Category: The Cultural Front

  • Charlie Chaplin remains one of cinema’s most iconic figures. His innovations behind and before the camera have left a lasting imprint that can still be seen in contemporary culture. Chaplin’s life was also decidedly political, and his alleged communist sympathies earned him a tremendous FBI file and eventual exile from the US. Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and director Martin Brest joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss Chaplin’s life and legacy.

    Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley
    Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
    Intro Sequence: Cameron Granadino


    Transcript

    Chris Hedges:  Few individuals did more to shape modern cinema than the actor, director, and producer Charlie Chaplin. One of the greatest of all comic mimes, he also pioneered cinematic techniques and storytelling. His films with his iconic role as the beleaguered Little Tramp with baggy trousers, mustache, cane, and bowler hat were not only comic masterpieces, but unflinching looks at poverty, unemployment, capitalism, exploitation, the callousness of authority, the search for meaning and dignity in a hostile world, and the yearning for love and acceptance.

    He argued that drama should be derived from the close observation of life. He refused to follow the conventions, including the penchant for exaggerated melodrama, perfecting his work with hundreds of takes, subtle acting, and nuanced facial expressions. He created full-length feature films with highly crafted plots and characters. He strove, he said, to put across the philosophical doubt I feel about things and people. His films, he said, were a metaphysical exercise, an attempt to unmask as absurd, antiquated, and unfair to humanity the idea that there exists a cosmos where humans were held responsible for their actions or the results of their actions.

    The French filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, wrote of Chaplin that “While remaining marginal to the rest of cinema, he ended up filling this margin with more things. What other word can one use, ideas, gags, intelligence, humor, beauty, movement than all directors together have put in a whole book.” Chaplin, the most famous silent film star of his era, swiftly earned the enmity of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, who saw in his poignant portrayals of the marginalized and forgotten political subversion. The FBI, which began investigating Chaplin in 1922 and would amass an FBI file of 1,900 pages on him for his alleged communist sympathies, finally drove him into exile. In 1952 while Chaplin was in London for the premiere of his film, Limelight, the US Attorney General revoked Chaplin’s reentry permit. This ended his Hollywood career. He would spend the rest of his life in Switzerland.

    Joining me to discuss in the first of a two-part series, the importance and legacy of Charlie Chaplin, is the film director, screenwriter, and producer Martin Brest. Martin has directed numerous films, some of which include Midnight Run with Robert De Niro, which was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Scent Of A Woman with Al Pacino, which won a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture and four Academy Award nominations with Pacino winning for Best Actor, and the blockbuster Beverly Hills Cop, nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture, and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

    So, Marty, Charlie Chaplin comes out of Vaudeville, he’s British, and then the film industry begins to recruit from Vaudeville. We’re going to talk about the transformation of the film industry, much of it pioneered by figures like Chaplin, but describe to us what the film industry was like when Charlie Chaplin arrived in Hollywood.

    Martin Brest:  Well, he started in Hollywood in 1914, and films had been developing as popular entertainment for the previous 10 years in the US, but mostly let’s say six or seven years, so it was primitive. Comedy filmmaking was a new part of it that hadn’t established itself yet. There wasn’t a tradition of it. So when he got involved in 1914, it was as people were trying to figure out how to make comedic films, and everybody was learning on their feet. He started out doing what he was told for the first five minutes of his career, and his backlog of skill and sheer luminescent talent started to pull him in his own direction.

    He decided that he wanted to direct his own films. So he was writing and directing and acting in it, and trying to figure out what this thing was, comedic films. Everybody was trying to figure out what this was. Film as an art form is unprecedented in the history of mankind. So this thing that was very, very, very new, storytelling on film, was now being taken to a whole new place. Trying to make comedic films on film and what that would be, what comedic characters should be, what comedic stories should be, and it was all unfolding as he entered. The timing is extraordinary.

    Chris Hedges:  Well, you had me watch Making A Living. 1914. Yeah. Is that his first film?

    Martin Brest:  Yeah, that’s his very first –

    Chris Hedges:  It’s not very good.

    Martin Brest:  – No. And he didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know what to do with him. He had more than 10,000 hours, he had this incredible career in English musical comedy and toured all over England and all over the US. He was a star in that world and a brilliant talent, and he had this reservoir of understanding of how to move an audience and how to make an audience laugh. So when he started, he didn’t know how to translate that into film, and nobody knew how to do it. There was no talent that was capable of directing him from the get-go. So it was a slightly awkward start. Not terrible. He was very, very young. He was 25 and he looked very young, so they tried to make him look older with facial hair and an awkward wardrobe. It wasn’t terrible, but he didn’t know what to do with his talent. He didn’t know how to put his talent in a framework. But he figured that out very, very, very quickly; Shockingly quickly.

    Chris Hedges:  Before we go on, this is from David Robinson’s biography, I want to talk about Vaudeville. He writes, “A musical act had to seize and hold its audience and make its mark within a very limited time, between 6 and 16 minutes. The audience was not indulgent and the competition was relentless. The performer in the musical could not rely on a sympathetic context or build-up. Sarah Bernhardt might find herself following Lockhart’s Elephants on the bill. So every performer had to learn the secrets of attack and structure, the need to give the act a crescendo, a beginning, a middle, and a smashing exit. To grab the applause, he or she had to learn to command every sort of audience from a lethargic Monday first-housed to the Saturday rowdies.”

    He later said that because he was booed – He was quite, as you said, a sensation in Vaudeville – He didn’t like live audiences. Once he got into motion pictures, he wouldn’t do stage. But many of the people that he drew into his films once he began making them, which we’ll talk about, came out of that tradition. He was very physical, he was himself quite a fine athlete. But talk about that training and that reservoir of talent and what that talent could do and how it ultimately became successful within the film industry.

    Martin Brest:  Well, again, he was used to working in front of a live audience, thousands and thousands of live audiences by the time he was 25. Some of them, I would imagine could be very aggressive if things weren’t maintained at a certain level. He knew how to navigate that to the point where it was second nature to him. Then when he had to stand in front of a camera out on a street with maybe one cameraman and one director and an assistant cameraman, he had to call up, I imagine, the memory of how his actions would affect an audience seeing this thing in the theater. It’s an abstract thing, shooting out on the street with two people watching you. But he had the instincts that were developed from doing it live.

    His imagination, coupled with his experience, enabled him to do the following: They would go out with their camera and have a little situation; a guy who wants to sit on a bench in a park and there’s a cop there and some little conflict of some kind. They would go out with that most minimal setup and he would have to look around and examine everything and see how he can fill it. So when you see a scene, it’s filled with delicious detail of how he moves his feet, how he bumps into a thing, how he picks up a thing and flips it, and how he uses some little detail on the set for some other thing – Like he’ll use something to buff his nails that’s not intended for that, and something to comb his hair that’s not intended for that – That imagination and ability to read the environment and figure out how to fill the moments with things that he knew were going to work in front of an audience was his skill. He took that to another level. There were a lot of people that could do that but he was looking for a larger context, which was the thing that started to separate him from the pack. Aside from the fact that he was the most skilled comedian at the time.

    Chris Hedges:  In 1914, he’s in this short film, Kid Auto Races At Venice. It’s a one-gag film where he goes in front of the camera, even though they’re trying to film a kid’s soapbox derby-type auto race, and he wants to be in front of the camera, but that’s when he first makes use of The Tramp costume. Let’s talk about that costume which became his trademark up until he made his first talking film.

    Martin Brest:  Well, it’s interesting, that film – Which was the third one he shot but the second one that was released, and they would make a film a week, these little one-realers, these nine or 10 minute films – It’s famous for the fact that that’s the first time he appeared in The Tramp outfit, which he was concerned about looking a little older than he was, so he put on a little mustache. He felt that the little mustache would add years while not hindering his ability to emote. The stories are numerous as to how he found each component: The shoes that were too big, the jacket that was too small, the pants that were too large.

    But that film, they were trying to make films at such a quick pace that if anything was going on, like in that case there were these kids, soapbox racers – Kids would make little race cars out of wooden boxes, and they were having a little competition in Venice, California – So somebody at the studio said go out and make a movie, let’s use this afternoon event for production value. So they would go out. And the premise of the film is so hip; It’s almost like Borat in a way. It’s very advanced considering that film comedy was in such a primitive state.

    The premise of the film is very simple – And it’s a 10-minute film, it’s very primitive – Which is there’s a cameraman and a director out trying to shoot a documentary of these auto races, and some character keeps getting in the way of the camera. Chaplin is The Tramp, and the director of this little documentary is always trying to get him out of the way. But as far as the audience at the time goes, they think this is actually happening. They think somebody is screwing up this little documentary. So it’s a meta-comedy for its time. It’s very sophisticated.

    Chris Hedges:  At the very end of the film, there’s this close-up where he mugs –

    Martin Brest:  Well, I have a theory about the end of the film. In a lot of Chaplin films and a lot of silent comedies, people do all these very physical things; They kick each other, they punch each other, they fly in the air and land on their backs, and you don’t know how they’re doing it without getting injured. The guy who was directing that film was appearing in the film as a director and they were shooting it in continuity, like in the order that it appeared in the movie, trying to figure out the story as they went. And this director in the movie is getting physical with Chaplin, kicking him out of the way, et cetera, et cetera. And at the very end of this thing, he gives Chaplin a kick. As Chaplin’s walking away he gives him a kick in the rear end and sends Chaplin flying.

    Now, all the guys that Chaplin would work with, all these Vaudevillians and musical hall performers, they were almost like circus performers. They knew how to do this stuff without injuring each other, and they knew how to fall, they knew how to kick somebody. This guy was not an actor, he was a director. I’ve watched it a thousand times and it looks like he really gave him a kick, and Chaplin really went flying, and when Chaplin got up, he looked pissed. It’s a real moment and the movie ends abruptly right after that. So I have a feeling that might’ve been a pivotal moment when Chaplin decided he wanted to direct his own movies, but I don’t know that for sure.

    Chris Hedges:  Well, part of Chaplin’s genius is that he realized that much of the shtick, especially the exaggerated gestures, the melodrama was not, at least for him, going to work on film. And that’s a constant. So he brings in these incredibly talented Vaudevillian actors who act with him for years. But he understands the intimacy of film very early and his portrayals – We talked about that beautiful scene at the end of City Lights, certainly one of the most poignant scenes I’ve ever seen in cinema – He very quickly grasps the language of the camera. In this biography by Robinson, he talks about how in many cases, he likes to work with people who aren’t actors because he shows them how to do it and that people who are actors, especially if they have been schooled in that melodrama, he finds very frustrating. So talk about his understanding of the language of film and how to bring that nuance and depth to filmmaking.

    Martin Brest:  Well, he had to figure it out for himself. One of the most extraordinary things I find about Chaplin – Which I responded to at a very early age, and audiences responded to, that I never heard discussed – Is he found a way to weld your consciousness, your concerns, your very spirit, to his character’s spirit. He would figure out a way and give time and create moments where he could create that bond so that you were with him every step of the way. It took me years and years and years even to notice this because I felt it without noticing it, that he would look into the camera but wouldn’t make eye contact with the camera. There’s a difference because then it would break the fourth wall.

    But he would look into the camera in a way – Let’s say he’s eating or something, he’s looking down and he would look into the camera as he’s doing it – Without you perceiving it, it creates a bond between his spirit and your spirit. It’s a magical thing, I don’t know how he came up with it. It’s invisible but you can feel it. You can’t notice it. So that was a magical thing that he developed. In terms of his film technique, it’s weird when people talk about the great directors, rarely is he mentioned. People call Hitchcock and this one, and that one, and this one, and that one, but his name rarely came up as a great director. Which to me is to miss the point, because he directed some of the greatest movies, some of the most potent movies of his time.

    Apparently, they weren’t overtly dazzling from a technical standpoint. They actually were, he just didn’t do fancy things with shots. He laboriously created things to occur within a shot. So it seems simplistic directorially when in fact it’s totally advanced, completely advanced, and to this day, dazzling. One of the things I find extraordinary is that when you watch movies of that period, so much of it is trapped in time. Even for instance, in a film like The Kid, there’s a scene in The Kid at the very beginning where Chaplin’s wandering through an alley and he sees this little baby wrapped up lying next to the garbage. You’re right there with Chaplin, and then there’s the bad guys who left the baby there. And when you look at them, you realize you’re watching a movie from 1920. They have this makeup, this Halloween makeup, and you realize that’s the period you’re watching. It just so happens that Chaplin transcends the period and it’s happening in the present as far as the viewer goes. So that’s a product of a genius and a technique that he developed that directorially, he never got enough credit for.

    Chris Hedges:  Let’s talk about The Tramp. The Tramp is in all of these films, he reminds me of that E.B. White story, Stuart Little. Chaplin himself was very small, 5’2″ and 125 pounds. He has nothing, he’s living in poverty, he’s constantly being hounded by the police. In several films, he ends up in jail. And of course, Chaplin himself grew up in dire poverty, and he and his half-brother Sydney, who worked with him, were sent off to boys’ homes because his mother who had mental health issues couldn’t take care of them and their father had left. But that figure, which becomes iconic, has built within it a profound class consciousness.

    Martin Brest:  Yeah. I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say that he was traumatized by poverty in his youth and his mother was dealing with mental health issues. It was a humiliating upbringing and an upbringing of deprivation. And as he found his voice as an artist, he naturally went to that well and used it. And it wasn’t a contrivance, he was coming from a memory of pain, deprivation, and humiliation, especially in the face of the haves. That contrast is in a lot of his work.

    Chris Hedges:  He wrote, in 1915, an essay called “The Illusion Of The First Time Acting,” and he says, “The guiding principle for the actor is that they always strive to convince the audience that what they’re doing, they’re doing for the first time.”

    Martin Brest:  Yeah. Even concert pianists have to do that. If you’re playing Chopin, one of the things is to make it feel like you didn’t know what the next note was going to be until you hit it. That would be essential, otherwise, it would seem stiff and airless. The nature of the scenes that he created with his collaborators was such that in a way, sometimes they were doing things for the first time in front of the camera. They had certain parameters and they would use whatever was around as they went from take to take to try and improve it and add delicious complexities to it and improvisations within the confinement of the material. But you have to make it seem like it’s the first time.

    Chris Hedges:  So as someone who’s directed many films, how do you achieve that? Because I assume you, like Chaplin, would do sometimes well over 100 takes, take after take, after take, after take. How do you achieve it?

    Martin Brest:  It’s interesting. I had to introduce Beverly Hills Cop at a big screening in L.A. 15 years ago or something, and the whole cast was there: Eddie Murphy, John Ashton, and Judge Reinhold and I thought, what am I going to say? I don’t know what to say. And before I realized it, what I said was – And I’ll introduce it by saying that that film was an improvisation. We had a script, but it got thrown out and we invented –

    Chris Hedges:  Well, that’s very much like Chaplin. That’s how he worked.

    Martin Brest:  – Well, I didn’t realize that, but I came up with a step outline for the whole movie, but not the dialogue and everything to fill it up. So we were shooting with the step outline the day before, trying to create a script to shoot and then get to the set and improvise. And what I said when I introduced the film was that I remember hearing that in the Silent era, the Silent Comedians, Chaplin, et cetera, would have an outline and they’d get to the set and they’d look around and see what can they use? And they’d try this, but that doesn’t work. Then they’d shoot it this way, that doesn’t work. They’d shoot it that way. Oh, that’s good, let’s build on that. And they’d do their thing. And it isn’t possible, but one would never think it would be possible in current-day Hollywood, or the Hollywood, in this case, of the eighties, in the studio system where you’re supposed to have a locked-down script and shoot it as good as you can and edit it as good as you can.

    But because of the circumstances that led to that movie being put together, I was able, without realizing – And I only put it together when I introduced the film – That I was able to make a contemporary Hollywood comedy using silent film comedy techniques, which is getting to the set with a bunch of, in that case, funny guys, and go through the things, see what you can come up with, try it, then try it again. Oh, that’s good, let’s do this, let’s do that. And build it scene by scene by scene, and then put it together. And the fact that it looked like a complete movie was amazing. I remember they asked me to do the second one. I thought I could never pull that off again.

    Chris Hedges:  Well, that’s interesting because that’s how Chaplin worked. And he talked about how he would be inspired by the physical surroundings, whatever the props were. There’s that scene, where is it? Maybe it’s in The Kid where he’s with another great Vaudevillian actor whose name I forget, but they’re workmen, and he has the soap, he’s trying to wash up.

    Martin Brest:  Oh, yeah.

    Chris Hedges:  Is that from The Kid?

    Martin Brest:  No, that’s from Modern Times.

    Chris Hedges:  Yeah, Modern Times.

    Martin Brest:  Ben Turpin was the other guy.

    Chris Hedges:  It’s brilliant. It’s absolutely brilliant. But he improvised all that. They both did.

    Martin Brest:  Well, I don’t think he improvised that scene because that scene had some little on-set special effect to blow bubbles –

    Chris Hedges:  No, no. But he and the other actor created it. I read in the biography that it wasn’t supposed to be, but then the two of them went off and started –

    Martin Brest:  – Maybe they rigged up that thing.

    Chris Hedges:  – Yeah.

    Martin Brest:  Well, it’s funny. I did another film using that technique. I don’t know if you could do it anymore, which is if you have a solid outline and a good script – It works better for comedy, I wouldn’t attempt this in a drama necessarily, although I guess one could – But every time you do a scene, you try and keep tweaking it and tweaking it and tweaking it and tweaking it and see what you can bring to it that you didn’t anticipate. And then judiciously edit it together to create the impression that that’s how it always was intended. It doesn’t look like it was invented, like the stuff in Chaplin movies, it doesn’t betray the creative use of chaos that went into its inception.

    Chris Hedges:  So One A.M., this is a classic theme of Vaudeville, the drunk and the pawn shop. Let’s talk about those quickly. And then he explodes as a star. But let’s talk about those, which you both had me watch and you underlined, “Watch silently.”

    Martin Brest:  Oh, yeah. To explain, I gave you a list of films to prepare for.

    Chris Hedges:  Yes, I watched them all.

    Martin Brest:  And some I specify that you should watch silently. The reason for that is a lot of silent comedies, silent films in general, somebody comes along and thinks that people want sound for it, and they come up with their own soundtrack. I’m sure their intentions are sweet but the music that goes along with a silent comedy or any film becomes essentially the narration. It’s very determinative of how the film is interpreted. So to have someone, who knows who, write a little score in 1987 for an old comedy and put it on YouTube, you’re better off watching them silently; it’s closer to the original intention. And you’ll find that you don’t need music, that the silent comedies and probably silent dramas, the good ones, don’t need music. They have their own music because of the rhythm, not only of events and movement but the rhythm of how it hits you, a certain rhythm that’s meticulously created that provides its own internal music.

    So to have somebody else’s music screw it up is not a great thing. Some of the films he made with music like Modern Times and City Lights, and later on he had the foresight to own the rights to some of his films. The films were ephemeral, nobody thought that a film had any value two years later, they didn’t have any value whatsoever. But somehow he thought that it was a good idea to make sure that he owned the films and preserved them. And sure enough, years later, he re-released them with scores that he wrote.

    Chris Hedges:  He was quite an accomplished musician. He played the cello, he played the violin very well, and his aunt, I remember from the biography, felt it was a shame that he didn’t become a musician because he was so talented. And we talked about this earlier, but if you watch the films, they’re so incredibly choreographed, and I want you to address that. But he of course would often film, although these were silent films, to music. Sometimes bringing in musicians to play. But there’s that boxing scene, that’s right? Which is remarkable. There are all sorts of scenes. He was so dexterous, obviously a very good athlete. He lived at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, and he worked out constantly.

    Martin Brest:  Well, this is another aspect of Chaplin’s movies that is not given enough attention, which is as films were silent until the late twenties, 1927-ish, and all of a sudden they started to have dialogue and music in them, and the use of music was being explored, like how do you use music in movies. And Chaplin, I would go so far as to say he was the only director – I don’t know if this is true, but I’ll bet it’s true – Of that early period who was on top of the music for his movies in a way that didn’t happen in film probably until the sixties, until Stanley Kubrick, in a way.

    I don’t know. Directors may have worked with composers, probably not in the thirties and forties, but maybe in the fifties and sixties. Music was done by the studio. So for a director to be on top of how his movie was going to be scored when a piece of music was going to start, when it was going to stop, when that theme was going to be repeated in another place, what should that music be? He was doing that in a way that wasn’t done until Stanley Kubrick did it. Everybody thought it was amazing when they saw 2001 and all that amazing music that he used in that.

    And then directors like Scorsese and people that are on top of the specifics of the music in their movies. Now it’s a normal thing, but back then it wasn’t done. And his control over the music in his films was extraordinary. The music was extraordinary, how it was used was extraordinary, and it was at a level that was, I hate the word, but it was like auteur-driven. It wasn’t wallpapered in by the studio later on, sometimes brilliantly or sometimes not.

    Chris Hedges:  This is your theory – Which makes complete sense. No, it does – And I know from reading the biography that he often frequently had live music playing while they were filming.

    Martin Brest:  Well, in that day people would use music to help them emote. They’d have off-camera music to help them get in the mood. But as we discussed, there are certain scenes that I’m convinced that when you watch them, they have an uncanny precision to the choreography.

    Chris Hedges:  They’re remarkable.

    Martin Brest:  Yeah, and they involve sometimes two, sometimes three people doing things with incredible precision. For instance, a character will turn away and he’ll turn back at a precise moment in relationship to the other person’s action that there’s no way to cue. And these things play out in one shot of duration.

    Chris Hedges:  Well, it’s like the scene we were talking about. Is it City Lights or is it A Dog’s Life where the dog is eating the hot dogs, but he’s eating these little cakes, but he has to take it at the precise moment?

    Martin Brest:  In A Dog’s Life where he’s eating little cream puffs, he’s stealing them off of a food cart. His half-brother’s playing the other actor. And it’s extraordinary. What it is for those who haven’t seen it this guy has a food cart, and he suspects Chaplin is a shifty character. And when the owner of the food cart turns away, Chaplin steals a little cream puff. And the guy is getting wise to it and he turns around as Chaplin gets it in his mouth, and the timing of it over the whole course of the scene is phenomenal. The guy always turns when Chaplin has done it, and has hidden the cream puff away in his mouth. And you wonder, how is this possible? And I’m sure that they rehearsed it to music.

    Chris Hedges:  It’s also that boxing scene –

    Martin Brest:  The boxing scene in –

    Chris Hedges:  – Which is brilliant.

    Martin Brest:  – City Lights. I’m sure that too, clearly. You could see them dancing in a rhythm.

    Chris Hedges:  He describes for him, acting as a dance, fundamentally a dance.

    Martin Brest:  That’s interesting.

    Chris Hedges:  I may have butchered that quote but he describes being on the set as a dance.

    Martin Brest:  Yeah. Well, sometimes you see him enter a scene, for instance, and before he engages in a specific action of a scene, he’ll do all these things that are phenomenal. And it is like a dance. He moved better than anybody in film. He was extraordinary. And again, it wasn’t for the flash of it. Everything was about engaging the audience’s attention to the dilemma of the character.

    Chris Hedges:  But when you watch it or re-watch it, there are all these subtle, tiny gestures that are hilarious that you miss the first time around. Everything is so incredibly choreographed. There’s a real artistry.

    Martin Brest:  Yeah. It’s like fishing; he never lets slack in the line. The line in this case being the audience’s bond with his character’s dilemma and it follows that dilemma throughout the course of the movie.

    Chris Hedges:  Was there any other director of his caliber during that time period?

    Martin Brest:  Not when it came to comedy. Buster Keaton co-directed to some… It’s a little blurry but Buster Keaton, I would say, is the closest to having that total determination of a project. They were the two titans.

    Chris Hedges:  You had D.W. Griffith.

    Martin Brest:  Yeah, who had zero sense of humor. D.W. Griffith had Biograph Studios, they were on 14th Street in Manhattan. He had this one assistant who said, why don’t we make comedies? This was in 1911 or 1912. Why don’t we make comedies? Comedies would be good. Or maybe even 1909. And D.W. Griffith didn’t have a comedic bone in his body. And this guy said, we’re making movies, let’s do it. And it never happened. This guy tried to make some comedies for the company D.W. Griffith was the star of, and I don’t think it worked out, particularly. So the guy who went out to California and started his own company, his name was Max Sennett, and he became the Henry Ford of film comedy. And that’s who Chaplin went to work for. He was the first guy that industrialized the development of film comedy in America.

    Chris Hedges:  Chaplin became so big, and we’ll talk about this in the second segment, that he founded his own studio, produces his own films. Let’s talk about the constraints that he faced within the studio system at the time. First of all, they were churning out one film after another. They didn’t do many takes. I remember reading every film had to end with a chase. But talk about the constraints that he was under.

    Martin Brest:  When you say the studio system or what we think of as a studio system, it started in the late twenties, early thirties, and he was starting in the mid-teens. So it was a different system, which was Max Sennett who had this lot and a thousand wacky comedy guys, circus guys, bathing beauties, animals, and all kinds of people: And certain people would go out and make these movies once a week. So he had to do it within that constraint and because at the very beginning, he didn’t have the pull, he had to fit into their way of doing it.

    As I said, very early on, it was apparent that he was a special thing and he wanted to do things in a more precise way than they were used to. When people think of things like The Keystone Cops which was Max Sennett – Which has become synonymous with very broad slapstick, which is considered very low – When I watch them, I’m in shock at the artistry and the precision. Stuff that nobody could do today. There’s nobody that could –

    Chris Hedges:  Is that because they came out of Vaudeville? So they were essentially trained.

    Martin Brest: –  They came out of Vaudeville. Some of them were circus performers, they were essentially all stuntmen, and they knew how to do very complicated, dangerous, physical things safely and comedically. So it seems very low, but the precision involved is awesome. Even in these dopey, Keystone Cop chase movies. When you see what these guys do, the stunts and things that play out in a long, continuous shot that involves dangerous hits and people missing each other, barely, it’s spectacular.

    But Chaplin very quickly decided he wanted to do something that was more based around a very specific character that he was developing, and wanted to make sure that anything funny, any gags, any shtick would suit the character, not be there for itself, not be there for any other reason than to help the storyline and his character’s arc progress forward. Obviously in the beginning he wasn’t as strict about it, but he was concerned about developing the integrity of a certain character and a certain emotion around the character, the certain story around that. And all that happened very quickly. He started in 1914, and it was already by 1915-1916 he was doing that. And nobody had ever seen anything like it.

    Chris Hedges:  Well, in the film studios, because he’s so popular, they have to give him more and more leeway because they didn’t like to do… And they wanted these things churned out on an assembly line.

    Martin Brest:  But very quickly they saw what they had and he became the most famous person on the planet. Because the films were silent, there was no language barrier. He was everywhere. So his salary started to go up, and he got control. And he used that control in a way that, again, I think of a director like Kubrick who insisted on and developed a right to have that total control at a time when directors didn’t have that control. And he did everything. He was the alpha and omega of decision-making in his films. Chaplin started that in the teens, which was unprecedented and he was very successful at it. And that kept building his power base and his ability to make bigger and more complicated films at a scale that wasn’t of their time.

    Chris Hedges:  Was he the first to put… You had Birth Of A Nation, I don’t know what year that was.

    Martin Brest:  I think that was 1914.

    Chris Hedges:  Was it that early?

    Martin Brest:  I think so, yeah.

    Chris Hedges:  So, that was the full-length feature-type film. But they weren’t doing that in comedy, were they?

    Martin Brest:  Well, there was one, it was Tilly’s Punctured Romance. Chaplin was in the first feature-length comedy but that wasn’t his movie and it wasn’t followed by a lot of them. Yeah, he started developing longer and longer movies that were against the grain of what was going on, but the box office rewarded it.

    Chris Hedges:  And that’s what we’re going to talk about in the second segment. That was film director, screenwriter, and producer Martin Brest. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can join us for part two of our discussion of Charlie Chaplin next week and you can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Black athletes have not only changed how the game of soccer is played; around the world, they’ve also harnessed their positions to fight for justice and political change through the sport of soccer itself. In the latest “Ask a Sports Scholar” segment, Edge of Sports host Dave Zirin speaks with Dr. Jermaine Scott about his forthcoming book Black Soccer: Football and Politics in the African Diaspora, and about the reality of teaching about race, culture, and politics at a public university in Ron DeSantis’s Florida.

    Dr. Jermaine Scott teaches courses on African American and African Diaspora History and Sports History at Florida Atlantic University. He is currently working on a forthcoming book called Black Soccer: Football and Politics in the African Diaspora.

    Studio Production: David Hebden
    Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
    Audio Post-Production: David Hebden
    Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
    Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen


    Transcript

    Dave Zirin:  Welcome to Edge of Sports, only on The Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin.

    It’s time to Ask a Sports Scholar, one of the most popular things we do on Edge of Sports. Today we are going to talk to Jermaine Scott, who teaches African-American and sports history at Florida Atlantic University. He’s currently working on a book called Black Soccer: Football and Politics in the African Diaspora. Let’s bring him on. 

    Professor Scott, thank you so much for joining us here on Edge of Sports.

    Jermaine Scott:  Hey, thank you so much for the invitation. I’m really excited to be here.

    Dave Zirin:  I love the background. I feel like I’m in a David Lynch movie with all that red, it’s awesome.

    Jermaine Scott:  Yeah, we try to keep the colors a little fresh throughout the house, so.

    Dave Zirin:  It’s very cool. Very cool.

    I want to ask you so much about Black soccer, what it is, what it means, how you got into that as an area of study. But I can’t talk to somebody from Florida Atlantic University without first asking them about teaching at the university level, particularly at a public university in Florida at this day and time in 2023. What is that experience like for you?

    Jermaine Scott:  That’s a fascinating question, Dave, and it’s a question that I think about often these days, obviously. It’s a lot of anxiety if I’m being completely honest. You walk into the classroom and you don’t know what a student might say. You don’t know how a student might interpret what you’re saying. So there’s a lot of anxiety about how you’re teaching and how you’re expected to relay historical facts.

    And I teach African-American history, I teach African diaspora history, and sports history. And all three of those courses — I teach other courses, but the core of my courses has to do with issues of race, with inequality, with histories of colonialism and slavery. And so these are all topics that are heavily contested right now in the state of Florida.

    So yeah, there’s a lot of anxiety but there’s also a lot of support within my department, other colleagues throughout the department, but also throughout the university, and throughout the university system in Florida. There seems to be a strong cohort of professors that are there for each other, and are essentially trying to build community.

    Dave Zirin:  But as somebody who’s been teaching in Florida for a few years, you can tell our audience the vibe is different now than perhaps it was a few years ago.

    Jermaine Scott:  Absolutely. I first got to FAU in the middle of COVID, 2020. So my first year was all virtual. The second year was okay. We started hearing things in the background. And then in the middle of my second year, third year, things started to come in really quickly.

    And yeah, again, my first and second year felt pretty free. I felt able to express myself the way I wanted to in class. And I still do, but I have this haunting sensation in the back of my head. If I start to get riled up a little bit, I have to reel it back in and make sure I don’t go off the rails too much. But yeah, so I think there’s ways of navigating it, and I think I’m doing okay doing that, but you just never know. Each semester is a new group of students, and you just never know in this political climate how they’re going to receive what you’re saying.

    Dave Zirin:  Absolutely. So let’s get to the fun stuff here. Black soccer, what does that mean, Black soccer? How do you define it? And I’m sure you define it more than “Black people playing soccer.”

    Jermaine Scott:  And that’s exactly how I wanted to start it. When we think of ideas like Black music or the Black church — And this is how I walk through it with my class, it’s like, are we just talking about Black people playing music? Are we just talking about Black people going to church? And that’s part of it, but there’s also something more substantial about it.

    And so what I’m trying to do is conceptualize this idea called Black soccer, and it’s to look at the ways in which Black footballers, Black soccer players, have used the game as a site of political articulation, have turned the game into a space to articulate their politics.

    And at the root of all of these chapters, which at the time seemed very all over the place, they’re in DC, they’re in São Paulo, they’re in Amsterdam, at the root of all the chapters is an effort for these Black footballers to reimagine or renegotiate their relationship to the nation as international footballers, as footballers that are in highly nationalized politicized spaces, national narratives shape a lot of their careers or shape the political context of the game in these different spaces.

    In São Paulo, for example, in the 1980s, Brazil is still under a military dictatorship, and that shapes the way in which clubs operate. While in Corinthians, in São Paulo, a club called Corinthians, about the midfielder Socrates, they had what they called a Corinthians democracy, which is where they democratize the entire club, where every player of the club, every staff member of the club, every coach had an equal vote on all the decisions of the club. This is in the context of a national narrative of the military dictatorship.

    Or in the Netherlands during the 1990s, the national narrative is multiculturalism. We have all these different races, and we can all live together.

    You have Black players on the Dutch national team who are of Surinamese descent. And they are asking questions about their treatment on the team, about how they are being portrayed in the media, and it starts to add wrinkles to these smooth, progressive, national narratives of cohesion.

    And so in each chapter, I’m looking at how Black footballers are using the game to kind of critique — Or how I like to put it, play within and against the nation.

    Dave Zirin:  Interesting to speak about it relative to the nation. We interviewed another sports scholar, Theresa Runstedtler, who wrote a book called Black Ball, and it was about the way Black people affected the very style of the game in the 1970s in a way that goes often quite uncredited.

    Jermaine Scott:  Yes.

    Dave Zirin:  Can we talk about that? Does that exist? Because soccer is a game of so much more structure than, say, basketball. Do you see a difference historically in how the style of the sport changed by the infusion of the Black athlete?

    Jermaine Scott:  Absolutely. And we can find this most noticeably in places in Latin America, in places like Brazil, places like Colombia, even in places like Argentina — Not necessarily the integration of Black players, but the integration of the working class, the working poor in Argentina. They all had a massive effect on the style of the game.

    So when the game is originated, it’s coming out of Europe, it’s coming out of England. The institutionalization of the sport happens at the end of the 19th century, and it’s a very rigid game. You have your defense, you have your midfielder, and you have your attack. And in the European game, it was a lot of running. You kick the ball and you chase the ball. It was very physical, man-to-man, pushing people out the way.

    In Latin America, when it was adopted by Black players, when it was adopted by the working classes, it became a much more free sport. So here we have the focus on the individual, where the players are not necessarily interested in these long passes, but they’re interested in expressing themselves individually with the ball. That might look like what we call in Brazil, the [inaudible]. The movement of Capoeira, of the capoeiristas. We see the same movement within Brazilian football.

    Peter Alegi talks about the Africanization of football, of course, in the continent of Africa, and how working class Black players, particularly in places like South Africa, adopted the game and made it their own. Not only their style of play, but also their participation, let’s say, in the stands. So how the supporters are also participating in the match is different in the ways in which the Eurocentric, European ways in which the game was created.

    Dave Zirin:  Wow, this is fascinating stuff. What attracted you to this area of study?

    Jermaine Scott:  So I was born in Florida, born in West Palm Beach, Florida, and I was born to Jamaican parents. And so football in Jamaica is the number one sport, probably next to cricket. But probably football is the number one sport. So I always grew up playing soccer, I always grew up playing football. I played it through high school. I didn’t play in college, but soccer was always central in the household.

    And it was also the first space that I began to ask questions about race. A lot of my team, I was one of two, maybe one of three Black players on the team, and I always wondered why that was. Why aren’t there more Black players on these teams? But then I would watch the World Cup and I would see the Colombian National team, and it was all Black players. The first World Cup I remember is the 1998 World Cup, and I remember watching the Dutch National team, and it just had a number of Black players. And in my young mind, I wasn’t associating Blackness with the Netherlands. I wasn’t associating Blackness with Colombia or Venezuela or even Brazil.

    And so seeing that, I had this tension. Why am I the only Black player on my team in the States but then when I look throughout the world, I see Black people playing the game all over? And so it became a space where I started to ask these questions about race, about identity. And I had the opportunity to study it as a critical practice, as a critical exercise to think about the political implications of the game. Obviously, joining this long tradition of scholarship that looks at how, of course, sports is deeply, deeply politicized.

    Dave Zirin:  Interesting. So it captured you intellectually through playing and through asking questions about playing.

    Jermaine Scott:  Absolutely, yeah.

    Dave Zirin:  And did you know going in as an undergrad that this was something you wanted to explore? Or was it that you started to look at sports and society and then thought, hey, when I was in high school, I used to think about this stuff a lot?

    Jermaine Scott:  Yeah, more the latter. I went into undergrad just doing African-American history. That was my focus. And then I actually went to grad school. Actually my first year in grad school, I was looking at a completely different topic. I was actually looking at Black labor movements in New York during the interwar period. But for some reason, sports and politics was just always at the forefront of my mind.

    And I remember my cousin, actually, who’s from Trinidad, gave me Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James. And this is when I was in middle school. I didn’t know who C.L.R. James was. I didn’t know what Beyond a Boundary was. But I read it and it intrigued me. But again, in middle school, I didn’t really understand the significance of what I was reading. And then of course, in grad school, Beyond a Boundary is the seminal text when thinking about this relationship between sports and politics and culture and society.

    Dave Zirin:  I don’t know. Not a lot of middle schoolers are given gifts that are books by Black Trotskyists. It’s very…

    Jermaine Scott:  It’s fascinating. And I had no idea at the time. I’m like, okay, C.L.R James, whatever.

    Dave Zirin:  That’s a special gift at that age. Much credit and love.

