Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics by Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski, Beacon Press, 2015. 

On December 12, 2015, The New York Times’s Sunday Review included an opinion piece by a pair of researchers entitled “The Rise of Hate Search.” The authors – Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, an economist, and Evan Soltas, a student at Princeton – reported a troubling finding: in the wake of the recent mass-shooting in San Bernardino, data-mining revealed an uptick of Internet users in California searching for phrases like “kill Muslims” and “I hate Muslims” on Google.” Soltas and Stephens-Davidowitz argue that this trend in “hate searches” correlates with an uptick in real-world incidents, and that “Islamophobia and thus anti-Muslim hate crimes are currently higher than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.” Moreover, they use hate search projections to predict that, “about one in every 10,000 Muslims will be the victim of a reported hate crime over the next year.”

The correlation Soltas and Stephens-Davidowitz observe appears real enough. Certainly, combating anti-Muslim violence is a clear moral imperative on its own terms. And yet, something about the overall argument is dubious. It’s not just the conceptual uniformity of “Islamophobia,” or of how reliably that sentiment can be inferred from search engine analytics. The issue is the status of “hate” itself as a thing that can be clearly inferred, unequivocally expressed, and easily quantified. An example Soltas and Stephens-Davidowitz offer highlights this problem: “There are about 1,600 searches for “I hate my boss” every month in the United States. In a survey of American workers, half of the respondents said that they had left a job because they hated their boss.”

Never mind the possibility that, in searching Google for “I hate my boss,” a person may just be looking for a self-help article on how to deal with a toxic workplace environment or a thread of “Office Space” memes or a support group in their area. The plain reality is that the “hate” someone feels for their workplace supervisor seems manifestly different from the valences of “hate” towards members of a minority religious group. The survey respondents who invoke “hate” for their employer do so to explain their quitting; whether Googling based on this “hatred” correlates with workplace violence is something the Times authors don’t address. Meanwhile, attributing a motivation of “hate” towards Muslims is clearly appropriate when someone leaves a pig’s head in a mosque in Philadelphia or throws rocks at a Muslim woman driving a car in Tampa. At the same time, commentators seem reticent to use the word “hate” when describing what fuels other events and trends – from the everyday humiliations experienced by many American Muslims to the pronouncements of leading politicians (not just Donald Trump!) who have spent months selling xenophobia in general and Islamophobia in particular. Our invocations of “hate,” though ubiquitous, are – at best – confused and confusing.

It is precisely into this bewildering landscape that Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski try to stage an intervention with their book, Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics (Beacon Press, 2015). First, Whitlock and Bronski seek to unpack and disentangle the contradictory valences and political purposes implicated by the invocations of “hate” in the contemporary American context. They also try to propose an alternative configuration of concepts to supplant it in the name of social justice. Their effort is as ambitious as it is uneven – an all-too-short 142 pages of history, theory, and cultural criticism that is by turns provocatively concise and reductively broad, brilliantly suggestive in its treatment of some specific examples and trends while frustratingly abstract and overly schematic in tackling others.

Both authors are veteran activists and accomplished writers and thinkers. Kay Whitlock began organizing on behalf of farmworker rights and against the Vietnam War in the ‘60s, and later became a prominent figure working against the criminalization (de facto and otherwise) of LGBTQ persons in the US. Her trenchant critique of hate crimes legislation, produced in 2000 as a working paper for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which tackled “the symbiotic relationship between hate violence and structural violence,” directly informs the first sections of Considering Hate, and remains worthwhile reading today. Michael Bronski has been an activist since the first beginnings of gay liberation in the ‘60s, has published prolifically, and is currently Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard.

Although both authors have a specific background in LGBTQ activism, Considering Hate has a broader scope. Indeed, Whitlock and Bronski seek to tackle and decompose the overdetermined catch-all of “hate,” dismantling and genealogizing what they term “the hate frame.” “Many in the United States are wedded to using hate to explain our personal interactions and political ideologies,” they write. “Society has created a ‘hate frame’ in order to explain violence, seek justice, and attempt to understand human goodness.” But hate is actually “an easy placeholder for a complex web of many other concepts.” Whitlock and Bronski set out unpack this complexity, and since the notion of “hate” is implicated in more than just violence involving gender and sexuality, Considering Hate gives extensive attention to dynamics that involve race, class, disability, religion, crime, and more.

Although the answers they can offer to it are only tentative, the ultimate question that drives Considering Hate is urgent: “What would it look like to disentangle hate from justice and replace the language of hate with that of goodness?” It certainly is relevant to people interested in social justice in any of a number of arenas, and on behalf of any number of groups. Meanwhile, even when vague, Whitlock and Bronski’s prose remains readable, and their citation of other authors – from Angela Davis to Hannah Arendt to Jean-Paul Sartre to Audre Lorde to James Baldwin to Susan Sontag to Toni Morrison to Paul Ricoeur – never feels like name-dropping for its own sake. There is little if any in the way of extended exegesis of any one figure’s thought (although Julia Kristeva, Simone Weil, and ultimately Slavoj Zizek do most of the book’s heavy lifting when it comes to the authors’ working understandings of violence and alterity). Instead, concepts associated with various thinkers are lucidly glossed and then promptly deployed in relation to real-world examples, with appropriate citations provided for those who might be interested to read more. In other words, Considering Hate represents an accessible book not only for academics interested in social movements and the idea of social conflict, but also for practicing activists and politically conscious persons in general.

The first sections of Considering Hate are far and away the best. The first chapter, “Dehumanization and Violence,” offers an unflinching take on the thicket of double-standards that mark contemporary political and legal invocations of “hate.” The overall argument is that most invocations of “hate,” in the courtroom and otherwise, serve an essentially crypto-hygienic function, isolating and containing spectacular acts of “hate” as problems that are ostensibly separable from the continuums of social attitudes and structural practices that actually facilitate them. “The sleight-of-hand of the hate frame is that it invites people to believe the problem of violence directed against marginalized groups exists anywhere else but in themselves,” write Whitlock and Bronski. “The appeal of the hate frame is that it reaffirms a clear distinction between people who do violence and those who do not.” Contra this distinction, the reality is much more messy – and ethically implicates everyone, not just “haters.” “Hate violence is society’s visible eruption of long-standing practices of injustice that are expressed in a multitude of ordinary ways. Like Poe’s purloined letter, they are hidden out of sight.” The modern examples buttressing their argument are persuasive: why, they ask, is the killing of Matthew Shepard understood to be a crime defined by “hate,” while sexual assaults of young women – which, in many horrific instances, are digitally captured and shared by perpetrators on social media – are not?

Working backward, Whitlock and Bronski propose an impressive, if schematic, genealogy for the peregrinations of hatred in American life. Much of this hinges on constructions of “monstrosity” in its fullest etymological sense – as something that society de-monstrates, showcasing as a revulsive abomination– and to historically attested taboos over purity, contagious defilement, moral hygiene, fears of deviance, and more. The overall narrative ranges from understanding the hate frame as a “protean” political mobilizer, from early settler colonial genocide to the era chattel slavery to the eugenics movement to segregation to the AIDS crisis to the War on Terror, and beyond. This synoptic perspective allows Whitlock and Bronski to draw upon well-cited research that provocatively suggests links between what might otherwise be seen as disparate historical phenomena (for example, the advent of turn-of-the-century Freak Shows alongside the development of asylums that sequestered the mentally ill from public view). Likewise, Whitlock and Bronski’s idea of “the interdependent nature of hate violence and broader systems of power” allows them to draw meaningful continuities between practices like lynching and the death penalty, and between institutions like the security state and the carceral one. The overall idea is that Americans only like to see themselves as being “hated” (exemplarily, in the contemporary moments, by terrorists who “hate us for our freedoms”) and as living in a world of monstrous persons driven and consumed by hate – but never as themselves motivated by or complicit in it. “Simply put, injustice and violence arise from a totality of conventional actions, beliefs, policies, and practices that degrade others, even when there is no conscious intention to do violence to an entire segment of the population,” write the authors. “It doesn’t take monsters to inflict terrible injury.”

