Donald Trump is important. Maybe he’s channeling Huey Long, maybe Lonesome Rhodes, maybe just “the Donald,” but despite his xenophobia and thinly veiled racist take on immigrants, he has spun a new American dream and captured those who have been without one for a long time.
Despite those excluded, whom Ta-Nehesi Coates describes so well, the belief that the dream exists is a gigantic part of the American story even though, for many, it’s faded from view. Today, in the shadow of the attacks in Paris, I wonder whether his message will thrive or wither in the face of such horror and fear.
With all that in mind, what does Trump have to do with John Valjean? What did the story mean to Jack Kemp (there’s a new biography ) and Teddy Kennedy (there’s a new book about him, too) both of whom, from opposite parties and ideologies, saw Les Miz multiple times? Can what spoke to them teach or maybe comfort us as we recoil from another bloody revolution in the streets of Paris? Tell me that this* is not what they – and we – are feeling today.
This little boy is now a father, but when he was six, we took him, along with his brother, to see Les Miz. At the end, he dissolved in my lap in tears, a wise child who understood, as so many do, especiallu today, what we may have lost and must struggle to recover? Listen and then, you decide.
*When Les Miz opened in New York, both Teddy Kennedy and Jack Kemp saw it multiple times. It might have been about a revolution, but it was everyone’s revolution:
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!
Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Then join in the fight that will give you
The right to be free!
Like most of us, I don’t think I’ve felt like this since 9/11, although Paris may feel scary in a different way because the scope and savvy of ISIS makes Al Qaeda look primitive in comparison.
I spend hours on the Web every day, and probably understand the reach, creativity and strategic smarts of ISIS outreach more than most of my peers. It’s kind of amazing that people committed to such a regressive lifestyle are so adept at using modern methods to build it. They’ve been using Twitter, Whatsapp and other basic tools for some time but even though I raised two gamers, it never occurred to me until I heard it this morning that online game consoles are great, almost invisible, ISIS communication tools.
There have been hints though, in our popular culture. Portraits of these tactics have appeared in TV shows as disparate in audience as NCIS and The Good Wife: plots about the online recruiting American teenagers for homegrown violence and about exploiting western commitment to privacy and free speech and thought, as well as the seemingly insurmountable gap between the world that nurtures these terrorists and the world we have tried to create for our own kids.
Of course, that dissonance means nothing if your goal is to return us all to a particularly fierce, and very old, version of holiness. It’s so sad to note, too, that our wonderful technology is once again taking us away from all we’d hope it would be.
Cate Blanchett as Producer Mary Mapes, Robert Redford as Dan RatherRachel McAdams, Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Lev Schreiver, and Brian D’arcy James as the Pulitzer Prize winning Boston Globe team
The ultimate goal of every great reporter is to find a terrific story that nobody else has, and report it. Right now, released almost simultaneously, are not one, but two movies about journalism and how it works. In one, eagerness to tell the tale combined with politics to destroy the story, and several stellar careers. In the other, universal caution and the power of the establishment combined in efforts to do the same. Based on true stories,Truth and Spotlight portray, with fierce and sometimes heartbreaking commitment, the professional, ethical and political challenges every good reporter faces.
Each features a wonderful cast: in Spotlight, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, and Stanley Tucci; in Truth, Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford, Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid, Elizabeth Moss, Bruce Greenwood and Stacy Keach. They’re all great.
Both stories beautifully illustrate the adventure, pain, excitement, drudgery and teamwork required in the service of a seriously reported story. Although Spotlight is a far better film, the familiar TV-ness of Truth, as Dan Rather and his 60 Minutes production team, pursue the “George W. Bush Went AWOL from the National Guard” story made it particularly heartbreaking for me. I emerged agitated and halfway out of breath.
It’s was just so sad to witness great work sidelined not by corporate politics or even overt censorship but by small decisions made in service of a great story and a tight deadline. All good journalists understand the importance of this: “If you don’t have time to check one more way, or listen to the person who still has reservations, the story shouldn’t air; if it’s about the President of the United States, even airtight isn’t good enough.” Eager to get on the air and armed with several good pieces of evidence, Mapes insisted the story was ready though – and so it aired.