    Jermaine Scott:  Yeah, shout out to my cousin Robbie.

    Dave Zirin:  Yeah, shout out indeed. Okay.

    So other than Pelé, who is completely obvious, who are the Black soccer players in your mind who truly change the game? Who should people be aware of?

    Jermaine Scott:  Wow. I definitely think people that have changed the game, we definitely have to think about, of course, Pelé. There’s also a Portuguese player by the name of Eusébio who really showed his true quality in the 1966 World Cup in England. That’s a player that’s of incredible import.

    But also players from the African continent. Players like Didier Drogba, who played for Chelsea, from the Ivory Coast, who changed the way we watch attacking players. Not only his strength, but his grace. He’s one of those players that finds a really special balance between power but also grace, graceful movements on the pitch. So Didier Drogba is one. Wow, there’s so many. There’s a number from Brazil: Ronaldo, Ronaldinho. And I’m saying all these players, and they all have controversial political backgrounds, but I guess that’s the nature of the work. So there’s a number of players. Wow.

    Some of the players that I look at in my own work from the Netherlands, we can think of players like Clarence Seedorf, Edgar Davids. These are players from the 1990s that added a new dimension to the Dutch style of game. At times, they were criticized for it. At times they were criticized for playing too hard, which is kind of nuts to think about it at the time. You criticizing me for playing too hard? So there’s all these different ways. But in the Netherlands, there are a number of different players that had instrumental impacts on the game and how they shaped this instrumental style of Dutch football, which is called Total Football. And so I try to argue in the book that these players added a specific wrinkle to the game, to the style of the game.

    Dave Zirin:  I’m just going to name a player and you tell me their importance. Or maybe you think, yeah, that’s not somebody I’m looking at. Does this player matter, and why do they matter? I just have two on my head, two that you just named a lot of the people that I wanted to ask you about. But let me ask you: Mario Balotelli.

    Jermaine Scott:  Yeah, I love Mario Balotelli.

    Dave Zirin:  He matters, though. I know you love him as a player, but he matters to your area of study? He’s part of that continuum?

    Jermaine Scott:  Well, yes. I don’t talk about him specifically within the chapters but he’s definitely a part of that tradition. When thinking about critiquing particularly the media and their portrayal of him. The classic visual I have of Mario Balotelli is when he’s playing for Manchester City, he scores the goal and he lifts up his shirt and it says, why always me? Why is he always the center of these attacks? When the team is doing bad, why is it always Mario Balotelli’s fault? And so Mario Balotelli has a fascinating career. He’s also one of a few, few Black players on the Italian national team. We rarely see Black players on the Italian national team. And that added to his contentious relationship with the nation.

    Dave Zirin:  Okay. Mbappé.

    Jermaine Scott:  The Wonderkid, the Wonderkid.

    Dave Zirin:  Does he matter to this continuum?

    Jermaine Scott:  He does. He does. A lot of people praise Mbappé, of course, for his quality on the pitch, his goal scoring ability. But he also has a political side. I believe it was the 2018 World Cup where feminist protesters invaded the pitch. And he’s like, cool. He’s like, let’s take pictures. And he’s expressed his independence as a player. And as Black athletes, when you articulate your independence as a player, the media is going to lash out at you. And so he has the courage to do that as a Black footballer in Europe. And of course, his quality allows him to do the things that he’s able to do. I think his quality also protects him in a lot of ways as well.

    Dave Zirin:  And last one: Marcus Rashford.

    Jermaine Scott:  Marcus Rashford, just brilliant player on the pitch. His community work in England is unmatched. Again, just a top-notch player. There’s certain players that I sometimes grapple with. I think we can do this with all athletes. Sometimes there’s a desire to want more radical politics. That’s not to say he doesn’t have a radical politics. I’m not necessarily sure how radical his politics are. But from the work that he’s done within the community, it shows that he obviously sees his importance outside of the pitch. And that’s critical for Black players.

    Dave Zirin:  Yeah, and his work on child hunger during COVID.

    Jermaine Scott:  Absolutely.

    Dave Zirin:  It’s one of the most impactful moments an athlete can have.

    Jermaine Scott:  Absolutely.

    Dave Zirin:  I don’t even think he realized the impact he was going to have. Forcing Boris Johnson to do a massive, massive change in terms of feeding kids during the desperate time. Incredible.

    Jermaine Scott:  Absolutely, yeah. And it’s just a testament to how footballers are able to use the game or use their platform to make these kinds of national changes.

    Dave Zirin:  Well, you’ve been so generous with your time, Professor Scott. Is there anything we’re missing about your area of study and work that you’d like to share with our audience?

    Jermaine Scott:  No, I think we covered it. I think the main argument that I’m really trying to drive home is that soccer allows players, allows Black footballers, allows Black soccer supporters, allows Black people to renegotiate their relationship to the nation.

    I’m writing in this tradition of a political theorist named Richard [inaudible] who critiques the nation state as an anti-Black formation. And so what does that mean for Black citizenship? What does that mean for Black nationality? And he tries to wrestle with that. He tries to say, well, what if it’s okay to question nationality? What if it’s okay to not have a nationality or to live in this in-between space? And I think soccer provides a good vehicle to do that.

    Dave Zirin:  Definitely. Definitely. The book is called Black Soccer: Football and Politics in the African Diaspora. I cannot wait to read it. I’m sure our audience feels the same way. Professor Scott, thank you so much for joining us here on Edge of Sports.

    Jermaine Scott:  Dave, thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • As the staggering number of civilian deaths in Gaza grows every day, and as fresh reports of Israel’s brazen attacks on mosques, hospitals, churches, refugee camps, and other civilian targets come across our social media timelines every few hours, there’s a mounting urgency among Israeli officials, pro-Israel groups in the US, and the US media and political establishment that’s backing these manifest war crimes to downplay the horrific mass killing of Palestinian noncombatants. With polls showing that a majority of voters, including 80% of Democrats, back a ceasefire—putting the vast majority of Democratic politicians at odds with their own constituents—excuses are needed to justify and handwave away the reports of carnage coming out of Gaza every day. 

    There are three popular tropes commonly employed by US media, politicians, and pundits tasked with supporting President Biden and his lockstep backing of the Gaza bombing to effectively, ex post-facto, militarize civilians being killed and maimed by Israel:  

    1. “Terror Tunnels” 

    Over this past week, The New York Times ran three different articles full of handwringing over what to do about the scary reality of Hamas’ underground tunnel network in Gaza. Such a network, to some extent, no doubt exists. Many Palestinians have argued it’s more of a network for smuggling harmless goods in and out of Gaza due to the Israeli blockade preventing imports and exports, rather than a sprawling, sophisticated underground lair teaming with Bond-like Hamas villains. The tunnels in Gaza almost certainly serve a combination of functions, for Hamas and non-Hamas-affiliated Palestinians alike, but the breathless coverage of the alleged “terror tunnels” serves one primary purpose: to justify massive civilian death. 

    Serious Reporters at the Times have focused intently on the Terror Tunnel issue, including lead liberal opinion-shaper David Leonhardt, who built a whole article around it for his very popular daily newsletter. He writes:

    The battle over the tunnels is a major reason that this war already has a high civilian death toll. More than two million people live above the tunnels — a layer of human life between many Hamas targets and Israeli missiles.

    Hamas has hidden many weapons under hospitals, schools and mosques so that Israel risks killing civilians, and facing an international backlash, when it fights. Hamas fighters also slip above and below ground, blending with civilians.

    Citing a 2014 Washington Post article—an article that largely relies on Israeli and pro-Israel sources—Leonhardt casually asserts that these tunnels are deliberately placed under hospitals, schools, and mosques so that they can be used as protection from bunker busters aiming for the tunnels. Surely, such a major claim would require more neutral sourcing, or evidence, or some type of demonstrable methodology for coming to this conclusion (rather than, say, concluding that tunnels in urban areas naturally undergird all types of civilian infrastructure, by definition). But Leonhardt is unconcerned with these deeper questions. He has lazy conventional wisdom to spout and articles to write that Boomer Liberals can brandish at friends on Facebook expressing concern about mounting child body counts in Gaza.

     The tunnels in Gaza almost certainly serve a combination of functions, for Hamas and non-Hamas-affiliated Palestinians alike, but the breathless coverage of the alleged “terror tunnels” serves one primary purpose: to justify massive civilian death.

    There are also two massive holes in the ghoulish logic of “we have to kill civilians because the Terror Tunnels leave no other option,” neither of which Leonhardt, nor the Times reporters who provided the collateral for his newsletter, seems concerned with addressing.

    1. If Israel Has No Choice™ but to kill thousands of innocent civilians because these civilians are placed between Israel’s otherwise “targeted” bombs and the Terror Tunnels in which the Hamas baddies dwell, then why doesn’t Israel publish a map of the tunnels and advise civilians to avoid these areas? Israel has provided such information about so-called “safe zones” in the past; it has also bombed those “safe zones.” In theory, the Israeli government could provide a clear map of the Terror Tunnels—they supposedly know where the tunnels are. Yet, it doesn’t do this. Why? Is Leonhardt even curious about why Israel doesn’t do this? Apparently not.
    2. An enemy “blending with civilians” was the exact same logic the US used to justify killing over 3 million Vietnamese civilians—or 10% of the country’s population—in its decade-long war against the Vietnamese insurgency. “That’s the same crap we did in Vietnam,” Marc Steiner pointed out this week on The Real News, recalling the ways the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians was similarly justified by the repeatedly stated suspicion that enemy combatants were hiding among them. “[We said], ‘Let’s destroy that village, because the [National Liberation Front] is there, the Viet Cong are there.’” Clearly, insofar as this tactic is or was employed by fighters in Palestine and Vietnam, the tactic itself wasn’t devised out of some discrete moral failing on the part of Palestinians in Gaza, or the Vietnamese, but is a specific feature of an occupied people engaging in asymmetrical war with a military power with total aerial dominance. Doesn’t this invite bigger questions about the nature of the Israeli occupation, the blockade of Gaza, and the cycle of violence they perpetuate? There are no Hamas or Terror Tunnels in the West Bank, for example, but Israeli military and settlers are also killing hundreds there as well. If collateral damage killing of civilians has to do with Terror Tunnels, then why have 144 Palestinians been killed in the West Bank in the past four weeks as well? 

    Ultimately, scare stories about Hamas Terror Tunnels have no practical journalistic effect other than militarizing the whole of Gazan society. After all, if the Terror Tunnels are everywhere, and the Terror Tunnels are legitimate military targets, then any civilian standing in any Gazan population center is little more than a Hamas “human shield.” Which leads us to our second trope:

    2. “Human Shields”

    A variation on the Terror Tunnel panic is the idea that Israel reluctantly kills civilians because Hamas uses them as “human shields.” This was casually asserted by Sen. Elizabeth Warren Tuesday while she lamented the deaths of hundreds killed by an Israeli airstrike targeting Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza.

    This is a trope that has been debunked by human rights groups for years, namely by Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa director Sarah Leah Whitson in 2021. 

    An enemy “blending with civilians” was the exact same logic the US used to justify killing over 3 million Vietnamese civilians—or 10% of the country’s population—in its decade-long war against the Vietnamese insurgency.

    The short version is: Even if one accepts the premise that Hamas is using human shields, from an ethical and legal standpoint, Israel is compelled by international law to not kill hundreds of civilians at a time in order to target, allegedly, one “Hamas commander.” That is a war crime. But the premise itself needs to be questioned, too. As Whitson notes, a Human Rights Watch report of Operation Cast Lead in 2009 found that, “In the killings documented in this report, Human Rights Watch found no evidence that the civilian victims were used by Palestinian fighters as human shields or were shot in the crossfire between opposing forces.”

    The claim that Hamas is “using human shields” is a specific charge that requires a specific standard of evidence to prove, none of which has been publicly provided by Israel thus far to any media outlets or third-party human rights groups of any kind. Israel’s definition of “human shields” is simply “a combatant may or may not be in the same general area as hundreds of civilians.” Israel rarely bothers naming these combatants, much less providing evidence that they were in the area in question after said area has been reduced to rubble and corpses. The “human shields” talking point can’t simply be tossed around as a post hoc justification after a crater in the ground leaves hundreds of Palestinian civilians dead. But, thus far, Israel has mostly gotten away with doing just this. 

    3. “Hamas Strongholds” 

    A breaking news alert Tuesday by The New York Times about an Israeli strike on the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, which killed hundreds of civilians, revived an old racist trope used to militarize civilian populations by referring to them as living in, or being part of, a militant group’s “stronghold”:

    In 2015, the Times’ Beirut bureau chief Anne Barnard infamously reported on an ISIS suicide bombing that killed 43 and maimed over 200 civilians in a market in Beirut in an article with the headline, “Deadly Blasts Hit Hezbollah Stronghold in Southern Beirut.” A Reuters headline published around the same time read, “Two Suicide Bombers hit Hezbollah Bastion in Lebanon.”

    Even if one accepts the premise that Hamas is using human shields, from an ethical and legal standpoint, Israel is compelled by international law to not kill hundreds of civilians at a time in order to target, allegedly, one “Hamas commander.” That is a war crime.

    This framing was widely criticized on social media, and the Times eventually changed its headline (Barnard even published a half-hearted mea culpa following the controversy). The Times, of course, would never frame an ISIS attack in downtown Paris with a headline like “Deadly Blasts Hit NATO Stronghold in Paris,” but the paper of record has no problem doing this for Arabs in Lebanon for no apparent reason other than orientalist dehumanization. Referring to Paris, London, or New York, after an ISIS attack on civilians, as a “NATO stronghold” would be seen as bizarre, callous, and effectively doing free propaganda for ISIS. 

    While the context is obviously different, a similar dehumanizing effect is achieved when sites of mass civilian death are callously referred to as “Hamas strongholds.” Justifying airstrikes that kill hundreds of civilians by claiming that the struck site was an enemy “stronghold,” even though Israel cannot be bothered to produce evidence of any military personnel or activity at the site, serves no other purpose than to posthumously conscript the dead men, women, and children buried under rubble as Hamas militants who deserved to die.

    Another Times report from Oct. 14 noted that Gaza City is itself “Hamas’s stronghold and the enclave’s largest urban center.” USA Today, reporting on the Jabaliya refugee camp airstrike, wrote, “Israeli airstrikes hit apartment buildings in the Jabaliya refugee camp, a Hamas stronghold near Gaza City.” On Oct. 10, AP told us that “Israel pounds Hamas stronghold in Gaza’s Rimal.” On Oct. 31, Axios referred to Gaza City as a “Hamas stronghold.”

    What purpose does this orientalist framework serve other than implying, not so subtly, that the civilians who were killed more or less had it coming because many of them support, in some abstract way, the goals of Hamas? If spatial proximity to Hamas fighters means one’s collateral murder is already justified, then Israel already had its built-in justification for eliminating or displacing anyone and everyone living in the 22-by-5-mile open-air prison that was Gaza.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • The Sure Foundation Baptist Church of Vancouver—already acknowledged as a “hate church”—became internationally known when one of their congregants, Tyler Dinsmoore, was arrested for anti-LGBTQ hate crimes. Video essayist Jordan L., also known as YouTube commentator Dead Domain, was shocked to discover that an Independent Baptist sister church in her backyard of Spokane, Washington, was preaching the same. She transformed herself to infiltrate the hate church to investigate the extent of their antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ views and to try and understand the hearts and minds of the congregants. Please join us for this extraordinary conversation with Jordan as she reveals what she uncovered during her weeks attending services and potluck dinners. Content warning: violent, racist, homophobic, and transphobic language.

    Production: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham
    Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
    Post-Production: Alina Nehlich


    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Taya Graham:

    Welcome to The Real News Network Podcast, where we delve deep into powerful stories that challenge the status quo and shed light on untold narratives. I’m your host Taya Graham with my co-host, Stephen Janis, and today, we bring you an incredible story of a person who decided to take hate head on and risk their own wellbeing just to do so. It’s a story of both resilience and bravery, a tale of a person willing to do whatever it takes to expose the inner workings of one of the most fearsome culture warriors in America.

    Stephen Janis:

    The story we are going to tell starts in the heart of Spokane, Washington. That’s where a church no less was spouting a theology that is both disturbing and alarming. There a pastor named Jason Graber was calling for the execution and hanging of parents of transgender children. A video of the sermon went viral, and though some religious leaders united in condemnation, others saw his sermon as an inspiration.

    Our guest took on the daunting task of going undercover as a man to infiltrate the Sure Foundation Baptist Church known for its anti-LGBTQ beliefs and practices. She sought to understand the inner workings of this hate group and reveal the truth behind its dangerous rhetoric.

    Taya Graham:

    Today, you’re going to meet Jordan, the trans woman who risked her safety and went undercover as a man to infiltrate the very same hate church responsible for the chilling threats. Today, she joins us to share her courageous journey and the powerful insights she uncovered. As we navigate this heart-wrenching story, we will uncover a deep well of organized hatred towards LGBT people and witness how the Christian New Testament doctrine of love and acceptance has somehow been twisted into calls for social isolation and even death.

    We’ll delve into the dark corners of hate and discrimination, exploring the consequences of words that incite violence and the challenges of safeguarding our constitutional right to freedom of speech. We warn you ahead of time that some of this discussion will contain hate speech, racial and homophobic slurs, and disturbing violent content. So please be forewarned. We are keeping the language unedited and unaltered so you can judge for yourself the goals of the Sure Foundation Baptist Church, and its potential impact on the young minds they reach.

    Stephen Janis:

    Let’s remember, this is a story of determination and courage. Throughout this episode, we’ll listen to Jordan’s harrowing experiences, her unyielding commitment to justice, and the impact this mission has had on her life and those around her.

    Taya Graham:

    Stay tuned for this powerful episode of The Real News Network Podcast. We’re here to elevate voices, ignite change, and build a world where everyone can live without fear. So stay with us for the sobering and eye-opening conversation coming up next.

    Jordan, thank you so much for joining us today.

    Jordan L:

    Thank you, Taya. Thank you both for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

    Taya Graham:

    So now we’re going to play a clip of Pastor Graber that went viral. Let’s listen to the pastor in his own words for a moment so we can start to understand the environment Jordan was embedding herself in and, again, a warning for content.

    Pastor Graber:

    … have a transgender surgery done on them. Any parent that would do that, they just need to be shot in the back of the head, and then we can string them up above a bridge.

    Taya Graham:

    So Jordan, first, just to set the scene, please tell us a little about Pastor Graber’s church.

    Jordan L:

    Well, Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Spokane Washington is an offshoot of the Vancouver branch, also called Sure Foundation Baptist Church, which is run by a pastor named Aaron Thompson. For those who know about the new IFB movement or the New Independent Fundamental Baptist movement, you’ll probably know that Aaron Thompson has also gone viral, has also made headlines, and that Sure Foundation as a whole comes from Steven Anderson’s church in the new IFB. Steven Anderson, of course, is no stranger to controversy. He’s been blacklisted and banned from entering dozens of countries around the world for his hate speech.

    The thing about Jason Graber going viral is that this church really does relish the headlines as I show in my video, but it was one of the first times that it’s happened from the Spokane church. Like I mentioned, Aaron Thompson has previously gone viral, Steven Anderson and his protege, Jonathan Shelley, who runs the new IFB church down in Texas, they’ve all had their time in the spotlight, but this was the first time that it had happened in Spokane.

    Stephen Janis:

    So Jordan, at what point did you feel like you had to do something? What motivated you to take this risk in this dangerous undercover mission to infiltrate the church?

    Jordan L:

    Well, I’ve been, for several years now, I’ve been running my YouTube channel and have primarily focused both on video games and media analysis and deeper critique. In the last year or so, as things for trans people and non-binary people like myself have gotten harder in the world as there has been just a slew of transphobic legislation across the country, I started feeling a need to use what very small platform I had at the time to speak out and create videos on subject matter like the death of Eden Knight, a trans woman who was killed in the last year, and other societal issues that similarly affect people like me.

    So it just came to me when I saw that … I read the headline because I like to keep up on things happening in the world of hate speech and hate groups as they grow. It surprised me that the church was actually in Spokane. It was unexpected. I didn’t see the local headlines until I started researching it later, but the way that the story had come to me was through Twitter. I read through the story, read through what Jason Graber said, and then I came across the fact that it was happening quite literally in my town, less than four miles from where I live.

    Taya Graham:

    So how did you prepare yourself mentally and emotionally or even physically for going undercover? Let’s play this clip from a sermon of evangelist Danil Kutsar and then have Jordan tell us how she prepared herself to face this.

    Danil Kutsar:

    Every single time as sodomite dies of AIDS, let’s just rejoice and be like, “Yes, another one died.” Let’s pray for more Muslims to go and shoot up these gay nightclubs, and whenever 50 of them die be like, “Yes, less pedophiles on this earth.” Let’s rejoice. Let’s be glad. You know why? Because that’s our reward.

    Taya Graham:

    Jordan, how did you prepare to face this?

    Jordan L:

    Well, I had the idea to go to this church, and it originally stemmed from a curiosity of how similar the rhetoric of these hate churches were to a lot of the rhetoric we see espoused by mainstream political commentators, especially the kind of people who are driving a lot of anti-trans gender sentiment like people from the Daily Wire like Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, that whole lot.

    So it started as just more of a curiosity to see if these people also watched Fox News, if these people also subscribed to the Daily Wire or if they were so far past that on the side of the right that they were something else entirely, but of course, I knew that they had this violent rhetoric and these very violent beliefs about what should happen to people like me. So it became a matter of deciding how to cover my tracks, how would I present myself, how would I arrive, how would I leave.

    I had a partner who picked me up and dropped me off every time we went to one of the services. I went alone, but they would drop me off and I would be dropped off a block away from the church and around the corner so that I was sure nobody saw me arriving, nobody saw me leaving. Then of course, there was the issue of disguising myself physically. I’ve been on low level estrogen for about two years now, and it has had a lot of effects on my body, but not nearly as much as some other trans and non-binary people who will go on additional hormone blockers, spironolactone, other HRT like that.

    So dressed in the right clothes and presented the right way, I can still pass pretty well. So it became a matter of putting my hair in a messy bun, making sure I didn’t have any nail polish or anything like that, maybe growing out a little bit of stubble, and just generally presenting myself as unthreatening and regular as possible.

    Taya Graham:

    So what was it like when you first walked into that church? How did you feel and how were you greeted?

    Jordan L:

    It’s weird because I grew up in church. I grew up in a Lutheran church and went to church almost every Sunday for most of my childhood on through my teenage years. While I’ve distanced myself from religion like that, I don’t have necessarily any bad memories of the church or the congregants, and I don’t have anything against evangelical Christianity in and of itself. The reason I bring that up is that I was familiar with so many of the workings of this church before I even stepped foot in there, and that was the bizarre part of it is walking in there, having people greet me in the most friendly manner, welcomed me in the door, asked my name at least three. Before this first service even started, at least three or four people walked right up to me, asked my name, shook my hand, said, “Welcome in. We’re going to have this after church. You should stick around.” It was really like any other church, any other gathering of people of faith who want to welcome a newcomer into their fold.

    Stephen Janis:

    Jordan, what did you have to do to establish trust? I’m sure they had suspicions about you, but now it seems like they didn’t. So how did you protect yourself from discovery and establish your bonafides as an extremist conservative?

    Jordan L:

    Well, I didn’t want to come across as too eager or too extreme because the church does have a history of other extremists. Like I mentioned in my video, there was a man in Vancouver named Tyler Dinsmore, who, as all records would indicate, had made plans to physically attack and possibly open fire on a pride parade in that area, and for several weeks leading up to that, he had fervently sought out the church’s doctrine to the extent he would drive overnight to go to the Vancouver church and sleep in his car so that he could attend service there.

    So I knew that they would probably be wary of people who would bring too much attention or too much disrepute right out of the gate. So I didn’t want to appear over eager. So it was really a fine line to walk, I feel, where I just tried to engage them in conversation, engage them both before and after. If they asked, like you mentioned, that sermon that Danil Kutsar preached was the first time I had been there, and right afterwards, he came up and shook my hand and asked if it was too hardcore. Of course, this church prides themselves on how hard their preaching is, how violent and heated it can get. So he wasn’t really asking if I was comfortable so much as I feel making sure that I was on board with that.

    So it was also a matter of, I feel, coming up with a character to play, which is how I viewed it is I came up with, as I detail on the video, I came up with a brief background on me, my family history, my history with faith and religion, and people in my family I disagree with because they had left disbelief, and things that were essentially cobbled together from what I had heard of years of different family members who had been kicked out of their families or shunned or what have you, separated from their families for believing differently or not wanting to put aside bigotry, which was very interesting because I think those were the things that garnered me that trust because when I got to talking about family, when I got to talking openly with some of the other preachers, whether it was an after church potluck or before church, I would often hear very similar stories that their own families wouldn’t talk to them anymore because of the church, because of what they engaged in.

    Taya Graham:

    Let’s take another listen to Pastor Graber where he draws specific parallels between biblical stories of child sacrifice and families deciding to move forward with gender-affirming care.

    Pastor Graber:

    The very first thing that comes up, it says, “Tophet is a location in the valley, the sons of Hinnom, near Jerusalem where there would go and perform sacrifices to Moloch, and specifically child sacrifices, where they would pass children through the fires of Moloch, like the Bible talks about and condemns every single time. I find it very interesting that if you just type that word into Google, that’s the very first thing that pops up and you say, “Well, what does that have to do with today?” Well, what do we have going on today? They were sacrificing children to Moloch back then, but what’s the big thing that’s going on today? Well, we have abortion, but also we have parents that want to take their children and basically offer them to Satan.

    Taya Graham:

    So this type of rhetoric seems dangerously divisive, uniquely dangerous, using the infallibility of the Bible as a word of God to construct such targeted rhetoric. Can you talk about what effect the fusion of biblical stories with political hatred and conspiracy can have?

    Jordan L:

    Yeah, absolutely. This church is unique, perhaps not among Baptist churches, but among evangelical Christians in that they don’t accept any other doctrine but the King James Bible. They do not use international versions. They do not use the New King James version. They only accept the King James Bible as the most true representation of the word of God. Now, of course, there’s a lot of debate that I’m sure biblical scholars can have to the efficacy of that considering it is in and of itself a translation, but they take everything literally as it said.

    However, the problem with taking biblical texts literally is that sometimes the translations are metaphors or when it was taken over through multiple languages from English to Hebrew, the words changed meanings. Now, I bring that up because they use a lot of those meanings to suss out meanings for other chapters, and I bring this up in my video. They will bring up a verse where God will define a reprobate, for example, and then later on a verse where God might say dogs are likened to reprobates or something. Off the top of my head, I can’t quote the exact thing.

    It doesn’t matter if those verses are in books that were written originally hundreds of years apart. To them, they see it as all a cohesive whole. So they can go to one point and then pick another point and then bring those together to say gay people are like dogs, for example. This all ties into their more conspiracist leanings. The reason I feel that this twisting of scripture is important to keep in mind is because they can really use it to justify anything, and that goes towards a lot of justifying hatred against things in the modern day, especially as it comes to Jews and women and other ethnic groups.

    They can take something, and because another word is referenced somewhere else in the Bible that might vaguely recall things like false teachers or reprobates, they can say, “Okay. This is talking about how the Jews are controlling the world,” or, “This is talking about how false teachers are actually politicians,” or any number of things.

    So really, it’s hard to say … I don’t want to say that necessarily the Bible informs their bigoted worldview because I don’t think it does. As the comment section in my own video has attested, there are plenty of people who practice plenty of different denominations of Christian faith who will absolutely rebuke these people and have pointed to an endless series of Bible verses for justification for rebuking them, but that doesn’t really matter.

    Again, bringing it back around, it doesn’t matter because to them, they believe their interpretation of the word of God is absolute. It doesn’t matter how necessarily questionable it is. So I think it’s less a issue of their bigotry coming from their faith and more of an issue of them using their faith to justify their bigotry.

    Stephen Janis:

    This is really fascinating what you’re talking about. I get the feeling. It seems that they were more comfortable with the Old Testament and skipping over the New Testament. It’s just fascinating to hear you talk about how they weaponized theology, but would they just skip over the New Testament and some of the … Is that what people were pointing out in terms of criticizing their adopted theology?

    Jordan L:

    Oh, absolutely. They do not, and this is something I’ve noted consistently, they reference, primarily of the services I’ve seen, which include the ones I’ve been to and then maybe a couple dozen more at this point, they love to reference Paul’s letters, the epistles, everything that came after Jesus’ death in the New Testament. They love to reference the Levitical laws, many of the harsher stories of the Old Testament, but when it comes to actually preaching what I would think a lot of people envision as the ideal of Christianity, which is to preach the love and acceptance that Christ himself taught, it’s fairly rare to hear them utter anything about that. It’s fairly rare to hear them and, again, this is across probably two dozen different sermons that I’ve read, not necessarily cherry-picked, any of the preachers talk about God as being accepting, as being loving.

    Again, as many verses post in my comments have pointed out, even in the King James version, how much Jesus refers to everybody around him as brothers and sisters, as siblings and humanity, they pretty much seem to ignore that in favor of the more fire and brimstone rhetoric. It’s really interesting because like I mentioned, they will take verses from the Old Testament and during a sermon will justify them using something that is hundreds of years later in history and was written hundreds of years later and then just squash the two together. It’s this really strange way to view their own theology where it takes possibly thousands of years of world history and flattens it into something that they think is somehow completely relevant in every way today.

    Stephen Janis:

    That’s fascinating.

    Taya Graham:

    It really is. You had a conversation with the male leadership that stood out to me. They asked you if you’re going to try to get your mom and other family members saved, and you responded that they went to an ecumenical and accepting church and your undercover character had a 13-year-old cousin that wanted to use them pronouns. Let’s play a little clip of the audio. It’s a little hard to hear, but Jordan can break it down for us afterwards.

    Speaker 6:

    That sucks because once the person becomes a reprobate, they’re capable of everything because their conscience is removed and that’s how you got people calmer, and because their conscience is seared with a hot iron, they’re capable to kill you, whatever, and they’re super dangerous.

    Taya Graham:

    How did you feel in that moment being faced with someone comparing trans and non-binary people to cannibal serial killers?

    Jordan L:

    Well, at that point, I had already heard so many things from the pulpit and it had become … I mentioned this as well, that they had me sit in the front row because that’s where all the single men are supposed to sit. So I was front and center for two sermons leading up to that conversation or I think it might have actually been three. So I had heard no shortage of bizarre rhetoric, and it had really tempered my ability to keep a poker face. Many people have wondered in the comments of the video how was I able to stay calm, let alone either not laugh at things I found ridiculous or get angry at things, and I think it was just a matter of focus. I went in. Every time I went into the church, I just took it as whatever they said I would just accept and I would be able to process later.

    That’s really the thing that … That was one of the stranger things I had heard said there, and I was very much left just nodding along and giving a sense of understanding, which they didn’t seem to notice anything off with. However, that I did, as soon as I got into my car, my partner had picked me up right after that service, that was the first thing I pulled out the recording and showed them because it felt … It was surreal to be there and to see somebody telling you, somebody who they thought were a unredeemable reprobate who deserved to be shot in the head, who deserved all these other graphic things they had depicted to me, telling me that I was capable of murder, that I was capable of just wanting violence, and for no cause or reason that I would devolve into being a cannibal or something.

    It was a very clear look into how reactionary their opinions of people who are different are because they don’t make any effort to understand, and you’ll notice this if you ever watch their sermons. They don’t draw any lines between somebody who’s gay or somebody who’s a drag queen or somebody who’s transgender. To them, it all gets lumped in as reprobate. To them, it is all equally sinful, equally worthy of derision.

    Stephen Janis:

    Jordan, I’m very sorry you had to go through that. Do you feel like, with the time you spent there, that you understand? What they say is so inexplicable and, obviously, it’s hard for anyone to understand, but do you feel like having spent time with them you understand what makes them so irrational and so clinging to these ideations of people they don’t even know? Did you feel like you understood them at all if it was worth understanding them, but do you feel like you had any insight into what drives these people?

    Jordan L:

    Speculating about people’s, their either mental faculties or emotional states was something I really wanted to try and stay away from for the video. I really wanted to let their words speak for themselves, let their actions speak for themselves. It’s something that a lot of people have either jokingly or seriously hypothesized in the comment section of whether these people, their mental acuity and their emotional state, whether they suffer with depression or what have you. It’s something I still don’t quite like to engage with it like that. I do want to know where they’re coming from, what led them to be so fervent in these hateful beliefs.

    I think there’s a quickness to judge bigots and people who perpetuate this kind of stuff as being not as smart, as being not as capable as everybody else. I think a lot of that is based in old stereotypes about rednecks or people from rural communities. I don’t necessarily think those are true. I think, however, that these people are deeply incurious. I think they do not seek out knowledge about the world around them. They do not seek out knowledge about other people. They often don’t get their facts right before spewing about recent legislation on trans people that have been passed, about recent news happenings and developments.

    So I think that is where a lot of their ignorance comes from is just not caring about the world around them and really using that ignorance to focus on groups that they can make themselves feel superior about. I think that’s almost part of it is there is this … I watched their annual Red Hot Preaching Conference this last weekend because they mentioned me. One of the pastors mentioned me in one of his sermons so I ended up going through all the sermons.

    One commonality between all of the mainstream pastors there was that they really just felt like bullies. The tactics they took were just mean when talking about people they didn’t like, for lack of a better word, but also, they all seem to really love the spotlight. They all seem to bask in the audience laughing at their jokes no matter how violent or bigoted they were. If I had to speculate on what drives a lot of the pastors to be this way, I think it is a sense of superiority. I think it is a sense of value that they feel, and I think you can see that in the way a lot of them talk about …

    I have this little mantra that I tell people that I don’t trust anybody who my dog doesn’t trust, and I say that’s true because my dog is very friendly, very loving, and trusts almost everybody. So if my dog doesn’t like you immediately, I feel that there’s something off, but I use that to speak to a larger thing of I don’t trust anybody who actively goes out of their way to dislike animals or who animals actively avoid.

    I think there is something wrong with people like that. I think you can tell there have been so many rhetoric, pieces of rhetoric and sermons I’ve been pointed to by other people in my comments talking about abusing animals openly and talking about how animals are beneath them, whether that’s they’re talking about little animals and dogs or they’re talking about likening gay people to animals.

    Likewise in the services I saw, there were a lot of verses talking about how to reprimand children and how to beat them. Pastor Shelley, again, the Texas pastor, went viral and I believe ended up getting kicked out of his church at that point because he had a whole sermon about how in the Old Testament lazy children, and talking about minors in the sermon, should be stoned to death.

    So this idea of exerting might and, of course, people out there who know Umberto Eco and the tenets of fascism will recognize a lot of the stylings that they use because there is a lot of emphasis on whoever is the strongest in this church, but to speak to what would bring the other members of the congregation there, and I feel like that was the really the saddest realization for me because this church, I don’t know if the recordings quite put it across, but every time I went, there were at least five or six toddlers in attendance, small children hearing this violent rhetoric. It’s not like parents were covering up their ears. They wanted them to hear this.

    I can only imagine that’s because like any other church, the people had come here looking for fellowship. They had come looking for a place to gather, a place where they can pursue their faith, they can pass it on to their children, which, again, something I don’t have any problem with in almost any other church, but whether they got suckered in or whether they too felt that sense of superiority, they came to believe all of this bigotry was true and so they are continuing to pass it on to their children, which is incredibly hurtful.

    Taya Graham:

    I’m glad you mentioned the other congregants because it seems that the men were the worship leaders, the speakers, but there were women there who were complicit, if not active in the hate and then, of course, there were children who are there hearing this hatefulness and learning it. So there were actually some innocent parties present. What did you think about the rest of the congregation? Can you describe the people who attended, either in demographics or in personality, anything about the other congregants?

    Jordan L:

    Yes. It was entirely White. I would say probably lower middle class if I had to guess just talking to the other families and hearing about their jobs and some of their struggles, but other than that, the appearance, and this is another thing that is striking about this rhetoric, none of them appeared, like I had mentioned a little while ago when you have … People have these images in their heads of what bigots look like and that they might be rednecks and flannels and gap teeth, and that’s not true. Everyone here looked like somebody you would just pass by at the supermarket or at Starbucks without thinking a second thought, without even noticing it. They didn’t wear Trump hats. They didn’t have MAGA belt buckles. They were just regular looking people.

    As for the role of women, they did … In one of the sermons, Brother Paul preached extensively about the role of women and how women are, and this is mostly in his words, women are just worse versions of men, how many of society’s problems that we face in modern day are due to women getting the right to vote, things like that. Women, there were at least four or five women in the audience that day and they just listened intently. I can only imagine they agreed with that. Also, I didn’t mention it as much in my video, but there was also this just air of subservience where when I would join the potlucks or the lunches after church, the women would be the ones generally preparing the food. They would be the ones in the kitchen, maybe talking amongst themselves, taking care of children, and then they would also, for many, many of the men, they came around, they picked up their plates, they picked up their garbage. The men didn’t ask them to or anything. It was just something that I think I feel was expected because it happened almost in unison.

    Then while that was happening, the men would be just sitting around and talking and they would pick up their food and go eat, and then it would get taken away when they were done with it. So it was this very subtle thing that I just noticed, and I don’t want to necessarily say that they were slaves or anything, but it felt like a definite attachment to the mindset that was occurring.