This first chapter hits hard, especially in light of contemporary headlines. For example, grappling with the public discourse over rape, Whitlock and Bronski observe that, “In its common form the rape story becomes an idealized tale of public virtue and individualized evil…Rape is imagined as an unspeakable crime, an affront to decency, perpetrated by violent interlopers [but] the reality is that is an ordinary and integral part of everyday life.” It is hard not to perceive this logic as underwriting, say, Donald Trump grandstanding that “Somebody must be doing the raping!” of America’s women, and the inevitable appeal of his then laying that at the feet of Mexican immigrants. We are willing to get outraged over rape as a crime perpetrated by people whom we already malign; confronting the pervasiveness of rape in American society, the reality of “rape culture,” not so much. For its assessments of contemporary American cognitive blockages around the idea of “hate,” Considering Hate is worth reading for its first chapter alone.

The second chapter, “Hate in the Public Imagination,” offers a reading of popular culture, specifically films and television, and is likewise interesting, if schematic. The underlying proposition is that, in the American popular imaginary, “definitions of hate are never constant; they shift, focus, and refocus in relation to events.” Per the authors, this plays out in films that durably thematize tensions between individualism and community, between vigilantism and authority. In practical terms, this involves interrogating a century and a quarter’s worth of media, breaking down each decade by how various specimen genres and films frame questions of who deserves to be hated and by whom; who is understood to have a right to make recourse to violence, and upon whom; and how or whether violence can vindicate justice. This does produce some remarkable insights. For example, writing about films made during the Second World War, Whitlock and Bronski note: “The treacherous German Aryan was, on the surface, dangerously close to the idealized white, patriotic American Everyman. The difference that screenwriters seized upon to demonize German citizens was that they were too white, too similar to one another, and too patriotic in their willingness to blindly follow orders.” The answer to this is the now-clichéd image of a multiethnic squad of American GIs, embodying a muddled worldview wherein “individual bravery is only valued in a collective context, nationalism is a pathway to peace, diversity is valued to distinguish it from fascism, and justice and goodness are achieved—and demonstrated—through the violence of war.” Likewise, Whitlock and Bronski provide fascinating parallels by juxtaposing film genres with historical events to draw out surprising similarities: Blaxpoitation films like Shaft (1971) are compared to 1970s Bond films and Dirty Harry (1971) to reveal an overall preoccupation with similar themes of justice through extra-legal revenge and “celebratory violence.”

On the one hand, this is all deeply interesting. On the other hand, it can feel cursory: we go from Edison’s Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Birth of a Nation (1915) to MASH (1970) to cable TV police procedurals to Dexter and Breaking Bad in less than thirty pages. The reader may well agree with Whitlock and Bronski that popular films and Production Codes have historically preferred to deal with two-dimensional representations of violence rather than ruminations on the structural conditions that produce it. But the broader problem (namely, how our appetite for narrative itself seems to include a preference for stories about individuals rather than structures) is only really interrogated at the level of truism.

The remainder of the book, while still lucid, does not offer as much as the first sections. The third chapter tries to move beyond understandings of “hate” that narrowly personalize to inter-personal accounts, relying pivotally on Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection (which is presented only briefly) and a reading of American history that emphasizes how “Violent attacks on people and institutions on the basis of actual or imagined cultural differences are so woven into the fabric of US history that they often appear logical and transitional — a sort of national hazing process; a ritual that leads to American tolerance and acceptance of diversity.” The theme, again, is that “the harsher reality of structural violence” is glossed over. The fourth tackles various modes of disavowing complicity in such structural violence – what the authors term “disengagement” – and the fifth tries to think through what a focus on “justice” and “goodness,” de-coupled from the hate frame, might resemble.

The problem is that midway through the book the lack of much in the way of a fleshed-out vocabulary about emotion and affect grows untenable. The sections that attempt to open up new conceptual space for thinking about alternatives to the hate frame suffer from this acutely. Relatively late in the book, Whitlock and Bronski write:

“What society calls hate is a set of responses to an interwoven set of historical, cultural, and physical stimuli and circumstances. With such myriad, confusing manifestations, hate has become a catchall word, easily manipulated for political ends. By pausing before labeling an action or emotion as hate, people may be able to create a space in which they can make clearer, more careful judgments about the collective and individual consequences of emotions, language, and actions emerging from animus.”

The idea of what “animus” is, however, is never fleshed out – and this is a problem since the term is invoked repeatedly as basically the primary substance from which hate is conjured. Brief forays into more psychologistic descriptions suffer accordingly, and with serious implications, since it appears that, to the authors, the transformation of animus towards monstrous and hated Others is both a paramount ethical task and a promise of hope. For example, on the subject of our “fascination with hate,” which involves an obsession with the monstrous Other that co-imbricates fear and enmity with arousal and pleasure, Whitlock and Bronski write the following (specifically building upon a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein): “The double-sidedness of fear is revealing here. As thrilling as it is to be frightened (the monster is terrifying in the first part of the novel), it is more thrilling to be relieved of that fear when the monster becomes a person.” On a very basic level, I am not so sure this is the case. Oftentimes, the revelation of a monster’s “true” identity is precisely the point where many horror films lose their thrill and veer either into meaningless gore or sappy kitsch. But for Whitlock and Bronski, the contrary is not only unquestionably true, but also underlies a pivotal mechanism for arriving at goodness: “The distance between human and monster, between person and object, is frequently portrayed is located within ourselves. The potential for identification and commonality is always there.”

But – what if it isn’t? When it comes to prescribing new ways of pursing justice, Whitlock and Bronski fall back, first, on calling for reflection upon and resistance to the hate paradigm. Following that, they offer a series of exhortations and axioms. “A new understanding of common humanity must emerge.” “The challenge is to think very differently about the nature of justice itself; to imagine accountability beyond the confines of punishment… to create peaceful and sustainable communities without relying on an unjust and violent criminal legal system.” “A beginning might be in radically breaking from society’s preoccupation with evil and enemies. It would be necessary to replace this language with an expanded civic vocabulary of goodness.” “Responsibility must be separated from punishment.” There are some tantalizing examples given, but the brevity of their treatment proves ultimately disappointing. The final chapter, which champions the power of “disruptive intelligence” and “transformative imagination,” emphasizes understanding interdependence, rejecting supremacist pretentions, and, above all, “a radical and compassionate embrace of the Neighbor.” Although they qualify aspirations for “common humanity” to safeguard against falsely “colorblind” egalitarianism, a commitment to universality-talk and faith in the transformative power of sharing one’s experiences with the Neighbor remain resolute. It is one thing, as a “first step,” “to trust that whoever our neighbor is, he or she is not automatically a threat to us.” But what if the neighbor knows who you are, and you know who they are – and it is precisely because of that you hate each other and want each other dead? It is one thing to grossly turn away refugees, to spurn the starving, to answer the New Testament’s “knock at the door” with selfishness (apart from addressing the etiology of the rhetoric of evil, this parable from the Gospels is one of the only points at which Considering Hate deals with theology). But it is another thing entirely to know who your neighbor is, to know their struggles, their way of life, their challenges – and then to despise them all the more for all of it.

Whatever the problems with Soltas and Stephens-Davidowitz’s conceptual framework on “hate searches,” their research on Islamophobia does note the following: “We looked at searches in the 10 counties with the highest Muslim populations in the United States. On average, these counties are about 11 percent Muslim, compared with 0.9 percent of the United States as a whole. We estimate, in these 10 counties, that anti-Muslim search rates are about eight times higher than they are in the rest of the country.” The implications of this data – which flies in the face of the so-called “contact hypothesis” (that proximity to difference produces tolerance) are distressing to ponder, but it is here that the rubber hits the road, hard.