In this case, although the story was never proven to be false, challenges to errors or lack of clarity in several small details (which were indeed careless or at least a product of selective listening) provided enough ammunition to cost both Rather and Mapes their jobs. In each case the removal was deeply humiliating. Knowing what was coming, it was agony to witness, especially when the entire editorial process was so familiar and the problem elements stood out so clearly.
Spotlight, again drawn from a true story, followed reporters uncovering the child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, revealed by the Boston Globe’s investigative unit the “Spotlight” team at the Boston Globe. In this case, the adversary wasn’t the White House and all the weapons at its disposal, Rather, it was one of the few institutions with more power: the Catholic Church and its hold over Boston and the Globe, whose readers were 56% Catholic as were much of the editorial staff.
Piece by piece, through roadblocks and threats, the team pulled the story of the abusive priests together, with victims on the record, only to be confronted by their new editor, who wasn’t satisfied that this information alone would bring change:
Show me that the church manipulated the system so that these guys wouldn’t have to face charges. Show me they put those same priests back into parishes time and time again. Show me this was systemic, that came from the top down.”
So they did. And their story rocked the Church worldwide. Literally.
To arrive there though, team members had to deal not only with the pain of the victims and horror of the story but also with their own relationships with the Church. That wasn’t just deep connection or lapsed faith, but also an emotional and spiritual system internalized by these longtime-Boston journalists as they grew up their very Catholic hometown.
In this case though, a combination of fierce commitment and great editorial guidance allowed them to resolve any questions that might arise before their initial story ran. They ended up writing hundreds. And won the Pulitzer Prize.
So. Two news movies. Both worth the time and money it will take to see them. Together they bring us perfect lessons: this is what happens when newsgathering doesn’t live up to the tough standards required of the profession, and these are the remarkable things that can happen when it does.
Three “good girls” at Newsweek talking with brief hire Nora Ephron, who left her researcher role for “someplace I can write.”
It’s hard to believe, watching now. Even more than Mad Men, Amazon’s Good Girls’ Revolt is all too familiar. The story of the women of Newsweek and their battle for equality in the newsroom, it’s a heartbreaker, and it’s not because of the huge moments of oppression or betrayal, although they are present. (Through some creative reporting, a young researcher discovers what really happened at the 1969 Altamont Festival that “killed the 60’s.” But the rewrite assignment – and the credit – goes to a guy who never left the building. “That’s how we do things here. We have a process. Men are the reporters – you girls are the researchers.”) The researcher on this story loves the thrill of reporting so much she surrenders everything she’s learned, even though she’ll never get credit for it in the office, much less in print.
Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.
Implicit, explicit and intractable power all in male hands, all the time, permeates every moment of Good Girls Revolt’s pilot episode. We know where their pending revolution is coming from.
Even more frequent than the “big stuff” were the small assumptions, dismissals, insults and slights that eat away, day by day, at confidence and ambition and hope.
Four women in a hallway conversation greeted by the boss: “Hello, my little coven.”
The Managing Editor sending his best researcher, who keeps her reporter partner (and lover) safe and “his” stories on the cover, for coffee. “Black, two sugars, right?”
“Sweetie,” “honey,” “cutie.”
A husband who “gives his wife a year” to write a novel before moving her to Connecticut to raise babies, but then puts a hole in her diaphragm so she’ll be pregnant before that year ends.
Three guys hungrily ogling a smart, but lovely women as she tries unsuccessfully to make it through the newsroom without incident.
Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.
For me it was a very sweet 60 Minutes producer sitting next to a very pregnant me in the newsroom and urging me not to come back to work – to stay home like his wife did. Or the executive who called with sympathy for my miscarriage and told me that, pregnant woman that I’d been, I shouldn’t have been working so hard – as if I was my fault. (His assistant asked me if I’d even wanted the baby at all.)
In addition to newsroom battles, this introductory episode takes us to a “consciousness raising” meeting, led by a pregnant “Eleanor Holmes Norton” and featuring, like a 12-step program, the telling of individual stories of humiliation, discrimination and sexual harassment.
Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.
In my own community, oppressive sexual relationships between researcher and producer weren’t frequent, but they weren’t rare, either. They almost never ended well. One correspondent told me at a bureau Christmas party “I’d really love to sleep with you. Really. But I never dip my pen in the company inkwell.” He thought I’d be impressed.