    Taya Graham:

    Were there any moments when you felt unsafe or fearful for your wellbeing while undercover? Let’s play this clip of Pastor Graber comparing the biblical story of Sodom to a Hollywood-led agenda of protecting and promoting homosexual men that puts children at risk.

    Pastor Graber:

    These sodomites, they raped her until she died. Now, this is the reality of what these people are like. Hollywood has been brainwashing people for decades to make it seem like they’re just normal, like there’s nothing wrong with them, they’re just like everybody else, they just have this one thing where they just instead of liking women, they just like men, but that’s a lie though. That picture that Hollywood has been trying to present to the general public for decades is a lie. It is simply not true.

    A lot of times, these sodomites, they can put on a real friendly face, and we’ll get in later, and they like to creep in to … They’ll even like to creep in to churches, but just because somebody is able to put on a nice face and to put on a show and he’s able to trick people into believing a lie about what they really are, that doesn’t take away from the fact that the Bible makes it clear what these people are like.

    Taya Graham:

    Jordan, did you fear being exposed? Were you scared of what the possible consequences would be? Did you feel at risk at any time?

    Jordan L:

    Well, it’s a complicated question because I feel after that first week, I didn’t feel I’d earned any of their trust. I had been very amenable and cheerful and open to the rhetoric or at least appeared to be to them, shaken hands. I’d even been saved by, quote, unquote, “saved” by one of their preachers who went through a whole speech with me on having me accept Christ.

    So I had gotten somewhat into their good graces, and by the second week, they knew my name and et cetera, but it was because every week they do two services. They do a different service in the morning on Sunday and then an evening service. Just to keep tabs on them, I was watching the evening services as they streamed them. It was something Robert Larson said about wolves coming into the church in sheep’s clothing and they might even talk like us and act like us. That did somewhat wrangle me. It had some of my hairs on alert, but I continued doing it for another week or so.

    So there were warning signs, and Pastor Jason the following week for the second service I wasn’t present for said something very similar about infiltrators, I thought it was maybe too much of a coincidence given my recent attendance and the fact that it had happened twice during the services that I did not come for. So I myself decided to … At that point, I had found so much, I had learned so much from talking to them. I didn’t think the experiment really needed to go on anymore, but was I ever really … I don’t feel I was ever being surrounded. I don’t feel like they were ever going to take me in the back and stab me or anything, but it was a high pressure situation because as they note on their website, they believe that, in their term, sodomites, which is their broad term for anybody who’s gay or queer, they believe sodomites should be put to death by the government. They believe that people like me deserve to die. They also mentioned that anybody who’s gay will not be allowed to attend church.

    So there was, of course, that worry about what would happen, what would a interaction look like if there was a confrontation like that, but I never really saw it coming down the pipeline in person. So in a vague sense, yes, I was worried for my safety, and I did take efforts like parking a block away, having my partner come pick me up. I took efforts to keep my identity safe, keep my physical body safe, but in the moment, it felt just like I was one of them.

    Stephen Janis:

    So this church goes beyond just the congregation. It affiliates itself with the new Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement, which has made several public statements condemning what it believes to be sodomy and the LGBTQ lifestyles. So how big is this movement beyond the congregation that you investigated?

    Jordan L:

    Well, that’s part of the scary thing is that as I’ve done my video, as people have commented on it, so many people were shocked to find that it was happening in Spokane. So many people were shocked to find that it was happening in Vancouver. The new IFB churches for years have been scattered across places like Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, in places I think a lot of people see as more red states where it might not be as surprising, but they are growing and expanding everywhere.

    Like I mentioned, they recently had their annual Red Hot Preaching Conference where all the big preachers like Jonathan Shelley and Aaron Thompson and Steven Anderson come and preach for three days. From the services I watched, they claimed more than 400 people were in attendance. From the services I watched when the camera would pull out, I don’t know if it was quite 400, but there were at least 200 plus people there, including a lot of visible small children, toddlers, and the like.

    So part of the scary thing about this movement is that it is growing. Even if slowly, it is growing and proliferating because I think a lot of people assume that when any of their pastor’s screeds go viral, I think they assume that this is just a small backwater church somewhere nestled in a Georgia swamp and there’s five congregants, and that’s not the case at all. Like I said, the people who go to this church are people you would never look at twice out in public every day.

    Taya Graham:

    That’s such an excellent point, and it’s really important that it’s highlighted. Something you pointed out, which I thought deserved to be highlighted was the overlap between the talking points of popular media pundits like Tucker Carlson, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and the pastors of this church. Let me play this clip and then have your response.

    Danil Kutsar:

    So the devil now has control over the public schools and the devil’s ready to teach our kids the sodomite agenda, to teach how boys can be girls and girls can be boys, and then the schools are not teaching kids that, “Hey, if you think you’re a cat, here’s some litter, you can go pee in this cat litter.”

    Taya Graham:

    So Jordan, can you talk a little bit about the similarities you saw between popular pundits and the Sure Foundation Baptist church’s talking points?

    Jordan L:

    Absolutely, and the cat litter thing is a great touchstone for that because the proliferation of this urban myth, which is really what it is, started in right-wing circles, and even though it was very quickly debunked, it has just continued to grow and spread where it is accepted as a fact, as a thing that happens even though it doesn’t, and that it’s used most often as ammunition against rights for young trans kids, rights for them to be able to go into their own bathroom.

    It’s almost similar to the slippery slope fallacy of gay marriage, where you still hear even in this church, first they just wanted to get married, and then they wanted to adopt kids, and then they will logically attempt to link that up to kids identifying as different genders. They’re very similar in a lot of ways to mainstream conservatives. I think one of the big differences is that they, unlike a lot of mainstream conservatives, they aren’t willing to prioritize publicity or prioritize infamy over what they see as their biblical principles.

    During the Red Hot Preaching Conference, for example, there were several pastors who openly condemned Andrew Tate and called him a womanizer, and, in their words, a whore monger. They have talked … One of the pastors, Jonathan Shelley, has openly referred to, he refers to as Ben Shapiro the Jew to make it clear to his audience that people like Ben Shapiro shouldn’t be trusted because he’s Jewish.

    So there are certain lines that they still will not cross due to their bigotry, which is fascinating to me because Ben Shapiro runs the Daily Wire. Daily Wire has put out so many of their transphobic talking points, and I’ve heard multiple preachers use the phrase, “What is a woman?”, which, of course, was made popular by Matt Walsh in his poorly researched documentary last year. So they still do ascribe to a lot of conservative media. They still really toe that line, but then they are so much more radical in other ways that they won’t compromise because it might make them more popular. I think that’s part of what makes them so dangerous because it allows them, in their eyes, a moral superiority over people like Andrew Tate, over people like Ben Shapiro.

    Stephen Janis:

    It really seems, I’m not saying this ironically and this is not a question, but it sounds to me like they haven’t read Margaret Atwood or it just sounds like Gilead to me in so many ways that these guys would-

    Taya Graham:

    No, I don’t think they’re cracking open Oryx and Crake or-

    Stephen Janis:

    Yeah, right, exactly. Wow.

    Jordan L:

    No, and that’s something that I think they’re proud of. I didn’t get the impression from them that they completely forsake worldly entertainment or they completely don’t read any books or anything, but they are proud to focus really only on the Bible and proud to focus all of their energy. They’re often at the expense of other pleasures. They’re also teetotalers. They’re completely against alcohol of any kind, for example.

    Taya Graham:

    Thank you for that. Oh, you know what? We’ll get a Ursula K. Le Guin selection and ship it there. That might be perfect.

    Stephen Janis:

    It creates real quandary. What measures do you believe should be taken to address hate speech and hate groups without infringing on the First Amendment? Some people say we must be tolerant of intolerance and others are free speech absolutist. What measures would you suggest to address this type of hate speech?

    Jordan L:

    Well, it’s a really weird time we live in as far as hate speech and everything else are concerned because you have to look at what constitutes hate speech and who’s saying it and the reach that they have. I think something like the recent Alex Jones case taken against him by the Sandy Hook parents is a great example of it because despite the fact that he never openly threatened the Sandy Hook parents, he had a massive audience who went and stalked these parents and accused them of being crisis actors, that their kids didn’t really die forcing them for years after every parent’s worst nightmare to continue reliving that.

    The jury found him guilty and he needed to pay reparations for everything he had done to essentially profit off of the misery of these people. Even though as many people like to bring up, when it’s discovered that the most recent mass shooter was a fan of Tim Pool or was a fan of Ben Shapiro or Tucker Carlson or they quote one one of their TV shows or videos in a manifesto, they like to really distance themselves from that rhetoric. They like to say, “Well, I can’t be responsible for every crazy person in my audience,” and you can’t be responsible for everything, but I think there is a certain point where you reach a level of influence where you can be held responsible.

    There is such a thing as incitement, and inciting a riot is really little more than free speech gone awry. You are getting other people to join your cause, you are getting them on your side, and you are going and causing irreparable damage in a lot of cases. I think the only difference is between something like inciting a riot and the targeted speech that we see proliferating more and more because of Elon Musk’s new efforts on Twitter, the only difference between those two is our experience with it in the immediate and the abstract because you can hear somebody shot up a church, shot up a school and they were inspired by White replacement theory, they were inspired by Lauren Southern or Tim Pool or whoever, but that’s different than seeing the video footage of somebody going and tagging and knocking over cars during a riot somewhere.

    I think that allows themselves to insulate a little bit more because of that. Now, do I think that hate speech as a whole should be necessarily censored? I don’t think there’s any way to do that in any society. What I think the real solution is awareness because most people, a overwhelming majority of people coming from all backgrounds of faiths, all kinds of different beliefs, whether atheist or Catholic or Muslim or Jewish can look at a church like this, look at what they espouse and recognize that it is not righteous, it is not a proper religion, it does not benefit the congregation to hear that, and it’s harmful, quite frankly, to the children in attendance.

    So I think the question is what do we do from there with the free speech that we have, with the free ability that we have to stand up and determine what we want to allow in our communities because there have been, in the past, there have been different churches in the same sex. Like I mentioned, Jonathan Shelley’s church, they got evicted from because the company got so many different calls about what they were preaching after he preached that sermon about stoning children to death.

    It’s less a question of what should or shouldn’t be allowed and more a question of how aware are we of what’s being said and how much effort are we willing to put in to prevent it because anybody, most people go about their lives not hearing and not knowing about things that are said by the far right, but that doesn’t mean that … We saw it. I think it was last year or earlier this year when Nick Fuentes, who is a open White supremacist, a White nationalist who has been at the center of controversy for many years, sat down and had a dinner with Donald Trump, the former president of the United States, the presumptive Republican nominee for the upcoming presidential run, and who knows what they said, but the idea that somebody like Nick Fuentes was written off by many mainstream pundits as just a kid in his basement, meanwhile, he was gathering a loyal following of frustrated young men who saw his rhetoric as the answer to their problems in society and life, and that got him to a point where he can talk to the president, the former president and future nominee.

    So it’s really a if you see something say something situation rather than just saying, “Okay. What they’re saying is violent, we should shut it down,” because I think more than anything, they’re strength in numbers. The ability of so many people … They’re preaching this in a small little room. They’re not on the street corners yelling it out. They know that if they did, they would get swarmed, they would be surrounded.

    A great example was the pride parade I went to this last year where there were a couple … I believe they were Westboro Baptist. There were a couple people there with their hate signs, but they were surrounded not by necessarily just the marchers in the parade, they were literally surrounded by allies who were cutting them off, who were playing drums in front of them. I think that’s the kind of support something like this needs. We need people to know it when they see it, recognize it, and putting the effort to calling it out.

    Taya Graham:

    That is such a great answer, and I know in some ways, I guess, and you partially answered my last question, but I’m just going to ask it anyway. I know this is a ridiculously big question, but in light of the hate church’s views, how can society work towards promoting acceptance and understanding for LGBTQ people and their families or what actions do you think individuals or communities or institutions can take to counter hate speech and prevent violence against the community? Your work provided very important insights, but I’m sure you wouldn’t recommend undercover investigations to everyone. What would you suggest to people who want to be allies and who want to counter this kind of hate?

    Jordan L:

    Yeah, I absolutely don’t recommend going and doing what I did, especially because churches like this are now, I think this church especially is looking out for that. I’ve had a lot of allies ask me, a lot of people who go, “Hey, I’m a cis White dude. How can I help?” I tell them the same thing. Find the events in your area. Find out where there is, even if it’s just a drag night, even if it’s just a queer open mic. Find where there are events happening and go and show up and support and help with events and make sure that you are helping to foster a community because, really, it’s not just a issue that affects, and that’s part of the reason why I made the whole video is that it’s not just an issue that affects queer people, is that their hatred affects Jewish people, it affects women, it affects children.

    So it behooves us to really band together no matter what religion, what race, what color you are against this kind of intolerance because if … Living in their version of a perfect world, if they got what they wanted and the people who advocate like Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles for elimination of people like me from society, they do not want to see us, they do not want to hear us, and if they got what they wanted, they’re going to turn their sights to women next or they’re going to turn their sights to minorities next.

    So there really is no better time than now to take those steps, take those actions and reach out because while there are a lot of spaces that queer people and people of color will try to keep for themselves, whether that’s to keep out infiltrators or to just continue cultivating their own culture and to have those private moments away from the rest of the world that they can feel like might not want them.

    So maybe you might come across those, but I guarantee those same people also welcome you to other events. They will welcome you to hear more about their culture. I think that understanding … I mentioned a long time ago now, but I mentioned that one of the biggest problems I feel with this church and what leads them to their assuredness and their bigotry is how incurious they are. I feel like that is one of the worst things you can be in the modern world because we’re not peasants who live their entire lives in a three-mile village and die at the age of 40.

    Almost everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket that can give you the answers to anything you might want to know, and yet, and this is a big problem I feel with partisan politics now, is that you’ll hear something and accept it as truth, whether it’s from a journalist outlet, whether it’s from an influencer or what have you, when the reality of that is given all of our abilities, when you hear something, you should immediately be able to go look it up and you should see what parts are true and what parts aren’t because most often you can, and that’s what I did with so many of these sermons is they would state a claim about Washington is kidnapping kids and turning them trans, and it turns out that’s not true at all. It has no basis in reality. It’s conspiracy theory.

    I feel like as a society, everybody would be better off if you heard a politician, doesn’t matter what side of the aisle they’re on, you heard them say something, you heard them make a claim and you immediately looked it up because I feel like so many of the divisions that are driven deeper in our country based on lines of racism, based on lines of homophobia and other bigotries are because people remain ignorant.

    Taya Graham:

    Jordan, if we want to watch your video in full as well as follow your work, where should people go?

    Jordan L:

    You can find my video on the YouTube channel Dead Domain. It will have my face on there, and then also the followup video that I recently made where Pastor Aaron Thompson calls me out in his sermon and also calling out the explicit and considerable anti-Semitic and White nationalist rhetoric that was at the Red Hot Preaching Conference. Aside from that, you can follow me on Twitter, @DomainDead.

    Taya Graham:

    Jordan, thank you so much for your time and the simply incredible investigative work you did, and thank you to everyone who listened and stayed with us to hear Jordan’s experience. Thank you for joining us as we stand in solidarity with Jordan and countless others who refuse to let hate and violence dictate our communities. It’s time to shed some light on this darkness and spark conversations that will pave the way for a more inclusive and compassionate society. Thank you, Jordan and Stephen, and thank you for listening to The Real News Network Podcast.

  • Common Dreams Logo

    This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Aug 1, 2023. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

    The Washington Post (6/23/22) describes its opinion section as a platform for articles that “provide a diversity of voices and perspectives for our readers.” Yet as the U.S. and its allies pour military aid into Ukraine, escalating the already bloody conflict with ever-more deadly new weapons, the paper’s opinion pages begin to look less like a platform for diverse voices and more like a cheerleading squad for the military-industrial complex.

    Post opinion journalism abounds with pieces advocating the sort of “light side vs. dark side” moral rhetoric characteristic of corporate media’s war coverage (FAIR.org, 12/1/22). A consequence of this binary worldview is the tendency to present the deployment of increasingly horrific means, like President Joe Biden’s recent decision to arm Ukraine with U.S. cluster munitions, as essentially just and necessary to achieve the West’s always-noble ends.

    From war crime to ‘correct call’

    Cluster munitions are a type of ordinance which can leave unexploded “bomblets” around for decades. Almost 50 years after the end of the U.S. government’s war of aggression against Laos, unexploded cluster bombs continue to kill and maim innocent people—frequently children.

    These weapons are rightly so reviled that, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded to the possibility that Russia had already begun using cluster munitions against Ukraine by calling it “potentially a war crime.” Even so, U.S. cluster munitions have arrived in Ukraine, and are now being used by Kyiv (Washington Post7/20/23).

    Advocating for escalation, a Posteditorial headlined “NATO’s Annual Summit Could Define a Decade of Western Security” (7/8/23) argued that NATO needs to “step up their game” in order to meet the threat of Putin’s regime in Moscow. It called Biden’s decision to arm Ukraine with cluster munitions a “tough but correct call.” The editorial board explained:

    Their use is banned by some major NATO allies, because dud bombs left behind on the battlefield pose a threat to civilians. But Russia has used them intensively in Ukraine, and the Biden administration is legally required to export only shells that have a very low dud rate.

    “Some” major allies? Out of the 31 NATO member states, the U.S. finds company with only seven others in its refusal to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions. More than two-thirds of NATO countries, including “major” allies like Canada, Britain, Germany, and France—and every European country west of Poland—have signed.

    The editorial board cites the fact that the cluster munitions being sent by the U.S. have a “very low dud rate,” and will therefore pose less of a risk to civilians. The Pentagon claims that the munitions it is sending have a dud rate of 2.35%; even if that’s accurate, it exceeds the 1% limit the Pentagon itself considers acceptable.

    According to The New York Times’ John Ismay (7/7/23), a failure rate of 2.35% “would mean that for every two shells fired, about three unexploded grenades would be left scattered on the target area.” There is reason to believe that the true dud rate may be much higher—possibly exceeding 14%, by the Pentagon’s own reckoning.

    Ends justify the means?

    Another Post op-ed, by columnist Max Boot (7/11/23), headlined “Why Liberals Protesting Cluster Munitions for Ukraine Are Wrong,” illustrates the “ends justify the means” rhetoric so pervasive in discourse over the war in Ukraine.

    Boot acknowledged the devastating impact of cluster munitions, noting that “in Laos alone, at least 25,000 people have been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance since the US bombing ended.” He added:

    Such concerns led more than 100 nations—but not the United States, Russia, or Ukraine—to join the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions abolishing the use of these weapons.

    Of course, the United States is notorious for isolating itself from the rest of the world when it comes to the signing of international treaties—as the Council on Foreign Relations, where Mr. Boot is a senior fellow, has shown. The U.S. signed but failed to ratify the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (which has 178 state parties) and the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (which has 189 state parties). It refused to even sign the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty (which has 164 state parties).

    Boot cited the probability that the dud rate of U.S. cluster munitions is much higher than the given 2.35%, but immediately downplayed this fact on the basis that

    Ukraine’s democratically elected leaders, whose relatives, friends, and neighbors are in the line of fire, are more mindful of minimizing Ukrainian casualties than are self-appointed humanitarians in the West watching the war on television.

    In other words, the Ukraine government should be allowed to decide how many Ukrainian civilians are acceptable to kill. This is a dubious principle even when you aren’t talking about a war against separatists; in the areas where the weapons are likely to be used, a large minority to a majority of the population identifies as ethnically Russian. Is the Iraqi government the best judge of how many Kurdish civilians are all right to kill?

    “Using cluster munitions has the potential to save the lives of many Ukrainian soldiers,” Boot claimed, despite the fact that these same U.S. munitions have a history of killing both civilians and U.S. personnel alike.

    Moreover, Boot argued,

    cluster munitions remain a lawful instrument of warfare for countries that haven’t signed the 2008 convention, and Kyiv has shown itself a responsible steward of all the Western weaponry it has received.

    Setting aside international norms, even countries who have not joined the cluster munitions convention must respect the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas. That makes cluster munitions used in such areas illegal—yet “responsible steward” Ukraine has already used its own cluster munitions in the city of Izium, predictably resulting in civilian casualties (Human Rights Watch, 7/6/23).

    ‘Running out of options’

    Meanwhile, Post columnist David Ignatius (7/8/23) approvingly quoted National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan touting the deployment of cluster munitions as giving Ukraine a “wider window” for success, with no mention of any arguments against them. Ignatius later stated in his biweekly Q&A (7/17/23) that he was compelled by the Ukrainians’ reported “moral argument” for cluster bombs.

    The Post’s sole “Counterpoint” piece (7/7/23) on cluster munitions, authored by Sen. Jeff Merkley and former Sen. Patrick Leahy, justly pointed out the “unsupportable moral and political price” of supplying Kyiv with cluster munitions. Unfortunately, the Post didn’t seem to have much time for such considerations, with the only other traces of criticism within the opinion section being found amidst the letters to the editor.

    This was true even months before Biden made his decision. A March piece by columnist Josh Rogin (3/2/23) framed the weapons as a sort of necessary evil as the Ukrainian forces are “running out of options.” Rogin referred to concerns from human rights groups and deemed the use of cluster munitions as “not to be taken lightly,” but did not dwell on these concerns, arguing, similar to Boot, that “more innocent lives will be saved if Ukrainian forces can kill more invading Russians faster.” Rogin concluded: “Because it is their lives on the line, it is their risk to take, and we should honor their request.”

    In total, the Post has published five pieces in its opinion section (including Ignatius’ Q&A) that take a direct stance in favor of arming Ukraine with U.S. cluster munitions, and only one opposed to it. Meanwhile, a recent poll by Quinnipiac University concluded that 51% of Americans disapprove of the president’s decision, while only 39% approve (The Hill7/19/23).

    With so much preference for escalation and so little toward military restraint, one thing seems clear: There aren’t many Einsteins in The Washington Post op-ed section.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • It was once taken from granted that gambling and professional sports could never mix, for the sake of the fans and the integrity of the games themselves. Those days are long gone. Smartphones have made sports betting more accessible and widespread than ever—and tech companies and sports leagues are in cahoots to reap the profits. Edge of Sports takes aim at this regressive and dangerous turn in the world of professional sports, asking what happens to the games we love when a scandal inevitably strikes.

    Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
    Post-Production: Taylor Hebden Audio
    Post-Production: David Hebden
    Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
    Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen


    Transcript

    Dave Zirin:  And now some choice words. Okay, look, we need to talk about the new national pastime: sports betting. I’m old enough to remember, lo, the many years ago when Pete Rose was banned for life from Major League Baseball for placing bets on his own team. I remember when sports leagues said they would never put a team in Las Vegas because of the very physical proximity to legal gambling. I remember when the official line was that the integrity of the game and placing bets could not even exist in the same zip code.

    Well, fast forward a few decades, hell, a few years, and it’s remarkable how much has changed. Now gambling is as much a part of sports as beer commercials. Smartphones have opened the door to sports betting apps, and the leagues have embraced the lucrative bounty created and generated by smartphone gambling. They’ve jumped on this with the wanton shamelessness of a puppy licking its bowl.

    It’s dizzying how quickly the commissioners have made this turn from gambling is evil to selling it to fans as all fun and Americana. I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining this radical shift – It’s money. A ton of it. But it’s not just the league owners panting with their puppy bowls out. Sports media like the trendsetter, ESPN Sports Center and its tall, smoothly bald host, Scott Van Pelt, are always ready with a special sports betting segment. Also, the most esteemed commentators in the sports media world, like TNT’s studio hoops team led by Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith, now do their own giggly gambling bits.

    In other words, a massive portion of the economic lifeblood of pro sports, from the leagues to the top of the media food chain, is being underwritten by sports gambling – Actually, that’s not quite right. It’s being underwritten by fans making bets they overwhelmingly lose. It’s a regressive tax on fans. Sort of like the lottery, except with one vital difference: It’s privatized. So instead of money going to build roads or schools, it goes into the pockets of billionaires.

    Now, I know some, clearly most, will say it’s all good, clean fun. But this isn’t just about sports betting. It’s about access to betting and it’s about the apps. Yes, anyone, especially in the digital age, can gamble whenever one likes. But there’s something called a “hassle cost” that has been eliminated by the apps. Now if anyone wants to lay down some money, there is no need to find a bookie or even navigate a casino website. Just swipe your finger, and as quickly as checking text messages, you are done. They have taken the most dangerous part of gambling – And I do speak from experience here – And that’s that it’s addictive, and they’ve combined it with that other great modern addiction, the smartphone. And for the leagues, it’s been like cracking open Fort Knox.

    Now, the phone app giants do have a warning label for gambling addicts, but it’s about as sincere as a lung cancer warning on a pack of smokes. The leagues do not care. And as long as the sweet dough trickles down to players and the now compromised media, no one else is going to raise a stink about this either.

    But as Neil Young wrote, the devil fools with the best laid plans, and wow, has old Satan fooled with the plans here, because something incredibly predictable has taken place: The players are deciding, in every violation of every league rule, to place their own bets. As a result, the NFL has just suspended four more players for gambling. And they didn’t get any slap on the wrist, either. These players are suspended for the entire 2023 season. It’s an incredibly harsh punishment for doing what everyone in the sports world is promoting, from the boss to the media interviewing these players after the game.

    The sports owners, let’s be clear about this, are terrified that if fans think players are operating in a way that compromises the alleged integrity of the games, the financial hit could be catastrophic. That makes referees as well – Who make a fraction of the players’ salaries – Particularly vulnerable to the allure of gambling, and players know it. The ugliest scene from the NBA season on the court was, for me, when Dallas Mavericks Superstar, Luca Doncic, late in a close game, started to make dollar signs with his fingers in the ref’s face to indicate that he thought the fix was in. Expect more of that.

    So it’s Vegas for the fans, owners, and media, and the Vatican for the players and the refs. And this is a recipe for future disasters. Players will gamble. The commissioner’s office will hand out year-long suspensions. And the media will get in deeper with gambling companies they should be covering instead of profiting from.

    The early sports organizers way back in the late 19th century were terrified of sports betting, fearful that fans would leave in droves if they felt like the outcomes were manipulated. A little more healthy fear, a little more introspection, a little more critical thinking, and a little less blind devotion to taxing fans would be a step in the right direction. But until there is a massive scandal – And that day is coming – We can only sit back and watch gambling swallow the sports world whole.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • In the 1990s, the construction of a new sports arena in Chinatown brought the Washington Bullets (now the Washington Wizards) to the heart of DC. The cost of this move was felt deeply in Chinatown, as several blocks of residences and small businesses were flattened to make way for the multimillion dollar project. Decades later, the Wizards are now considering an exit from DC for Virginia. As has been noted on the show before, these massive sports teams moves primarily benefit owners and their cronies in industry, who stand to benefit from vacuuming massive quantities of taxpayer money into their own pockets. Edge of Sports breaks down how the flight of sports teams from DC could once again come at Chinatown’s expense.

    Click here for the full episode

    Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
    Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
    Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
    Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen


    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Dave Zirin:

    Okay, look, for those who do not know, we record and produce this TV show in the great city of Baltimore, a place with a sports history, as rich as any in the worlds of pro baseball and football, but without an NBA team. This was not always the case. In 1963, Baltimore got a team as the Chicago Packers moved to town and called themselves the Baltimore Bullets. Then a decade later, the Bullets left Baltimore for the DC suburbs, first as the Capital Bullets in Landover, Maryland outside of DC. They eventually became known as the Washington Bullets.

    The story continues. In 1997, the team dropped the bullets name because of concerns of owner Abe Pollin, that they were glorifying violence. They became the Wizards. But with that rebranding, the team enacted a different kind of violence, this kind cruel and cold, with prophets running rough shot over the people. Pollin moved the team to a brand spanking new arena in the heart of DC’s Chinatown, irrevocably changing the area.

    The arrival of the arena was like a bomb going off, flattening the entire community. It signaled the end of Chinatown as a place where actual Chinese and Chinese American families lived and ran shops and restaurants. Instead, it became a neighborhood that adapted to the stadium, as developers tore down local businesses in favor of high-end chains with impossibly bright signage. And of course, in a nod to what was, the names of the restaurants are spelled out in tiny Mandarin lettering, beneath the big signs writ large, promising high end gluttony, either before or after the game. A community had been replaced by a brand.

    That shoddy Blade Runner-esque landscape is what exists now in the Chinatown corridor. And so it has been for a quarter century. But now, there are reports that the Washington Wizards are planning their fifth move in 60 years, with an eye on tax breaks and public funds that could be accrued by hightailing it to the Commonwealth of Virginia, along with the NHL’s Washington Capitals, and perhaps even the WNBAs Washington Mystics who are playing in a brand new arena themselves in Southeast DC.

    Franchise owner Ted Leonsis who bought the team from Abe Pollin, has decided that threatening to move the teams, straight extortion, is the way he wants to do business with the city. Let’s forget a moment that 70 million was spent to refurbish the arena just two years ago. Let’s forget that if this move happens, the team will either call themselves the Virginia Wizards, which sounds more KKK than a pack of Marlboros, or remain the Washington Wizards, keeping the commercial branding while abandoning the city, a total slap in the face.

    Forget that if they dare continue the tradition of playing Welcome To DC by go-go Legends Mambo Sauce in the arena, it would be yet another slap in DC’s face by a feckless franchise that hasn’t won 50 games in a season since Jimmy Carter was president. Also forget that while Northern Virginia is close, it’s psychologically and politically for a lot of folks in DC, a whole other world. Forget all of that.

    What is truly vexing me, what’s really grinding my gears, is that this team is now threatening to gut the same neighborhood for the second time in a quarter century. What is going to happen to all those big box bars and restaurants in Chinatown? If the arena leaves, will they be able to stay open? No. Will Chinatown magically come roaring back? No. Instead, we’ll be left with a ghost town of boarded up restaurants, with tumbleweed lazily being blown across Seventh Street.

    This is maddening. An utterly venal effort aimed at extorting more money out of a city and a budget crunch. Team owner, Ted Leonsis, might as well be saying, “Nice neighborhood you got here. Be a shame if something happened to it.”

    Look, if you know me, you know what my solution to this would be? The city should seize the Wizards, pay off Leonsis and have the team become the most lucrative public utility in the city. Enough with franchise owners coast to coast, threatening our cities for more public welfare during a time of rising inequality and infrastructure degradation. I mean, a portion of I95 quite literally collapsed. And yet, new sports arenas is where the Ted Leonsises of this world are saying we should be spending our precious public funds. So, if you want to break it down to a slogan, save DC save the Wizards, seize the team.

    Well, that’s all the time this week. Thank you, Dr. Harry Edwards. Thank you to the team here at The Real News Network. If you are listening right now, if you are watching, please stay frosty, stay safe. We are out of here. Peace.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • The central place of sports in American life lends immense influence to athletes to shift the culture of the country—and for more than 150 years, Black athletes have done just that. Few scholars are as attuned to the intricacies of this history as renowned sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards. From his role in shaping the events of the 1968 Olympics to the politics of Colin Kaepernick, Edwards is just as much a participant in this history as a student and teacher of it. Now 80 years old, Dr. Harry Edwards joins Edge of Sports as he embarks on his “Last Lectures,” a final project to close his long career as a public intellectual.

    Dr. Harry Edwards
     is a renowned sociologist whose work examines the relationship between race, sports, and politics. He is the author of The Revolt of the Black Athlete.

    Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
    Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
    Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
    Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen


    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Dave Zirin:

    Tonight on Edge of Sports. I can’t believe it. We’re talking to famed sports sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards. We’re talking about somebody who influenced the 1968 Olympics and the politics of Colin Kaepernick. He’s been in this game over 50 years. Can’t wait to talk to him, Dr. Harry Edwards.

    Welcome to Edge of Sports, the TV show. I’m Dave Zirin. This week an icon joins the program and I do not use that word lightly. We have civil rights activist and sports sociology pioneer, author of the seminal book, Revolt Of the Black Athlete, Dr. Harry Edwards.

    In Dr. Edwards, we are talking about someone who is an advisor and organizer of figures ranging from to Smith and John Carlos and the lead up to the 1968 Olympics to 50 years later, Colin Kaepernick. It’s a remarkable, legendary stretch as the preeminent public intellectual of the sports world.

    Now, Dr. Edwards is actually why we have no sports scholar on this week because we have Dr. Harry Edwards and that’s enough sports scholarship over a lifetime to fill a library. So, let’s bring him on now. The great Dr. Harry Edwards. Dr. Edwards, welcome to Edge of Sports TV.

    Dr. Harry Edwards:

    Thank you so much for having me.

    Dave Zirin:

    I just want to jump right in. If you could tell us, I mean you’ve been giving lectures for decades and now you’re doing something called a project called The Last Lectures. Can you speak to our audience a little bit about what The Last Lecture’s composed of?

    Dr. Harry Edwards:

    Well, what I intended to do three years ago was to make this my last series really of public lectures, spend more time with my grandsons and family and so forth. This is my 80th trip around the sun and I thought it was about time that I tried to prioritize what I really wanted to do with my life.

    So, I wanted to put a cap on over half of century of scholar activism and look at the whole history of athlete activism, the 157 year history and the contributions that had been made by athletes to those efforts to form that more perfect union, contributions that have either been downplayed or overshadowed by their athletic prowess are simply ignored and denied because that degree of activist concern beyond the arena made a lot of people in the mainstream in particular feel uncomfortable. And so, they tended to downplay, discount, neglect, forget, lose that perspective on 157 years of athletes transforming their athletic stages into platforms of advocacy, in an effort to help broaden democratic participation in American society.

    Dave Zirin:

    Now, athletes of course have this incredible ability to affect society, affect change, move the needle, reach people who otherwise perhaps could not be reached. What is it about the situational place of the athlete, particularly the Black athlete, that has given them a degree of power that allows them to punch through a little bit of the silencing that particularly happens to Black America?

    Dr. Harry Edwards:

    Well, as I point out in the Sociology Of Sport, a discipline that had been disciplinary possibility that had been overlooked for generations. We invest so much in of our most critical values and sentiments into sport. People identify with athletic teams because they see themselves in their own life struggles taking place through that prism of sport that we can usually change … Circumstances change people by changing their perspectives and understandings of the games that they played. That was a revolutionary statement in 1968 when churches were being bombed and leaders were being shot down and people were being bitten and driven down the street with fire hoses so powerful they could take the bark off trees. For somebody to stand up, raise their hand and say, “Hey, these guys out here playing basketball have something critical to contribute. These guys out here running track have something critical to contribute.”

    And of course, a lot of people laugh. They’re not laughing anymore. But initially they didn’t understand that whole history. But at the time I was writing the Sociology Of Sport, so I understood that struggle was already a century old. So, the basic investment that people and societies have in their sports institution as an affirmation of a legitimation … a something that legitimizes the perspectives and so forth that they have ideologically value, sentiment-wise and so forth, you can use that investment to change people’s perceptions and understanding of sport and in that way, change them and society.

    So, women’s sports have had a tremendous impact in terms of changing perceptions of women in American society. And of course, it’s inextricably intertwined with what’s going on in the broader society. So, something like the resending of Roe v. Wade constitutes an existential threat to women’s sports.

    People talk about Title IX in 1972, that mandated parity for women in terms of expenditures in sports and other areas of education. But what they don’t talk about is 1973 Rowe v. Wade, which gave colleges and universities and professional teams that would eventually emerge some assurance that if we gave this woman a contract, if we gave this woman an athletic scholarship in May, she’d be around in September to start the season. She’d be round in March to play in March … and she’d be round in June to run in the NCAA track championships or play the finals of a professional sport and so forth.

    So all of that now is again in question, but it goes back to something else that I stated in 1968, that the challenges of our circumstances are diverse and dynamic. Our struggle therefore, necessarily must be multifaceted and perpetual and there are no final victories. We keep going back, fighting battles that the last generation thought won, but there are no final victories. So, here we are again, trying to eliminate this consigning of women to reproductive bondage, as if it were 1920 or 1950.

    We’re again fighting for voting rights, as if it were 1965 or 1866 at the onset of reconstruction. Here we are again, fighting for access to higher education, terrain that we thought we had conquered. We’re going back fighting battles over that terrain. So, there are no final victories and sport reflects all of this. Sport in point of fact is the canary in the mineshaft that tells us something about what’s going on in the broader society.

    Dave Zirin:

    In the late ’60s, did you believe then that a final victory was possible that smashing or dismantling institutions of oppression was a possibility? And how has your thinking evolved on that over time?

    Dr. Harry Edwards:

    No, I never thought that there was a final … Matter of fact, the statement that I made about there being no final victories was in response to a reporter in 1968 when we shut down the New York Athletic Club over discrimination. They would invite us in to participate in the New York Athletic Club Indoor Track Classic, but we couldn’t walk into the New York Athletic Club. We couldn’t stay overnight at the New York Athletic Club. And so, I knew that the reporter asked me, Well, doctor, if Jackie Robinson wasn’t able to get this done, look at Bill Russell. Look at Elgin Baylor, look at all of these great Black athletes who’ve come along. What makes you think that you are going to be able to get it done through such tactics and strategies as boycotting the New York Athletic Club or this proposed boycott of the United States Olympic team that you’re proposing? What makes you think that that’s going to get it done?”

    And that’s when I made the statement that there are no final victories. Every generation has to confront the challenges before them. And sometimes, those challenges involve re-fighting, re-battling over terrain that the last generation thought it had conquered. There are no final victories.