In fairness to them, Whitlock and Bronski do not promise answers to the questions they raise. Their language is of opening space for new configurations of thought, clearing ground for new possibilities – and, above all, of not “permitting those already in charge to determine the terms of debate.” And yet, immediately after writing this, they ask: “How can justice practice shift from a focus on vengeance to an emphasis on healing, reparation, and transformation of the conditions that produce violence?” The answer: “To imagine this possibility, those who do serious harm to others must hold themselves accountable for their actions and work to repair the harm they have caused.” To illustrate such self-accountability, Whitlock and Bronski offer the example of a convicted American murderer who, working with his victim’s family and prosecutors, will serve a modified sentence and has since devoted himself to advocacy. This is a moving true story, but it still takes place largely within a framework of state institutions that serve a function, however broken, of holding people to accountability, however flawed and imperfect the surrounding ideology may be. But what of those who not only prey upon their neighbors, but reject taking accountability for themselves, and are insulated by power and privilege from ever having it imposed on them? Is the animus felt towards such people by those they harm of the same toxic species as the animus (or indifference) that sustains their oppressors? This question does not really arise in Considering Hate, but it, like the question of the Neighbor who knows you and then decides you are disposable anyways, remains pressing all the same.

***

Patrick Blanchfield holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com.

The post Review: Considering Hate appeared first on The Revealer.

“Compassion impels us to want to help terminally ill people in any way we can, but a less emotional analysis of right-to-try bills, coupled with a knowledge of the science and conduct of clinical trials reveals that these laws, as currently constituted, are almost universally a bad idea.” David Gorski, Science-Based Medicine, July 21, 2014.

Debra Johnson was born with “wads of flesh for thumbs, and her arms were folded up like chicken wings.” With surgery, her index fingers were fashioned into thumbs, her arms were straightened. For 30 years, she thought her deformities were an act of God. “She said she heard the same refrain for decades from doctors and family: ‘That’s how God made her,’” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer in October, 2013.

As an expectant mother, Johnson feared that her son would be born with the same physical defects, but he wasn’t. When, years later, he went off to medical school, he called his mother one day to tell her that he knew the cause of her birth defect: thalidomide. “I came home that night, and I started looking it up, and the more I read, the more I just cried,” she told the Inquirer’s Reuben Kramer. Johnson joined up with others who were born with birth defects in the same era to sue GlaxoSmithKline (formerly Glaxo, Kline, French) and Sanofi-Aventis (formerly Richardson-Merrill) for distributing thalidomide in the early 1960s, despite knowledge that the drug caused birth defects. In April of this year, a Pennsylvania federal judge dismissed the cases stating that they were subject to a one-year statute of limitations.

Thalidomide was developed in Germany in the sleeping pill-heavy 1950s and entered the market in 1957 as the “only non-barbiturate sedative known at the time,” and therefor safe for pregnant women. By 1960 it was distributed in 46 countries with sales numbers that rivaled those of aspirin, wrote Bara Fintel, Athena T. Samaras and Edson Carias in Helix, a publication of Northwestern University, in 2009. An Australian doctor, William McBride, found that thalidomide also prevented morning sickness in pregnant women, an “off-label” use of the drug, and set what the Helix authors call a “worldwide trend” of use.

Kindergarteners born with phocomelia as a side effect of the drug thalidomide. (Photo by Leonard McCombe//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

There was one person in the US, however, who was not convinced that thalidomide was safe, Dr. Frances Kelsey. In her first month at the Food and Drug Administration in 1960, she was tasked with reviewing thalidomide for approval and sale. Despite broad, accepted use in Europe and elsewhere, she was concerned with reported side effects and withheld approval from the US manufacturer, Merrell. “She refused to be hurried,” wrote the New York Times in an obituary for Kelsey, who died at the age of 101 in August this year:

Merrell stood to make millions and was anxious to get moving. It had tons of Kevadon [thalidomide’s market name] in warehouses, ready for marketing, and 1,000 American doctors had already been given samples for “investigational” research. The company supplied more data, but also mounted a campaign to pressure Dr. Kelsey. Letters, calls and visits from Merrell executives ensued. She was called a fussy, stubborn, unreasonable bureaucrat.

Still, drug manufacturers distributed millions of tablets in the US because, as the Philadelphia Inquirer notes, “clinical trials required little FDA supervision at the time.” Soon McBride, the Australian doctor responsible for widespread use of the drug for morning sickness, began to link thalidomide to a high number of children born with defects. By 1962, the drug was banned in Germany and elsewhere, but not before more than 10,000 babies were born with deformities worldwide.

Merrell withdrew its application from the FDA when the reports of birth defects shook Europe. The FDA’s Frances Kelsey was hailed for her prevention of a similar crisis in the US and was tasked with establishing new protocol for drug testing and approval. Write the authors at Helix:

The tragedy surrounding thalidomide and Kelsey’s wise refusal to approve the drug helped motivate profound changes in the FDA. By passing the Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendments Act in 1962, legislators tightened restrictions surrounding the surveillance and approval process for drugs to be sold in the U.S., requiring that manufacturers prove they are both safe and effective before they are marketed. Now, drug approval can take between eight and twelve years, involving animal testing and tightly regulated human clinical trials.

Despite the effectiveness of these longstanding procedures, many in the US—often those ideologically opposed to government regulation, wedded to federalist interpretations of the Constitution, and allied with right-wing groups and think tanks—continue to criticize both the Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendments Act and the FDA’s role in drug approval. A wave of new legislation, called Right to Try laws, which claim to allow terminal patients access to experimental drugs as soon as Phase I trials are completed, have been passed in 24 states in less than two years. Their popularity is largely based on legislators’ and the public’s misunderstanding of the FDA’s process and on the often misleading but heart wrenching tales told by activists and proponents of the bill.

***

To read Right to Try: How the Federal Government Prevents Americans from Getting the Lifesaving Treatments They Need, a new book by Darcy Olsen, president of the libertarian Goldwater Institute, is to encounter real-life fairy tales about everyday Americans who miraculously overcome impossible circumstances to live happy, healthy lives. The people Olsen writes about are torn asunder by delayed or erroneous diagnoses, impossible long-distance travel for treatment, deadly mysterious disease, and epic, repetitious battles waged with pluck, unfathomable determination, hope beyond hope, and blessed new “cutting edge” drugs. The heroes in these dramas are normal and loving families, desperate mothers who refuse to take no for an answer, and altruistic doctors who defy all limits to lovingly care for their dying patients.

The relentless, detestable villain in these tales is not a host of deadly diseases, nor the travails that these diseases bring to bear on the finances, health or spirit of the families afflicted. It’s not the disparity-defining cost of treatment, so far out of reach for so many. It’s not even the inevitable precariousness of human existence, wracked with disease and predestined for death. The villain in every one of Olsen’s stories is a faceless, heartless, bureaucratic government agency, hell bent on ignoring the afflicted, thwarting their obvious last chances at happiness and health, an organization warped to a mission of denying life to the free and defenseless children of our proud, exceptional nation. This cold, death-fostering villain is identified by a simple three-letter acronym: FDA.

Right to Try is an ode to free market ideals, unfettered individual rights, and a blatant pastiche of American religious concepts that characterize the current conservative-minded political movers in the country. The people Olsen writes about are convinced that any new drug is a promise, a miracle, a healthy future for their child. They thrive on hope and the privilege that, as Americans, anything, even a terminal disease, can be cured by corporate innovation unfettered by government regulation.

Jenn McNary, the subject of chapter one—the subtitle of which is, “How the FDA Let a Mother Save One Son…and Left Her Other Son Die”—is dumbstruck when her son is diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and the doctor tells her there are no treatment options. Olsen writes, “Jenn was incredulous. There had to be something she could do. This was America, after all. Certainly in this day and age, we have treatments for everything.”

