 40 years.But as Unger himself points out, former CIA director Michael Morell has called Trump an “unwitting agent” of the Russians; former national security director James Clapper has described him “in effect … an intelligence asset”; and former CIA director John Brennan has said Trump is “wholly in the pocket of Putin”. So Shvets’ accusation isn’t really very surprising.Many other Trump-Russia books have dated Trump’s initial contact with the Russians to a visit to Trump Tower by then Soviet ambassador to the United Nations Yuri Dubinin, in 1986. Unger – through Shvets – reports that the association actually began six years earlier when Trump purchased 200 television sets from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue. According to Shvets, Kislin was actually a spotter agent for the KGB. Kislin denies any connection.In any case, the meaning of this transaction – like scores of anecdotes recorded in these pages – is never fully explained. The subtitle of Unger’s book is How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power and Treachery – a rubric that enables the author to throw in almost every bit of unconfirmed gossip ever published about everyone from convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to former British press magnate Robert Maxwell. And Maxwell’s daughter, Ghislaine, who was – or wasn’t, depending on which page of this book you’re on – Epstein’s girlfriend as well as allegedly his collaborator in recruiting underage girls to sate Epstein’s seemingly unquenchable sexual appetite.As well as being a publisher, according to Unger, Maxwell was extremely close to the Israeli secret service, Mossad, and the KGB. And perhaps Mossad was actually responsible for killing Maxwell, whose drowning off his yacht was officially ruled an accident.Unger’s sourcing for this is typical of the book. He writes: “According to the Sunday Age, in Melbourne, Australia, on 2 November 1991 … an unnamed source close to the Israeli cabinet told Hersh that Maxwell would soon be eliminated. The author did not know how seriously to take the threat. Three days later, Robert Maxwell went missing …”Hersh is Seymour Hersh, probably the most famous investigative journalist of his generation, but in the copious source notes of Unger’s book there is no indication Unger ever contacted Hersh to confirm this Australian bulletin. Since Hersh is in the phone book, and he actually answers his own phone, I found it quite easy to reach him.Did he remember being contacted “by a source close to the Israeli cabinet” who told him Maxwell was about to be knocked off?“I have absolutely no memory of getting such a tip,” Hersh told me. “And I must note that most people, so I gather, who want to kill prominent others do not usually discuss such in advance.”And so it goes throughout Unger’s book: dozens and dozens of wild stories and salacious accusations, almost all “too good to check”, in the parlance of old-time journalists.This is particularly true of the lengthy section about Epstein, who is here because he had the largest collection of kompromat of anyone in history. Or did he?Unger writes that it was “widely known” that Epstein “was making tapes of grave sexual crimes”. But Unger has never seen any of the tapes, or found any reliable witness who says that he has.: “The people who knew weren’t talking,” Unger writes. “There was speculation that it was used to facilitate deals with Wall Street power brokers and to cement the loyalty of various actors in the drama, be they high-powered lawyers, heads of state, royalty, billionaires, media moguls, or operatives in any intelligence service.”On page 186, we are treated to a barrage of bold-faced names from Epstein’s notorious black book – everyone from Deepak Chopra, Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson to Bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth and Saudi prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud. And that sounds very exciting – until you get to page 195, when Unger admits that “being on Epstein’s contact list meant nothing in and of itself. It’s far more indicative of the power brokers he and Ghislaine were cultivating than whether they actually had knowledge of or participated in Epstein’s nefarious activities.”Unger is much more interesting in a long section about Opus Dei, the secret Catholic society with origins in fascist Spain which the lawyer and Columbia lecturer Scott Horton describes as “the most effective secret society in American history, especially when it comes to changing the nature of the judiciary and filling vacancies with people who are their picks”.There is also the remarkable story of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, the most successful Soviet double agent of modern times, who belonged to Opus Dei and whose brother-in-law, John Paul Wauck, got a job writing speeches for then acting attorney general William Barr in 1991. At that moment, Unger writes, Barr was overseeing “the greatest mole hunt in FBI history, yet presumably [was] unaware that the mastermind spy they were hunting was his own speech writer’s brother-in-law, and that all three of them were closely tied to Opus Dei”.Details like that keep you turning the pages. But Unger’s willingness to include almost anything to titillate makes this book wildly uneven, and ultimately unsatisfactory. More