    This is what this whole notion of pursuing that more perfect union, we’re never going to be have a perfect union, but we have that mandate constitutionally, we the people, to pursue forming that more perfect union. And it doesn’t say we the people with the exception of athletes, and thank God it doesn’t say we the people, thank God it says we the people and not we the presidents, or we the Supreme Court justices or we the United States Congress, or we the state legislators or governors. It says we the people and that includes the athletes. And many of us always took that seriously.

    So, there was no question in my mind, or in the mind of H. Rap Brown, who I had extensive discussions with about this issue, or in the mind of Dr. King who I also discussed this issue with. And we held a press conference in New York City on January 17th, 1968 in point of fact, about this very issue, that sport and society are inextricably intertwined. And what is a legitimate battle in society is also a legitimate battle in sports. And we have a greater and more visible platform to make statements and to project visions of change in sport.

    So no, I was writing my dissertation on the sociology of sport in 1968. I was a student of sport and society. And so I’ve never had this notion that somehow there’s going to be some final blow that’s going to free up even the institution of sport, much less society.

    Dave Zirin:

    One of your observations in the ’60s, which was so bracing, which I have not found record of anybody making previously, was that US Black Olympians were being used to sell a lie abroad about the state of racism in the United States. Fast forward to today, global superstars from Jordan to LeBron, are we still in that place where the global fame of athletes can be incredible and powerful, but it could also possibly obscure problems here at home?

    Dr. Harry Edwards:

    Well, that’s true, but you have to put that in context as well. There’s never been a progressive movement involving race in American society that was not transactions. What we have to offer that society values in exchange for giving us a role, a participatory role, in increasingly democratic society. What do we have to offer? So, there’s never been a move, progressive move, involving race in American society that was not transactional.

    People talk about the Black quarterback today. “Oh, isn’t it wonderful that the NFL has finally awakened to the fact that Black quarterbacks are intelligent enough and so forth to play quarterbacking at the highest level?” Nonsense. What gave us the Black quarterback was not a change in attitude about race and so forth in the NFL among NFL owners and coaches. What gave us the black quarterback was the fact that Bill Walsh, Sid Gillman, Eric Coryell, moved the game from a run first to a pass first game, which meant that a quarterback could win a game with a 80 yard pass. And I don’t care if he had been ahead, the other team had been ahead, the whole game.

    So, you began to develop a counter to the quarterback, which was the sack artist, Lawrence Taylor, most certainly Charles Haley, people like Michael Strahan and so forth. These sack artists began to take over. So, now it wasn’t enough just to have pocket mobility, despite all of the built-in Tom Brady protections for the the pocket passer and so forth. You had to have escapability. And so all of a sudden, a Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes, these guys became prototypical NFL quarterback.

    What gave us the Black quarterback was not a change, a victory in NFL football in terms of the perceptions of black intellectual capability and so forth. What gave us the black quarterback in the NFL was Michael Strahan, Charles Haley, Lawrence Taylor, and others, just as surely as the lion gave the antelope his speed.

    So, at the end of the day, we have to recognize that transaction is what is critically important, and that has been all along the way. So, Black athletes taking center stage abroad came about as a consequence, in part as a result of the post World War II, Cold War with China and the Soviet Union. And now, with Russia and China as they point out to Africa, Central and South America and Asia, you’re going to go with them as opposed to us? Look at how they treat Black people in their own country. Look at how they treat Asians in their own country. Look at how they’re treating Latino immigrants in their own country.

    And so, to have Latino baseball players at center stage, to have Black basketball and football players at center stage, is a transactional situation that evolved in consequence of broader issues, as well as internal demands for greater freedom, justice, and equality as we pursue forming that more perfect union. And it’s an ongoing struggle. Yes, is the situation changed today from the post-World War II years when they brought in Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby in baseball, Kenny Washington and Woody Strode and Marion Motley and Bill Willis in football, Chuck Cooper, Nat Clifton and Earl Lloyd in basketball? No, it hasn’t changed. The dynamic is the same. What has changed are the actors.

    Dave Zirin:

    There’s a story that I’d love for you to tell. I just read about it at the Andscape website. I didn’t know any of this history. 1987, Al Campanis on the Nightline TV show, he was the president GM of the Los Angeles Dodgers and he said that Black people did not have the necessities to become baseball managers and executives. He was quickly fired. And then please take it from here. What happened next?

    Dr. Harry Edwards:

    Well, my fellow San Jose Spartan, Peter Ueberroth was also commissioner of Major League Baseball at that time. And he asked me to come in, work out a plan, a strategy to make this correct because Al Campanis was really being scapegoated for a attitude that was more or less general in the baseball hierarchy in this country. And Peter Ueberroth understood that.

    So, he said, “I’m not going to interfere with you. You do what you feel is necessary to make this right, to put us on the right path in terms of it. Campanis is probably through in baseball, but we can do something I think to get on the right path in terms of how we handle this situation.” So, the first thing I did when I came in was to hire Al Campanis. Because at some point, I don’t care how far apart we are as a nation, we’re going to have to come to together.

    We’re going to have to sit down at the table, arrive at some agreement as to the direction we want to go in, and then give people the latitude, even those who have made grievous mistakes to say, “I want to help.” And when I contacted Al, the first thing he asked me was, “What could I do to help?” I said, “Al, you know more about baseball than I will ever know. Who are great candidates to be front office officials in Major League baseball.” The first person he named was Dusty Baker. And I said, “Well, let’s meet with Dusty Baker.” He was out of the Dodgers organization, like Al.

    And so, we met at a restaurant that was under pressure because of hiring practices and so forth in terms of minorities. We went in there and sat down at that restaurant and met with Dusty. And we decided that not only would we bring pressure to hire Dusty Baker, but we would have him hired by the Dodgers’ arch competitor, arch adversary, the San Francisco Giants.

    And so, Dusty went into the San Francisco Giants organization, was hired and now has worked him his way up, of course, to be a successful manager. And in point of fact, was the World Series championship manager in 2022. Unfortunately, neither team had a African American on its roster, even though the Astros had … Dusty’s team of course had a Black manager. So, at the end of the day, Dusty Baker was a product of Al Campanis and I trying to come together to demonstrate two things, that even arch rivals could cooperate and collaborate to make something great happen in terms of what we’re supposed to be as a society, what we professed to be as a nation. And that even people as far apart as a 1960s radical such as myself, a Black Power advocate and organizer, and a Al Campanis can come together to try to make this thing right.

    And in point of fact, our basic position was that as a people and as a nation, we have no other option. And the greatest thing about having no other option than to come together, sit around the table, arrive at some strategy to move forward, is that you have no other option. And so, that makes it a little bit easier. And that’s what Al Campanis and I were trying to do, both in terms of us getting together and also having Dusty Baker who came out of the Dodger organization, being hired by the Dodgers’ arch rival, the San Francisco Giants, and then moving forward of course, and it all coming to fruition this past year in the World Series.

    Dave Zirin:

    Yeah, an amazing story. And that chapter in it was certainly something that was not said during the broadcast, which makes your testimony about it so incredibly important.

    Dr. Harry Edwards:

    Absolutely.

    Dave Zirin:

    And it speaks to this other question which I’d be so remiss if I didn’t ask you. Over the last many decades, you have been the most prominent public in intellectual allowed in this sports world space, to be able to debate, discuss, and influence policy. And frankly, I don’t even know who number two would be.

    And I wanted to ask you about the secret sauce because I know a lot of young academics right now, young sports … I’m sure you’re meeting them too. This new generation of sports scholars are attempting to be more forward facing, more public, trying to connect with athletes, trying to develop new theories. I think they who watch this program would love to know how it’s done. Is there any applicable advice for your ability to get inside the room that you can share?

    Dr. Harry Edwards:

    Yes. My first piece of advice would be to hold on to that dream of contributing, of being part of that narrative, of making a contribution in that definitional struggle about what we ought to be as a society, what we already are as a nation, and the trajectory of where we might be headed as a people if we do not resolve some of these critical divisions and so forth that we’re faced with.

    Hold on to that dream of having input into that. Do not be dissuaded, discouraged and so forth because you’re not getting a call from a major network or because you’re not getting eighty requests for lectures and panels a year.

    The second thing that I would say is learn to dream with your eyes open. Never allow yourself to take for granted that anything that has happened will continue to have the impact initially, as it was initially conceived. And also, understand that there are things that emerge within the context of evolving reality that nobody had anticipated, but that can be managed within the context of your understanding of the dynamics involved.

    And the third thing that I would say, is take full advantage of the only shortcut to getting to where you want to get. Take full advantage of the only demonstrable shortcut to success in this realm. And that is hard work. Everything else is more difficult.

    You have to put in the homework, the study, the analysis. You have to make the kinds of decisions that position you to see more clearly. That position you to think in greater depth. And if you don’t do that, if you are discouraged by, “Well, so-and-so said that that’s not important. So-and-so says that sports is the tar department of human affairs. So-and-so says there’s no such thing as a sociology of sport.”

    And I mean, the kinds of arguments that I had to pose to simply get that argument and discussion on the table. It sounds ludicrous, but I had to argue at one of the greatest institutions in this society, Cornell University, the PhD program. I had to argue, if sociologists are paying attention to dyads, two person relationships and triads, three person relationships and writing dissertations and monographs and all other kinds of things on these relationships, but a hundred million people watching the NFL championship game is not worthy of sociological analysis, then somebody is insane and it’s not me. And finally he said, “Okay, you can write your dissertation in that area.”

    So, you can’t be dissuaded by the limitations of vision evidenced by those who you, because of the area that you’re working in, have to work with. You have to cut them some slack, give them some latitude, try to point them in a different direction, but never, ever be diminished in your dream of making a contribution.

    Look, I’m on my 80th trip around the sun. This is one that is going to be over sooner rather than later, more than likely. There’s going to be ample space for people to step in and say, “If old Edwards can do this, if he can illuminate an area of academic activist, popular development to this extent, geez, how much more can I do? Because I’m just that much better, smarter, insightful than he was.” That’s the attitude that they should take.

    Dave Zirin:

    And the other incredible, almost puzzling talent that you’ve had over the decades is the ability to connect with the individual athlete. I say puzzling because we all know that to be a pro athlete takes an incredible dedication. A lot of these young men and women wear blinders just for the purposes of getting to those goals. And yet, you’ve been able to pull back the blinders in a lot of one-on-one and group conversations.

    Again, an advice question. You’re connecting with an athlete. What is the best way to let them know that not only you care, but that you have some knowledge that can help push everybody forward?

    Dr. Harry Edwards:

    I think that in the age of social media, that’s easier than ever. You can respond to athletes’ websites, Twitter accounts, Instagrams and so forth. But more important than anything, it’s dealing honestly with the realities and so forth that athletes and all of us are impacted by and involved with.

    I was blessed throughout my professional and career development to have personal contacts, to be able to pick up the telephone and call, to be able to meet with, one-on-one, some of the greatest athletes that this nation has ever produced. I don’t care whether it’s Arthur Ashe, or Tommie Smith and John Carlos, or Bill Russell or Jim Brown, or Curt Flood, Wilma Rudolph. To be able to pick up the telephone and chat with them about an issue that came out in a Sports Illustrated, or how they might handle a problem that came up in their particular sport, has been a tremendous blessing for me.

    But the obstacle, the main obstacle, to getting to that level is not from the side of the athletes. It’s from the side of the individual who aspires to have those kinds of conversations which become a critical dimension of their analysis and understanding of the sports institution and its role in society. If you don’t know the people most critically involved, and it is the athletes who are most critically involved in sports, I don’t care how great an owner you are, nobody’s going to come to see Jerry Jones play quarterback against Robert Kraft. They come to see the athletes. And so, that connection becomes critical, but getting access to that connection is always difficult but there are … It’s easier today because of the social media than ever before.

    Dave Zirin:

    You’ve been so generous with your time, Dr. Edwards. Just one last question. We’re going full circle now with the last lectures. No one really gets to choose their legacy, but what would you like your legacy to be in the decades ahead?

    Dr. Harry Edwards:

    You know, that’s one that I’ve given virtually no thought to cause that’s not one that I can control. That’s something that people will ride after I’m on the other side of the lawn. But if I had an image, if there was something that I would like to be remembered for, it would be this. I would like people to know, to believe, to think, that I was a great teacher.

    We’ve all heard that old saying, those who can, do. And those who would prepare, develop and certify those who do, teach. I think that teaching is the greatest profession in the world because unlike dentistry, medicine, architecture, law, chemistry, who do … All of these professionals, who do something for somebody, a great teacher incites people to think and inspires them to learn, so that they can do for themselves. And that is the greatest thing that you will ever do for anyone.

    So, I hope that somebody at some point will at least say, “Well yeah, old Edwards was a pain in the you know what. But he was also a great teacher. I think that he helped to change the world’s perspective and understanding of sport, which meant that they had a greater and better understanding of themselves.”

    And that is what I would like to be a central part of my legacy. Of course, I’ll never get away from the activist dimension of it, which was such an important part of my teaching because I was just teaching, teaching the world. Being a teacher to me is what is central and critically important.

    Dave Zirin:

    Yeah, we just happened to be interviewing Solomon Hughes last week and he said to us, “Yeah, my life was changed at Berkeley when I had a professor named Dr. Harry Edwards.” So, that part of your legacy, I think is very secured. Dr. Edwards, thanks so much for joining us on Edge Of Sports TV.

    Dr. Harry Edwards:

    Oh, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be with your privilege, anytime.

    Dave Zirin:

    Okay. As I said earlier, I have no ask a sports scholar segment because who would want to follow Dr. Harry frigging Edwards? But I do have some choice words.

    Okay, look, for those who do not know, we record and produce this TV show in the great city of Baltimore, a place with a sports history, as rich as any in the worlds of pro baseball and football, but without an NBA team. This was not always the case. In 1963, Baltimore got a team as the Chicago Packers moved to town and called themselves the Baltimore Bullets. Then a decade later, the Bullets left Baltimore for the DC suburbs, first as the Capital Bullets in Landover, Maryland outside of DC. They eventually became known as the Washington Bullets.

    The story continues. In 1997, the team dropped the bullets name because of concerns of owner Abe Pollin, that they were glorifying violence. They became the Wizards. But with that rebranding, the team enacted a different kind of violence, this kind cruel and cold, with prophets running rough shot over the people. Pollin moved the team to a brand spanking new arena in the heart of DC’s Chinatown, irrevocably changing the area.

    The arrival of the arena was like a bomb going off, flattening the entire community. It signaled the end of Chinatown as a place where actual Chinese and Chinese American families lived and ran shops and restaurants. Instead, it became a neighborhood that adapted to the stadium, as developers tore down local businesses in favor of high-end chains with impossibly bright signage. And of course, in a nod to what was, the names of the restaurants are spelled out in tiny Mandarin lettering, beneath the big signs writ large, promising high end gluttony, either before or after the game. A community had been replaced by a brand.

    That shoddy Blade Runner-esque landscape is what exists now in the Chinatown corridor. And so it has been for a quarter century. But now, there are reports that the Washington Wizards are planning their fifth move in 60 years, with an eye on tax breaks and public funds that could be accrued by hightailing it to the Commonwealth of Virginia, along with the NHL’s Washington Capitals, and perhaps even the WNBAs Washington Mystics who are playing in a brand new arena themselves in Southeast DC.

    Franchise owner Ted Leonsis who bought the team from Abe Pollin, has decided that threatening to move the teams, straight extortion, is the way he wants to do business with the city. Let’s forget a moment that 70 million was spent to refurbish the arena just two years ago. Let’s forget that if this move happens, the team will either call themselves the Virginia Wizards, which sounds more KKK than a pack of Marlboros, or remain the Washington Wizards, keeping the commercial branding while abandoning the city, a total slap in the face.

    Forget that if they dare continue the tradition of playing Welcome To DC by go-go Legends Mambo Sauce in the arena, it would be yet another slap in DC’s face by a feckless franchise that hasn’t won 50 games in a season since Jimmy Carter was president. Also forget that while Northern Virginia is close, it’s psychologically and politically for a lot of folks in DC, a whole other world. Forget all of that.

    What is truly vexing me, what’s really grinding my gears, is that this team is now threatening to gut the same neighborhood for the second time in a quarter century. What is going to happen to all those big box bars and restaurants in Chinatown? If the arena leaves, will they be able to stay open? No. Will Chinatown magically come roaring back? No. Instead, we’ll be left with a ghost town of boarded up restaurants, with tumbleweed lazily being blown across Seventh Street.

    This is maddening. An utterly venal effort aimed at extorting more money out of a city and a budget crunch. Team owner, Ted Leonsis, might as well be saying, “Nice neighborhood you got here. Be a shame if something happened to it.”

    Look, if you know me, you know what my solution to this would be? The city should seize the Wizards, pay off Leonsis and have the team become the most lucrative public utility in the city. Enough with franchise owners coast to coast, threatening our cities for more public welfare during a time of rising inequality and infrastructure degradation. I mean, a portion of I95 quite literally collapsed. And yet, new sports arenas is where the Ted Leonsises of this world are saying we should be spending our precious public funds. So, if you want to break it down to a slogan, save DC save the Wizards, seize the team.

    Well, that’s all the time this week. Thank you, Dr. Harry Edwards. Thank you to the team here at The Real News Network. If you are listening right now, if you are watching, please stay frosty, stay safe. We are out of here. Peace.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Scheerpost logo

    This article originally appeared in Scheerpost on July 9, 2023. It is shared here with permission.

    LONDON: The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent, but no longer attempts to shine a light into the inner workings of power. This failure is not only inexcusable, but ominous

    The U.S. government, especially the military and agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and Homeland Security, have no intention of stopping with Julian, who faces 170 years in prison if found guilty of violating 17 counts of the Espionage Act. They are cementing into place mechanisms of draconian state censorship, some features of which were exposed by Matt Taibbi in the Twitter Files, to construct a dystopian corporate totalitarianism.  

    The U.S. and the U.K. brazenly violated a series of judicial norms and diplomatic protocols to keep Julian trapped for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy after he had been granted political asylum by Ecuador. The CIA, through the Spanish security firm UC Global, made recordings of Julian’s meetings with his attorneys, which alone should invalidate the extradition case. Julian has been held for more than four years in the notorious Belmarsh high-security prison since the British Metropolitan Police dragged him out of the embassy on April 11, 2019. The embassy is supposed to be the sovereign territory of Ecuador. Julian has not been sentenced in this case for a crime. He is charged under the Espionage Act, although he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication. The U.K. courts, which have engaged in what can only be described as a show trial, appear ready to turn him over to the U.S. once his final appeal, as we expect, is rejected. This could happen in a matter of days or weeks. 

    Julian has not been sentenced in this case for a crime. He is charged under the Espionage Act, although he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication.

    On Wednesday night at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Stella Assange, an attorney who is married to Julian; Matt Kennard, co-founder and chief investigator of Declassified UK, and I examined the collapse of the press, especially with regard to Julian’s case. You can watch our discussion here

    “I feel like I’m living in 1984,” Matt said. “This is a journalist who revealed more crimes of the world’s superpower than anyone in history. He’s sitting in a maximum-security prison in London. The state that wants to bring him over to that country to put him in prison for the rest of his life is on record as spying on his privileged conversations with his lawyers. They’re on record plotting to assassinate him. Any of those things, if you told someone from a different time ‘Yeah this is what happened and he was sent anyway and not only that, but the media didn’t cover it at all.’ It’s really scary. If they can do that to Assange, if civil society can drop the ball and the media can drop the ball, they can do that to any of us.” 

    When Julian and WikiLeaks released the secret diplomatic cables and Iraq War logs, which exposed numerous U.S. war crimes, including torture and the murder of civilians, corruption, diplomatic scandals, lies and spying by the U.S. government, the commercial media had no choice but to report the information. Julian and WikiLeaks shamed them into doing their job. But, even as they worked with Julian, organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian were determined to destroy him. He threatened their journalistic model and exposed their accommodation with the centers of power.

    “They hated him,” Matt said of the mainstream media reporters and editors. “They went to war with him immediately after those releases. I was working for The Financial Times in Washington in late 2010 when those releases happened. The reaction of the office at The Financial Times was one of the major reasons I got disillusioned with the mainstream media.”

    Julian went from being a journalistic colleague to a pariah as soon as the information he provided to these news organizations was published. He endured, in the words of Nils Melzer, at the time the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, “a relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation.” These attacks included “collective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his assassination.”

    Julian was branded a hacker, although all the information he published was leaked to him by others. He was smeared as a sexual predator and a Russian spy, called a narcissist and accused of being unhygienic and slovenly. The ceaseless character assassination, amplified by a hostile media, saw him abandoned by many who had regarded him a hero. 

    “Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide,” Melzer concluded

    The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel, all of which published WikiLeaks documents provided by Julian, published a joint open letter on Nov. 28, 2022 calling on the U.S. government “to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.” 

    But the demonization of Julian, which these publications helped to foster, had already been accomplished.

    Julian went from being a journalistic colleague to a pariah as soon as the information he provided to these news organizations was published.

    “It was pretty much an immediate shift,” Stella recalled. “While the media partners knew that Julian still had explosive material that still had to be released, they were partners. As soon as they had what they thought they wanted from him, they turned around and attacked him. You have to put yourself in the moment where the press was in 2010 when these stories broke. They were struggling for a financial model to survive. They hadn’t really adapted to the age of the internet. You had Julian coming in with a completely new model of journalism.” 

    There followed a WikiLeaks-isation of U.S. media outlets such as The New York Times, which adopted the innovations pioneered by WikiLeaks, including providing secure channels for whistleblowers to leak documents.

    “Julian was a superstar,” Stella said. “He came from outside the ‘old boys’ network. He talked about how these revelations should lead to reform and how the Collateral Murder video reveals that this is a war crime.” 

    Julian was outraged when he saw the heavy redactions of the information he exposed in newspapers such as The Guardian. He criticized these publications for self-censoring to placate their advertisers and the powerful.

    He exposed these news organizations, as Stella said, “for their own hypocrisy, for their own poor journalism.”

    “I find it very ironic that you have all this talk of misinformation, that’s just cover for censorship,” Stella said. “There are all these new organizations that are subsidized to find misinformation. It’s just a means to control the narrative. If this whole disinformation age really took truth seriously, then all of these disinformation organizations would hold WikiLeaks up as the example, right? Julian’s model of journalism was what he called scientific journalism. It should be verifiable. You can write up an analysis of a news item, but you have to show what you’re basing it on. The cables are the perfect example of this. You write up an analysis of something that happened and you reference the cables and whatever else you’re basing your news story on.”

    “This was a completely new model of journalism,” she continued. “It is one [that] journalists who understood themselves as gatekeepers hated. They didn’t like the WikiLeaks model. WikiLeaks was completely reader-funded. Its readers were global and responding enthusiastically. That’s why PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Bank of America started the banking blockade in December 2010. This has become a standardized model of censorship to demonetize, to cut channels off from their readership and their supporters. The very first time this was done was in 2010 against WikiLeaks within two or three days of the U.S. State Department cables being published.”

    While Visa cut off WikiLeaks, Stella noted, it continued to process donations to the Ku Klux Klan. 

    Julian’s “message was journalism can lead to reform, it can lead to justice, it can help victims, it can be used in court and it has been used in court in the European Court of Human Rights, even at the U.K. Supreme Court in the Chagos case here,” she said. “It has been used as evidence. This is a completely new approach to journalism. WikiLeaks is bigger than journalism because it’s authentic, official documents. It’s putting internal history into the public record at the disposal of the public and victims of state-sponsored crime. For the first time we were able to use these documents to seek justice, for example, in the case of the German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was abducted and tortured by the CIA. He was able to use WikiLeaks cables at the European Court of Human Rights when he sued Macedonia for the rendition. It was a completely new approach. It brought journalism to its maximum potential.” 

    “The things we hold dear, democracy, freedom of speech, free press, they’re very, very fragile, much more fragile than we realize. That’s been exposed by Assange. If they get Assange, the levies will break. It’s not like they’re going to stop. That’s not how power works.”

    Matt Kennard, co-founder and chief investigator of Declassified UK

    The claims of objectivity and neutrality propagated by the mainstream media are a mechanism to prevent journalism from being used to challenge injustices or reform corrupt institutions.

    “It’s completely alien, the idea that you might use journalism as a tool to better the world and inform people of what’s happening,” Matt said. “For them it’s a career. It’s a status symbol. I never had a crisis of conscience because I never wanted to be a journalist if I couldn’t do that.”

    “For people who come out of university or journalism school, where do you go?” he asked. “People get mortgages. They have kids. They want to have a normal life…You enter the system. You slowly get all your rough edges shorn off. You become part of the uniformity of thought. I saw it explicitly at The Financial Times.”

    “It’s a very insidious system,” Matt went on. “Journalists can say to themselves ‘I can write what I like,’ but obviously they can’t. I think it’s quite interesting starting Declassified with Mark Curtis in the sense that journalists don’t know how to react to us. We have a complete blackout in the mainstream media.” 

    “There has been something really sinister that has happened in the last twenty years, particularly at The Guardian,” he said. “The Guardian is just state-affiliated media. The early WikiLeaks releases in 2010 were done with The Guardian. I remember 2010 when those releases were happening with The Guardian and The New York Times. I’d read the same cables being covered in The Guardian and The New York Times and I’d always thought ‘Wow, we’re lucky to have The Guardian because The New York Times were taking a much more pro-U.S. pro-government position.’ That’s now flipped. I’d much prefer to read The New York Times covering this stuff. And I’m not saying it’s perfect. Neither of them were perfect, but there was a difference. I think what’s happened is clever state repression.” 

    The D-notice committee, he explained, is composed of journalists and state security officials in the U.K. who meet every six months. They discuss what journalists can and can’t publish. The committee sends out regular advisories

    The Guardian ignored advisories not to publish the revelations of illegal mass surveillance released by Edward Snowden. Finally, under intense pressure, including threats by the government to shut the paper down, The Guardian agreed to permit two Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) officials to oversee the destruction of the hard drives and memory devices that contained material provided by Snowden. The GCHQ officials on July 20, 2013 filmed three Guardian editors as they destroyed laptops with angle grinders and drills. The deputy editor of The Guardian, Paul Johnson — who was in the basement  during the destruction of the laptops — was appointed to the D-notice committee. He served at the D-notice committee for four years. In his last committee meeting Johnson was thanked for “re-establishing links” between the committee and The Guardian. The paper’s adversarial reporting, by then, had been neutralized.

    “The state realized after the war in Iraq that they needed to clamp down on the freedom in the British media,” Matt said. “The Daily Mirror under Piers Morgan…I don’t know if anyone remembers back in 2003, and I know he is a controversial character and he’s hated by a lot of people, including me, but he was editor at The Daily Mirror. It was a rare opening of what a mainstream tabloid newspaper can do if it’s doing proper journalism against the war, an illegal war. He had headlines made out of oil company logos. He did Bush and Blair with blood all over their hands, amazing stuff, every day for months. He had John Pilger on the front page, stuff you would never see now. There was a major street movement against the war. The state thought ‘Shit, this is not good, we’ve gotta clamp down.’”

    This triggered the government campaign to neuter the press. 

    “I wouldn’t say we have a functioning media in terms of the newspapers,” he said. 

    “This is not just about Assange,” Matt continued. “This is about all of our futures, the future for our kids and our grandkids. The things we hold dear, democracy, freedom of speech, free press, they’re very, very fragile, much more fragile than we realize. That’s been exposed by Assange. If they get Assange, the levies will break. It’s not like they’re going to stop. That’s not how power works. They don’t pick off one person and say we’re going to hold off now. They’ll use those tools to go after anyone who wants to expose them.” 

    “If you’re working in an environment in London where there’s a journalist imprisoned for exposing war crimes, maybe not consciously but somewhere you [know you] shouldn’t do that,” Matt said. “You shouldn’t question power. You shouldn’t question people who are committing crimes secretly because you don’t know what’s going to happen…The U.K. government is trying to introduce laws which make it explicit that you can’t publish [their crimes]. They want to formalize what they’ve done to Assange and make it a crime to reveal war crimes and other things. When you have laws and a societal-wide psyche that you cannot question power, when they tell you what is in your interest, that’s fascism.” 

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • After decades in Oakland, the A’s are moving to Las Vegas, where a promised stadium of gigantic proportions awaits. The decision has not only been devastating for the city of Oakland and its many baseball fans, but also carries wider implications that extend beyond the MLB to matters of public finance. After all, why should cities keep shelling out billions in taxpayer money for sports facilities while schools and hospitals close? Edge of Sports host Dave Zirin zeroes in on the controversial new Vegas stadium, taking aim in particular at MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, the “Gordon Gecko” of baseball.

    Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino 
    Post-Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino 
    Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino 
    Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen


    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Dave Zirin: Wow, that was Solomon Hughes, but now I got some choice words. Okay, look, in the early 1970s, the Oakland A’s were a dynasty winning three straight World series led by players like Reggie Jackson, Raleigh Fingers, and Jim Catfish Hunter. They also had a 12 year old kid from the streets of Oaktown who entertained the clubhouse with his dancing moves. This kid’s name was Stanley Burrell, and he had an uncanny resemblance to the great home run king “Hammerin’ Hank Hank Aaron. So they called him Hammer Stanley Burrell took that on as his dancing name, and 15 years later became known to the world as MC Hammer. I tell that story because it speaks to how woven this team is into our collective culture, but I also tell that story because it would not have happened if they were the Idaho A’s or the San Antonio A’s or Yes, the Las Vegas A’s because the Ballad of the funky head hunter, aka MC Hammer is not an A’s story.

    It’s not even a baseball story, it’s an Oakland story. Hell, the unlikely start of Hammer’s career is an Oakland legend, as sure as Huey Newton and Bobby Seal putting out the first issue of the Black Panther speaks while listening to Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man is an Oakland legend, a legend rooted in a truth that perhaps can only be found in Oaktown. And this is because of Oakland that this team, the A’s, has given us more legendary people and moments than we have had any right to expect.

    The Bash brothers, Mark McGuire and Jose Canseco, the famous 20 game winning streak with one of the most inexpensive rosters in the sport and a World series in 1989 that literally cracked the earth open. But now because a billionaire franchise owner who made his fortune by inheriting a sweatshop empire as well as a major league baseball commissioner who really seems to hate the sport of baseball, the as are looking to be leaving Oakland to go to a publicly funded paradise in the Las Vegas desert, I’ve had much to say over the years about how these sweetheart stadium deals fleece taxpayers and the poor about how publicly funded arenas are nothing but monuments to corporate greed about how economists say you’d be better off dropping a billion dollars from a plane and letting people pick up the money and spend it than using the money for a sports complex.

    This is not a debate, it’s a fact. And academics have been putting out the data that proves this for decades. But for the very powerful, these stadium deals are pure gold, a magical alchemy that takes public funds and after being laundered through sports becomes private profit. I have much to say about all of this and to the working people of Vegas, I am so sorry. I am sorry for your schools and hospitals and parks. I am sorry for what is about to happen to you, but I want to focus here not on the Oakland Franchise owner Gap clothing heir John Fisher. I’m not going to focus on the way he sold off every decent player on the team to drive down attendance and then cry poverty in order to facilitate this move. I’m not going to focus on him. He’s nothing. A garbage bag stuffed with spam doing exactly what he was told.

    I want to focus on the person pulling his strings, Major League baseball commissioner Rob Manfred. It was Manfred who did not want a privately funded deal to build a new stadium in Oakland. And it was Manfred who decided that Pilfer tax dollars from Vegas mattered more than decades of loyalty and support given by the people of Oakland to this franchise. I also want to focus on Manfred because this past week in an interview with my man Jun Lee over at ESPN, he exposed his character and it’s rotten to the core. He showed himself not only prepared to gut a great baseball town, but kick it in the teeth on the way out the door. Listen to these comments. The injury is bad enough, the insults far worse, and the lies unendurable. On the A’s relocation he said, “The real question is, what was Oakland prepared to do?”

    There is no Oakland offer, okay? They never got to a point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site. And it’s not just on John Fisher. The community has to provide support. This as the Oakland Mayor’s Office pointed out immediately before that quote even hit the airwaves is simply not true. There were numerous plans on the table, just not one as a wash in public money as the Vegas plan. Manfred was also asked about a recent event where fans filled the stands in protest of the move to Vegas in what was being called a reverse boycott to that Manfred smirked and said, “I mean, it was great. It is great to see what is this year, almost an average major league baseball crowd in the facility for one night. That’s a great thing.” And when Jun Lee pointed out to Manfred that studies say that stadiums do not generate significant local economic growth, he shrugged it off with this pithy observation. “Academics can say whatever they want.”

    Look, this isn’t a baseball commissioner, it’s a sports radio caller. It’s a YouTube commenter, and it’s more evidence that no one dislikes the game of baseball in all its pageantry and joy than Rob Manfred the Grinch of the national pastime. But comparing him to a Dr. Seuss character is too kind. He’s more like Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street. Greed is good, and anything that gets in the way of greed is inherently bad.

    That movie came out in 1987, and if we’ve learned anything since then in this age of decay, it’s that greed isn’t good. Greed destroys communities, greed destroys small towns. Greed destroys I-95 and greed is destroying our cities. And publicly funded stadiums is one of the ways they do it. They take all the joy and community cohesion that baseball can create and use it like a club to attack and alienate the most vulnerable, the very people whose love has made the game everything it is. It’s obscene. Rob Manfred is killing this team. Its future will no longer be in the hearts of the Oakland faithful. Instead, they will be in the Vegas desert to be buried with the rest of the bodies.

  • From 1979 to 1991, the Los Angeles Lakers would become a dominant force in the world of professional basketball and in American culture more broadly. Led by coach Pat Riley and star players Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the “Showtime” era of the Lakers is still, in many ways, the standard by which other sports dynasties are measured today. On the court, in the locker room, and beyond, the legendary Lakers franchise was both a reflection and a driver of a culture, a sport, and a country undergoing seismic changes, and the HBO dramatized series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty tells the story of the the larger-than-life personalities and politics that defined the Showtime era.

    This week on Edge of Sports, host Dave Zirin speaks with actor Solomon Hughes about Winning Time, which is debuting its second season on August 6, and about stepping into the role of playing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar himself. Later in this episode, Zirin shares some choice words on the Oakland A’s and Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred; then, in “Ask a Sports Scholar,” we talk with Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, about her forthcoming book “Can’t Eat a Medal”: The Lives and Labors of Black Women Athletes in the Age of Jim Crow.

    Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
    Post-Production: David Hebden
    Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
    Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen


    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Dave Zirin:

    Welcome to Edge of Sports, the TV show only on the Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin and we have an amazing show This week, my goosebumps have goosebumps allow me to explain. One of my favorite TV shows of the last year was HBO’s Winning Time. It was a dramatic reenactment of the wildly entertaining story behind the fast breaking, hard partying Los Angeles Lakers teams of the 1980s, the team of Magic Johnson, Pat Riley, and the Man in the Middle, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Now, the coaches, executives, and players from back then all hated Winning Time. They said that the warts and all drama was rife with exaggerations, caricatures, and untruths. But the public loved it, the critics loved it. And you know what? I loved it too. And the breakout star of the show was Solomon Hughes, who had the extremely difficult task of playing the iconic Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, portraying the very poker-faced, deeply intelligent Kareem would prove difficult for any actor.

    But for Solomon Hughes, who played hoops for four years at Cal Berkeley while earning multiple degrees, it was also his first acting job. It is a wild story, and we have him here today on the Edge of Sports, but that’s not all. I also have some choice words about Oakland, the Oakland days, and the imminent move of this iconic, iconic baseball team to the great city of Oakland. And I’m talking to a frontline sports scholar, one of the best in the biz. Brilliant, brilliant stuff here, Dr. Amira Rose Davis. But first, let’s talk to the man in the middle, Solomon Hughes, Solomon Hughes. Thanks so much for joining us.

    Solomon Hughes:

    Thank you so much for having me, Dave.

    Dave Zirin:

    Oh my goodness. I have so many questions, and I’m going to start with the one I think probably my listeners are wondering right now, after that introduction I just gave you, sir, you never acted before. You have a PhD. How did you even hear they were casting for Winning Time? Did you think you’d get the part? How did this happen for you?

    Solomon Hughes:

    Man, we hear this from our parents and they talk about the power and importance of relationships, and it was two former teammates from Cal, one who has been acting for about 20 years. Robbie Jones and another who I was roommates with, Francisco Elon, who played with the Spurs, played endgame for a number of years, and now lives in the Netherlands. So Francisco, they’ve been doing a search for a number of months, and a casting agent reached out to him. Francisco wasn’t interested in auditioning, but he suggested me. And so Robbie calls me up and says, “Just so you know, since Francisco suggested you as someone who can audition for this part.” And so I did the self tape, and for me, it was just fun. It was a fun experience. I didn’t really think too much of it. I was like, “This is an HBO show. There’s no way this is going to work out, but I’m going to have fun digging in and recording these scenes.”

    And so I sent in the self tape, and then about four days later, I found out that they were going to fly me down to LA do an person audition in front of all the producers and writers. And that was crazy, but it was one of those things where you’ve gone this far, just leave it all out there and see what happens. And then a week after that, I found out I got the part, and it was mind blowing for sure. So I tell people that I’ve, film and TV and theater have had a huge impact on me personally. And so I feel like I’ve always, I’ve had my eye on this industry just as a huge fan. And so I feel like getting the opportunity to step into it has just been an enormous blessing.