When Christine McSherry’s son Jett is also diagnosed with Duchenne, she tells Olsen, “I was a nurse for a long time. I was very accustomed to finding the solution and giving it to the patient and was shocked to find out that there was no solution whatsoever.”

The book is full of this sort of incredulity, the privilege of believing that Americans are immune to the tragedy of death. Perfect lives and traditional families are interrupted not by the common occurrence of deadly disease but the ineptitude of an uncaring government ready to let them die. Medical cures aren’t rare and unpredictable, they’re blessings bestowed by infallible corporate science. Life is a right. Death, it seems in this cosmology, is not in the Constitution.

“The FDA held the power of life and death,” writes Olsen.

It is this polish of unmitigated, unrealistic hope that characterizes the book. Right to Try reads like a barely-updated, “awe shucks”-inducing 1950s family TV show. Children aren’t born, they “come along.” “Hope appear[s] on the horizon.” Good mothers know what’s best for their children and if they fight hard enough they can keep them from dying. Kids go to Camp Promise and become advocates for legislation to “help others.” Boys like sports, love their siblings and if they fight hard enough, they live. Every new drug is an “historic breakthrough.” “The Lord always provides a way.”

***

“There are times when supporting science-based health policy and opposing health policies that sound compassionate but are not are easily portrayed as though I’m opposing mom, apple pie, and the American flag,” David Gorsky writes at Science-Based Medicine. “Mom, apple pie, and the American flag,” are signifiers of a particular version of American culture, call it the American Dream, that reveres liberty, independence and freedom…for those who can afford it. This version of the American Dream, espoused by Olsen, the Goldwater Institute, and Right to Try laws, hold free-market corporations and meritocracy as a kind of faith. They posit that belief in a go-it-alone approach to survival trumps the safety and well-being of others, those who believe differently or don’t have the same resources.

The visage of bland, sentimental and moral rightness that the book projects—and the promotion surrounding the laws themselves—is of another era; clear, absolute and in keeping with that of other “traditional values” ideals perpetuated so often by today’s social conservatives. Of course, this is by careful, politically-savvy design. Only by blocking any question of the objectives and outcomes of such legislation can proponents use morality to paper over nuance and flaws.

And regarding Right to Try laws, the flaws are many. Not only do the laws not guarantee access to drugs, but they potentially pose a serious danger to both individual patients and a drug approval process designed to protect the health and safety of all citizens. Based on model legislation written by the Goldwater Institute, the laws don’t compel any pharmaceutical company to comply with patient requests. For this reason, bioethicist Arthur Caplan has called them “Right to Beg” laws. Nor do they hold doctors accountable for their recommendations or insurance companies liable for coverage of costs (in fact, in a court of law they probably release doctors and insurers from any future responsibility).

The laws and their surrounding rhetoric misrepresent every experimental drug as “life-saving,” when, for instance, only 5 percent of cancer drugs in Phase I ever make it to approval. “Just because a drug has passed phase I clinical trials does not—I repeat, does not—mean that the drug has been ‘deemed safe by the FDA,’ as the laws claim, writes David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine. Patients in hospice or hoping to enroll will likely be prevented from doing so because of the program’s prohibition of curative treatments.

The larger hazard of Right to Try laws is how they threaten a drug’s approval process with the FDA. Should patients receive experimental drugs and experience adverse effects or die—and this is theoretical; there’s no proof that anyone has yet to successfully receive a drug through Right to Try in the nineteen months there have been such laws—bioethicists, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies fear the repercussions that outcome could have on the drug’s testing and approval. In short, one patient’s campaign to receive a drug could ultimately prevent it from reaching thousands of others whose lives it could save in the future.

President John F. Kennedy gave Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey the nation’s highest federal civilian service award in 1962, saying she had “prevented a major tragedy of birth deformities.” CreditThe White House

And yet, legislators across the political spectrum love these laws. Every governor, representative or legislator can stand by them, claiming in their support to have helped save the lives of their constituents. Right to Try laws expose the gullibility of legislators, their lack of research or critical thinking, and their faith in moral absolutes. Suckered into feel-good laws with no benefit—or the potential to tragically harm drug safety for all of us—lawmakers have been hoodwinked by Olsen and her proponents into messing with public safety.

Only government has the resources and power to protect public health: that’s the FDA’s charge. Weakening or side-stepping the agency, rather than working with it to better serve the needs of both individual patients (via the agency’s existing Compassionate Use program*) and public safety (through extensive testing measure that began with Dr. Frances Kelsey in the 1960s) can disasters like the birth defects caused by thalidomide be prevented.

***

This, the final installment of the “Patient Body” for 2015, feels like a culmination of several themes I’ve explored over the course of the year. In a review of Anthony Petro’s book, After the Wrath of God, in May, I wrote that, “Moralizing of a particular religious stripe seems indelibly attached to some of the most dire public health issues of our time.” But particular ideas of moral behavior have also been used to shape our public policy, as I wrote about the purity movement in July:

Public health regulations are often a telling barometer of our country’s moral compass, from vaccination laws to the legal drinking age. And no public health category is more fraught with moral minefields than sexual health. Right now, our moral compass is set on shaming and inhibiting the lives of young people, particularly women, by setting up and devoting wads of money to an ideal that will never be achieved.

And in October I wrote about new, anti-abortion laws that seek to prevent the abortion of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome. On the surface these laws have been described as necessary to provide more information, but their proponents are more concerned about further limiting access to abortion. “To bioethicists, doctors and reproductive rights activists, however, it’s a new way to inject ideological laws into the patient-doctor relationship. Under the guise of disability rights, these laws target women with shame, distrust and intrusive restrictions,” I wrote.

Right to Try laws show us that ideological attempts to shape public policy are not reserved for sexual and reproductive health. In keeping with the Goldwater Institute’s libertarian, anti-government mission, these laws use the rhetoric of personal rights and independence to subvert government regulation, to bring manufacturers and consumers into closer contact. They pit individuals with certain kinds of access and privilege against the health of the rest of the population—with a moralizing “boot straps” logic that is indigenous to our era. But it’s a faulty logic, too reliant on false hope, too imbedded in nostalgic ideals of self-reliance and a political system more concerned with winning than protecting public health.

In October, California’s governor Jerry Brown became the first to veto a Right to Try law, only a week after he signed Death with Dignity into law. Conservative columnist Wesley J. Smith wrote a short, exasperated post for the National Review at the time, smattered with incredulity and “good griefs.” “A ‘right to die,’ but no ‘right to try and live,’” he simplistically concluded. It’s an embarrassing post. One that shows all the piety and emotions of a movement unwilling—or politically unable—to acknowledge that its black-and-white interpretations of beneficial social governance are sentimental throw-backs, out of step with the serious and nuanced problem-solving government is intended to address.

As the election year rolls toward us, we’ll hear even more flattening of complex health issues into tidy polit-speak about the health of our nation. And as Trump moves the GOP further into non-explicit evangelical territory, the moral objectives professed for public health will only become more coded, more covert, more difficult to detect. Tracing these through lines–and identifying their purposes and outcomes—is not just good politics; it is necessary for the health and safety of all of us.

*The FDA has long had a program that allows patients to access experimental drugs before approval but Right to Try advocates have either ignored it or attacked it’s requesting process as too cumbersome, despite the FDA’s recent revision of the process.

***

Past “The Patient Body” columns can be found here.

***

Ann Neumann is a contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU. Neumann‘s book, The Good Death, will be published by Beacon Press in February 2016.

The post Accusing the FDA of Playing God appeared first on The Revealer.

Subway Conversations About Politics – Part 2

I was sitting at a coffee shop in Hell’s Kitchen, talking about Donald Trump, when the man with the plucked ostrich feather came by. I was making the point I usually make about Trump, since Paris and since he presided over the beating of a black protester by a majority white crowd in Birmingham, Alabama. He’s not funny anymore, The man with the plucked ostrich feather overheard me.