We need this show – and so do our daughters and nieces and sons and nephews and husbands and young friends. Here’s how Buzzfeed’s Ann Helen Peterson ends her piece on the show:
Good Girls Revolt may be about a bunch of accidental revolutionaries. Its politics may be embroidered with melodrama, and romance, and fixation on clothes. But, then again, so is life. And that doesn’t make the show, or the work of the women behind the scenes, any less feminist — or necessary.
As [production designer Jeannine] Oppewall says, “Sometimes I look at my nieces, who don’t quite yet see the amount of work it took for us to pull this off, and I’m like, ‘You better have a look at the past, because if you’re not vigilant, the past can always be your future.’ You gotta babysit it and talk about it and push it and make it seem like this is absolutely the way it should be.”
The Torah says I can’t use my computer on Shabbat, and since I’ve committed to post every day during November, I kind of have to cheat and set this to post on Saturday even though it’s almost Friday night “lights off.” (Observing Shabbat means not using electric devices unless they’re on timers, not lighting a fire and a ton of other things.)
So instead, I simply wish you a little of the peace to be found in quiet contemplation or just plain family time playing Monopoly. Whatever your way of honoring the weekend, enjoy it. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Cancer has taken so many people I’ve loved and admired. This new interview with two hugely admired and much-loved celebrities reminded me of how deeply it affects us all . We know, in our heads, that the presence of beauty, courage, fame and an amazing marriage and family can’t keep the monster at bay. Neither can being the most respected broadcast journalist of the past 30 years; Tom Brokaw had cancer too. So did my husband, by the way. Thankfully, they are still with us. But it’s a roll of the dice, not fame or fortune, or even education, that’s made it so.
So why are we not all enraged? Why do we refuse to keep this plague at (or at least near) the top of our agenda? We face so much right now: attacks on women, racial tension, income inequality, climate change, declining education systems and infrastructure – fill in your own particular blank. But no matter how we feel about any of these issues, we all grieve for those we’ve lost to cancer; we all long for their presence in our lives and know that it is just a lack of knowledge that took them from us.
No family is untouched; the lucky ones face it among older members but so many lose loved ones — family and friends, well before they’ve seen their children grow up, or get married or find their way in the world and before they’ve exhausted the gifts that brought so much to all of us. I’ve been thinking about them a great deal recently, and have felt, for some time, a need to honor them once again here. Many died before there was an Internet but I’ve added links where I could.
And it’s hard to hold a candle In the cold November rain — Guns N’ Roses
We’re on our way now- committed to NaBloPoMo*: the pledge to post every day in the month of November. Needing the discipline of a public pledge, I’ve taken it on. November: the month when my second son and first daughter-in-law arrived on the planet, when I first saw Africa, when the hero of my youth died in Dallas; the month of Kristallnacht and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sherman’s burning of Atlanta and the launch of Queen Elizabeth’s record-setting reign. So much has happened in this month that ends with our beloved Thanksgiving.
There’s plenty to talk about: a Presidential election that’s precisely a year away, an unprecedented assault on women’s rights, faith, grief, the vagaries of our popular culture, families, grandparents, holidays, admired friends, books, music, movies and the world in general. Oh, and the wonderful work of the women whom I’ve joined on this adventure. You can find them all here.
*National Blog Posting Month
I’ve been hiding from the news, which is weird since I spent most of my life as a journalist. I’m not sure though, that after 8 agonizing years of W and then 6 frustrating ones with President Obama (much of it not his fault) I can face what the next congress will do.
Do you remember the various, endless Clinton hearings? Even more than the impeachment battle, the moment that I keep remembering was deeply personal: Sen. Alphonse D’Amato questioning Deputy Chief of Staff (and my longtime friend) Harold Ickes, whose father, also Harold, had been Secretary of the Interior in the Roosevelt Administration, and credited with implementation of much of the New Deal.
His father, D’Amato told Harold, would have been ashamed of him.
I had worked with Harold when we were all young, so along with political anger came real pain that, beyond the issues, he had faced such very cruel personal grandstanding.