    Dave Zirin:

    Amazing. And I want to talk to you about acting about your process, but first, the question that sprung to my mind immediately when I learned about your academic background is, “Okay, here’s a guy who played center at the highest collegiate level. Here’s a guy with serious academic chops.” And before you ever heard of Winning Time, did anyone ever tell you that just by virtue of being a cerebral, academic, focused basketball player, the man in the middle, a center, did anyone ever say to you, “Wow, you’re kind of like a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?”

    Solomon Hughes:

    There’s at least I can remember two occasions. One was when I was playing because I shot a jump hook, which is not nearly as graceful as the sky hook, but it is very, very effective. And I led the PAC 12 and field goal percentage specifically because I was shooting the shot. And so I think I’d hear people kind of make that comparison there, but I also think my dad is someone who was a huge fan of Kareem’s and really influenced by Kareem as well. And so I think essentially trying to emulate my father, I was in a lot of ways emulating the legacy that Kareem has left for so many of us.

    Dave Zirin:

    What was your Kareem knowledge base before getting this role?

    Solomon Hughes:

    So I thought I knew just about everything growing up in Southern California, watching the Lakers in the ’80s, I really thought I knew just about everything. His autobiography was one of the first big books that I read growing up and-

    Dave Zirin:

    Oh, me too.

    Solomon Hughes:

    Yeah. It was so great. But he’s written a few books about himself. He had that beautiful documentary Minority of One. So getting into those, I just feel like it just really blew open the doors in terms of there was so much more about his life. I mean, what I found, what I really enjoyed learning about was just his time in New York, all of the different things that influenced him, music, civil rights, black American rights, et cetera, all of those things, just his passion around journalism, those things were incredibly fun to uncover and learn about. So I would say that my knowledge base was bigger than the average fan, but Kareem is an ocean, so I feel like there’s just, I’ve only just dipped my toes. And the great thing about him is his legacy continues. He’s still writing books, he’s still producing, putting out media that brings history into the conversation in a really entertaining and engaging way.

    Dave Zirin:

    Wow. How familiar were you with that history of the 1960s of the activist athlete? And Sure. In that tone, I got to ask, there’s some amazing books by your bedside as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Winning Time, you got Huey Newton. You’ve got the Quran, you’ve got other books that are so strongly of the moment. So how much of that history did you walk in, “Okay, I’m going to play this because I’m familiar with that moment.”

    Solomon Hughes:

    Yeah, yeah. Similarly, so my father grew up in the south, and at a pretty young age, he moved to California. But just having a legacy of family or from the South who experienced Jim Crow segregation. And then when they came to California, experienced a different kind of racism where it’s not all the markings of what you experienced in the South, but it was definitely present. And so I think my dad was very intentional about making sure that his kids were aware of our history, were aware of the struggles, the sacrifices.

    And so I think growing up as a kid, I was just really intrigued by history and in particular the journey of African Americans. And so I was pretty familiar, but again, it’s fun to go back. I went back and reread his books to go back and read Huey Newton to go back and read Assata Shakur, read these books that you read in college, or you read when you’re in high school, but now you’re bringing it together with life experience. That was when I was 20 years old. Now I’m over 40. And to revisit those things, especially when we’re in this time where we’re still having a lot of the same conversations, it is really compelling.

    Dave Zirin:

    So you went to Berkeley. You majored in sociology. Did you Were a hooper. So where my head goes immediately is the great sports sociologist who was at Berkeley for so many decades, the legendary Dr. Harry Edwards. Did your paths ever cross?

    Solomon Hughes:

    Yeah. So I believe it was my freshman year, he had stopped teaching sociology of sport. And up to that point, everyone was like, “If you take one class at Berkeley, it has to be sociology of sport with Dr. Edwards.” And I got there. He was no longer teaching it. I still took the class. It was a great faculty member who did teach it, but he did teach a course on slave history, enslaved person’s history. And David, it was, it’s one of those things where it’s every day you’re pinching yourself. You’re in this classroom. I know myself and a couple of my teammates were lucky enough to get into the class. And so much of it is a performance, right? You’re talking about this brilliant individual who embodies so much of the journey of African Americans, and I remember it being a classroom experience where you could hear a pin drop. Everybody was just totally captured by everything he was saying. So it was an incredible experience for sure. And his book, his experiences, et cetera, obviously were very influential on just the way I think about the world.

    Dave Zirin:

    Adam McKay, the director and the mind behind Winning Time, I spoke to him before this interview. He described you as a great actor, a natural, brilliant. This is Adam McKay we’re talking about, dude puts out movies like, I eat potato chips. So is this something that you want to do going forwardly, or is this for you, the part, and then it’s back to the classroom?

    Solomon Hughes:

    No, I would love to pursue acting. This realm, when I think of how much I’ve been influenced by film, TV, theater, et cetera, I’m eager to pursue a role in this space to pay back a lot of what I’ve benefited from. So when I hear people talk about they’ve been touched by my performance, that means everything. That means everything. And I think it makes me want to work harder, learn more. I’ve been really blessed because I’ve been able to work with a number of incredibly talented acting coaches. But beyond that, being on the set of Winning Time for two years, I’m around master actors, masters of the crew, the cast, et cetera. Everybody is exceptional with what they do. And again, you’re working with the mind of Adam McKay. I tell people, when I did my in-person audition after I was done and I was leaving, I stopped and I just thanked them for the opportunity.

    I said, “Adam, no matter what happens, regardless of whether I get this job, I just want you to know I am an enormous fan of what you do for this world.” And that’s from the bottom of my heart. And so it’s funny because I felt like there was this moment where I had to really, as I was prepping for the audition, he was going to be in the room, and I was really excited about me meeting Adam McKay, but there was the work that had to be done. I had to really put myself out there. So yeah, I would love to pursue it because there’s so many stories. Dave, you know this. Again, and so talking about people that have influenced me, you are one of those people that has have deeply influenced me because the way you talk about sport, the way so you bring into the conversation, our history, our culture, et cetera, it’s just, you’re an incredible storyteller. And for me, that’s what acting is. It’s being a part of these powerful stories, these powerful narratives that can change people’s hearts and lives.

    Dave Zirin:

    To put it mildly, there’s so many stories that haven’t been told. I read them in nonfiction form and I ask myself, “Where’s the movie?” And the answer often has to do with both not taking sports seriously, it has to do with not taking movies that center black actors seriously. And I think if we are moving beyond that, and there are at least some signs, certainly in Winning Time as part of that, that we’re moving beyond that, I think there’s just potential for an absolute renaissance of tales from the world of athlete activism, but it’s going to take actors who know how to play some very challenging individuals. And that’s where I get to my next question for you, because I think it would be very hard for even a seasoned actor to play Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, because I’ve met Kareem, I’ve interviewed Kareem. His emotions and his thoughts are so deeply internalized. What has been your method been your thought process for expressing the internal life?

    Solomon Hughes:

    Yeah, so because of COVID, there was a delay in completing season one. So we filmed the pilot, and then we had a lot of time off before we came back to film. And up to that point, and again, I went back and read his books, but that additional time just really gave me the opportunity to even further immerse myself in not only what he’s written about himself, but the ecosystem that he came up in. So I wanted to learn more about Harlem. I was already a fan of jazz music, but that was the only thing I was listening to for a year and reading about artists, reading about their backgrounds, his spiritual journey. I started reading the Quran. I’m Christian, I have Muslim friends, had lots of conversations with him, and it was like I wanted to leave no stone unturned in terms of what are some of the things that potentially influenced this life, this greatly lived life.

    The other thing is I think we really benefit from being in this YouTube era, because I got really good at changing up the search terms. And I would find these interviews from the sixties where he’s talking to reporters, and it was incredible. There’s so much content about him and seeing the person, essentially, his journey from his college years as to who he is now, there’s a lot of really, really interesting and compelling content out there. So I think it was… But even with that, Dave, I feel like I just approached it with an immense amount of humility because to your point, he’s going to go down as one of the most important Americans that’s ever lived. I don’t think there’s any… In the world. I don’t think there’s any debate about that. He’s just lived such a full and influential life.

    And so with that said, there’s an immense amount of humility, even when I’m getting ready to step in front of camera that I obviously cannot perfectly portray this man, but I can just out of gratitude, put forth my best effort. I often tell people there, I know that he hasn’t been a big fan of the show, but I think the reality is this, I’m just one of a number of people over time that will step up to be a part of his story, because his story is so massive. Now I met a playwright a few years ago who was working on a play about Kareem, and so his stories, his stories are just so incredible. So I feel like I’m just one of a many I think over time that will have stepped up to try to play this role.

    Dave Zirin:

    Yeah. And how do you wrestle with that? I said in the introduction that of course, that I love the show that a lot of the former Lakers, not fans of the show, to put it mildly. And you’re playing somebody you so clearly admire who has publicly disavowed the show. I’d love to hear your thought process about how you get your head around all of that. And I’d love to know if there has been a subtle reach out from Kareem’s Camp just to give you dap for doing it so well.

    Solomon Hughes:

    No, no, subtle reach out. So, well, when Kareem, when he wrote about it was clear that he said he didn’t watch it. And so I think beyond the pilot. So I think there’s that, that’s just the reality, the hope is that he’ll give it a shot at some point. But I think the reality is there’s a lot of reverence, an immense amount of reverence for him. And so it is something to wrestle with for sure. It is. Every actor that I talk to, it’s tough playing somebody who’s still living for sure. And Spencer Haywood is another person whose story is immense. And he’s shown appreciation for it. And so that means a lot. I think especially when you look at his journey, where he came from and how pivotal that his decisions were in terms of changing the game of basketball, changing the NBA professional sports workers’ rights, et cetera.

    So that was an immense blessing to know that he had watched it and he appreciated it because he really is a central figure when you talk about the history of the NBA. And so I think like anybody, the hope is that he would give it a chance and he’d watch it and maybe have, see our appreciation for him, but if he doesn’t, it is what it is. And it doesn’t change the fact that we’re all influenced by him. We’re all fans. And the other thing I think in terms of how you wrestle with it is I think it’s hard for us to see how impactful we are beyond ourselves. We have our own first person experience. So Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar changed the world. And so I think the idea that somebody would step up and try to tell their story, I’m like “Buckle up.”

    I feel like just get ready. This is when people learn more, because that’s the other thing about this so much fun is people will watch. So I didn’t know that, and I went and read, and I was blown away by that. That’s exactly right. So they were so influential and so many things that were maybe, I want to say, taken for granted in terms of what they started. I think I can only imagine that it’s hard to understand why someone would be that intrigued by your life. But the reality is, again, these men changed the world.

    Dave Zirin:

    Absolutely. And we do a favor for future generations when we show them with three dimensions. Otherwise, all you’re doing is saying to young people, “Look at this amazing person. You could never be them.” Instead of saying, “Look how amazing this person is, what can you learn from them?”

    Solomon Hughes:

    I think that’s exactly right. And I think the other thing is, I think if there is concern over someone who might look at these men in that phase of their lives and be judgmental, I mean, that’s the sanctimonious crowd that you’re never going to please anyway. You’re trying to please someone who is always going to be judgmental. I think when you look at this, and to your point, you see the three dimensions. You see, these are humans who are man pursuing incredibly high goals in the midst of incredibly challenging times. It’s an incredibly compelling story.

    Dave Zirin:

    It is. And for what it’s worth, the relationship between Kareem and Spencer Haywood. And in a way, there’s that kind of subtle generation gap between them and the younger players. They get it in a way, Magic’s crew not is one of my favorite parts about the show and one of the most richly evocative parts about the show, because that tension was always there with that Lakers team, the unsmiling Kareem with the ’60s backdrop and the new Jack Magic with the smile that could light up a room. I mean, that tension is part of what makes it so compelling.

    Solomon Hughes:

    Right. And the fact that they were able to sustain that for so long, and win five championships.

    Dave Zirin:

    Oh, with love and appreciation.

    Solomon Hughes:

    I know. I know.

    Dave Zirin:

    That’s the amazing part. Not trade me, but love and appreciation.

    Solomon Hughes:

    Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

    Dave Zirin:

    Let’s get off Winning Time here for the rest of this. I have a couple questions. I know it’s a lot to talk Winning Time, but you played briefly for the Harlem Globe Trotters, and I’d love to hear about that in general, but you’re working on a script that brings together the modern issues of racism and policing that are so much a part of the current conversation with a historical moment involving the Harlem Globe Trotters, can you speak about that? Because I read a little bit of this, I thought it was brilliant. Please. Thank

    Solomon Hughes:

    You, Dave. Thank you. Yeah, right after college, I didn’t get drafted and I was kind of trying to figure out what was next. And the Globe Charterers, they used to have a team that was essentially comprised of former NBA players and former college players who were aspiring to play professionally. And you would play a series of games, I think it was 14 exhibition games against college teams. In a lot of ways you were basically touring the country and just making people aware that the team would be coming through with the generals later in the year.

    And it’s three months. And some of the players I played with were really amazing people. So it wasn’t a long stint, but it was just enough for me to just really be intrigued by the organization, by the history of the organization. And I tell people in the courses that I’ve taught about sport and race, there’s always a component about the globe charterers, because when you think about the way that they were used by the United States as essentially this commercial to show the world everything is okay with black people, it an incredibly… You’re talking about men who… And this is before basketball had really, really taken off.

    So this was like America’s team. And so the juxtaposition of being black American men in the ’40s, in the ’50s with so much celebrity, but still there are these realities about the lives that you live in America when you’re outside of your uniform. And so what I wanted to do, so I have a few projects in mind, but with this short film, it was capturing this incident that happened in 1983 where three members of the Globetrotters were in Santa Barbara, in between games, window shopping in downtown Santa Barbara, and they were racially profiled and held at gunpoint by the Santa Barbara Police, and I think it was Lou Dunbar, I think it was Lou Dunbar that said there was this moment where they were held at gunpoint and they were being ordered out of their taxi cab, and his flip flop fell off. And you realize, “If I reach back for that, I’m dead.”

    And it’s just that story I tell people, the number of black men in my family that have been in similar situations with the police, where one false move has lethal consequences. Right. It’s really absurd. Right? It’s absurd. I think it’s two things. It’s absurd, but it’s also, it makes sense when you think about the history of this country, the history of race and policing, et cetera. So I’m essentially retelling it in a fictionalized way that kind of captures the sentiments of the ’80s of the Reagan era, because in the ’80s you had very influential black athletes who were supporting Ronald Reagan, and on his second term and the complications of, he presented this message of putting God first. And so I think that was strongly appealing to a lot of black folks who had connections to the church, et cetera. But I think when you look back and you look at his legacy, it’s all performative.

    I mean, putting God first looks a lot different then you’re talking when you’re putting God first, you’re talking about justice, you’re talking about equity, you’re talking about not abandoning cities, abandoning communities. So I think I have a couple goal, I have a couple visions in mind for the Globetrotter story because again, arguably America’s most important sports team and the men amount of labor that they put into this to sustain this very, very important American tradition, I think it’s a story that has to be told, and I’m looking forward to getting this short film up and running, and then I have some longer term feature ideas as well.

    Dave Zirin:

    Amazing. And you explore that contradiction really at the heart of the Globetrotters, which is that they’re this incredible expression of art and athleticism, and there’s also the expectation that they be all about Americana, that they entertain, that they smile in a country where they’re being mistreated at gunpoint in Santa Barbara. To explore that, I mean, is I think one of the great goals of fiction and nonfiction or the kind of fictionally nonfiction expression, biopic art that you’re becoming so accustomed to.

    Solomon Hughes:

    Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think, you said that their job was to smile and to entertain. And again, when you look back like YouTube again, YouTube has just been this great just archival resource. You find all of this footage where they’re playing in these different cities and they’re just delighting throngs of people, and then they get on the bus, drive to the next city, do it again. And it’s just talking about the labor and the contradictions of the realities that they were facing as black men in America. I think it’s… Yeah.

    Dave Zirin:

    Amazing. Solomon Hughes, you’ve been so generous with your time. How can people keep up with you and the, shall we say, giant steps you’ll be taking going forward?

    Solomon Hughes:

    Love that. So I’m on Instagram right now, but I am thinking about creating a website that kind of captures some more of my visions and my goals in terms of how I want to impact this space. But @SolomonYoungHughes is where people can find me online right now on Instagram.

    Dave Zirin:

    Amazing. Hey, thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

    Solomon Hughes:

    Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

    Dave Zirin:

    And should we call you Dr. Hughes? Can I call you Dr. Hughes?

    Solomon Hughes:

    Solomon is perfectly fine.

    Dave Zirin:

    All right. You got it. Thanks so much, Solomon.

    Wow, that was Solomon Hughes, but now I got some choice words. Okay, look, in the early 1970s, the Oakland A’s were a dynasty winning three straight World series led by players like Reggie Jackson, Raleigh Fingers, and Jim Catfish Hunter. They also had a 12 year old kid from the streets of Oaktown who entertained the clubhouse with his dancing moves. This kid’s name was Stanley Burrell, and he had an uncanny resemblance to the great home run king “Hammerin’ Hank Hank Aaron. So they called him Hammer Stanley Burrell took that on as his dancing name, and 15 years later became known to the world as MC Hammer. I tell that story because it speaks to how woven this team is into our collective culture, but I also tell that story because it would not have happened if they were the Idaho A’s or the San Antonio A’s or Yes, the Las Vegas A’s because the Ballad of the funky head hunter, aka MC Hammer is not an A’s story.

    It’s not even a baseball story, it’s an Oakland story. Hell, the unlikely start of Hammer’s career is an Oakland legend, as sure as Huey Newton and Bobby Seal putting out the first issue of the Black Panther speaks while listening to Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man is an Oakland legend, a legend rooted in a truth that perhaps can only be found in Oaktown. And this is because of Oakland that this team, the A’s, has given us more legendary people and moments than we have had any right to expect.

    The Bash brothers, Mark McGuire and Jose Canseco, the famous 20 game winning streak with one of the most inexpensive rosters in the sport and a World series in 1989 that literally cracked the earth open. But now because a billionaire franchise owner who made his fortune by inheriting a sweatshop empire as well as a major league baseball commissioner who really seems to hate the sport of baseball, the as are looking to be leaving Oakland to go to a publicly funded paradise in the Las Vegas desert, I’ve had much to say over the years about how these sweetheart stadium deals fleece taxpayers and the poor about how publicly funded arenas are nothing but monuments to corporate greed about how economists say you’d be better off dropping a billion dollars from a plane and letting people pick up the money and spend it than using the money for a sports complex.

    This is not a debate, it’s a fact. And academics have been putting out the data that proves this for decades. But for the very powerful, these stadium deals are pure gold, a magical alchemy that takes public funds and after being laundered through sports becomes private profit. I have much to say about all of this and to the working people of Vegas, I am so sorry. I am sorry for your schools and hospitals and parks. I am sorry for what is about to happen to you, but I want to focus here not on the Oakland Franchise owner Gap clothing heir John Fisher. I’m not going to focus on the way he sold off every decent player on the team to drive down attendance and then cry poverty in order to facilitate this move. I’m not going to focus on him. He’s nothing. A garbage bag stuffed with spam doing exactly what he was told.

    I want to focus on the person pulling his strings, Major League baseball commissioner Rob Manfred. It was Manfred who did not want a privately funded deal to build a new stadium in Oakland. And it was Manfred who decided that Pilfer tax dollars from Vegas mattered more than decades of loyalty and support given by the people of Oakland to this franchise. I also want to focus on Manfred because this past week in an interview with my man Jun Lee over at ESPN, he exposed his character and it’s rotten to the core. He showed himself not only prepared to gut a great baseball town, but kick it in the teeth on the way out the door. Listen to these comments. The injury is bad enough, the insults far worse, and the lies unendurable. On the A’s relocation he said, “The real question is, what was Oakland prepared to do?”

    There is no Oakland offer, okay? They never got to a point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site. And it’s not just on John Fisher. The community has to provide support. This as the Oakland Mayor’s Office pointed out immediately before that quote even hit the airwaves is simply not true. There were numerous plans on the table, just not one as a wash in public money as the Vegas plan. Manfred was also asked about a recent event where fans filled the stands in protest of the move to Vegas in what was being called a reverse boycott to that Manfred smirked and said, “I mean, it was great. It is great to see what is this year, almost an average major league baseball crowd in the facility for one night. That’s a great thing.” And when Jun Lee pointed out to Manfred that studies say that stadiums do not generate significant local economic growth, he shrugged it off with this pithy observation. “Academics can say whatever they want.”

    Look, this isn’t a baseball commissioner, it’s a sports radio caller. It’s a YouTube commenter, and it’s more evidence that no one dislikes the game of baseball in all its pageantry and joy than Rob Manfred the Grinch of the national pastime. But comparing him to a Dr. Seuss character is too kind. He’s more like Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street. Greed is good, and anything that gets in the way of greed is inherently bad.

    That movie came out in 1987, and if we’ve learned anything since then in this age of decay, it’s that greed isn’t good. Greed destroys communities, greed destroys small towns. Greed destroys I-95 and greed is destroying our cities. And publicly funded stadiums is one of the ways they do it. They take all the joy and community cohesion that baseball can create and use it like a club to attack and alienate the most vulnerable, the very people whose love has made the game everything it is. It’s obscene. Rob Manfred is killing this team. Its future will no longer be in the hearts of the Oakland faithful. Instead, they will be in the Vegas desert to be buried with the rest of the bodies.

    And now we have the part of the show we call, Ask a Sports Scholar, where we ask someone from the world of sports research about what they have learned and what they can teach us. And I’m so proud this week to bring on Professor Amira Rose Davis. Now, we prerecorded this because in addition to being a brilliant scholar, I’m not sure anyone’s life is busier, but here she is. She made the time. She has much to teach Dr. Amira Rose Davis.

    Our next scholar is University of Texas, professor Amira Rose Davis, and I’m so excited to have her on the show. Total Rockstar. Professor Davis is an assistant professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora studies at the University of Texas Austin, where she specializes in 20th century American history with an emphasis on race, gender, sports, and politics. She’s finishing up her first book, something that I have been waiting for for some time, Can’t Eat a Medal: the Lives and Labors of Black Women Athletes in the Age of Jim Crow. Amira Davis, thank you so much for joining us.

    Amira Rose Davis:

    Yeah, thank you. Happy to be here.

    Dave Zirin:

    Oh, I want you to start please by talking about the sports and the angle on those sports that’s your primary area of study.

    Amira Rose Davis:

    Yeah. So I really look at many sports. My primary focus is looking at the long history of black women’s athletic involvement. And so in my book for instance, it spans the beginning of the 20th century, right around the 19 hundreds, all the way up to the early days of Title IX and the 1970s. I also, of course, as you know, do contemporary work along the same themes, but because of that focus, I get to talk about so many sports because black women have played and continue to play a wide variety of sports. So tennis, golf, roller derby, many Olympic sports, especially track and field basketball, of course, boxing, bowling, baseball. So that’s one of the best things I like about my focus of study is if there’s a black woman somewhere playing it I get to kind of jump into that sport for a little while.

    Dave Zirin:

    As you speak I’m reminded of a line in Bill Rhoden’s book Forty Million Dollar Slaves, and I’m paraphrasing, but he said the most striking part about the history of black athletics with regards to women is how little of it has been recorded. How are you able to find the data to put together a book on this?

    Amira Rose Davis:

    Absolutely. I think that it was a topic and perhaps still remains today, that is assumed to have scarcity, assumed to have breadcrumbs. And a lot of that is because there’s not one dedicated archive, especially if you’re thinking about operating at a historian, going into archival spaces. There’s not a archive that’s like, “This is the history of black women in sports read here,” and that means you’re looking for breadcrumbs. But luckily, I was trained up and come from a lineage of black women historians who know how to get that history by searching broad and wide and in depth in certain places. So for me specifically, black newspapers have been a huge resource. The black print media long reported on black women in sports, they included their scores. There was fluff pieces, there was in-depth articles about them throughout the 20th century. So I used those.

    I relied a lot on oral histories, both oral histories that had been recorded over the years, as well as oral history. I conducted myself over the last decade. In addition to those materials, I do a lot of textual analysis. So a lot of times, even if there’s not words describing black women’s history in sports, what there is a lot of pictures. And so analyzing pictures and sometimes moving video and cobbling together, all of these things, oftentimes, I’ll just leave this example on the table, there’ll be like a history of black women.

    And if you look deeply and you ask the right questions, you realize there’s descriptions of their athletic careers in there, whether they were not necessarily elite athlete, they didn’t necessarily go to the Olympics. But part of what I was trying to is find in the book is what the larger landscape of black athletic participation on the women’s side looked like. And so sometimes it’s a neighborhood game or sometimes it’s somebody describing that they played volleyball for years and finding those scraps within larger stories or within papers of their brothers or their fathers or on the little box in the page that nobody’s caring to read is really how I found these voices, and I hope to place them at the center of my work.

    Dave Zirin:

    A counterintuitive question for you, did black women actually have more space and more freedom to play different sports in the early 20th century than white women may have had?

    Amira Rose Davis:

    Yeah, absolutely. And so one of the things… Well, some white women, so basically what you have-

    Dave Zirin:

    Some white women.

    Amira Rose Davis:

    … at the beginning of the 20th century is absolutely a expansion of opportunities for black girls and women that doesn’t look the same in terms of white women, especially if you’re looking at say, the seven sister schools, Smith College, the kind of prim and proper places. You might have golf, you might have tennis, but there was a concerted effort to focus on play days, calisthenics, things that weren’t too strenuous. And so we see a disruption to that mentality in white ethnic women. So it’s no surprise that some of our earliest track and field stars are Babe Dietrich sand from my hometown of Beaumont, Texas. For instance, German immigrant, Polish immigrant like Stella, Stella Walsh, right? These ethnic immigrants had enclaves that expanded athletic opportunities as well.

    And for African-American women, it was no different. There was a feeling in the community that muscular assimilation, the idea that you could prove your fitness for citizenship, you could prove that you were equal to broad society through success, through that black excellence, and that extended to black women, especially if they were ever in competition with white women. And through that mentality, what we saw was the development of athletics at the neighborhood level as well as the school and the collegiate level. And so just a quick stat to kind of ground you with that, by the 1940s, about 85% of colleges for white women that served white women were opposed to varsity athletics, while 75% of black colleges encouraged or supported varsity athletics for black women. So you see there’s a huge disparity in institutionalized opportunities.

    Dave Zirin:

    You came at this subject with a real knowledge base. But what’s something you’ve learned through writing this book that’s really surprised you?

    Amira Rose Davis:

    Yeah, so I think that when I came at this, I was looking for stories and what I realized I was really doing is writing a labor history, particularly about symbol. What I’ve learned and what I’ve been particularly attuned to is the way that beyond just their athletic careers, black women athletes take on these broader cultural meanings as symbols that are kind of conduits for debates. We see this with Serena Williams. We know it in the contemporary sense. I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned and continue to learn from these stories in my project is just how long that history it is. Whether it’s a long history of their athletic activism or a long history of how their symbol, their personhood has been used for political, social, cultural means by other people. I don’t necessarily know if it was a surprise, but I think I’m constantly a student of the ways in which their bodies get projected on.

    Dave Zirin:

    I really want to teach the people watching this show something that maybe they didn’t know before, something very basic and straight up. Can you tell my watchers, my listeners, can you tell them who Roseanne Robinson was?

    Amira Rose Davis:

    Absolutely. Roseanne Robinson. Rose Robinson was a Chicago I multi-sport athlete actually. Her and her two sisters were dominant in track and fields and volleyball. Basketball, among other things. But Rose really rose to prominence through track and field, specifically as a high jumper at the 1959 Pan-American Games in Chicago. She refuses to stand for the anthem. She has a long career of using her athletic background to fuel activism. So actually as a member of CORE in Cleveland, she led efforts in a skating rink, a skate in, which is like a sit-in, but you’re skating to desegregate a place. And one of the reasons she was so effective is because she was so agile, she could evade capture as they were trying to desegregate a skating rink In Cleveland, what she’s perhaps most known for is a time in which making the national track and field team, she was asked along with many black athletes to tour the world in this kind of soft power propaganda effort from the US State Department.

    She declined that offer very publicly saying she has no desire to be pawn in those political games. And about six months later, she was imprisoned on tax evasion charges. She was thrown in jail where she staged a hunger strike. You see pictures of her trial where she’s being carried in because she’s so emaciated from the hunger strike that she can’t walk. She writes about the hunger strike and saying her athletic training has prepared her for this. She looked at it like practice. She looked at it and drew upon the same resource that she does when she’s training her body for athletic events to prepare and sustain a hunger strike. This was over what’s basically $300 roughly today. And so that’s one of the ways we see her athletic activism intersecting with her peace activism, her work as somebody who’s trying to desegregate places. She would ride her bike up and down Route 40 to desegregate diners in her later years of life.

    And it’s just one of these stories that sometimes we miss, but that helps us really understand not only the long history of athletic activism, but how her understanding, like her broader family, her, she had a sister who went to the 1948 Olympics, right? Her sister’s childhood flaunts on the schoolyard, all the opportunities they had to be the Robinson Sisters from Chicago who could beat you at every sport is not only indication of her athletic activism that would happen in later life, but those broad opportunities that we just discussed for black women to be involved in sports and have a platform in which to stand on to speak out.

    Dave Zirin:

    And I think that she’s also very important when we speak about Kaepernick today to say that, wait a minute, protesting during the anthem has a history that arises out of the contradictions of being a black athlete in the United States.

    Amira Rose Davis:

    Absolutely.

    Dave Zirin:

    Yeah. You’re great talking about your areas of study and you’ve educated so many people about a topic that we really need to know more about. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about the push in the Texas State House to eliminate tenure from UT and other public universities. What’s the stake of that fight right now and how does it affect you as a professor?

    Amira Rose Davis:

    Yeah, I mean, we’re living in scary times. It’s not just happening in Texas, although that’s capturing a lot of headlines, but we’re seeing this really assault on higher education across the country. Here in the Texas state as we’ve been down at the Capitol a lot. We had a testimony session on Monday that went into the wee hours of the morning. Everybody coming out opposed to Senate bill 18, which would eradicate tenure here. I’ve likened it to Texas and their weather grid and their ability to say, “Oh, we want an independent grid,” and then we all freeze seemingly once a year. That’s what this would do for the University of Texas and the rest of the higher education systems and colleges and university in the state eradicating tenure, which protects academic freedom, which allows time for innovative research to occur, which protects your right to do things like be critical of big athletic departments or be critical of international politics.

    Those are the concerns on the table. I think one of the bigger concerns is that this was tied in with an anti DEI bill and a critical race theory bill. It’s very much Culture Wars 101, and the threat came because the faculty senate at the University of Texas, Austin affirmed the right of professors to have academic freedom to do their research and also to teach classes on race, on gender, on sexuality, et cetera. And the lieutenant governor didn’t like that and also saw a great opportunity to rile up constituents. And so literally when we’re talking about tenure, we can’t detach it from these broader kind of concerns about DEI because they’re very much being paired together. They want to eliminate tenure so that people who teach about race and gender and ethnicity and people who talk about the long history of power in this country and how it manifests and say words like white supremacy and say words like homophobia, transphobia, it’s very much a attack on that.

    And so the stakes are really high, not only because it kind of severs us from the national higher education landscape, although like I said, this is something that’s happening across the country, but we’re already seeing a brain drain. It’s something that I’m proud to work at the University of Texas, Austin. I think that our departments are amazing. Some of the work being done here is so innovative. The students are phenomenal, and the diversity that is at the university is a credit to it. It’s why it’s so good. And so seeing efforts to attack that have been really disheartening and something that we are all kind of 10 toes on the ground fighting.

    But you can call, you can help. You can post, you continue. And like I said, not only here if you live in Virginia looking at UVA, looking at UNC and in the North Carolina schools, Florida obviously. So just continuing to have that kind of national awareness, I always say is very easy for people up east to say, “Oh, that’s Texas. Oh, that’s Florida.” Or post a meme without seeding them out of the nation. But if it’s happening anywhere, it’s happening in this nation. And so understand that we’re fighting on the ground, but continuing to pay attention to what we’re doing and sending support is much needed.

    Dave Zirin:

    Absolutely. And if we haven’t figured out yet that state lines are no impediment to these laws spreading, then we have truly learned nothing. You see people, I told you she was a rockstar. Professor Davis, Amira Rose Davis, however you would like to be referred to. Thank you so much for appearing here on Edge of Sports.

    Amira Rose Davis:

    Yeah, thanks Dave. Great to see you, congrats on the show and in everything you do. It’s great to see you always

    Dave Zirin:

    Great to see you too. That was awesome. Thank you so much, professor Davis and thank you Solomon Hughes. Thank you everyone here at the Real News Network for this terrific program. Just wait until next week’s show, though. It’s going to make you get all the spell piece in your gonectica zoinks. I am excited already. Please stay frosty. We are out of here. Peace.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • In his latest monologue, Edge of Sports host Dave Zirin takes PGA to task for its planned merger with LIV Golf, a former competitor funded by the Saudi Arabian monarchy.

    Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
    Post-Production: Cameron Granadino


    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Dave Zirin: And now I’ve got some choice words about Saudi Arabia chowing down and digesting the willing meal that is the Professional Golfers Association Tour.

    Okay, look, there was a time in the way distant past; let’s call it May; when the official position of the PGA Tour was that its competitor, the Saudi-backed golf tour known as LIV, was a scandalous, even-odious operation.

    Referring to Saudi Arabia’s horrific human rights record, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan said just last year, “You’d have to be living under a rock to not understand the implications of involving yourself with the Saudis.” But Monahan’s strong comment is now just a reminder that pencils have erasers.

    In news that was initially shocking; but upon reflection, really isn’t show shocking at all; the PGA Tour announced that it will permanently merge with the LIV Tour. As Monahan said, “The game of golf is better for what we’ve done today.”

    Gee, does this mean that Monahan is now living under a rock? If anything, he has come out into the sunlight from beneath his rock, to say that he does understand the implications of involving himself with the Saudis. And those implications are wealth beyond his wildest dreams.

    The Saudi Crown Prince, known as MBS, is promising to invest billions of petro dollars in this merger. In return, the PGA Tour is dropping all litigation against LIV for raiding its talent. And the PGA Tour will get a new name that is at least jointly approved by the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has spearheaded a massive crackdown on dissent in the kingdom, and pursued a war in Yemen that has resulted in one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.

    Now way, way back, when the PGA Tour was still protesting LIV’s existence, its leaders claimed to be standing beside 9/11 Families United, which continues to demand, among other things, information about all the nations, especially Saudi Arabia, that helped the hijackers who flew the planes into the towers and Pentagon.

    9/11 Families United’s response to the news of the PGA Tour-LIV merger is scathing. It reads in part: “Our entire 9/11 community has been betrayed by Commissioner Monahan and the PGA, as it appears their concern for our loved ones was merely window dressing in their quest for money.”

    ESPN quoted an anonymous PGA Tour player who said of the day’s news, “It’s insanity. The LIV Tour was dead in the water. It wasn’t working. Now you’re throwing them a life jacket? Is the moral of the story to always take the money?”

    Well, yeah. The moral reminds what Danny DeVito said in the movie Heist: “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.”

    This announcement, I would argue, is best understood as the latest win in the Saudi kingdom’s game of sports-washing, that is using sports as a shiny bauble to legitimize authoritarian regimes, and distract from the regime’s human rights abuses.

    And we got to say, it isn’t surprising that Saudi Arabia would find a willing participant in the PGA Tour: a right-wing, good-old-boy organization, steeped in a good-old-boy brand of racism, sexism, and plantation nostalgia.

    Now it will happily re-embrace golfers it branded as traitors, literally, for leaving for LIV, such as Phil Mickelson, who took $200 million of Saudi money to leave the PGA Tour. At the time he took that nine-figure check, Mickelson said, and I quote, “The Saudis are scary mother bleepers to get involved with.”

    Referring to Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen; who wasn’t just killed, but beheaded and dismembered with a bone saw; Mickelson said, “We know they killed Khashoggi, and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”

    Now, Mickelson later apologized for these comments: not to the Khashoggi family, and not to LGBTQ people. He apologized to the Saud Royal Family.

    The PGA Tour’s lack of human rights principles should surprise only the most naive among us. This is an organization that of course had a soft spot for Donald Trump. But then, of course, Trump also threw his lot in with the LIV Tour as part of his greasy charm offensive towards the Saudi Royal Family.

    Part of the price for getting close to the family was ignoring the murder of Khashoggi. And in return, LIV sent several tournaments to Trump-owned clubs. And a Saudi sovereign wealth fund, led by the crown prince, invested 2 billion in Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s new private equity firm just six months after Trump left office. Disgusting.

    What’s particularly depressing about this episode is that last year Trump presciently, it must be said, mocked to the golfers who stayed with the PGA Tour and got on their high horses about Saudi human rights abuses. I want to read Trump’s words, painful though it may be.

    He wrote on Truth Social, his idiotic social media page, “All those golfers who remain loyal to the very disloyal PGA in all its different forms will pay a big price when the inevitable merger with LIV comes, and you get nothing but a big thank you from PGA officials who are making millions of dollars a year. If you don’t take the money now, you’ll get nothing after the merger takes place, and only say how smart the original signees were.”

    Now, that unnamed PGA Tour player we quoted earlier … who asked whether the moral of this story is to always just take the money … In Trump’s view, clearly that answer is “Yes.” Only suckers look past the money to focus on the blood on the floor.