He’d wended into the shop to pester the clerks, and was wearing a ratty costume of discard clothes, cloaked by a too-big suit jacket, colored black. “You gotta vote for Donald Trump,” he announced, breaking into my conversation. “He’s the only hope we’ve got!” The bell on the door dinged twice. He left the shop.

I saw him marching down the street in the white-blue sunlight, twirling his tall and picked-clean feather with both hands. He walked towards the water, and was gone.

Think Big

On Sunday, the sixth of November, the President of the United States addressed the nation from the oval office. The last time he did so was in 2010 – and his announcement concerned “the end of our combat mission in Iraq.”

His remarks on the sixth were less ambitious. Days before, two “radicalized” American Muslims shot up a workplace holiday party in San Bernardino, California, killing fourteen and wounding more than twenty. As massacres go, it was small potatoes – neither as gruesome or as organized as the assault Paris suffered in November. But San Bernardino is American soil, and the “holiday party” is a ritual of forced socialization required by many American workplaces. Fear, spreading like fire in dry woods, flared crimson across the internet.

Which is why the President spoke from the oval office on December Sixth. He used this platform to argue against overreaction – and any major alteration in policy concerning international and domestic terrorism. “The strategy that we are using now — airstrikes, Special Forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country — that is how we’ll achieve a more sustainable victory,” he said.

“We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam,” he continued.  “ISIL does not speak for Islam.  They are thugs and killers, part of a cult of death, and they account for a tiny fraction of more than a billion Muslims around the world.” Islam, Obama implied, was a religion – ISIS, a cult. And more than that – a cult of “death.” A reality and a system of beliefs dedicated to the antithesis of life.

This election season, the President acknowledged, has produced a lot of odd and hyperbolic ideas. But “freedom,” he explained, “is more powerful than fear.” Americans, united by their “common ideals” can meet any challenge. “So long as we stay true to that tradition,” he said, “I have no doubt America will prevail.”

Others do.

The Wrong Composition – It Doesn’t Work on Human Flesh

I am excited about the prospect of atomic war.  Two days before Thanksgiving, a Russian warplane was shot down by Turkey, supposedly for a brief airspace violation. Vladimir Putin, I have heard, has dreams of dissolving NATO — of pushing some minor member-country to the point of invoking Article Five, and committing all the allied nations to war on its behalf. This war, Putin is supposed to suppose, will not actually occur — the leaders of the major NATO states are too cautious to risk a showdown with a nuclear superpower over anything but the most flagrant of attacks on the wealthiest of states.Not going to war, an effective breach of the great North Atlantic Treaty, would instantly transmute the iron of that postwar alliance into steam — and by such alchemy, Russia could remake the world. Writer Max Fischer rendered it in relatively complete form on Vox last summer. It’s been catching on.

I don’t like the word “belief.” It’s too small, too optional — it reads as something that can, and should, be altered by the acquisition of information and the accumulation of years. Beliefs are open to question. Realities are trickier.

Reality forms the context and the precondition of belief — it is the raw material from which beliefs are assembled, and the workshop where they can be modified, reinforced and discarded. Realities are also comparatively invisible. While belief is the subject of conscious examination, realities simply “are.” They can be held up or thrown out as beliefs can — but the cost of doing so is high. It requires thinking beyond the boundaries of one’s thinking – a process of dissociative (and sometimes physical) violence from which it is impossible to return.

NATO is a belief. The bomb is a reality.

The cold equations of troop distribution and weapon capabilities define the reality of war for the the military thinkers I have known.. All ideology fails in the face of these amounts: only so many bullets for only so many skulls, and a discrete number of missiles for a discrete number of cities. Everything beyond that annihilating fact can be negotiated, ignored, disproved, trespassed and sanctioned — but in the end, the harshest truths exert their power. Russia and the United States have the power to render our planet uninhabitable. Military expression is built from gestures, subtle and overt, towards this concealed power.

Writing for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in March of last year, Nikolai N. Sokov, a senior fellow from Vienna’s Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, summarized a disturbing modification of belief among Russia’s military thinkers. In 2000, spurred by a possible war in Chechnya, Russia’s Security Council developed a new doctrine regarding the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “The doctrine introduced the notion of de-escalation—a strategy envisioning the threat of a limited nuclear strike,” Sokov explained. Essentially, this threat was built around the potential deployment of a relatively small nuclear weapon against a military target. Such tactics were meant to communicate to the United States, or any other nuclear power, Russia’s willingness to face annihilation for the sake of its interests. This show of force, it is supposed, will trigger “de-esclation” by necessity. Its inverse – escalation – remains unthinkable.

As Secretary of the Russian Security Council in 1999, Vladimir Putin helped draw up the founding documents of de-escalation. As President, a year later, he “signed it in,” accorsding to Sokov. De-escalation remains an important entry in Russia’s military vocabulary.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists still maintains their famous “doomsday clock,” a timepiece that ticks closer to midnight as the tangle of beliefs governing the planet’s nuclear arsenal approach the point of fatal accident – a nuclear war. Since January of this year, it’s stood at three minutes till – its latest hour since 1984.

We have built a pistol from scratch, polishing every piece and cog. Then, with great ceremony, we pointed it at our own heads and threaded a finger through the trigger guard. Everything since has been Russian roulette.

Common sense, and the rules of effective narrative, demand a discharge. Hence, Fallout.

War Never Changes – But Media Does

On November 10th, three days before the terrorist attacks in Paris, the fourth installment of the Fallout franchise was released for personal computers and home videogame consoles worldwide. The series, like many gaming juggernauts, has an excess of history. The original Fallout, subtitled “a post-nuclear role playing game” was released in September of 1997. In this game, and its sequels, players are invited to construct a personalized character who lives in a world annihilated by nuclear war. What remains of our civilization, in this reality, is ruin and rust — ironically styled after the pop-culture and industrial design of the Eisenhower administration. In Fallout games, your character picks through the rubble, encounters mutated ghouls and wasteland settlements, and cuts an individuated swath through a world where history has ended.

Fallout 4, released this year, is set in the environment of a post-nuclear Boston. It made more money in its first twenty-four hours of release than the new “Jurassic Park” movie has since June: seven hundred and fifty million dollars, derived from over twelve million copies sold. That’s roughly six copies for every subscriber currently boasted by the New York Times,, and all in one day. Who knows what the game will achieve as Christmas approaches.

Videogames are big business. Investment analyst John Markman, writing in Forbes last month, reflected on how little videogames are discussed by more traditional media, in spite of their financial success. “If the videogame industry were covered as heavily as Hollywood […], every director, character designer and scenarist in hit franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield would be a celebrity stalked by TMZ,” he wrote.  “Instead they labor mostly in anonymity and just vacuum up cash.” What makes this popular disinterest curious is just how much cash is involved. The videogame industry, Markman continued, is fast eclipsing film in terms of raw profitability: “Tech research firm Gartner sees the worldwide videogame market of console, online, mobile and PC products at $111 billion by 2016 and $128 billion in 2017,” he reported. Film, by contrast, generated only “$88 billion in worldwide revenue” this year.

In print and on television, videogames are treated as a mysterious haven for social misfits and amoral malcontents. In the United States, since the 1990s, they’ve carried almost as much blame for mass shootings as permissive gun laws. But this doesn’t bother gamers overmuch. After all, as John Markman pointed out, this relative impenetrability just means that the gaming industry gets to “vacuum up cash” without attracting the kind of gnawing, endless media commentary that churns in the wake of Hollywood… and Washington, for that matter.