That’s not important in policy terms and is probably mild compared to the harshness that any witnesses at the pending, inevitable deluge of hearings under a Republican congress will face: two years of destructive power escalating the politics of obstruction to that of destruction. Beyond what that will mean to our country, poor people, women, immigrants, ACA users, voting rights, Supreme Court nominations, and the jeopardy we face around the world, none of which will receive much attention except as political weapons, it’s just not something that will be easy to watch, especially for an unrepentant dreamer like me.
It happened three times in one week; things that would have happened very differently to people of color. First came a real, seriously sizable pack – yes pack – of teenage boys running down California Street after dark, screaming and cursing — looking maybe like all of them were chasing the first one. Except for the dog and me, nobody seemed to care. No one yelled “slow down” or “quiet down” in this family-rich neighborhood. No one called the police to report a dangerous group of boys intent on making, if not trouble, at least way too much noise — and on a school night! Did I mention that they were white?
The Trail in Question
This morning, for the zillionth time, a very large off-leash dog came at our very large, protective, on-leash one. He feels helpless when he’s on a leash and approaching dogs aren’t, and gets very agitated. When I called to the owners to please call their dog back toward them, they yelled at me! Why does this matter? The park trail is strictly for dogs on a leash. Almost no one follows the rules. When we moved here, I asked our dog walker about it; she smiled indulgently and told me to “just turn around and go the other way.” Each culprit, it seems, sees this particular infraction as ok – for them, and raising the issue would do no good. Did I mention that they were white?
One of the Crosswalks in Question
Finally, there’s this: California law requires drivers to stop for pedestrians at crosswalks. Our non-commercial street is pretty busy despite being almost totally residential. At least one in four drivers rush right through even when pedestrians are already into the street. At night it’s more than that, and since they don’t see people as quickly in the dark, far more dangerous. Did I mention that many of them are white?
We live in this neighborhood because it is diverse. Signs in the library are posted in three languages (see below) and we hear more than that on the street, including Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Russian. Even so, the people involved in this law-breaking — did I mention that they are all white?
The Library in Question
For months I have had the privilege of listening to sisters of color speak and write among themselves and to the rest of us of the moment after moment, incident after incident, that are part of their lives. Many are desperately terrifying or heartbreaking, or both. Like the ones described here though, they are automatic assumptions of white privilege, of the right to break an inconvenient law without consequence and to censure people of color for similar infractions. As small as these examples are, or maybe because they are, they teach us how much we all presume, how automatically we assume it’s ok for us to break the law or the social contract. What they haven’t taught us yet – horrible huge assault or small presumption, is how much each one diminishes us all.
Lena Dunham was just a little older, when she wrote this, than she was in the currently infamous story from her new book; it’s been raging through right-wing and/or feminist (?!) blogs for days. If you’ve been offline for the past few days, her new book Not That Kind of Girl, includes material about sexual curiosity, sisters, vaginas and sexual limits, all in the form of what were, to many, uncomfortable anecdotes.
Dunham and her book have been brutalized in the press and on blogs – mostly for telling the truth – a truth which some claim is the sexual abuse of a younger sibling. It seemed more like a less-than-attractive set of events and not, to child development experts, worthy of the outrage it generated.
Beyond that, it’s honest, real and revealing, so: is this cacophony of condemnation how we modern readers reward a writer’s honesty? It shouldn’t be – and JD Salinger told us why:
Since [writing] is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? … I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions.’ Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.” (Seymour, an Introduction)
Donald Trump is important. Maybe he’s channeling Huey Long, maybe Lonesome Rhodes, maybe just “the Donald,” but despite his xenophobia and thinly veiled racist take on immigrants, he has spun a new American dream and captured those who have been without one for a long time.
With all that in mind, what does Trump have to do with John Valjean? What did the story mean to Jack Kemp (there’s a new biography ) and Teddy Kennedy (there’s a new book about him, too) both of whom, from opposite parties and ideologies, saw Les Miz multiple times? Can what spoke to them teach or maybe comfort us as we recoil from another bloody revolution in the streets of Paris? Tell me that this* is not what they – and we – are feeling today.
This little boy is now a father, but when he was six, we took him, along with his brother, to see Les Miz. At the end, he dissolved in my lap in tears, a wise child who understood, as so many do, especiallu today, what we may have lost and must struggle to recover? Listen and then, you decide.