    That thinking has now won the day among the PGA Tour brass. These are the politics of golf, writ clear and writ large. Authoritarian, angered at the thought of social responsibility, hostile to progress, and always looking for some big whale to suck up to, with no regard to nationality or body count.

    Shame on any of us who thought this could have ended up in any way other than the Saudi Arabian Royal Family gobbling up professional men’s golf, while the ham-faced PGA Tour fat cats look away from Saudi atrocities, and count the cash. Unreal, except all too real.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • After four years as a professional linebacker for football teams in the U.S. and Canada, Aaron Maybin put down his helmet and picked up a range of new hats off the gridiron. As a public school teacher, artist, and activist, Maybin’s best days are still yet to come. Aaron Maybin joins Edge of Sports for a wide-ranging conversation on the boxes athletes get placed in, racism within the NFL, and his life after football.

    Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
    Post-Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
    Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
    Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen


    Transcript

    Dave Zirin:  Welcome to Edge of Sports, the TV show, only on The Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin. This week we have a former NFL player who left the sport to become a teacher, an artist, and a person of great importance in West Baltimore: Aaron Maybin. Also, I have words about the passing of legendary athlete, actor, and organizer Jim Brown, and what there is to learn from his fierce life.

    But first, let’s talk to an author, an artist, an organizer, a teacher, and, oh, by the way, a former NFL player: his name is Aaron Maybin. 

    [SEGMENT BREAK]

    Dave Zirin:  So Aaron Maybin.

    Aaron Maybin:  Yes, sir.

    Dave Zirin:  Great to have you on the show.

    Aaron Maybin:  It’s an honor to be here. I feel like this is long overdue.

    Dave Zirin:  Absolutely. I mean, I want to talk to you about your work. I want to talk to you about your writing. I want to talk to you about Baltimore, but I got to start with the question that I bet my viewers want to know the answer to: Look, people drive themselves into the floor, sometimes into a grave to make the National Football League, but the life clearly did not appeal to you. And I want to ask you why, and I want to ask you if you miss any of it?

    Aaron Maybin:  I feel like that’s an amazing question, and it’s such a unique time to be unpacking that. The short end of that answer is I got to the point in my career where I realized that if I were to drop dead at that moment and the greatest thing that somebody could say about me and my life is that he was a damn good football player, then I wasted a long amount of time in my life. And I think that when you look around at the legacy of a lot of the former athletes that I worshiped coming up and that so many other kids that came from where I came from worshiped, not to say that football was the extent of their life’s work or their legacy, but for the ones that didn’t have the life after. That they could have had and that didn’t find a passion for themselves outside of the game that they really did love.

    Those stories end up being a lot sadder than they are, you know what I mean? Great. I think about idols of mine that I had growing up, the Muhammad Alis of the world, the Jim Browns of the world at that time. God rest his soul. I think that seeing how the conversation about his life that’s taking place right now is somewhat irritating to some people because they feel as though after a man passes away, we only should talk about the highlight reel of his life, but our lives aren’t just our highlight reel. You know what I mean? And if the things that I did on a football field are the greatest representation of who I am as a human being, then I didn’t spend enough time developing myself as a human being.

    Dave Zirin:  An amazing point

    Aaron Maybin:  And I’ve always saw myself and so many other athletes as so much more than that. And I think that it’s a lot easier to put guys in boxes and just accept the fact that we’re one type of way. So when individuals are multifaceted, it’s a lot easier to dismiss them as the outcast when actually that’s a lot more normal than we give credit for. But we just don’t encourage people to explore that side of themselves. That’s not what we celebrate. We don’t celebrate the academic genius or the creative artist. We celebrate the athlete, we celebrate the entertainer. But I think that you’re starting to see a lot of athletes step outside of that box and show sides of themselves that it’s never really been cool to show before. But I think that we’re redefining what that cool looks like by being audacious enough to be ourselves.

    Dave Zirin:  We’re redefining the cool. I love that. And we’re redefining the cool to be holistic in nature.

    Aaron Maybin:  Absolutely.

    Dave Zirin:  This quote I love from James Baldwin. He said, and he’s specifically talking about Black America, and he’s specifically talking about entertainers, which athletes, of course, are under that matrix. He said, “America is a country devoted to the death of the paradox.” Meaning you better stay in your round hole with a round peg and not try to get out of there.

    Aaron Maybin:  And people love to build you up as long as you’re in that space, but the second that you step out of it, they love being able to pull the one Jenga piece out and watch the castle fall. We love playing that game with our celebrities. We’ll build you up just to watch. And I see that with so many. And again, some of it is warranted and I touch on that in a lot of my writing. I think that we’re at a point that we have to really be examining ourselves as a culture and a society. Where does the desire to cancel people come from? You know what I mean? Where does this mob mentality lead us? And I think that if we’re not asking those kinds of critical questions while still understanding that holding people accountable and all of those things are necessary. But it’s possible to hold people accountable without canceling them.

    It’s possible to find each other. It’s possible to live in the gray matter between us than to retreat to our silos of indifference and say, we’re just going to pick our hills to die on. And it’s really tough to, like you said, and I think that this is something that even before the James Baldwins of the world and the Amiri Barakas and all of the great storytellers and world changers in that canon. They were all exploring the same questions and they were looking for the same answers. And I think that today we’re still looking for that same ethos that they channeled back then. And we’re constantly changing as a culture and a society. And how we change, I think, is just as important as the change itself. So looking at ourselves, the ability to look out at the world around us, but then the ability to look ourselves in the mirror and see our own imperfections where we’re falling short and holding ourselves accountable to get better every single day as we’re asking that from others.

    Dave Zirin:  Absolutely. I’m going to talk about Jim Brown later in the show. And one of the things I’ve been saying as people have asked me about him is that it’s so important that we not cancel Jim Brown, and it’s so important that we not genuflect in the face of Jim Brown.

    Aaron Maybin:  You actually wrote my favorite biography of Jim, to be perfectly honest, because I thought that you did that in your writing. I thought that you showed a human being. And I think that too many times we have this heroes complex where we want to see superheroes, but these aren’t superheroes. These are human beings. And the second that we take them off of that pedestal and look at them for the imperfect individuals that they are, they actually are more admirable because you understand what they had to fight through to achieve what they achieved, or in spite of themselves. You know what I mean? We’re able to accomplish certain things that are honorable and good people can do bad things. You know what I mean?

    Dave Zirin:  I’m glad you said that because that’s where the learning begins. Once we start seeing people as three-dimensional, because if you think about it, what is really there to learn from Superman?

    Aaron Maybin:  Nothing.

    Dave Zirin:  Heat vision, stop some bullets, fly. That’s about it. But Batman, there are lessons there.

    Aaron Maybin:  Or even Clark Kent.

    Dave Zirin:  Even Clark Kent.

    Aaron Maybin:  The understanding that on the other side of this indestructible figure, and I think that as a Black man, I’ve internalized that perspective and that struggle a lot more than average people would. Because I think that specifically when you talk about athletes, a lot of us wear that title of indestructibility as a badge of honor. But historically in this country, even from the days of enslavement, Black bodies have always been looked at as indestructible, which is the reason why they were the guinea pigs of our medical field. The first people to be experimented on and dehumanized in a way because you expected them to be able to overcome anything. They survived the middle passage.

    They survived a brutalization that would’ve wiped a weaker people off of the planet. So the idea that you can endure more, the idea that you feel less, the idea that you’re always going to be strong enough to overcome it. Because a LeBron James exists, because a Jim Brown exists. Because somebody that comes from a hood similar to where you come from and is able to scale that caste and class system to the top, that the same reality is not just possible but probable for you, even though we know it’s not. You know what I mean? So the idea that we would internalize those thoughts to the point where we’re putting handicaps on people that in real life don’t have a safety net underneath.

    Dave Zirin:  Everything you’re saying is reminding me of the NFL’s race norming scandal, if folks don’t know what that is, that’s when the NFL wasn’t paying out concussion settlements to Black athletes, to Black NFL veterans because they said, well, their IQ may have dropped from concussions, but our baseline for what their IQ should even be is lower. So an assumed lack of intelligence, basically saying, oh, it’s not the concussions that has them failing these tests. It’s the fact that they have Black skin.

    Aaron Maybin:  And even when you take it a layer deeper, why do they send police officers into Black communities to operate with impunity? You don’t see police brutality in any community where the median income is over $100,000 for the families that live there. So what that says to me, and what the data and what the information says to me, is you send these police officers into communities where people don’t have the money to go out and get lawyers and defend themselves. They don’t have the means financially and socially, economically, to be able to fight back against that system. 

    Think about it from the standpoint of NFL players. Most NFL players are not uber rich, like you would believe. The second, third string guys, the free agents that are bouncing around from team after team, the guys that are on all of the special teams that are getting the majority of those concussions. From these car accident-sized collisions that they’re doing over and over again throughout the course of a season, they’re seen as expendable. One of my best friends who we just buried a couple of months ago, his name was Matthew Rice, nickname Blu, another artist that went to Penn State from Baltimore. Left Penn State, played for several teams: Buffalo Bills, New York Giants, Detroit Lions, before going over to NFL Europe to continue fighting for his professional career. From the day that I met him, he suffered from epilepsy, he suffered from concussions, he suffered from seizures, debilitating seizures. The type that…

    Dave Zirin:  Take over your life, really.

    Aaron Maybin:  Exactly. I’ve been there to experience, you know what I mean? With him – And we lived together and traveled together, this was my brother – Died from brain cancer earlier this year. But from the standpoint of the seizures and the concussions and all of that kind of stuff, the speed at which his body deteriorated once it all got bad is something I’ve never seen before. And there’s no way that all of those years of football, you know what I mean? And we talked about that towards the end, because that’s something that deep down all of us are terrified about.

    Dave Zirin:  But the NFL is so clever though in it’s [inaudible]

    Aaron Maybin:  Because they expect the players like him never to do the class action lawsuit. They expect the players like him never to make a big fuss. Because even at the point of you possibly dying, we have to still acknowledge how much we love this game. And how much we were willing to sacrifice certain things if it gave us an opportunity to change the trajectory of our family’s lives.

    Dave Zirin:  I can’t tell you how many NFL players I’ve interviewed, and I ask them, do you want your son to play in the NFL? And they say, absolutely not. And then I say, do you wish you’d never played in the NFL? And they say, no, I’m glad I played in the NFL. There’s a cognitive dissonance there.

    Aaron Maybin:  It’s the same thing that you get when… No hustler that’s on the street getting money wants that life for your son. But if that is all you had access to, and that allowed you to put food on the table and to keep the lights on and to keep your son out of the harm’s way of a bullet, you think he regrets the fact that he went out there and did what he needed to do?

    Dave Zirin:  What he had to do.

    Aaron Maybin:  You know what I mean? NFL players were mercenaries.

    Dave Zirin:  It’s interesting though. That’s the only sport where you hear that. You’ve got LeBron James’s dream is to play with his son, Bronny. You don’t hear that in NFL circles. It’s hard to speak with you about this and not think about one of those times where the toll on the NFL body was there for the whole country to see. And that’s when Damar Hamlin went down in the Buffalo Bills game against the Cincinnati Bengals. And two questions about that I had for you: The first was your reaction when you saw that, and then the NFL’s ability, in almost real time, to spin that into this kind of Rocky story of Damar Hamlin coming back. And, oh, look at his first words from the hospital. It was, did we win? I don’t know if that’s true, but the NFL was certainly trumpeting that.

    Aaron Maybin:  Exactly. And it’s always hard for me to discuss this because, for several reasons, I feel how I feel. If that young man still wants to go out there and put his body on the line, that’s still his decision to make. And who am I to tell him that’s something that he’s worked his whole life in pursuit of is also the thing you need to walk away from. All players experience that moment. But for each of us, it comes to us differently. And we have to be able to, when I had that moment myself, and I had to accept what this was, what I was doing to myself and really recognize that if this continues, I have to be cool with whatever is the result of this.

    But again, when you’ve never cultivated yourself outside of the field or outside of the arena that you perform in, when you’ve never felt the pride that comes along with being celebrated for something outside of the game. How many players do you think really see the type of success for themselves outside of that game and they’ve been able to do inside? You know what I mean? For a lot of guys, even when you get to college, they don’t encourage you to really go after pursuing a career and a lifestyle that will fulfill you. They want to keep you eligible. They want the product on the field to be number one. They care less about the student athlete thing for the most part. And unless you’re the kind of guy that goes out of his way like I did, and several others that I grew up with did, you really don’t see a life outside of this profession for yourself.

    Dave Zirin:  You talk about achievement and being recognized for achievement off the field, off that kind of hyper gladiatorial arena. You have been celebrated as a community organizer, as a teacher, as a mentor, as an artist, as a writer. And I’m doing the short version of the list.

    Aaron Maybin:  I wear a lot of hats.

    Dave Zirin:  You wear a lot of hats, but you also achieve while wearing these hats, and you inspire while wearing these hats. And I wanted to ask you where that part of you comes from? I feel like from what I know about you, the seed is art and that from which all flows. And I want to know where that comes from, especially for somebody who is clearly on a track at a young age towards professional athletics.

    Aaron Maybin:  Art was always my preferred language method of choice from a young age. I was creating before I could form words and speak. So even at a young age when I was not yet a year old, months old, I’d run around and grab things off of tables and turn it into something in my mind to be sitting there playing with an inanimate object for minutes at a time. And then when I got a little bit older, all of the aluminum foil and the Reynolds wrap around the house started to disappear because I was making action figures and toys to play with. And then my father started to realize that I would run around, I was in perpetual motion as a kid. I would run everywhere. I would never sit still. Every school I went to made attempts to medicate me.

    But one of the things that my parents recognized early on was the only time I would really sit and engage with something was when I was playing a sport. I would key in to whatever my coach was saying. And when I was making art, I would sit still for hours and draw, paint, sculpt, whatever. And my parents, unlike a lot of parents would’ve done at the time, they poured into that. They understood that this is something that we have to nurture. They introduced me to my mentor, Larry Poncho Brown, at a very young age. 

    And especially after my mom’s passing. After my mom passed, I was six years old at the time. I stopped talking. I stopped the joyful kid that was always perpetual motion and all of that, got a lot darker and a lot quieter, and a lot more pensive, and art became how I communicated. The feelings that I was feeling I didn’t really have language for yet. And you add that to the fact that I was functionally illiterate until I was in the sixth grade. I just felt lost during that time and I felt like nobody understood or was trying to understand me in a way that would help. So art was how I expressed what was going on. 

    And before long, I realized that it wasn’t just a therapeutic exercise for me, but it was something that the adults around me celebrated. It was something that they recognized the skill in and said, oh, you got a future in this” And human beings, whether we want to admit it or not, we all have a desire to be appreciated, celebrated. Acknowledged, loved on. And that became an outlet that I saw for myself the first time outside of the athletic arena, that I felt like I was celebrated and appreciated for my skill and my talent. And I wanted to feel more of that. So I started to not just experiment with these things, but pursue mastering those crafts. 

    And as I learned how to read and eventually fell in love with language after being exposed to Black books and the canon of authors that actually wrote with me in mind. And then I realized I was never as dumb as I thought I was, never, it wasn’t that I didn’t love reading, but the books that I was being given. I can’t look at Huckleberry Finn and see myself in that as a kid from West Baltimore. And I didn’t know at that point that there were artists, that there were authors out there that were writing with me in mind, that were writing in a language. If I can read the shorthand of a Mark Twain, or the shorthand of a Shakespeare or anybody else, then why can’t I read the shorthand of a Zora Neale Hurston? Why can’t I read the shorthand? Why isn’t this great American literature? 

    So the second I get exposed to the Richard Wrights and the Zora Neale Hurston’s and the Alice Walkers, and then contemporary guys like Dee Watkins and Sister Soldier, and it goes on and on and on and on. I can talk books and authors all day, but think about how many Black kids in Baltimore don’t realize that they love books because they’ve never been given literature with them in mind. So I realized eventually I needed to start telling my own stories. I didn’t want to trust anybody else to tell my story for me.

    Dave Zirin:  I can’t help thinking that the books you’re describing are the very books they’re trying to ban.

    Aaron Maybin:  Of course, of course. I just did a podcast on that, my most recent podcast was on the banning of books right now in America, because we’re seeing unprecedented… Nazi Germany didn’t have this many books banned. And I think that to put it in its proper context, there was a time that Germany was one of the social capitals of the world. They had a huge LBGTQ community out there. You had gay bars everywhere. 

    Dave Zirin:  It’s where Jews felt safest.

    Aaron Maybin:  You had artists and entertainers of color that would vacation there every year because they felt at home, they felt accepted. You had tourists that would go through there. It was a really beautiful, robust culture over there. And during the Nazification of Germany, you started to see a lot of things that you’re seeing right now in America. You started to see the banning of books and subjects in schools. You started to see a change in the tone of public discourse. You started to see a lot less understanding and a lot more finger pointing and condemnation. You started to see this mob mentality run wild. 

    So when we see these things, a quote that I’ve always had as a north star of mine is, whenever they start banning books, our people need to be running to read them. And that’s whether you agree with them or not. There’s a reason why freedom of speech is the standard in this country, because the second that speech is no longer free, the second that you start to police what somebody says, you’re trying to police what they think as well.

    Dave Zirin:  Absolutely. I wish I had three hours to talk to you. I’m not joking.

    Aaron Maybin:  We could definitely do it all day.

    Dave Zirin:  We got to one question out of 10, which I love, frankly. And I am going to go to my notes though, because this is a question I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time. What is the difference between the Baltimore you know with the Baltimore people think they know?

    Aaron Maybin:  I could talk about this all day. At this point in my life, I’m 35. I’ve accomplished a lot, first round draft pick. You know what I mean?

    Dave Zirin:  Published author on numerous occasions.

    Aaron Maybin:  Published author, nationally award-winning artist. All of those things. I’ve lived in New York before. I’ve lived in Miami before. I’ve lived in Atlanta and South Carolina. I could have chose to put my roots down anywhere. But Baltimore is the only place that I’ve lived that I’ve ever felt at home. Baltimore is home, not just because I was born here, but it’s the only place that feels like home. All of these places that I lived – and granted, there are different factors that contribute to this, but you feel tolerated. You feel accepted. But you don’t feel wanted. You don’t feel loved. I could sit out on the front stoop of any row house in this city and have conversations with people that would blow your mind. Everything from the food to the tough love that we show to one another, the grit within the charm in this city. I love it. It’s a part of my DNA. 

    And the thing that whenever people hear about our city, you’re hearing information that’s been given to you with an agenda. And the agenda is for you to be afraid of it. The agenda is for you to want it to change. The agenda is for you to fear the people and to fear the culture and all of those things. But all that does is it robs you of the opportunity to fall in love with it the way that I do. Everything from the language to our customs, our quirks, the fact that we will never be a big metropolitan city because we don’t desire to be. The blue collar that’s in our way of living, in our vernacular, in our mindset. That for me is authentic. That for me is home. That for me is love. 

    And of course, you have the other side of the coin. You have the poverty. You have the struggle, you have the segregation. Still to this day, we’re probably one of the most segregated cities in America, because we were the birthplace of redlining. But the thing that most people don’t think about, even when they think about that, is what happens when you take a city as small as Baltimore and chop it up into 300 small neighborhoods? You know what I mean?

    Dave Zirin:  Makes it very difficult to organize, doesn’t it?

    Aaron Maybin:  Absolutely. But the beautiful, unintended result of that is in those 300 little neighborhoods, you have 300 little villages and communities where there’s all the love and affection and intimacy and life and vigor to make life possible, even in those spaces of lack. And for me, I’m never going to stop fighting to make that what people think of when they think of our city. And in order for that to happen, you need to experience more of it. But when all you see is The Wire – Shout out to David Simon and everybody – That’s a part of that because it was an amazing show. But even a show as multilayered as The Wire can’t show you all of the layers of the beautiful tapestry that is our city. 

    So through my artwork, through my writing, through just the way I live my life, I never wanted to be a person that’s preaching at everybody or anything like that, but I want to be an example of how you can live life in a way that improves your community, that shows love to your people, that creates a pathway to success for the youth that are following behind us. That allows us to truly be in a space where we can thrive.

    Dave Zirin:  Aaron Maybin, I’ve wanted to do this for so long. Thank you so much for joining us here on Edge of Sports.

    Aaron Maybin:  Thank you for having me.

    Dave Zirin:  We’ll be back right after this

    [SEGMENT BREAK]

    Dave Zirin:  And now, I have some Choice Words. The alert came across my phone from The New York Times: “Jim Brown died at 87. An acclaimed football player, actor, and civil rights activist, he was accused of domestic violence.” Wow. It was a lot to take in. I had spent four years writing a book about his life called Jim Brown: Last Man Standing, from which much of this, what I’m about to say to you, comes from. As part of that project, I stayed at Brown’s house in the West Hollywood Hills for a week, and despite his age and health, it was difficult to ever imagine this oak tree of a man dying. The Times alert showcased a fool’s errand in its attempt to drill Jim Brown’s life down to 20 words. Here he is being called a civil rights activist when he opposed much of the politics and many of the methods and tactics of the Civil Rights Movement. He derided civil rights marches as “parades” in the 1950s and then again in 2016. 

    That was when he engaged in an ugly, public feud with Rep. John Lewis, whom Brown condemned for questioning Donald Trump’s legitimacy as president. By that time, Brown supported Trump, a position that I argued made sense given his politics, which were both consistent and complicated. Brown supported Richard Nixon in 1968 and spoke at Huey Newton’s funeral in 1989 – Huey Newton being one of the founders of the Black Panther Party. 

    What is not complicated, though, is his treatment of women. But again, to break that down to only “was accused of domestic violence” does both the history and the survivors an injustice. Brown’s life calls for more than genuflection or dismissal, as I said to Aaron Maybin; it demands study. 

    Football is the closest thing we have in this country to a national religion, albeit a religion built on a foundation of crippled apostles and disposable martyrs. In this brutal church, Jim Brown was the closest thing to a warrior-saint. Brown was both statistically and according to awed eyewitnesses perhaps the greatest football player to ever take the field. At six-foot-three and 230 pounds, running a sub-four-and-a-half-second 40-yard dash, he was like a 21st-century Terminator sent back in time to destroy 1950s and ’60s linebackers. In the gospel of football, defensive demons like Dick Butkus or Lawrence Taylor have carried some of that fearful mystique: transforming their opponents into quivering balls of gelatin. But on offense, the all-time great skill players have inspired adulation but never physical fear. On that side of the line of scrimmage, the list of true intimidators began and ended with Jim Brown.

    The statistics that define his time in football are still without equal. Brown played nine years and finished with eight rushing titles, a level of consistent greatness no one has come close to matching. He was the only player to average 100 yards rushing per game over an entire career, getting five yards with every carry. Then there was the most impressive-of-all number: zero. That was the number of games Brown missed over his nine year career. It would be an achievement for a place kicker. But it was especially remarkable given the ungodly workload Brown maintained and the constant punishment he took, touching the ball for roughly 60% of all of the Cleveland Browns’s offensive plays.

    But Brown was also more than an athlete even when he was an athlete. He was, in many respects, the first modern superstar, again as if arriving from the future. In an era before strong sports unions, he organized his locker room to stand up to management on issues great and small, never giving an inch and earning a derisive nickname from team executives: “the locker room lawyer.” Fifteen years before Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists for Black athletes at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Brown was the one who refused to be treated as a second-class citizen because of the color of his skin. In the time before Muhammad Ali “shook up the world” by joining the Nation of Islam and refusing to fight in the Vietnam War, it was Brown whom Ali turned to for advice and support.

    Brown was the first player to use an agent. He was the first superstar to successfully demand that a coach be fired and that released teammates be immediately un-released. He was the first athlete to ever willingly quit his sport in his prime, because his “manhood” was more important to him than enduring the disrespect of management. He was the first Black athlete to be bigger than the league itself. When players like LeBron James have leveraged their own stardom to assert their will on the direction of their teams and their leagues, it all traces back to Brown.

    If that were where Jim Brown’s story ended, it would fill volumes. But his football life was just the opening salvo in a much more sprawling epic. Brown parlayed his athletic fame into Hollywood stardom, where it was thought he could become “the Black John Wayne.” When this path was stymied by the racialized rules of Hollywood, he became the first Black actor to try to rewrite the script by launching his own mainstream, big-time production company to make, as he put it, “Black films for a mass audience,” along with his partner the comedian Richard Pryor, before they had a falling out for the ages. He was an outspoken Black Power icon in the 1960s and spearheaded a network of Black economic unions to build independent hamlets of financial strength in the Black community.

    Brown has had his supporters and detractors. But the common thread that one hears from everyone who has had dealings with him – Dealings good, bad, and ugly – Is that “Jim Brown is above all else, a man.”

    This word “man” might as well have been a birthmark affixed to Brown when he arrived in the world on Feb. 17, 1936. His nickname as a small child was “Man,” and the word “manhood” is the political current that pulses throughout his life.

    Kevin Blackistone wrote in The Washington Post in 2017, this is what he wrote, it’s a great quote, he wrote, “Brown, maybe more so than any other Black athlete the past 50 years, came to be seen as sort of an emperor of Black masculinity and of Black power.” 

    Brown’s assertion of his own unassailable masculinity conjures another legend who was a friend and contemporary: Malcolm X. In his eulogy for the icon of Black empowerment, the actor Ossie Davis said, “Malcolm was our manhood.” Davis, in his stentorian voice, was arguing that Malcolm embodied Black masculinity, valor, and heroism in a society dedicated to treating and labeling Black men as “boys.” Brown quite self-consciously cut himself from that cloth.

    Jim Brown asserted his fierce sense of manhood as a principle of emancipation. On the most hyper-masculine cultural canvases of the United States – NFL football, the Black Power movement, Hollywood’s Blaxploitation era, the gang wars both inside and outside prison walls – Brown made his mark. 

    In the most toxic expression of how our society defines “what makes a man” – The assertion of domination over women – He has left a very different kind of legacy. This history of accusations of violence against women levied against him have scarred his legacy. When pressed about all of these incidents, Brown only said, “There’s been lies written about me, there’s been some truth, too. I’m no angel, but what I do, I tell the truth about.”

    It was not merely that Brown did not take the accusations of violence against women seriously. No one in power really did. Art Modell, the former owner of the Cleveland Browns, said in one interview with a wise-guy smile in place that Brown “got into trouble because of, shall we say, a rough social encounter with a gal, or two, or three.”

    The cases against Brown are extensive. He often said that he has “never been convicted of violence against women,” which is true. But almost all the cases tended to follow a script that was far too common at the time: Women, exclusively Black women, making heinous accusations against Brown, then facing all sorts of harassment and disbelief, and dropping the charges. Brown also shook his head when I asked him about this history, and he only said, “Violence against women… Shit,” as if he could not believe this still followed him so late in life. Yet the cases span the years from 1965 to 1999. It’s a remarkable stretch that cannot be written off as just an endless series of law-and-order conspiracies, coincidences, or bad luck. If we are going to tell Brown’s story, it is irresponsible to not say the names of Brenda Ayres, Eva Bohn-Chin, Debra Clark, and others.

    As the years passed and at least a minority of people started taking these allegations seriously, they prevented him from achieving the kind of mainstream adulation bestowed upon contemporaries like Ali and Bill Russell. Barack Obama, who as president took a particular joy in interacting with Black sports heroes of yesteryear, never invited Brown to the White House, which stung. Donald Trump, however, rolled out the red carpet. In December 2016, the president-elect sat down with Brown and former NFL player Ray Lewis. Brown left the meeting saying, “I fell in love with [Trump] because he really talks about helping Black people.” 

    If we understand Jim Brown’s actual political beliefs over the last 50 years – And not the beliefs we projected onto him – His meeting with Trump should have surprised no one. His history shows that in addition to being a great football player, legendary tough guy, and anti-racist icon, Brown was always a mess of political contradictions. He’s the anti-racist who condemned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the Civil Rights Movement as a waste of time. He’s the NFL rebel who has long been at odds with the NFL Players Association. He was almost alone, almost alone, in fighting for the life of Crip gang founder, multiple-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and author Stan Tookie Williams until Tookie’s last day on death row. He also stood with Donald Trump.

    Meeting Jim Brown in the flesh in 2014, even at his advanced age, almost answered the question for me as to how he could be widely revered despite his history and politics. He projected a sense of strength that made you want – Even with all evidence to the contrary – To be lined up on his side. He walked with a cane as tall and thick as a baby oak. It was a chunk of wood designed to hold up a very specific body; a body that, even with age and a pronounced limp, was striking in its power. He was built like a series of imperfect, craggy cubes, no longer possessing the 47-inch chest and 32-inch waist that made him a Hollywood sex symbol but still looking like he could move a mountain. Yes, he needed that cane to walk. He could not turn his neck. His hands could no longer grip objects with anything close to full strength. But he was still Jim Brown: sharp as a tack and made of stone.

    Now I want to say something he said to me. He said, “I’ve always occupied a special position and been able to get certain opportunities because the system wanted to use my talents for economic gain. And as long my talents were relevant, I was relevant. But, the greatest desire in my soul was and is to represent myself as a man and carry myself as a man at all times. I wanted to help others and always credit those who helped me. I wasn’t ‘Jim Brown’ always. One time I was 8 years old, 12 years old, 18 years old. So you can’t look at me or anybody as just one block because it doesn’t all wrap up like a big box with candy and ribbons around it and shit. And it isn’t all negative or positive. It just is what it is.”

    Something documentarian Ken Burns said makes this understandable to me. He said, “We always lament in the superficial media culture that there are no heroes, but that presupposes that a hero is perfect, and what the Greeks have told us for millennia is that a hero isn’t perfect. It’s just the negotiation between a person’s strengths and weaknesses… And sometimes it’s not a negotiation. It’s a war.”

    [SEGMENT BREAK]

    Well that’s all the time we have for this week’s show. Thank you so much to Aaron Maybin for coming in studio and talking to us, thank you so much to everybody out there who’s been supporting Edge of Sports. For everybody out there, I’m Dave Zirin, only on The Real News Network. We are outta here. Peace.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • In this episode of Edge of Sports, host Dave Zirin highlights two takes on the gender politics of sports culture. Dr. Cheryl Cooky joins the Ask a Sports Scholar segment to discuss the history of sports and gender equality, as well as her book, No Slam Dunk: Gender, Sport, and the Unevenness of Social Change. Finally, W. Kamau Bell climbs aboard for a special interview looking back on his career as a media personality, from the early days of Totally Biased to United Shades of America.

    Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
    Post-Production: David Hebden
    Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
    Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen


    Transcript

    Dave Zirin:  Welcome to Edge of Sports, the TV show, only on The Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin, and this week, we have TV host, comedian, and documentary filmmaker, a guy who’s just killing it these days: W. Kamau Bell.

    Also, in Ask a Sports Scholar, I’m talking to Professor Cheryl Cooky at Purdue University in a segment that we call Ask a Sports Scholar. And, I have choice words about Ja Morant and this country’s sick, hypocritical, and altogether racist relationship to the gun, as well as some final thoughts about someone whose name, if you don’t know it, you will: Victor Wembanyama.

    But first, as promised, we have director and executive producer of the HBO documentary 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed, as well as the four-part Peabody Award-winning Showtime docuseries We Need to Talk About Cosby. He won a rack of Emmys for his award-winning CNN docuseries United Shades of America – A show that was canceled, and we are going to speak about that – He is the ACLU Celebrity Ambassador for racial justice: W. Kamau Bell.

    Dave Zirin: First question for you. I got to ask, it’s not a question really. It’s more of a joke that I made up and I figured you of all people would appreciate this as a master of the comic arts. What’s the difference between Kamau Bell and Meryl Streep?

    W. Kamau Bell: Oh my God. What’s the difference between, I don’t know, I can’t even, my brain is broken.

    Dave Zirin: Kamau’s got a bigger trophy room. That actually leads into my first question. You’re getting a lot of shine right now with your projects, and I know it wasn’t always that way. You’ve been in this business a while. How do you understand that yourself? What is it about 2023? What is it about the kind of work you’re doing that’s getting this attention and recognition?

    W. Kamau Bell: I was always the comedian who, especially when I started to really figure out what I wanted to do, that I cared about the outside world and also was always the kind of comedian who didn’t do it the way that I was told we were supposed to do it. I never moved to LA. I didn’t audition for a bunch of things. I didn’t, which none of that’s bad. But I look at a lot of my friends or people, my peers, where they moved to LA and they audition for stuff and they get some things, they don’t get some things. And you can seem like I’m with my kids all the time. I know that guy in that commercial. You know what I mean? I know that guy in that movie or the voice of that cartoon animal is a friend of mine.

    It’s like that, but I didn’t do that stuff. And so I just followed my nose and then found myself surrounded by people who eventually trusted me to do things that I had no qualifications for. And then it’s the man meets the moment or the moment meets the man. Suddenly it’s that weird twisty journey I took, prepared me to do things that I didn’t know that I was preparing to do. And now we’re in this era where, and then it became cool to care. I don’t know if it’s cool to care anymore, but it became cool to care for a while and suddenly I was a guy who had been caring for a while. It was like, “Oh, that guy cares. And he’s funny. I want to care and be funny.” Now I think it’s that thing has been over quoted, but the 10,000-hour rule. I did my 10,000 hours of being me and now the world is ready for it.

    Dave Zirin: Nice. You’re giving me an image of studio executives in the movie The Player gathered around a table saying, “We need someone with that caring feeling.”

    W. Kamau Bell: Exactly. That definitely happened.

    Dave Zirin: Who’s got that care vibe?

    W. Kamau Bell: Years ago, you know my show, The Bell Curve, I did. Which is the thing that the project that really broke me through. I remember being in a manager’s office, a very powerful show business man. Well, he worked for a very powerful management company. He was not powerful at the time, but it was a management company that I really wanted to be a part of because they had everybody. They had every comedian. And he was just there like, “Yeah. I know a lot’s happening with you and there’s something here,” but you can tell he is like, “I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do with it. People laugh when you say things, but you’re not saying things I normally expect people to laugh at. And I know that people are starting to talk about you, but I don’t know what to do.” He didn’t say that, but he never signed me, so clearly he didn’t know what to do with me.

    Dave Zirin: I want to talk to you about the docs that you have out, especially the most recent one. I Am 1000% Me. First, got to ask, because you were talking about how you came up and I know someone who was important to your early career was Chris Rock.

    W. Kamau Bell: Sure.

    Dave Zirin: You mentioned Totally Biased, your talk show that Chris helped facilitate. Here’s my take, I’m totally biased, so this is an agree or disagree question. It was once said about Velvet Underground’s first album that, and you probably know this quote, that, “It only sold 100 copies, but everybody who bought it started a band.” And that’s how I feel about Totally Biased. The legacy is profound. Your thoughts, years after the cancellation as you look back on Totally Biased?

    W. Kamau Bell: Yeah. Last year was the 10-year anniversary and it didn’t sneak up on me. I knew it was coming, but it was just to know that people are still talking about it. I still hear about it. And also it’s that thing now where I’ve talked to fully grown adults who were like, “I was a child.” I’m like, “Oh my God.” And I’ve talked to people who literally said it helped them get into movements and helped them get into a career in activism. And I certainly think that at the time when it was over as much as it hurt, to look up within a couple of years and see John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Samantha B, now the difference between me and them is that they all went to Jon Stewart University. They had a different level of education than I had about being a TV host.

    And then to see Robin [inaudible] show, it felt maybe I was the John the Baptist who got his head chopped off. But then a bunch of Jesus came behind me. And I definitely know the show had an impact and still has an impact. Dwayne Kennedy, who you know, good friend of mine who works on the United Shades of America is always like, “We should start it, we should get it back together.” He wants to start the band up. I was like, “Dude, you are the one who wanted it to end.” The New York Times wrote an article a few years ago about it as a way to say what the impact of the show had been. And a lot of people were on that show like Hari went on. Obviously Hari Kondabolu, The Problem with Apu is a doc that was literally inspired by a segment from Totally Biased.

    Guy Branum has a career. It’s funny, Hasan Minhaj, we kept trying to figure out how to get him in, but we couldn’t. He was definitely in those, we were talking about him in those writers rooms. Pardona Sharela and just the people who were on that show, many of them have gone on to do lots of great things. Oh, Kevin Avery, a young man named Kevin Avery who went on to write for the first two seasons of the John Oliver Show and Win two Emmys. It definitely felt the people who worked on that show and really got what we’re trying to do have gone on to have careers. And that makes me very proud.

    Dave Zirin: Yeah, I know Kevin Avery, of course from the world-famous Denzelits podcast. Which explores all manner of the films of Denzel Washington.

    W. Kamau Bell: Denzel Washington is the greatest actor of all time. That is the [inaudible].

    Dave Zirin: Absolutely. And Jon Stewart University, I was actually a mascot. The Fighting Hasids. But let me ask you this. Well, I Am 1000% Me. You’re coming off this Peabody winning Cosby documentary that shook things up from a news perspective in terms of people. It became a news story that you made this doc. And so assumedly you could have probably picked your project coming out of this success, and this is where you went. Talking about mixed race kids and how they navigate the world. Why was that the choice for you?