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the last seventeen years, writer Jerry Holkins and artist Mike Krahulik have uploaded a three-panel comic strip to www.penny-arcade.com, offering profane observations on the latest news in gaming. Each strip is accompanied by a brief “post,” or text piece, by Holkins. On the 23rd of November, this year, its subject was the relationship of gaming to its attendant journalists – the kind of people who blog about the subject professionally, or write for one of the industry’s few surviving magazines. “There was a period of time, not even that long a period of time in the grand scheme, where a kind of collaborative back-scratching arrangement was in operation between publishers, the developers in their charge, and the enthusiast press,” Holkins reported. As of 2015, “it has not been dissolved utterly, but you can tell […] that something key has changed.”

Kotaku [www.kotaku.com], the videogame blog operating under the auspices of the struggling Gawker Media, had just posted a story complaining of being “blacklisted” by several prominent game publishers as a result of unfavorable coverage — among the offending parties, according to Kotaku , was Bethesda, the company responsible for Fallout 4.  “I can understand why a publisher might determine that an increasingly hostile outlet whose business model is “Start Shit” might not be the best time or money investment,” Holkins wrote on the 23^rd.  “Why did it ever work this way?  Why would you be obligated to spend millions of dollars on something and then place it gently on the black altar of a hivemind cult, bowing as you retreat?” Why, in other words, should “journalism” be involved in games at all?

Consumers and publishers have access to the same Internet — and through that medium, the press releases and advertisements and pre-release content traditionally filtered first to an “enthusiast press” can be given directly to consumers. . Gaming blogs and websites, Holkins concluded, are becoming superfluous. “Having been the cowering creature beneath enthusiast media’s Eye of Sauron on more than one occasion […] I have no sympathy for these creatures,” he said. “Which is to say, I have the same sympathy they express for those outside their cloister.”

The maturation of digital games occurred at the same time, and often on the same platforms, as the maturation of digital communication writ large. Where the subculture specific to gaming is now, the larger culture is likely to be in three years, or five. Print magazines covering games lost their primacy around the turn of the century, for instance. Now, if Holkins is to be believed, the digital imitators of magazines are dying too. “These creatures,” as Holkins calls them, are journalists covering a very large and lucrative industry. And they are passing from the world.

On Monday, the 23rd, while Jerry Holkins was dancing on the grave of the “enthusiast press,” republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump repeated a controversial story on stage at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “During a speech recently, I said that I saw, in parts of New Jersey [Muslims] getting together, and in fairly large numbers, celebrating as the World Trade Center was coming down, killing thousands and thousands of people!” he said. To accentuate his point, Trump kneaded the air with his right hand — miming the motion a building falling inward.

“And I saw people,” the candidate continued. “And I saw em’ on television and I read about it on the Internet.” The press, however, was unconvinced. They called, Trump said “all day and all night,” pestering him about the veracity of his claim. “All of sudden I’m getting all of these tweets! ‘I saw it!’ ‘I was there!’ ‘I was this!’ But I saw it!” Dutifully, Trump rebroadcast his supporters’ accounts, and continued to do so over much of the next week. As far as he was concerned, this settled the matter. The press remained doubtful.

On Sunday the 29th, Trump called in to NBC’s storied political talk show, “Meet the Press.” Its host, Chuck Todd, exercised his journalistic prerogative: challenging the frontrunner on the veracity of his remarks. “Let’s go to this Jersey City comment,” Todd began. “You said you saw this [celebration but] nobody can find evidence […] Where did you see this?”

“Chuck,” said Trump, sadly. “I saw this on television. So did many other people […] I’ve had hundreds of phone calls to the Trump organization saying ‘we saw it! It was dancing in the streets!'”

“This didn’t happen in New Jersey,” Todd pressed, citing a litany of sources. “There were plenty of reports.”

“It did happen in New Jersey,” Trump maintained. “I have hundreds of people who agree with me.”

Todd continued to protest. “But they want to agree with you!” he said. “That doesn’t make it true!”

“Meet the Press” dominated the other Sunday shows in November, in terms of viewership. According to Rick Kissel, writing in Variety, ” It averaged 953,000 adults 25-54, besting ABC’s “This Week” (907,000), CBS’ “Face the Nation” (808,000 for its first half-hour) and Fox’s “Fox News Sunday” (502,000). And in total viewers, its 3.424 million held off “Face the Nation” (3.390 million) and “This Week” (3.232 million) and nearly doubled up “Fox News Sunday” (1.716 million).”

Donald Trump’s twitter account, where the “truth” of his New Jersey claim has been affirmed again and again, has over five million subscribers.

In media, as in war, beliefs must yield to certain mathematical reality. “Meet the Press” has more “prestige” than Twitter – just as The New Yorker has more prestige than a magazine like PC Accelerator, which once tried to boost sales by putting a sexy orc on the cover. But if more people watch Trump’s twitter than “Meet the Press,” the “truth” offered there is given a larger footprint than Todd’s debunking. The traditional press and its digital descendants, the papers, are still with us – still influential. But for how long? “You may feel very confident that there are conversations at every publisher now, wondering to what extent they are required to eat shit from these people,” wrote Holkins on the 23^rd. I am equally confident that our political campaigns are entertaining the same idea.

Give the People What They Want

Fallout 4 begins with a short movie, designed to ease players into the recreational world they have purchased – a meticulously crafted model of an American city in ruins. It begins like this:

“In the year 1945, my great-great grandfather, serving in the army, wondered when he’d get to go home to his wife and the son he’d never seen. He got his wish when the U.S. ended World War II by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

What followed, the film explains, was a golden age, where “people enjoyed luxuries once thought the realm of science fiction.” But “years of consumption lead to shortages of every major resource.”  In the end, “the entire world unraveled.”

“In the twenty-first century,” the game gravely concludes, “People woke up from the American dream.”

Everyone is talking about “dangerous rhetoric” these days. This variety of it – a poetry of national disillusionment – is a good way to sell twelve million copies of a sixty dollar game. It’s also a good way to run for president.

On Monday, December 7^th, Donald Trump dropped a bomb of his own. He suggested, in an official statement issued by the Trump campaign, “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

He was denounced by everyone – except the voters.

All our “common ideals” seem to be on the table this year. Beliefs are dying, being replaced – but our reality, as it has existed since the Second World War, is being progressively revealed.

Our freedom is the consequence of fear. Our nation’s geopolitical position has been predicated, for the last seventy years, on our willingness to employ the machinery of global suicide. Whether we remain willing or not doesn’t matter. The fact of what we are is waiting in the pit of our stomachs.

There are many of “cults of death.” Some bigger than others.

***

You can read all of the “Salem 66” dispatches here.

***

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

The post Dispatch #8 – December 10, 2015 appeared first on The Revealer.

By Don Jolly

Introduction

After the war, in the years of flood and famine, the profession of history was all but forgotten. Once the last of the universities were shuttered and the last of the great cables destroyed, the intellectual life of human beings retreated into the solitary dens of monks and archivists; there, the words of the past were preserved in archives and the works of the future undertaken by isolated hands. Such communes and cloisters served as home to the great scholars of those chaotic centuries, a mysterious and time-lost lineage of genius that includes such famous names as DannyBoi, Wolfpack10 and -=Da_Big_Fucker=-. To them, and to their anonymous supporters, the course of human civilization owes an immeasurable and eternal debt.

Obscurity and death are not at all the same thing. In fact, the former is, under the right circumstances, a prime defense against the latter. Freed from schedules and accreditations, the historians of the tribulation produced many interesting studies — and one work of legitimate greatness.

Written by a nameless scribe sometime in the middle of the twenty-third century, this magisterial achievement of art and scholarship provides the most lyrical and most well-documented account of the American empire’s decline and fall. In spite of its age, and the troubled circumstances of its composition, this seven-volume masterpiece remains an essential part of contemporary scholarship on the American epoch. It is grand not only in what it attempts, but what it definitively achieves — and in this author’s opinion, it shall never be surpassed. All of us who pursue the craft today stand meanly in its shadow. One Hundred Years of Solid ‘Tude: A Definitive History of North America in the Days of Trump is the best of the grand histories, and a monument to the tenacity of human achievement.