    W. Kamau Bell: It really wasn’t like I started working on 1000% Me, when we were still in post-production on the Cosby doc. We were still wrapping it up and HBO approached me and said, “Have you ever thought about directing a doc about your mixed race kids? Or doing something about your mixed race kids?” They didn’t even really know I was working on this Cosby doc because it was just not, we hadn’t made any announcement about it. They just thought, “Oh, United Shades, he could do something about his kids.” And so I was like, “Oh, well I actually am directing now.” And then I was like, “I could do,” and so they, HBO docs are the greatest people in the world and so they just basically let me experiment. And it became this way to experiment on when we first started filming it, it was really just HBO gave us some money and said, “See what you can do. See what you come up with.”

    It was both a low pressure situation because HBO didn’t have a lot of demands and a high pressure situation because me and Melissa decided our kids could be in it. And friends of my oldest daughter, Sammy, were in it. It was like we were using our community to experiment with. But also, no, this was not the pressure of the Cosby doc. Really it was a relief to work on this. And you got to remember, the Cosby doc hadn’t come out yet and I was like, “That Cosby doc might end my whole career.” At least I have this, at least this will come out after my career has ended. And it will be a totally small tiny thing that probably no one will ever notice in the wake of the end of my career. And so it was really refreshing to work on.

    And then the Cosby doc came out and it actually did not end my career and people appreciated it. And I’ve had survivors from who were in the doc say they felt it helped alter the narratives around them and the way in which they’ve been, the media and then even trolls deal with them in a different way now for a lot of them. And so I was just like, “Yay.” And then I realized, “Oh, that’s where 1000% Me is coming out.” And I really still thought this is a tiny thing that involves my kids and their friends. It’s not going to get that attention.

    But then I started getting excited about the fact that it was such a different feeling than the Cosby doc. That it was going to let people who maybe hadn’t heard of me before, maybe the Cosby doc was the first thing they ever saw that I was involved in, to know I’m not just that guy. And so for me it was really great to know that it wasn’t like I was the next, now I’m going to take down somebody else. And the fact that the mixed, that 1000% Me is actually hopeful in a way that most of my work isn’t actually, there’s hope in it, but it doesn’t end in rising hope the way 1000% Me does.

    Dave Zirin: Yeah. I was thinking you might do a Michael Landon doc after Cosby, just all 80s sacred cows called Highway to Hell. The Michael Landon Story.

    W. Kamau Bell: The white dad. Yeah.

    Dave Zirin: The father on different strokes, that could make a hell of a doc.

    W. Kamau Bell: Oh my God.

    Dave Zirin: The Conrad Bean story. But let’s take it to the dock itself. I would look you right in the eye and tell you the truth if I thought your kids dropped the ball. And I would do it happily. Your kids are so cute and they’re so good in this doc. And I’m sure you knew that before you turned the camera on that this would be a winner. What were the conversations like with you and your partner Melissa, though, about do we do this? Do we not do this?

    W. Kamau Bell: A lot of it came out of the, so I guess I’ll just back up and you know this about me. And you’re probably in similar positions sometimes. A lot of people love me. A lot of people hate me. A lot of people can’t stand me. And they let me know in various ways. And especially after the Cosby doc, there’s a lot of heat around me that I really was, I’d be in airports and people would look at me and I would just be like, “Oh, is this it? Is this the moment?” And then I’d be like, “Well, at least they went through security so they don’t have a weapon. I don’t think.” But there would be just-

    Dave Zirin: Unless you’re in Texas.

    W. Kamau Bell: Yeah, yeah. True.

    Dave Zirin: Just kidding. Not really.

    W. Kamau Bell: Yeah. It was really about, so we’d worked hard to keep our kids out of the spotlight of my career and this was a choice to put them right in the middle of it. But we just knew if we were going to make a doc about mixed race kids and not include our kids, it would just seem dishonest. And also our kids would be mad at us. They would just be like, “Why? How could you talk to my friend and not talk to me?” And our kids have been around my career enough. All of them, but especially the two oldest ones that they understand what they’re looking at, they understand they’ve been on set of United Shades. There’s a little bit of excitement of like, “Oh, we finally get to participate.” And even down to the, we rented houses to film in and they brought stuff from our house to set decorate.

    And they were excited about decorating the set. And they brought games so that the other kids could play games while they were waiting to be interviewed. And they brought Uno cards and there was a trampoline at this one house and all the kids were in the trampoline. They were hosting the kids.

    Dave Zirin: That’s amazing.

    W. Kamau Bell: And so they really wanted to be a part of it and really were a part of it. And so it really was just it’s jumping into the deep end of a pool, you grab your nose and you jump in and you just hope it works out. And do everything you can to protect yourself. Wear some floaties if you can’t swim. That’s what we did. And it was scary. It was scary up until the moment it came out. It’s still a little bit, every time I get tagged in a comment on Instagram about the doc, I’m like, “Don’t say anything about my kids.”

    But they are really, my oldest daughter, as she says in the doc, wants to be a musician. For her, it feels like the beginning of a career. For Juno, she’s more like me, I like attention, but I don’t like everybody looking at me. Which is how, I like attention, but don’t look at me while I’m getting attention. She has, her big struggle is, “I was so young back then”, even though she’s two years older now. But they have really enjoyed it. Even my youngest kid, Asha, who was three when we filmed it, just liked the fact that she’s in it. She just likes seeing her face in it.

    Dave Zirin: I turned to my wife during it and I said, “Juno’s nickname should be Juno Carson.” Like Johnny Carson, but Juno Carson because she delivers the line so well. The timing is so good. I was like, “She should.”

    W. Kamau Bell: No, she’s good. We actually call her Kamau Junior. I call her Kamau Junior because I feel very, I can see her brain working, but it doesn’t always come out of her mouth because I used to be like, “I don’t know if I should say this,” But yeah, Juno definitely did the thing.

    Dave Zirin: Kamau Junior’s better than Juno Carson.

    W. Kamau Bell: But you wouldn’t have necessarily known Kamau Jr.

    Dave Zirin: It’s true.

    W. Kamau Bell: You don’t know Juno like I do, Dave.

    Dave Zirin: No, that’s true. Yeah, just a little less. I saw her in a doc and I was like, “She’s funny.”

    W. Kamau Bell: Yeah, she is.

    Dave Zirin: Well question for you on the issue of doing it in the Bay and focusing solely on the Bay. I remember seeing your standup, you introduced me to the concept of Bay Area Brown and what that means. And how much of a conscious choice for you was I’m staying in the Bay because there’s a very specific set of circumstances here? Or was it more just this is my kids’ milieu and I want to explore that?

    W. Kamau Bell: No, we definitely, when we first started talking about it, and this is how it’s like I said, HBO was like, “Whatever you want, however you want to do it, let’s figure it out together.” And so of course we were like, “Oh, we’ll fly all around the country and talk to mixed race kids all around the country.” And then we shot the first weekend in this developmental shoot and we talked to, I don’t know, seven or eight kids that weekend. And after it was over, I was like, “I think we’re done.” It felt like we had already had enough for the film or we had the core of the film. And I knew if we flew around the country, the film was never going to be four hours long. It wasn’t a four part thing. It was only going to be one part. At the most. It could have been maybe an hour and a half.

    I know from United Shades if you shoot too much, you’re just using less of anybody or you’re going to cut people out. You’re going to just end up wasting time and resources and people’s time. What we have here is enough to turn into a film. And also, let’s remember, when we started filming, it was October 2021, COVID was still, it’s still COVID, but it was like, “Oh wait, it hasn’t gone away yet.” Actually my first case of COVID I got during the time we were filming.

    There was also a thing about, it’s just really hard to go out into the world and film right now. And I was also filming United Shade. I knew that it was hard to be out there and also to talk to kids. It felt we have enough here, if this is good, if we do a good job, if HBO is open to it, hopefully we can make more. And we actually, at one point I put in one of the early edition, one of the early rough cuts. Volume one. And they were like, “Take that out.” I was was like, “All right. I tried. I tried.”

    Dave Zirin: Yeah.

    W. Kamau Bell: And then it became about, the Bay Area is a really special place. It’s been like a lot of places, it’s been affected by a lot, but it is a very special place. And there is something specific here. And I wanted people to know this is the Bay Area. Don’t think this is mixed. It very became important to be like, “This is what’s happening here. It’s not the same for mixed kids in Appalachia. For mixed kids in Alabama. For mixed kids in the Bronx. Or mixed kids in Idaho.” It really felt like a time to lean into the Bay Area in this that I love being living here and being here. And it was an opportunity to really lead into what I love about it.

    Dave Zirin: I don’t have to tell you that there are a lot of folks these days who are feeling a little bit down about the present and even about the future. How did working with these young people and interacting with them to this degree, did that change your perception at all about where we’re going?

    W. Kamau Bell: I always feel, Juno told me recently, she’s like, they’re doing some unit in her third grade class about optimists. And she’s like, “Guess who I chose to write about?” And I was like, “Who?” She’s like, “You.” And I was like, “Huh.”

    Dave Zirin: Wow.

    W. Kamau Bell: Am I an optimist? And so I like the fact that she sees me that way. While at the same time I think the only way for me to hold onto optimism is if I think we are doing the work to get us to a better place. For these kids, I am so happy they feel so, especially at their young ages, tuned into the world and so accepting of who they are. But also as we show in the film, by the time you get to some pre-teen kids and some teenagers, that feeling of acceptance starts to get pushed by the outside world.

    And so to me it’s if we all do the work for these kids, then they can stay in this special place. But we all got to do the work. We definitely live at a time where if Ron DeSantis is the next president, I think it’s more likely Trump is president from jail than Ron DeSantis is president. Honestly, I believe that’s true.

    Dave Zirin: I do too.

    W. Kamau Bell: But yeah, we’re definitely living in a time where hard fought things we thought we want are being taken away.

    Dave Zirin: I don’t think Ron DeSantis is ready for prime time. And you’re starting to see that in local elections in Florida as well. LGBTQ Pride as we’re doing this broadcast in Tampa was just canceled. There is a lot that I think people are going to resist when it comes to him going on the national stage.

    W. Kamau Bell: That is what is so weird about, can we talk about that for a second?

    Dave Zirin: Yeah, please.

    W. Kamau Bell: That is what’s so weird about Florida. Florida is a state that is super LGBTQ, separate from the DeSantis part. It’s super LGBTQ-friendly. It’s got a lot of different types of people there especially because of Southern Florida. It’s a very diverse state. There’s a lot of celebrities and wealth there because of the tax. It is a very diverse, upwardly mobile state with a lot of, there’s definitely conservatives there as I’ve seen in United Shades of America. But it’s like he’s acting like Florida isn’t that.

    Dave Zirin: Exactly.

    W. Kamau Bell: He’s acting like he’s the governor of some state in the middle of the country that doesn’t have diversity and doesn’t have an LGBTQ community and also doesn’t have an economy based on those things.

    Dave Zirin: No, that’s a great point. Indeed. My mom’s from Florida and she grew up with people who were from the Dixie South basically. It was Dixie where she grew up. Back of the bus, all of that. And a lot of expat Cubans who are not exactly friendly to progressive politics. And a lot of Jews. I think it’s a unique sauce. Factor in Haiti now. And factor in countries that aren’t as resistant to progressive politics as Cuba. It’s its own soup for sure.

    W. Kamau Bell: But he’s pretending it’s a thin broth and it’s not. That’s why I think it’s so strange about.

    Dave Zirin: No, it’s gumbo. No doubt. I would be remiss if I can’t let you go without asking you about United Shades of America. One of my favorite shows, so incisive. Won enough awards to make the aforementioned Meryl Streep very angry. I heard she’s vicious, come award season. Why was it canceled? What happened?

    W. Kamau Bell: CNN canceled. When they canceled Tucci, I was like, “Oh man.” Tucci won, my last two interviews I was up for, he won them. And his show was doing well. Just forget United Shades and whatever it was doing, Stanley Tucci show was doing well for CNN and doing the thing that show was supposed to do, winning awards. It won a bunch of, it won, I don’t know, it won three or four Emmys in the two seasons it existed. It’s clearly not about these shows not doing well. It’s about the entire direction of the network changing. Think when I got to CNN, I got there and I really felt I could be there because of Bourdain.

    There was, and the news section of CNN was over here and I was in Bourdain town. And I got to follow his show. I got to go with him to Kenya before he passed away. That’s what drove me to CNN. Bourdain wouldn’t be at CNN right now. And so for me, if you don’t want that spirit there, then I’m happy to go because there’s that. Because I don’t do the rest of this stuff. When I knew, and I knew, it’s one of things where you see the writing on the wall before the public sees the writing on the wall. We started, and I was really happy the Cosby doc in some sense was coming out because I was like, “It will define me in a new way for a lot of people and give me something to, if it goes well,” we kept saying, “If it goes well,” and luckily it did go well enough.

    It really was a sense of, I’m already headed a different direction. By the time the general public, and some people really, the funny thing is I was in CNN last week because I did a couple appearances for 1000% Me. There were people in the building who don’t know the show is off. They didn’t really make a big deal out of it. And I didn’t make a big deal out of it. But yeah, it was just, if it was like, “We’re keeping every show except yours.” It would feel like something, I might feel a type of way, although I’m also like, “If you don’t like me, I don’t like you.” But it was the fact that they cleared out the whole, they cleared the whole deck and are clearly going a different direction. And that’s not a direction I’m headed.

    Dave Zirin: And I can’t really understand why a news network would attempt to appeal to the very people calling in bomb threats to their headquarters. That seems like an odd calculation.

    W. Kamau Bell: It’s a very difficult thing. It’s a very, I don’t know, it’s been very publicized. They have people who own lots of stock there who feel like Fox News has gone too far. And so they want to a CNN, Fox News, whatever. Good luck to them. There’s a lot of good people in that building. I know I did good work for them. And I know I did a thing on their network that nobody else was doing and maybe nobody else could do. And so I feel very proud of that work and I also know that because I don’t stop working. I’ll be fine.

    Dave Zirin: Kamau, you’ve been so generous with your time. One last question for you. I do asking people what they’re reading these days, and I’m reading a book, I’ll just shout out Jessica Luther recommended it to me, Boom Town, about the history of Oklahoma City that draws in the Oklahoma City Thunder. It’s an incredible fever dream of America told through the lens of Oklahoma City. Great book. Well what’s you reading these days Kamau?

    W. Kamau Bell: I’m just Reaching for it because I actually, it’s a homework assignment because I’m doing an event with Kwame Alexander. But it’s Why Father’s Cry at Night. And it’s written, some of it is poems, some of it is letters, some of it is essays about being a black father. And I happen to have opinions about being a black father so this is what I’m reading right now.

    Dave Zirin: Wow. Everybody check that out. Why fathers cry at night? Powerful title.

    W. Kamau Bell: Yeah, no, for sure. It’s one of the things you’re like, “I don’t don’t know if I want to read this.” Because it’s making me cry right now.

    Dave Zirin: Yeah. Hell with night. I’m crying at two in the afternoon. But Kamau, I really do appreciate it, man. Thanks so much for joining us here on The Real News Network and Edge of Sports, man.

    W. Kamau Bell: No problem. Thanks for having me. The Last Dance is one of the great documentaries of all time. All right, good talking with you.

    Dave Zirin: Next time. Michael Jordan, let me tell you. Okay. We’ll be back right after this.

    Dave Zirin: And now, I’ve got some choice words. Okay, look, Ja Morant holds the attention of the entire sports media right now, and for all the wrong reasons. The 23-year-old all-star Memphis Grizzlies guard was seen brandishing a gun while laughing and listening to music in a car, riding in the passenger seat while an alleged friend was live-streaming the party over Instagram. This comes just two months after Morant had been suspended from the team and was compelled by the NBA to enter counseling after also showing off a gun on social media.

    And that came on the heels of a series of accusations that Morant had, among other things, flexed the gun during an alleged assault. Now he has been suspended indefinitely from the Memphis Grizzlies and all team functions. Ja Morant, the $200 million point guard, the face of the franchise, the person that Daily Memphian columnist Chris Herrington said to me is, “The most important person to the city since Al Green,” is in danger of throwing it all away.

    Yet, anyone being pious about Morant’s behavior or arguing that he deserves some kind of maximum sanction is engaging, I believe, in some all-NBA hypocrisy. I do not defend treating a gun as a fashion accessory, but I am wondering why Morant is subject to this level of scrutiny, ensuring more time in some therapeutic clinic while this country’s gun addiction rages out of control. Why aren’t GOP politicians who arm their kids to the teeth for Christmas card season, or sport AR-15 lapel pins where flags used to go, compelled to lie on a psychiatrist’s couch?

    This country’s gun addiction is fostered not by young Black men, but by a far right drunk on fear, with visions of race war dancing in their heads. Ja Morant deserves the attention, but he doesn’t deserve to be a symbol for a country that glamorizes, fetishizes, and even deifies the gun, not when we have arrived at a place where these weapons of war have more right to exist than school children. Our culture has been long poisoned, and Ja Morant is a product of that culture.

    Look, everyone should read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, to understand that the embrace of the gun didn’t begin with the marketing of the AR-15, or rap music, or even with the founding of the NRA. It started with Western expansion, when barbarity was justified by vicious racism and the ever-present terror that the oppressed might come looking for payback. When all the dust and debate is cleared, the book makes clear that the roots of the Second Amendment lie in a romantic ode to White vigilantism.

    The support for this kind of violence is seen in presidential wannabe Ron DeSantis’s raising money for Jordan Neely’s killer, which only escalates the probability of more death. And here’s a shocker: The NRA has not stepped forward, as of this discussion, to defend Morant’s right to bear arms. It would actually be smart politically if they did. But racism trumps a political strategy, especially when their billionaire Nazi memorabilia collecting dark money backers demand it.

    The fact of the matter is that until we develop the mass political will to truly challenge the valorization of violence by the NRA, the gun manufacturers, and the fascist right, the bloodshed will continue. So please spare the sanctimony about Morant. He may very well need help, but if he needs professional assistance to wean off his weaponry, then we are going to need a mental health Marshall Plan for the rest of us. For a nation that bans book bags before guns, a collective trip to the couch could not come soon enough.

    Dave Zirin: And now it’s time for our segment, “Ask a Sports Scholar.” This week we have the co-author of several books including No Slam Dunk, Gender Sport, and the unevenness of social change. She’s also a professor of American Studies and Women’s Gender and Sexuality studies at Purdue University. Her name is Cheryl Cooky. How are you?

    Cheryl Cooky: I’m doing great, Dave. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

    Dave Zirin: I’m thrilled to have you. I’ve been reading your stuff for a long time, you are definitely a target for us in terms of someone we wanted for this segment. I’m really interested in the title of one of your books because I think sometimes we’re taught that social progress is this linear formation. Particularly in terms of racism. Oftentimes it’s taught in terms of, I refer to it as segregation, integration, celebration, and yet you write very specifically the unevenness of social change. What do you mean by that especially in regards to gender and sports?

    Cheryl Cooky: Yeah, I think, Dave, you hit the nail on the head, particularly when we talk about the stories and the narratives that we like to tell about progress and history in the sense of there is this real investment in a view of history as happening in a upward and onward progressive trajectory in a very linear upward fashion. And I hear this from students, I hear this from people I talk to. It’s like before Title IX women didn’t play sports, and certainly that’s not the case. I think what we were thinking about when we’re using that term, the unevenness of social change, is the ways in which progress and resistance or progress and stagnation happens simultaneously.

    I think each moment in history when we’re talking about sports and whether it’s the focus is on women and women’s equality, or racial equality, or the intersection of multiple social locations, what we’re really looking at are these moments that can really be best characterized by the tensions and struggles between advancing and moving forward, and maybe the forces of backlash or resistance to that progressive change.

    And that’s really, I think what we were trying to capture in the book is the ways in which a idea or perspective of progress happening in a linear fashion is really simplistic and erases a lot of the nuance in terms of how really important advances get made throughout history, but are also corresponding or happening alongside of oppressive restrictive resistance to that change.

    Dave Zirin: What’s something that you’ve learned by studying coverage and commercials related to women’s sports and related to gender? What’s something you’ve learned that either really surprised you or you think would really surprise our audience?

    Cheryl Cooky: Gosh. Well, I think the one thing that really surprises people when they first hear about it is the longitudinal study that I’ve conducted with Michael Messner at the University of Southern California and some of our colleagues throughout the years, which in that study, what we found was that when we were looking at our particular sample that we focused on, which was televised news and highlights shows, was that in fact, over the course of the 30 years that we’ve been studying that particular area, the coverage of women’s sports has not significantly changed in any meaningful way.

    And in fact, the latest iteration of the study was published in 2019. The coverage of women’s sports was very similar, if not less than the coverage in 1989 when the study first took place. And I think that’s a really surprising piece for people. As a component of that study, we’ve added on online media and social media as the media landscape changed and how people produce and consume data has changed.

    And in fact, looking at legacy media, again in those spaces of online and social media, not a whole lot of coverage of women’s sports, and in fact, it doesn’t exceed double digits. And we think maybe, “Oh, well, there’s more coverage online or there’s more coverage in social media.” And that hasn’t been the case. Where I think the change is happening is really in the niche spaces for women’s sports.

    And I think that’s been one of the areas that’s been most surprising for me is the ways in which, in this current moment, those who are producing content, the decision makers and those who are responsible are now women athletes, former women athletes, women who’ve worked in the industry, in legacy spaces, male dominated spaces, who are now either creating their own content, their own platforms, and really taking the reigns and instead of waiting for change to happen, they’re actually making the change happen for themselves, which I think is surprising in a good way.

    Dave Zirin: Angel Reese, Caitlyn Clark, LSU versus Iowa, NCAA Women’s Finals, higher ratings than the World Series. Are we seeing, if not a revolutionary change, an evolutionary change in terms of the popularity of women’s sports?

    Cheryl Cooky: Gosh, I hope so. Yeah. If you follow the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament this year, gosh, what an exciting event. What a high quality product, really interesting stories you’ve mentioned. I think that we are on the precipice of change. I think maybe the NCAA Final Fours is a snapshot or maybe a piece of that. I don’t know if it’s necessarily the driver. I have somewhat mixed feelings about the, not so much the event itself, but the ways in which the media and social media conversations framed that event.

    And I think on the one hand, the story between Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark really resonates, I think with much of the narratives around sports that we tell, the rivalry, the two teams or the two athletes who are competing against one another at this high level. And it brings an excitement, and it’ll be interesting to see how that translates into next year with respect to ratings, and coverage, and social media content.

    I think in some ways it’s a good thing, for a lack of a better word, that we’re seeing women’s sports covered in those exciting ways and through those narrative structures. At the same time, though, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a paper that I wrote, and it’s in that book, no Slam Dunk with some colleagues that was on the Don Imus incident in 2007, I believe. And the ways in which, at the time we were looking at print media, but the ways in which print news media covered the Final Four event and ways that really focused on the controversy of Don Imus’s comments about the Rutgers Women’s basketball team, which were racist, and sexist, and classist, and problematic on a number of different levels.

    And that actually garnered more coverage than the tournament itself. And in some ways, I feel like that controversy between Angel Reese and Caitlyn Clark resonated in many ways with what we saw back in 2007, particularly the ways in which the racialized and racist commentary happened where you have legacy sports commentators calling players. I don’t know if I can swear on the show, but effing idiots and disparaging her, Angel Reese. And particularly what we’ve seen in the research is that black women, women of color, often face a different scrutiny, a different lens that’s both speaking to racialized sexism and gendered racism.

    And it was unfortunate to see that happen. That’s why I’m a little bit lukewarm in terms of whether this is evolutionary or revolutionary. I think it’s definitely speaking to larger changes that are happening, but also, again, I think echoing that theme of unevenness of social change is really also speaking to some ways in which racism and sexism are still permeating these spaces.

    Dave Zirin: I will say as a note of hope, of course, that the ratings preceded the controversy, which is a good thing. It wasn’t going into the game.

    Dave Zirin: Professor Cheryl Cooky. Yo, thank you so much for joining us here on Edge of Sports here at the Real News Network. Really do appreciate it.

    Cheryl Cooky: Thank you for having me, Dave. Always a pleasure.

    Dave Zirin: And now I just want to end with a segment that I’ve decided to call Hold Up, Wait A Minute. Okay, Look. Victor Wembanyama, the seven-foot-five French teenager who is the most highly touted and hyped incoming NBA player since LeBron James, if not ever, will be going to San Antonio. The NBA lottery balls fell in place and the Spurs franchise forever changed overnight. I love this landing spot for the man they call Wemby.

    Greg Popovich, their Hall of Fame coach, has had experience with two all-time greats, described coming into the league as can’t-miss prospects: David Robinson and Tim Duncan. But here’s the thing about can’t-miss prospects: Sometimes they miss, especially when in an organization that doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing. Ask Luka Dončić, a generationally great player who didn’t even make the playoffs this year because the Dallas Mavericks front office made a series of moves that gutted the franchise.

    But Greg Popovich knows how to coax a Hall of Fame career out of a potential Hall of Famer. And for that reason alone, I’m thrilled with this, because it gives us one of the most beautiful and rare things in sports: seeing someone with limitless potential actually given the space to play like the sky is, in fact, the limit. Victor Wembanyama, Greg Popovich, San Antonio, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

    Well, that’s all the time we have for this week. For The Real News Network, this was Edge of Sports. I’m Dave Zirin. Stay frosty, people. We are out of here. Peace.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • In the premiere episode of the all-new series Edge of Sports, host Dave Zirin interviews DeMaurice Smith, outgoing Executive Director of the NFL Players’ Association. The episode also touches on the controversy surrounding Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson’s new $260 million deal—and how scrutiny regarding players’ salaries is never extended to the big bucks pocketed by franchise owners. Finally, sports journalist Professor Travers joins ‘Ask a Sports Scholar’ to discuss the right-wing hullabaloo over trans kids playing sports. 

    Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
    Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
    Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
    Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Lori Grinker was just an art school student when she was assigned to shoot a project on young boxers under the guidance of legendary trainer Cus D’Amato. It was through this project that she met a 13-year-old Mike Tyson, whose career would blossom at the same time as hers. Throughout her decades as a photographer, Grinker’s work has spanned a range of historical topics, and often found political insight in deeply personal portraits. Lori Grinker joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss two of her books, AfterwarVeterans from a World in Conflict and Mike Tyson

    Studio Production: Dwayne Gladden, Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
    Post-Production: Cameron Granadino


    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Chris Hedges:

    I first encountered Lori Grinker’s remarkable work as a photographer in her book, Afterwar: Veterans From A World in Conflict, where a century of war is represented by and through portraits of individuals and their haunting stories. Her other books include Dear Grinkers, a Photographic Series on Diaspora, Six Days from 40, an installation revolving around her brother’s life and his death from AIDS, and a portrait of Audrey in all the little things which considers her mother’s struggles with cancer and dementia in documentary and still life images.

    Grinker, for an art school photography assignment, was shooting a project on young boxers under the guidance of the legendary trainer Cus D’Amato. Her main focus was a nine-year-old boxer Billy Ham. While photographing him, Cus wandered over and asked why Lori was shooting Ham when the bigger kid in the corner working on a speed bag would one day be the heavyweight champion of the world. The kid was then a 13-year-old Mike Tyson.

    Over the next decade, Lori photographed the coterie that surrounded Mike, Cus’ funeral, going home to Brownsville, old friends, trips abroad, in hotel suites before and after fights, his relationship with Robin Gibbons, their wedding, their divorce, and the training and fights in between until Tyson’s first defeat, the Buster Douglass fight in 1991.

    Joining me to discuss her books Afterwar and Tyson is Lori Grinker. I saw a tie-in between the two books, having been very involved in war and a little involved in boxing. They’re very hyper masculine cultures, subcultures. They’re certainly about violence in one form or another. But they’re different in the sense that the Tyson book is about the rise, largely, of a great fighter, whereas Afterwar is really about the after effects of conflict, the wounds, internal and physical, that you carry. Let’s just talk a little bit about the concept behind Afterwar, what it is you were trying to do.

    Lori Grinker:

    Well, I had gone to the Middle East to Israel and the West Bank in the ’80s, and I just got really interested to know what people from both sides were thinking and feeling. I found my way to Beit Halochem which is like a veteran’s home where they had all kinds of physical therapy, but sports and programs for families. I got in and I started photographing there and I started interviewing people from each of the Israeli wars. I really wanted to know what it was like on the other side from the Intifada, from Lebanon, and I started interviewing people from those sides.

    Then it opened up to all these wars. I got interested in Vietnam, veterans going back to Vietnam, looking for closure, meeting with the Vietnamese who were both in the North and the South, both who they fought with and fought against. I started to see how these people had more in common with each other after war than they did with some of the people they left back at home. It was this shared experience and the human cost of war that I wanted to document.

    Chris Hedges:

    Well, some of the stories are pretty horrific, because there’s text describing their ordeal from physical wounds, from psychological wounds. Was there a commonality that you felt between all of these victims?

    Lori Grinker:

    Clearly one commonality is that it never goes away. You live with it and it lives on in you for the rest of your life. You’re never the same person after. I think that for me, as somebody who would never experience war, I really wanted to understand what that was and to understand the mechanisms of all these wars. Instead of judging these people, no matter which side they were on, understanding what brought them there, whether it was the politics of the place, or they were poor people who had another no other way to get an education but join the military, people who were conscripted due to colonialism in World War II from West Africa; What brings people to war? It’s not always this black and white story. Not everybody that goes wants to fight. Not everybody that joins the military does it out of allegiance to their country, or because they want to be a hero. Often, because it’s the only way they can afford to get money and to get an education after. Then of course there are drafts.

    The women were very interesting to me, because we didn’t know that much about women fighting, and why would women go to war? When I spoke to women in Eritrea who fought against the Ethiopians, and they said, well, we had no choice. They were raping our neighbors and killing our fathers. 40% of the fighting army in Eritrea were women, and they helped win the war. It gave me a really clear picture of the history of these wars, what it takes to recover, what kinds of therapies there are in all these different countries, how similar they all are. How so many veterans, like Vietnam veterans, would go back to other countries and really help veterans from the Troubles between Britain and Ireland and help them heal their wounds. It’s like this collective giving back, almost, for ever being in war, but then being on the side of peace and trying to help those people find peace within themselves.

    Chris Hedges:

    That’s what Jung called the wounded healer.

    Lori Grinker:

    Yeah.

    Chris Hedges:

    Let’s talk about just a few of the pictures before we go onto the Tyson book. Is Danny, is it Shemul?

    Lori Grinker:

    Danny Shimoni.

    Chris Hedges:

    Shimoni. Right. Talk about his situation.

    Lori Grinker:

    Well, Danny Shimoni was somebody I met that time when I first went to the Middle East when I first stayed in Israel in 1986, I think it was. Could have been a little earlier. I had photographed him then when I first went, and he was swimming, diving in, and he was missing his ankles and feet. When I went back years later when I was actually working on this book, because then it was a story just about that center, I had to find him, and they helped me find him because they recognized his stumps, because you couldn’t see his head. It was him diving into the pool.

    Chris Hedges:

    It’s on the cover of your book. Yeah.

    Lori Grinker:

    He wanted to be in the project, and he was a manager at Hertz Rent A Car or something. He just talked to me about his experience. And he was in Lebanon, and I never got to go to Lebanon for the book, so we made the chapter just him. The picture became this very peaceful, meditative image of him floating, basically, in that because I couldn’t recreate him diving in. Of course, I interviewed each person, and he was very young, and I think most of those people just don’t really understand what they were fighting for in a lot of these situations.

    Chris Hedges:

    Maria Latifa, you shoot her in Cuba.

    Lori Grinker:

    Maria was one of the people who went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Along with Tina Modati the photographer, she helped start the international brigades. She had been a teacher of Che’s children, so that’s why there’s a picture of him in her house. She and her husband, I think they might have been kicked out of Cuba for their politics. Then they went to Spain to help fight for in the Spanish Civil War.

    Chris Hedges:

    Is it Hetock Ock, is that right?

    Lori Grinker:

    Hatimock. In 1989, I got support from Life Magazine to go to Vietnam with American veterans who are going back looking for closure. One group were bringing this prosthetic technology there. And this was in the North of Vietnam, and they were going to the villages and they set up labs. And it got more sophisticated as time went on, but they would fit each person’s stump at first and then go back to the United States, have these prosthesis made, and then go back and give them to the people. I had been there when they were going back, just by chance. I got to go with them. She had the new leg and she hardly used it. She was still using this heavy old wooden leg that they made there because she said she only had one of the American ones and she wanted to keep it for special occasions as if it was a pair of her nice shoes. She fought in the North against the Americans.

    Chris Hedges:

    I like the book, having covered conflicts, because the people that you portray in the book, especially those who were grievously wounded, are pretty much rendered invisible by the wider society. We don’t see them, we don’t hear their story unless they’re willing to read from the kind of approved 4th of July script.

    Lori Grinker:

    I think after the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq, at least American veterans became more vocal. I think when there were so many problems at VA hospitals and problems with benefits, they became more vocal in that, and there were more people fighting for them for their rights, but I do think it’s still a bit under the radar. And I think some people just want to come back and get back to normal. It takes a while for many of them to see what they’re going through. When I’ve given talks, there are people who, through the stories of these veterans — And I guess I could read a couple of quotes if you wanted.

    Chris Hedges:

    Sure, yeah.

    Lori Grinker:

    They learned about their parents, their fathers, mostly, who never talked about their experience in Vietnam, but they began to understand it by reading other people’s stories in my book. That was very cathartic for them, and that really made my 15 years of documenting these stories worth it.

    Chris Hedges:

    Why don’t you read the section about Oleg?

    Lori Grinker:

    Okay, so Oleg was a Russian soldier who fought in Afghanistan, and he lost his hands, and he said, “I was brought up thinking that the capitalist countries and the communist countries were enemy, so when I joined the army, I believed I was defending our Soviet homeland. We thought we were helping people who asked for it. Half a year into the war, my patriotism faded. In my dreams, I still have hands. When I wake up, I can even feel my fingers and tighten my fist. Although it’s there, it’s not there, it’s as though there’s something invisible covering my hands, and that’s why I can’t see them.” Then we think about the Russians today who are being forced to go fight in Ukraine.

    Chris Hedges:

    Let’s talk about Tyson. You’re in there before anyone knows who Tyson is, he’s living with Cus D’Amato. I found it interesting, in the introduction you began with your own wayward path towards school [laughs]. I guess that gave you a certain street credibility.

    Lori Grinker:

    Yeah, my editor actually… Well anyway, I don’t want to talk too much about details of it, but I guess that was what it was for, the street credibility. It was also that it was true. I was looking for a way out and I was a messed up kid, and certainly life wasn’t anywhere near as difficult as Tyson’s or some of these kids up there, but seeing them made me appreciate my life and the ease of which I had with a lot of things. It opened me up to this whole other world that wasn’t my world. I started to see how boxing was helping these kids. Billy Ham was interesting to me because he was tiny and he had muscles.

    Chris Hedges:

    He was nine years old.

    Lori Grinker:

    Nine-year-old with muscles. There was a girl named Nadia who was a girl. She was older, actually, older than most of the kids, and she’s still up there. I was focusing on this female and this nine-year-old, and that’s when Cus would say, but you should focus on Mike. He’s going to be the next champion. To me, Mike was this big kid who looked like a boxer, and it seemed obvious. I wanted the anomalies. But of course, Mike was part of the group, so I would be photographing him because he was there training with them, and they were a little gang of kids and they would laugh together and do their chores in the house.

    Chris Hedges:

    They were living at Cus D’Amato’s house.

    Lori Grinker:

    There was a group that would live there all the time, a small group. Mike was one of them. Then Billy Ham would come on weekends. His parents lived in a trailer and his father kept the greens of a golf course. He mowed the greens or something like that. On weekends, he would be up there to learn boxing, and he loved it. There were probably a few other kids that came on weekends, and there were a couple of others that were living there at the time.

    Chris Hedges:

    Having observed the culture — Before we get into Tyson — And it is its own culture, what are your takeaways from it? How would you define it?

    Lori Grinker:

    Well, I was a student when I first went up there, and I was a staunch feminist from my teen years, and I found it a bit anti-female or sexist in some of the conversations. I would try to correct them. I would try to teach them. Then I realized, if I’m going to be doing this, I’m not there to change who they are. I’m there to document their lives. That taught me that there’s certain boundaries you don’t pass when you’re being a journalist. I was an art student, but this was a journalism class, and it was my first and only journalism class. I didn’t never study journalism, but I learned that lesson there. I was more the observer.

    What drew me to it was the camaraderie between them all, the support between them all, this crazy household of Cus and Camille and these kids. It’s this older couple taking care of this mix of kids, and all connected to boxing. Jim Jacobs was my entree into the world, and he was the co-manager. He was also a handball champion and a comic book collector. I had photographed him for a seminar that was being taught at The New School on Muhammad Ali, and he was one of the guests. He started talking about Cus and the kids upstate. I said, oh, I have to do a photo project. Can I come upstate? He talked to Cus and they let me come up.

    Visually, it was very interesting. You had all these different ages of kids, you had this older couple, you had the gym, which was a fantastic atmosphere, and you had the training. The training was intense and almost like choreography at times, the stretching and the movements and the concentration. What was really interesting about Mike was how studious he was. He was so determined. Every word Cus said, he hung onto. He would read books and he would watch fight films up in the attic.

    Chris Hedges:

    [inaudible 00:19:53] a picture of that. Looking at Super Eight movies or something [crosstalk] automatic.