What follows is an excerpt.

Chapter For: No, Fuck You!

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the empire of the American States comprehended the fairest part of the Earth, and the least civilized portion of mankind. Its princes, their thrones diffuse and specialized, ordered the realities of almost every human occupation, defining by whim and accident the nature of the globe. This rulership, as was explored in the preceding chapters, was rarely recognized and rested on an infrastructure of circumstance. Few of America’s princes were conscious of the power they held, and multitudes of its serfs adorned their self images in royal silk — feeling, in a measurable way, responsible for the direction of the state.

This, as Bartman666 has ably explored in his .txt file “Anarchy Balls,”is the net effect of democracy, when its ideals alone serve as the central faith of a society whose practical functions have escaped control. The American States, in the years before Trump, held the globe hostage with such obtuse and unnamed powers that the greatest portion of their empire was allowed to pass anonymous and unidentified. To America, the Earth surrendered its stores of rare metals, its oceans of hidden slime, its blooms, its blossoms and the back-breaking labors of its most ignored inhabitants. This commerce, however, conducted itself without banners, and the princes who commanded it were allowed to operate as both merchants and secret priests. They advanced the interest of the nation without bearing its name or ideology, and amassed such vast reserves of lucre that the machinery of American government ground its gears according to their bidding, its operations unimpeded by the interchange of executive or congressional power. These true rulers, unnumbered and forgotten, were untempered by even the traditional concerns of tyrants. Insulated from detection by the mediating organs of a priestly press, America’s unspoken kings built great machines of trade and industry. And these machines, in turn, grew like fat amoebas, consuming and consuming until their bulk was so fantastic that no single ruler or council of command could hope to direct their initiatives in full. In this way, the true mechanisms of power slipped away from human hands — and America, imagining herself lean and ethical, began to decompose.

It was jacked up — just jacked up to hell.

November of 2015 arrived with a flush of new enthusiasm in the camps of the politically inclined. Donald Trump, not yet the American Commodus, was involved in the early stages of a contentious fight for the nomination of one of his country’s two major political parties. Careful analysis of voter attitudes, assiduously collected by a press fully indoctrinated in the democratic religion and wholly faithful in regards to the augury of statisticians, placed Trump in the lead of most contests, commanding something between 25% and 30% of the vote among the population’s relevant subsection.

Journalists themselves, and Trump’s opponents in the opposite party, were galled by this ascendency. For them, the rise of Trump seemed to be a refutation of reality and many articles of their cherished faith. To them, Trump could only be proof of the electorate’s stupidity, its re-emerging racial animus and its bloodthirsty disregard for the rules of political decorum. Such an interpretation, however, still relied on the basic faith to which the press was pledged. For Trump to be a brutal ruler, it must follow that he was contending for a post of rulership. Trump’s supporters, laughing to one another through the digital aether, were followers of a different and more modern God — to them, the joke of Donald Trump was, in truth, the joke of American power. They supported an unserious president because, from their perspective, the office was itself unserious, and the sacred franchise of their democracy was no more or less than an ability to minutely effect the content of television shows.

November delivered Trump his first true correspondent in the race. This rival was a retired neurosurgeon named Ben Carson, famous for his hand in shaping successful books of inspiration and his outspoken devotion to an ancient Roman crucifixion cult. Carson, too, commanded 25% of the vote according to most measures and, in some November polls, even more than that in Iowa. The achievement was particularly attractive, given that Iowa was a province noted for its evangelical character and prized for its position as one of the first of the voting territories. Carson’s lead in Iowa might indicate that the so-called “Christian right” was breaking away from Trump, and hampering his ability to translate popularity into electoral success.

Carson’s rise was trumpeted by the organs of the press, so anxious were they to conjure a narrative of the frontrunner’s decline. “For the first time since The Times and CBS News began testing candidate preferences in July, the retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has displaced Donald J. Trump as the leader of the large Republican field,” wrote journalists Jonathan Martin and Megan Thee-Brenan in the October 27th edition of the New York Times, an outlet remembered today primarily by virtue of its dull and insulting videogame reviews. “The difference is well within the poll’s margin of sampling error,” they continued, in a note that was oft ignored in the weeks ahead. By virtue of this poll, and others, Carson became either “the” frontrunner or “a” frontrunner. As a consequence, he fast became a target of investigation.

Carson was, in truth, a candidate much like Trump. He lacked any experience in the political class, and his cult was, primarily, one of personality. Whereas Donald Trump was boisterous, parodic and immoral, Carson, however, operated within an affect of comfort, moral good and calm — at least to for his supporters. The groundwork of this personality was laid by a public combination of surgery and spirituality, which had been simmering in the media for thirty years.

Throughout the 1980s, Carson made headlines with various feats of brain surgery performed on imperiled children, and held onto them by the force of his virtuous personality. On 23rd of August, 1987, for instance, Carson commanded more than a full page of the “People/family” section of the Kokomo Tribune, the storied hometown paper of Kokomo, Indiana, a once-was town in the region known today as “the big taint.” Carson’s ministrations, the Tribune reported, saved the lives of “eight youngsters” through “the surgical removal of half of the brain.” In addition, continued Nancy Shullins, a reporter for the Associated Press, “Carson took no credit for his skill in the operating room. It is the unwavering belief of the 35-year-old neurosurgeon that a higher power guides his scalpel during surgery.” God, dissected brains, and a happy ending. Who could resist?

Carson, a black man, had grown up in Detroit — and the narrative of his life, as presented in the press, was a narrative of adversity overcome. Although Carson was plagued by the handicaps commonly attributed to his race in the American imagination, he had subdued them all — transforming anger into mildness and disaffection into discipline. “Carson’s first experience with sharp objects and divine intervention came at the age of 14,” Shullins reported. “In his inner-city Detroit neighborhood, he attempted to stab another teenager.” Luckily, a belt buckle blocked the blow, and Carson resolved to give his anger up to God. He became a surgeon, and cultivated an attitude that led to his earning the nickname “Gentle Ben,” which was also the name of a television bear famous for not killing Clint Howard, in spite of numerous opportunities.

This character arc, dorky and unbelievable, can elicit only crunchy lols from the modern poster. It should be cautioned, however, that such mutant narratives were shaped, in large part, by the limited media of the twentieth century. Winning press, especially in the storied outlets like the Kokomo Tribune, required a delicate admixture of uplift, moral certainty, and the grotesque. The pressures of natural selection, working on the numerous applicants for fame, shaped their stories in ways that seem parodic and alien to us today — but which may have seemed, to their original audience, more real and consistent than the lives they lived themselves.

“There are not a lot of role models for black children,” Carson told the A.P., to justify his presence in the paper. That was why he spoke so freely about his life, he said, and why he took his speaking on the road. Carson was a frequent fixture of school assemblies and religious gatherings throughout his thirty years in the public eye prior to his presidential run. He was,an enthusiastic evangelist of “the American dream,” the imagined capacity of that vanished nation to allow its citizens to reinvent themselves and achieve beyond the meanness of their upbringing.

Less than a month after his profile in Kokomo, Carson again made news — this time for removing the deformity of a pair of twins born with their heads conjoined. This supreme demonstration of skill, accomplished over 22 hours and as part of a well-populated team of surgeons, rocketed Dr. Carson to television, where he became the focus of an episode of ABC’s 20/20. His first book, Gifted Hands ghostwritten by the prolific Cecil Murphy, appeared in 1990 and offered, in expanded form, much of the same material that had been highlighted by Carson’s early press appearances. It reproduces the near-stabbing as follows:

“I was in the ninth grade when the unthinkable happened. I lost control and tried to knife a friend. Bob and I were listening to the transistor radio when he flipped the dial to another station. ‘You call that music?’ he demanded. ‘It’s better than that stuff you like!’ I yelled back, grabbing for the dial…In that instant, blind anger — pathological anger — took possession of me. Grabbing the camping knife I carried in my back pocket I snapped it open and lunged for the boy who had been my friend.”

The salvific buckle, in Gifted Hands, is depicted as a symbol of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, an archaic youth military organization with which Carson was intimately involved. Again, such buffoonish symbolism must be read in context — and taken as both a remnant and accusation towards a world that was rightly ruined.

Following this incident, Carson descended into a fit of trembling. “I knew that temper was a personality trait,” Gifted Hands reported. “Standard thinking in the field [of psychology] pointed out the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of modifying personality traits.” Still, the future Doctor had to try. “I sank down on the toilet, sharp mental pictures of other temper fits filling my mind,” the story continued. “At one point I slipped out of the bathroom long enough to grab a Bible. Now I opened it and began to read in Proverbs. Immediately I saw a string of verses about angry people and how they get themselves into trouble.”

Carson lost himself in the text, moving his lips to the words without speaking them aloud. “The words of Proverbs condemned me, but they also gave me hope,” Gifted Hands concluded. “After a while peace began to fill my mind.” Through the grace of God, and the elegance of language, he was delivered. Gifted Hands was meant to serve a similar function — its words, clunky and simplistic, are also a promise of transformation. Carson and Murphy expanded on the promise with many successive volumes, and won a multitude of souls. By November of 2015, those who believed in not just the events of Carson’s life but in the capacity of his work to inspire and encapsulate personal change were supporting his bid for president. It was a movement long in coming, but to the obtuse instruments of journalists it registered as a cold quarter of the electorate, indistinguishable from all the rest.

Soon, the press felt obligated to review Carson’s various narratives and appraise their factual accuracy. His standard of truth was found wanting, especially where the stabbing incident was concerned. What followed was a confusion of bizarre headlines, as the press followed up with those who knew Carson in adolescence — and who remembered a very different boy than the one upon which Carson’s redemptive fame was predicated. New York Magazine ran a story by writer Eric Levitz titled “Ben Carson Defends Himself Against Allegations That He Never Attempted to Murder a Child.” Gideon Resnick in The Daily Beast declared: “Ben Carson’s stabbing story is full of holes.” The Washington Post, in a play for long-forgotten dignity, opted for the relatively neutral “Ben Carson defends recollection of formative stabbing story.”

This public doubt proved an irritant to Carson, and prompted him to denounce the press loudly and often — even going so far as to decry their tactics from the stage of the fourth primary debate, which was held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on November 10th. “I have no problem with being vetted,” Carson said. “What I do have a problem with is being lied about and then putting that out there as truth.” The truth, of course, was that he had tried to stab that boy. It had been true all the way back to 1987, and the Associated Press’s writing in the Kokomo Tribune. Doubting that was tantamount to doubting all that followed from it — the salvation of the psalms, the transformative power of “hard work,” and the character of “Gentle Ben.”

For Carson’s supporters such conclusions were unthinkable. Carson had, for better or worse, come to represent more in their minds than just a man or a surgeon or an inspirational writer. His promise was tied into America’s promise and, not accidentally, into the promise of the press. For years, long before his flirtation with politics, newspapers and magazines and television programs had spit out Carson’s narrative verbatim, using it to score points of “human interest” and provide an uplifting thread of story to run between the advertisements which remain the truest and most advanced expression of American art. To many, the sudden skepticism of the press must have looked like an admission of guilt — another place where the friendly skin of Empire had worn away, revealing its inhospitable bone.

Donald Trump, regrettably, did not allow this grand mistake to run its course. Instead, he joined the press in denouncing Carson as a liar, and further compounded his mistake by doubting the Doctor’s religious convictions. By virtue of this rhetoric, a Trump rally held on the 12th of November at Fort Dodge, Iowa quickly ascended to a perch of public infamy — there, as the press reported, Trump mocked the physics of Carson’s belt buckle claim and had the audacity to ask “How stupid are the people of Iowa?” It looked like a disaster to many who witnessed it.

Trump’s error was the same as the error of the press — his doubts were not restricted to the intelligence of his audience, but to the legitimacy of their ideals. For Trump, of course, the revelation of illegitimacy was stock-and-trade. Carson’s brand of it, however, was sincerely held and cultivated by years of earned exposure. It was also, sadly, part of Trump’s pitch – his superficial appeal to American’s resurgence. It revealed Trump for what he was, but what he could not be if he hoped to win a majority of Iowa republicans — an American apostate. In the years to come, Trump would be freer with his thoughts. But 2015 was a time of transition, and his victory was not yet assured.

In the press, Trump’s performance was floated as a breaking point — a moment when the frontrunner had fatally overplayed his hand. Journalist Jenna Johnson, writing on the following day in the Washington Post, reported that as the night wore on ” Trump appeared to unravel on stage… Rather than sticking to his usual, tidy 60 minutes, Trump kept going and going,” his pronouncements sprouting odd shoots and leaves of psychopathic color as the clock ticked onward. “Those standing on risers behind Trump — providing a backdrop of Iowan faces — eventually gave up and sat down in a falling cascade,” Johnson concluded, poetically. In her mind, it seemed, the corner had turned — and Trump was on the wane.

Had the mechanisms of fate wound themselves in some alternate arrangement, there is a chance that Johnson’s line about the crowd sitting down at last might serve as the gravestone of the Trump movement, and a signal the perpetuation of the old style of American power. But this was not to be.

A recording of the speech uploaded to YouTube shortly after the event by Trump supporters, bore the proud title of “FULL Speech HD: Donald Trump BEST Speech EVER in Fort Dodge, IA.”

Trump arrived late in Fort Dodge, but conducted himself with an appropriate energy. America, he told the crowd, was in a state of decline. Its spirit was whipped, he said, and its military stymied by chaotic conditions in the Middle East. “We’re not proud of ourselves anymore,” he said, repeating a great canard of his previous stumps. “We’re embarrassed. We can’t beat ISIS. We can’t beat Iran in a trade deal or in a nuclear deal. We can’t beat China, China’s killing us…”

It was not, however, a hopeless situation. “How do we recover from things like that?” Trump asked. “You recover by getting smart people to make deals!”

“I love war in a certain way,” he continued. “But only when we win! We never win — by the way, when was the last time we won a war? Our wars are always politically correct.” In part, he continued, the fault was one of leadership. Trump, positioning himself in opposition to the mild wisdom of his predecessor, Barrack Obama, advocated for a new kind of American military man. “I need tough and mean and really really smart,” he said. “Like general Douglas MacArthur…General MacArthur was the number one student in the history of West Point…and he was a great general!” More important, the candidate continued, “He had the image! He’d get off the thing, y’know, the plane, with the corncob pipe and the hat — he loved it!”

This, Trump knew was the important piece. The image — like Carson’s quelling of his internal violence, or the credulous distraction of politics itself. The Age of Trump was, in truth, the age of the image’s perfection and liberation – the era of the full divorce between inhuman power and human vanity. Trump, in that moment, asked the crowd to imagine a better class of video clip – and admitted that it was all he could reasonably offer them.

Later, Trump revealed his plan for “beating” ISIS:

“They have certain areas of oil that they took away — they have some in Syria, some in Iraq,” he said. “I would bomb the shit out of them. I would just bomb those suckers. And that’s right, I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refin — I’d blow up every single inch — there would be nothing left! And y’know what? You’ll get Exxon to come in there and in two months — you ever see these guys, how good they are, the great oil companies? They’ll rebuild the sucker, brand new, it’ll be beautiful!”

The candidate then fanned his arms away from his body, standing in the spotlight like a witness to transcendent truth. “And I’ll ring it,” he said, of the oil fields. “And I’ll take the oil. And I said I’ll take the oil.”

The applause that night was lackluster.

Less than a day later, Paris was in flames, and the course of history decided.

***

The post Dispatch #7: One Hundred Years of Solid ‘Tude appeared first on The Revealer.