    Lori Grinker:

    Because Jim owned the big fights with Bill Cayton and they were the co-managers, so they had a fight film archive. He had access to everything. I remember taking those pictures. I had no idea how to do that. It was so dark, and obviously it was all film, and I was just learning how to take pictures. They laughed a lot. Camille kept a really tight ship, and they all did their chores and they cleaned up after dinner.

    Chris Hedges:

    We have a couple fold out pages. My favorite is the fold out into three pictures of Cus D’Amato, who’s in a bathrobe, he’s probably in his 70s — Who knows how old he is at the time.

    Lori Grinker:

    Yeah, I mean —

    Chris Hedges:

    Showing the Peekaboo Punch.

    Lori Grinker:

    Right.

    Chris Hedges:

    That’s what it’s called, right?

    Lori Grinker:

    Peekaboo style. That was one of the weekends I stayed up there. And we were in the living room, and it was after dinner and Cus was in his bathrobe, and he just starts, it’s boxing all the time. The guys were sitting around and he just started doing his thing. I love that series, because it’s actually five pictures, I think. It opens up with three, and then you fold it the other way and there are two.

    Chris Hedges:

    That’s right.

    Lori Grinker:

    Yeah, it’s really fun. I think it’s fun to see this old guy in his bathrobe doing that.

    Chris Hedges:

    I think a lot of people who don’t follow boxing don’t understand how complicated it is. You have a quote from Tyson in there, which I think is true, about how the best boxer is not the brute, or something, but the one who can think, who’s smart. I think that’s also true, and I thought that you captured that complexity in the book.

    Lori Grinker:

    Thank you. I think that Tyson was saying that it’s a thinking man’s sport, and I didn’t know that, and I agree that a lot of people don’t know that. That’s certainly what Cus brought to it. I think until you’re studying it, maybe nobody knows that. Maybe you just think it’s about being as strong as you can and punching, but there is strategy and even photographing it. And most sports — And I’m not a sports photographer by any means, except for doing some boxing a long time ago — But you have to anticipate what’s going to happen next. If you don’t know all the moves and don’t know how this other fighter thinks, it’s almost like chess; you have to be looking at everything and know what’s coming next, and know what can happen if you move one way. That’s what interested me in it. I don’t like boxing, but once I could see the intelligence of it, it was interesting to watch.

    Chris Hedges:

    So you meet Tyson, he’s a kid, you follow him. There’s a picture. He goes back to Brownsville in his white Rolls Royce. There’s pictures in the hotel suite of him and Robin Gibbon. But it is this meteoric rise — I think he becomes world champion when he is 20. But he changes, and not in good ways. That’s also part of what you’re documenting.

    Lori Grinker:

    Yeah. Well, what happened was actually the white Rolls Royce is Catskill and the blue Rolls Royce’s Brownsville.

    Chris Hedges:

    All right.

    Lori Grinker:

    He went through, well, at least two Rolls Royces during my time. I think he had or has a good soul and a generous heart, and I think he let everybody in. And not everybody was interested in Mike. They were interested in themselves and what they could get from it. I think Robin and her mother were like that, but they really did seem like they were in love in the beginning. They did fight a lot, but it was hard not to believe that they weren’t in love. Then you would see her mother on the phone all the time, and suddenly things were happening. You could see all these plots and you could see all these people arrive suddenly that were now a part of the entourage. Then Don King is there. From the inside you could see these changes happening and you could see Mike changing. Of course, he had all this money, which he never had before. Just before that, he lost Cus.

    I think if Cus hadn’t died, things would’ve been very different. Then of course Jim Jacobs died, and Mike didn’t want to stay with Bill Cayton and Don King was already working on him. Even though Mike had once said he’d never go with Don King, he ended up with Don King. I think he became less and less reliable for me and other photographers who had appointments set up, assignments set up with magazines, and he just wouldn’t show. Mine were usually a little easier than some of these who came with a big production team and lighting and cost a lot of money, and he didn’t show for them either.

    For me, I had started working on Afterwar and I wanted to do other things, and I never intended to make my career about Mike Tyson, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was really dumb luck. Well, not so dumb — I picked a good story, but I never was going to stay there forever, and I certainly wasn’t a celebrity photographer.

    But I think when I put all the pictures together, that’s when I started to see the breadth of what I had. It was a lot of trips up and back and up and back, and I went with a lot of different writers and I’d be on assignments different weekends, and I worked for the big fights doing some of the fights for them, but then all the behind the scenes stuff was mine. I just did that on my own. There were a lot of things Mike wouldn’t let me go to. He never let me go to the big parties. I’m sure he didn’t want me to see what was going on there, or he didn’t want it documented.

    Chris Hedges:

    Well, you have in the book, I think mothers are slipping him phone numbers of their daughters or something.

    Lori Grinker:

    We were driving and we were on in traffic in New York City on the BQE or somewhere going over to Brooklyn, and she literally handed him a piece of paper with her daughter’s number. People were feeding him and pushing his buttons and enabling him. He, I think, went back to the troubled places that Cus really helped him focus on getting out of.

    Chris Hedges:

    Well, he becomes surrounded by predators, really. You intimate that that includes Robin and her mother.

    Lori Grinker:

    It looked like that to me. We came back from Japan together, Robin and I, and her mother came to pick her up from the airport and said, oh, we’ll give you a ride back, but first come to New Jersey. You’re flying all night and you get there in the morning. Of course I say yes, and we go, and I’m taking pictures of Robin in these rooms of this mansion in Bernardsville, New Jersey. Then that night Mike calls me and he is like, so what’d you think of the house? Then they bought it. It seemed very well… Choreographed, I guess.

    Chris Hedges:

    When you watched him as a professional — As you know, I boxed part of the YMCA team in Boston, and I remember my coach telling me that I would never make a good boxer because I didn’t have enough hate in my heart. He had an extremely troubled childhood. There was obviously a lot of anger there. What about that phenomenon of hate in terms of Tyson, or maybe even in terms of the other boxers?

    Lori Grinker:

    Well, I don’t know about the other boxers because that was such a short part of my time there. A couple of other boxers that I photographed were Roberto Duran and Alfredo Benitez. I don’t know about anger… Well they weren’t sophisticated in ways that Mike was. Maybe they weren’t as intelligent. Certainly Muhammad Ali was, and I got to photograph him, and I don’t think he had hate.

    For Mike, yeah, I mean, all the troubles of his youth apparently fueled his abilities to punch like that. He was an extraordinary physique. He was so developed at age 14 that they used to say that they had to show his birth certificate to get him matches in the fights for these boxing clubs because nobody believed he was really 14 and these clubs lied all the time. Mike didn’t have to lie, he was that age and that well developed.

    I think through the book, you see the humanity in him and you see his humor, and I think some of the love of the people around him as well.

    Chris Hedges:

    Well, they’re not mutually exclusive. The guys that I boxed with came from very rough backgrounds, and there was a lot of anger at the circumstances, and yet I think that camaraderie was perhaps the most attractive thing about it. Certainly for me, and amongst ourselves, there was a great deal of kindness and sensitivity. But it doesn’t preclude, I think, that it becomes an outlet for anger, even rage. I think you’re probably right about Muhammad Ali. But there are other fighters, Foreman would be an example, that I think would admit to bringing that kind of anger into the ring.

    Lori Grinker:

    Then they are brothers after.

    Chris Hedges:

    Sometimes [laughs].

    Lori Grinker:

    Well, I mean right after in the ring, they seem to be respectful of each other. I don’t know. It’s a world haven’t been a part of in such a long time. Bruce Silverglade, who owns Gleason’s Gym, wrote a piece for the book, and he’s such a wonderful man, and he’s certainly seen everything boxing has. We did a book signing there, and a couple of years ago I brought my students to the gym and some of them started photographing boxers. It’s interesting that there are champions who have money now, but there’s not been anyone like Tyson and Ali, and I don’t know if there ever will be. There’s also so many people now doing stories and studies on the damaging effects of boxing, of course, brain damage and all that. There are kids there who are from Brownsville or East New York or these neighborhoods that are still really rough, and they’re so dedicated, and they’re from a single mom home or something. But they don’t seem angry, they just seem to want a way out.

    Chris Hedges:

    Well, the saddest part was watching, and they recognize it is perhaps the only way out, and then they have a fight where they just got clobbered and they realize they aren’t going to be a pro. Then you would just watch them deflate. They realized they would spend the rest of their life where they were as a pot washer or construction worker. That was even harder to watch than whatever physical beating they took.

    Lori Grinker:

    Yeah.

    Chris Hedges:

    We’re going to stop there. That was Lori Grinker on her books Afterwar and Tyson. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • The new one-woman play ‘The Road to Damascus’ reinterprets the biblical story of Saul and the tale of Little Red Riding Hood as an allegory for white complicity in the US prison system and the possibility of redemption through anti-racism. Creator and performer Kathy Randels joins Rattling the Bars to discuss her new work.

    Pre-Production: Frances Madeson
    Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden
    Post-Production: Cameron Granadino


    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Mansa Musa:

    Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m Mansa Musa. And today, I have a remarkable woman. I use these terms a lot: remarkable, extraordinary. But in this regard, she encapsulates all of these things: Kathy Randels. Kathy, welcome to Rattling the Bars.

    Kathy Randels:

    Thank you so much, Mansa. It’s great to be here.

    Mansa Musa:

    All right, Kathy. I asked you this off camera, and I was joking with you that it wasn’t going to be easy. How would you describe yourself?

    Kathy Randels:

    All right. Something new comes out every time, right?

    Mansa Musa:

    Always.

    Kathy Randels:

    A preacher’s daughter from Bulbancha, which is the Indigenous name for what people know as the city of New Orleans. Was born and raised here. I am a mother myself to a 16-year old named Emma. I’m a wife to Sean LaRocca. I’m a daughter to some ancestors who have already transitioned.

    And I am someone who has worked inside the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women for 26 years. I’ve seen a whole lot that I don’t like, so I have made a performance piece that is trying to rattle the bars right now, Mansa.

    Mansa Musa:

    And you know what? We going to rattle these bars. Because now, you took a subject matter and turned it into a play. And the subject matter you took in is called The Road to Damascus.

    And in the road to Damascus, as anyone of a Christian persuasion know, the road to Damascus is where Saul, who later became Apostle Paul, who was a known persecutor of Christians. Matter of fact, on the road to Damascus, he had got permission to go find some Christians, bring them back and kill them. He had just stoned Stephen.

    Kathy Randels:

    [inaudible 00:02:15]

    Mansa Musa:

    And you chose The Road to Damascus-

    Kathy Randels:

    Yes, sir.

    Mansa Musa:

    … as a form of generating a play.

    Give our audience a overview of why you chose The Road to Damascus, and a little snippet of what the play is about. And on the heels of that, maybe you can grace us with some talent and music. How’s that sound?

    Kathy Randels:

    That sounds beautiful. Thank you so much. Thanks for this opportunity to speak about it.

    I feel like The Road to Damascus chose me. It was one of those moments where sometimes your intention as an artist is met with a calling from a divine source, or even a human source.

    In this case, I’ve been working on this piece for about three years now, and there were several things that were swirling around. One, on the political spectrum was that last president who I don’t feel like naming right now.

    Mansa Musa:

    He will remain nameless.

    Kathy Randels:

    And especially being in Louisiana, I’m in probably the most progressive area of the State of Louisiana. And being a white person whose family has been in this country, settler colonizers for many years with a tiny bit of Cherokee, about seven generations back.

    Yeah, I was very discouraged by the huge rise of white supremacy that was being not just condoned, but sanctified under the last administration.

    And I came to something that I think Martin Luther King Jr. came to. He said it much more eloquently than me. But I really felt very deeply that racism is not something that we can legislate away. Racism is a spiritual disease.

    And I really felt having grown up in the church and having grappled with church and Christianity for years now; I’m in my mid-50s; I really actually felt like I wanted to go back to the church with this, and to challenge my fellow white Christians, specifically, on the role our church has played in creating white supremacy in all the systems of our country, but especially the criminal legal system. So that’s part one.

    Part two is an amazing woman named Mama Glo Williams. Gloria Dean Williams. She was a member of the LCIW Drama Club for over 20 years.

    Mansa Musa:

    And that’s the drama club you created?

    Kathy Randels:

    Yeah. I started it. And I have many, many partners in the work throughout the years. My main co-director now is a woman named Ausettua AmorAmenkum, who’s also based here in Bulbancha, New Orleans. And yeah, Mama Glo is the woman who served the longest sentence in the State of Louisiana. She did 52 years at LCIW.

    And through another one of our graduates, a woman named Fox Rich, who some of y’all may have already met and heard of. She’s the woman who had a documentary film about her successful struggle to get her husband out of Angola, called Time. That’s the name of their [inaudible 00:06:20], almost on-

    Mansa Musa:

    Netflix, yep.

    Kathy Randels:

    Yep, yep. Actually, it’s on Amazon, I think. Amazon, if y’all want to catch that. I’m a big rabbit chaser, so bear with me, Mansa.

    Mansa Musa:

    Take your time. We having this conversation.

    Kathy Randels:

    A sidebar about Fox is, she’s in a runoff to become our next congresswoman in the State House of Louisiana. So we’re excited about that.

    But I want to come back to the time when Mama Glo was still in prison. After Fox successfully got our governor, John Bel Edwards, to sign her husband’s clemency papers, and when he was out, they were thinking about what they were going to do with their blessing of freedom. And they really felt called to help free more people.

    And they started a participatory defense movement chapter in New Orleans. It’s called PDMNOLA. They wanted to tackle a large case at the beginning, and spoke with Ausettua and I about any women in the drama club. And we were like, “Well, Mama Glo’s the one who’s been there the longest.” And they were like, “Well, let’s try to free Mama Glo.”

    So we worked together to free Mama Glo. Many, many, many: her family, PDMNOLA, our organization called The Graduates, which is a performing ensemble of formerly incarcerated women out of LCIW, VOTE in New Orleans … Many, many, many folks contributed to helping build a case for Mama Glo to be released.

    She was pardoned by the pardon board. And after two years, was still waiting on the governor’s signature. And Fox is originally from a city north in Louisiana called Shreveport. And she shared with me one day that three Black ministers from Shreveport had a meeting with the governor; this was during COVID. Mama Glo had had COVID, and almost died from COVID. And they asked the governor what it would take for him to sign Mama Glo’s papers. And he said, “A Damascus experience.”

    Mansa Musa:

    Hm.

    Kathy Randels:

    And I had been thinking about this piece already. I had been thinking about Saul/Paul’s conversion experience. Thinking about this idea that what all white people; but maybe even especially, white Christians in America; need is a major conversion experience, especially around prisons and the whole philosophy of prisons in our country. That was a Damascus experience for me, to hear that that’s what the governor felt like he needed.

    So when I first started really diving into making the piece, my intention was to perform it for the governor, so that he would see it and feel so moved to sign Mama Glo’s papers.

    Mansa Musa:

    You know what? I like the way you took that when he said “A Damascus experience,” and he said that’s what he needed. But the thing is; now, my question to you is; because we know the Damascus experience is the conversion of Saul into Paul. So when he said that, who did you think he meant to be converted? Him or Mama Glo?

    Kathy Randels:

    I think he was talking about himself.

    Mansa Musa:

    So he was saying in essence; and you can follow me out on this; that he would have to see something in his thinking that would make him have compassion towards Mama Glo. All right?

    Kathy Randels:

    That’s [inaudible 00:10:47]

    Mansa Musa:

    I heard what you said about performing it, that that would be the performance. And if you would’ve been able to see it out, had the performance, had it for the governor, he see the play, he had a conversion, he cut Mama Glo loose, we ride off in the sunset, everybody happy.

    But how did you see it in terms of the reality? Because that ain’t happened. But how do you see it in terms of the reality, of having this information out there? And maybe he could see it and have that conversion? Or if he didn’t see it, others would see it, and be converted to have him converted.

    Kathy Randels:

    Right.

    Mansa Musa:

    You follow me out?

    Kathy Randels:

    Totally. Totally. Well, and then the curve ball is that he finally did have his Damascus experience. And he did sign Mama Glo’s papers before I finished making the piece.

    Mansa Musa:

    Okay.

    Kathy Randels:

    Halfway through making the piece, one of the initial intentions of it went away. So I had to rethink what I was doing with the piece.

    And just on the governor, I will say that he has released a lot of women. Something historic is happening in Louisiana right now. Releasing Mama Glo, he has signed, I think; I have to talk to Ivy Mathis from VOTE, who’s really keeping track of all of this; but he has released at least somewhere between 12 and 15 women within the last six months.

    Mansa Musa:

    Okay. So he has been converted. I’m thinking about Isaiah 61, saying what: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me.” So what, the spirit of the Lord is upon him?

    Kathy Randels:

    Yeah. We could use a little more spirit. There’s a whole lot more people on his desk still.

    Mansa Musa:

    A whole lot more spirit gotta be having.

    Kathy Randels:

    Yeah. We need a little more spirit. But no, we’re in a quote-unquote red state, Mansa.

    Mansa Musa:

    I know exactly where you’re at.

    Kathy Randels:

    And who gets into that position next is scary. We’re looking at … Anyway, don’t let me go down that road!

    Mansa Musa:

    Hey, but Kathy: talk about this here. Okay, let’s go and unpack, why drama?

    In DC they had a group in Lorton. Lorton was the major maximum security prison in the District of Columbia, where I’m at presently. And they had a group down there called the Inner Voices of Lorton.

    Kathy Randels:

    Nice.

    Mansa Musa:

    And the Inner Voices of Lorton, they used drama. And to get out of the prison, they had to get Richard Nixon, of all people, to sign their pardons. And Richard Nixon pardoned quite a number of them as a result of the Inner Voices of Lorton.

    Chris Hodges, he is a known author and professor; wrote a book and conducted and dealt with around plays that had men look at themselves and be able to unpack their trauma through a drama. But my question to you: what made you, one, look at this as something that could be used?

    And two, why did you think that it would be helpful in an environment where it was so much trauma, degradation, a whole lot of ills going on as a result of the system that they inflicted on these women?

    What made you think that this right here, your method, would really have an impact on helping them? And ultimately having a Damascus experience that resulted in 12 women being released to this day … or more?

    Kathy Randels:

    Well, when I started the drama club, I had just graduated from college. I was, I guess, about three years out of college in my mid-20s. And I had just moved back home to Louisiana.

    But I went to university at Northwestern in Chicago. And I had made a solo performance piece. I was a performance studies major. So theater has been, I guess, my talent, my gift, my calling from age 12. And I’ve studied it and practiced it all my life.

    My final performance for my senior project was a piece called Rage With/Without that was about anger, aggression, and violence in women. Which was something that as a white Southern Christian woman, I was not encouraged to express my anger growing up.

    Taking women’s studies classes and also studying theater in college really got me thinking about that. That got me thinking about what emotions do I have access to? And what emotions have I closed myself off from, or not even been invited to experience?

    Then three years after I did that performance, a dear friend of mine, Ruth Carter, was working with some lawyers on the Illinois Clemency Project for battered women in Illinois. That was back in 1994.

    Mansa Musa:

    That’s right.

    Kathy Randels:

    And we’re still dealing with this, right?

    Mansa Musa:

    Mm-hmm.

    Kathy Randels:

    But one of the professors had seen my performance. And I told her that I really wanted to meet some of the women who had killed their abusers to have … My piece was very much based on books. It was a college academic piece. And I really wanted to meet women who had gone through these experiences. So I met them, and I incorporated two of those women’s stories into Rage Within/Without.

    One of the women that I interviewed: I told her I was going back to Louisiana. And she kind of put the finger on a third eye. She was another Damascus moment. She said, “Well, Kathy, when you go back home, you need to work with the women down there.”

    And I was like, “Okay.” I had no idea how I was going to do it. But I wrote a grant; it was a small NEA grant; and I said that I would perform Rage Within/Without at LCIW and do a six-month workshop afterwards.

    I got the grant; I hadn’t talked to anybody at LCIW. Again, the divine channel opened, and the person I called was Lorraine Gibson, who was an incredible social worker. She really believed in serving and helping the women at LCIW, not in punishing them. And she thought this was a good idea.

    She let me come in, did the piece, did the six months. And then a woman named Cheryl Keahey, who is an ancestor now, put the finger on me and said, “Now Kathy, you know you can’t leave.”

    Mansa Musa:

    Oh yeah.

    Kathy Randels:

    And I said, “Okay.”

    Mansa Musa:

    Hey Kathy: now while we got a little time left, give us an overview of what The Road to Damascus is.

    Kathy Randels:

    Okay. So the subtitle is As Told by Grandmother to Little Red. Grandmother is an incarcerated woman; and in many ways, she’s modeled after Mama Glo. She’s been incarcerated for over 50 years. Little Red is her granddaughter, a teenager in many ways modeled after me.

    Saul is the prison guard, and the wolf is … Hmm, I was trying to describe the wolf yesterday. The Wolf is the natural order; divinity untampered with by humanity. So the story tells these four characters, and how they intersect.

    And maybe now would be a good time, if I may, to sing. There’s an opening song I think lays out the themes that are then explored more deeply in the piece.

    Mansa Musa:

    Oh yeah, most definitely. Yep.

    Kathy Randels:

    Is that okay?

    Mansa Musa:

    Yeah, most definitely. Yes.

    Kathy Randels:

    All right. Sorry about that, y’all.

    (singing)

    Mansa Musa:

    Yeah. All right. Tell us where our viewers can get in touch with you, and where our viewers can support [inaudible 00:23:49] theater, this particular play.

    Kathy Randels:

    Thank you. Thank you so much.

    Mansa Musa:

    How they can get in touch with you.

    Kathy Randels:

    Yeah, definitely. Y’all can reach out to me at Kathy, K-A-T-H-Y, @artspotproductions, with an S on the end, dot org. And this piece, we just finished performing the piece here in Bulbancha, New Orleans. And we’re taking it to the state capital next, Baton Rouge, to a place called The Red Shoes. That’s going to be on March 11th at 6:00 PM.

    Then we’re taking it to the Lafayette area on March 18th. That location is still TBD. And then I’m coming up to the Northeast. Well, first The Graduates are going to be performing at the Beyond the Bars conference. I hope some of y’all can come to that at Columbia University.

    We’ll be performing on March 24th, and Mama Glo will be with The Graduates for that performance. And it’s going to be her first time performing in New York. She’s also going to be giving a panel called Mama Glo’s Healing Circle on Sunday, March 26th. That’s at 2:00 PM; that’s also going to be a part of that conference.

    And then finally, The Road to Damascus in New York. We’re going to do it at Union Seminary in the James Chapel. That’s going to be on March 31st and April 1st. And Mama Glo is going to speak after the piece with our audiences there. So I think the best way to find out what’s going on is to come to our website, artspotproductions.org, or shoot me an email.

    And yeah. Thank you so much, Mansa. Thank you for following my tangents. I know I can travel all over the world with words, but you are an amazing, amazing spirit. I feel blessed to have met you here today, and I’m grateful for the work you’re doing.

    Mansa Musa:

    It’s my honor. And we like to remind our Rattling the Bars viewers and listeners: that there you have it: The Real News about The Road to the Damascus, a play by Kathy about conversion. But more importantly, a play about healing and uplifting us in our humanity. In this time and day and age, this is what we really need: an upliftment of our humanity.

    Thank you, Kathy, for being this remarkable woman that you are, and honoring us and gracing us with your song and with your work.

    We ask that all our viewers and listeners continue to support Rattling the Bars and The Real News. As you well know, our comrade, Eddie Conway, has transitioned. And we want to continue to invoke his memory and his good works by continuing this work on Rattling the Bars and The Real News. So we ask that you continue to support Rattling the Bars and The Real News. Thank you very much, and thank you, Kathy.

    Kathy Randels:

    Thank you so much. Y’all have a great day.

    Anncr.:

    Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories, and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity Forever.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Jan. 11, 2023 marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Aaron Swartz. Swartz had a prolific career as a computer programmer: At the age of 12 he created The Info Network, a user-generated encyclopedia widely credited as a precursor to Wikipedia. Swartz’s later work would transform the internet as we know it. He helped co-found Reddit, developed the RSS web feed format, and helped lay the technical foundations of Creative Commons, “a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools.” In 2011, Swartz was arrested and indicted on federal charges after downloading a large number of academic articles from the website JSTOR through the MIT network. A year later, prosecutors added an additional nine felony counts against Swartz, ultimately threatening him with a million dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison. Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment from suicide on Jan. 11, 2013. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with the co-hosts of the Srsly Wrong podcast, Shawn Vuillez and Aaaron Moritz, about the life and legacy of Aaron Swartz. 

    Viewers can learn more about Swartz by watching the documentary The Internet’s Own Boy, and reading his “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.” 

    Pre-Production: James Daley
    Post-Production: Jules Taylor


    TRANSCRIPT

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximilian Alvarez, I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. The Real News is an independent, viewer supported, nonprofit media network. We don’t do ads and we don’t take corporate cash, which is why we need each one of you to support our work so we can keep covering the voices and issues you care about most. So please take a moment and click on the link in the show notes or head on over to therealnews.com/support and become a monthly sustainer of our work, and a huge shout out to all of our members who already contribute. January 11th, 2023 marks the 10 year anniversary of the death of Aaron Swartz. Swartz was a prolific computer programmer, an activist, a prodigy. By the time he was just 12 years old, Swartz created The Info Network, a user generated encyclopedia that is widely credited as a precursor to Wikipedia.

    When he was in his teens, he was involved in the founding of the website Reddit. He helped develop the RSS web feed format, and the technical architecture for Creative Commons, a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools. Throughout his life, Swartz remained a fierce opponent to the enclosure of knowledge for the sake of profit and control. He was a generation defining advocate for the democratization of information and access to that information, and for the not yet fulfilled promise of the digital age to bring humanity closer than we’ve ever been to realizing that goal. And like so many other whistleblowers and advocates fighting for the public to know what the public has an inalienable right to know, from Chelsea Manning, Daniel Hale, and Reality Winner, to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz was persecuted by our government and vilified by many in the media, all for the crime of downloading too many academic journal articles from the website JSTOR, including many that were in the public domain, from a building on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Refusing to accept a guilty plea bargain, Aaron faced trumped up charges by an Obama led Department of Justice looking to make an example out of him. In July of 2011 he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. Then in September the following year, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine additional felony counts, increasing his potential prison time if convicted. And then on January 11th, 2013, Aaron was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment after taking his own life. As the great writer, activist, and friend of Swartz, Corey Doctorow wrote in a blog post the day after Swartz’s death, “Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles, many in the public domain, and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn’t an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard and generally part of the gang.”

    “And Aaron hadn’t done anything with the articles yet, so it seemed likely that it would all just fizzle out. Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR, the journal publisher, backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories. The feds who tried unsuccessfully to nail Swartz for the PACER RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him. The feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Chelsea Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other less credible theories. Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have revolutionized American and worldwide politics. His legacy may still yet do so.” Now I never had the chance to know Aaron personally, but as someone who works in digital media, I’m reminded every single day about the debt that we all owe to Aaron. About how much worse things would be if we weren’t fortunate enough to have him with us for 26 years, however short they were. And I’m reminded of the duty we all have to carry on his fight.

    To commemorate the anniversary of Swartz’s death I recorded a special conversation for the Real News Podcast with Shawn Vulliez and Aaron Moritz, the brilliant hosts of the Srsly Wrong podcast, and co-creators of the animated series Papa & Boy on Means TV. Frankly, we didn’t know if it would be right or appropriate to have Aaron, Shawn, and I try to recount Aaron Swartz’s life and to go through beat by beat the federal government’s persecution of Swartz. And if you are looking for that kind of breakdown, I would highly encourage you to check out the documentary which is titled The Internet’s Own Boy, which in characteristic Swartzian fashion, is freely available to watch online.

    In this conversation, though, Aaron, Shawn, and I reflect on Swartz’s impact on our own lives and on the world we live in today, and we examine the Gorilla Open Access Manifesto, which was written in 2008, and bears Swartz’s name on the byline. And we hope that this conversation will at least be a worthwhile tribute to Aaron Swartz and the movement that he helped grow. So as always, I want to thank all of you for listening, and thank you for caring. And without further ado, here’s my conversation with Aaron and Shawn from the Srsly Wrong Podcast.

    Shawn Vulliez: Hey, I’m Shawn Vulliez, one of the hosts of Srsly Wrong,

    Aaron Moritz: And I’m Aaron Moritz. And yeah, thanks for having us on the show, Max.

    Maximillian Alvarez: Well, it is really, really great to have you guys on The Real News Network. I’ve been a big, big fan of your work for a number of years. And to anyone listening, if you don’t already listen to the Seriously Wrong podcast, then frankly I envy you because you have a real feast before you. Seasons and seasons worth of incredible podcasting that Aaron and Shawn have done. And I’ve been fortunate enough to be a guest on their show a couple of times, and I think it was through listening to you guys that a lot of the stuff that we’re going to be talking about today, your show more than most others I can think of, has really gotten those juices flowing and percolating in my head over the years. And I know that it’s not only a intimate aim of your work that syncs up with everything that Aaron Swartz stood for, everything that the Gorilla Open Access Manifesto is about, but that you yourselves also have your own sorts of histories with this movement, as it were, this open access, open information movement.

    I wanted to just maybe start there before we dig into the manifesto itself and ask if we could go around the table and just… I suppose to honor Aaron on the 10 year anniversary of his tragic death, if we could just say a little bit about how our lives and political and intellectual paths have intersected with Aaron’s and the movement that he was a part of, and just use that as an occasion to help set the table for listeners who may not have known a whole lot about Aaron until now and what he stood for.

    Aaron Moritz: Yeah, I feel like the open access movement and the online activism of the late 2000 early 2010 area was one of the things that really got me interested in politics in the first place. Partially just being a teenager and pirating things that I couldn’t afford and feeling like it was wrong for information not to be able to be free, even in the sense of art I was trying to consume as a kid without a lot of money. But then the side of it coming from Wikipedia and access to information and knowledge and the connections to access to information online, to information freedom and the ability of people to think for themselves and learn for themselves without gatekeepers in the way of it was really always inspiring to me.

    And reading back about Aaron’s story during the run up to this, it really struck me how many different things I use all the time he contributed to, like Creative Commons music we use on the show all the time. We also pay for licenses to music, but Creative Commons stuff, especially early on, was something we used a lot. And also anyone who listens to any podcasts is using RSS all the time. When you submit your podcast to iTunes or Spotify or whatever, it’s input your RSS feed, and each episode comes out through RSS. So I feel like so much of what we do every day, especially us hosting a podcast, is related to Aaron and his work, and the values expressed in the manifesto are like… Always been very dear to me.

    Shawn Vulliez: When I first got involved in politics, when I ascended from being a teenager who didn’t care about politics and thought that politics was a realm of assholes in suits, that was sort of an intractable place of the assholes in suits playing games together in ways that were meaningful to them, but meaningless to me, when I had the kind of transition to becoming a teenager who read Noam Chomsky and started being like, “Oh, holy shit, the news is lying to me,” one of the things that was a paradigm shift for me where I became interested in radical politics was the thought of a paradigm shift around the way we conceive of the internet, rooted in that same kind of stuff around just the abundance of experiencing web piracy as I grew up as someone without any money to spend, and just feeling like it was this incredible… There was a paradigm shift, there was a twist on what was going on.

    We were told that copying is stealing, that listening to music is illegal unless you pay for it. But then at the same time, everyone was doing it and it was completely around you all the time. People giving each other burned CDs and stuff like that. And there was this discontinuity there that the information liberation movement, the open access movement, it flicked a switch in my head of holy shit, the internet could be a library. The internet already is a library, except it’s just illegal to contribute to, it’s illegal to take out books from it. Swartz makes this argument really well in an essay he wrote when he was, I think, 17 in 2004, of just making the basic point that copying isn’t theft. When you steal something, there’s one less thing where you stole it from. But copying is distinct because just because you’re listening to music doesn’t mean someone else can’t listen to it. And it’s absurd to talk about lost potential sales as a legally enforceable thing.

    And he gives this great example in one of the interviews he gave of… If we’re going to be criminally liable for any sort of lost potential sale, then the list would never end of things that stop sales from happening, and that could include brick and mortar libraries, it could include used bookstores, but it could also just include a friend of yours coming over and you spend the afternoon talking to them and going to see a movie, and it’s like, “Do you owe James Cameron now? He lost a potential ticket sale because you got really in enraptured in a conversation with your friend.” So when I look at the trajectory of Aaron Swartz, and there’s all of these ideas that he talks about at different times, and they resonate with me at different times in my political development, but really my key starting point was the piracy question, the information question, the exact things that he’s most famous for is how I became interested in serious politics for the first time.

    And another sense of kinship I feel with him is that he was… As a prodigy and internet kid, he’s going online at 14, interacting with adults in spaces where he got to be treated seriously as an adult and that was part of his development, part of his story, and that resonates so deeply with me, with my experience of being a kid on the internet and the space that the internet gave me to step into the shoes of adulthood, to take the world seriously and be taken seriously. I’ve got a really deep affinity for Aaron Swartz, and knowing his story, there’s so many connections that it’s too many to list.

    Maximillian Alvarez: And I mentioned that listening to your guys’ show over the years was one of the ways that… I guess one of those vectors through which I kind of connected late to Aaron Swartz and the open access movement, and I think it caught my ear when, God, I think, yeah, it must have been in Michigan still listening to the show, and I heard Shawn talk about his time in the Pirate Party in Canada. And I wondered, Shawn, if you could just say a little bit about that for folks listening who may not be familiar with it.

    Shawn Vulliez: So the Pirate Party is a political party movement. There’s pirate parties in a number of countries around the world, some that they’ve been elected in include Germany, Iceland, in the European Union, started in Sweden, I think, in 2006. And when I became interested in information liberation politics and the piracy question, it turned out that the Pirate Party of Canada had just recently registered to run candidates for election in Canada. And I got involved as one of my early political organizing experiences. And because of, I don’t know… There’s a little bit of a… When you’re talking about stuff you did when you’re a kid, it’s hard to… When you’re talking about stuff that you did when you were a young person, the boundaries between what you’re proud of and what you’re a little embarrassed of kind of blur a bit, but I was elected leader of the Pirate Party when I was 21. I was the youngest party leader in Canada.

    I wish I could go back in time and tell myself the things that I know now that could have helped me be a much more effective advocate, but our whole thing was drawing attention to the issue of piracy, access to information, open information in government, giving people access to information that affects their lives, information that affects the way they conceive of government. And that was something I was involved on and off with for a handful of years, maybe four or five. And yeah, definitely really formative political experiences there, and I learned a lot doing that. I think I knew who Aaron Swartz was. I wasn’t super keeping up to date with him. I didn’t know him super well at that time, but the whole sphere, the whole milieu of ideas is so clearly influenced by him, and he’s so clearly influenced by information liberation spaces.

    That experience is part of why I feel such a deep affinity for Aaron Swartz, because he also kind of walked this line between… There’s both the anarchistic side to his politics, like the Gorilla Open Access, the smash and grab, anarchistic, let the scientific papers free to the world, open the doors, WikiLeaks kind of stuff. But then there’s also… He had a very pragmatic, political, he was involved in the formation of progressive super PACs, and he talked about the importance of making tiny tweaks to laws, tiny amendments that could make big impacts. And he had both those kind of sides with him. And that really connects with the way that I think of the Pirate Party, is both having these very radical, reframing, outlandish things, but then also pragmatic step-by-step scientific tactics to achieve that end at the same time. But yeah, I think the Pirate Party’s still elected in Iceland with a handful of people, and they’re kicking ass as far as I know.

    Maximillian Alvarez: Pirate Party going strong. It was so fascinating to kind of hear more about that because I feel like I missed the boat, at least in terms of being part of that movement, being really, I think, aware of and invested in that movement beyond a surface level. I guess folks who listen to the Real News know my story. I grew up quite conservative in Southern California. There weren’t too many occasions for me to, I suppose, just bump into, I don’t know, folks who were members of the Pirate Party and folks who were, I guess, like y’all really developing a political consciousness as part of your engagement with this movement, or at least with the people and ideas that were involved in it. I feel like I’ve learned a lot about that after the fact, and I feel this nostalgia for a time that I didn’t even get to experience as a member of that movement, or as someone who was thinking really critically about these things when Aaron was still alive. And I regret that.

    But in another sense, I think there’s something heartening to the fact that there’s still so many ways that I can see my own interaction with the very things that Aaron was interacting with and prompted a lot of the same thoughts and questions that they prompted in him. I think about the fact that, first of all, I didn’t actually know that Aaron Swartz and I were born in the same year, 1986, and it got me thinking about… There was a kind of viral tweet that went around recently because the famous American broadcaster Barbara Walters just passed away on December 30th. And the person this tweet rightly pointed out that in actual fact, Martin Luther King Jr., Anne Frank, and Barbara Walters were all born in the same year, 1929. But we just have such a hard time grasping those timelines together because Anne Frank and MLK just feel so far in the past, and for that reason, they feel more locked in time, they feel older, but in fact, if they lived in different circumstances, they would’ve been alive as long as Barbara Walters had.

    So I’ve been thinking about those parallel timelines of Aaron and I being born in the same year, being in that very particular space that I guess the three of us are all into some degree, of being in that millennial generation that spent a crucial formative decade of our youth in the analog world, and then we’re the first real generation to be sucked into the transition to the digital world. And I think that there’s something peculiar, there is something that makes our generation unique in that sense, and it’s written into the experiences that are common among us. And this is what I meant when I said that even though I wasn’t thinking the same way way that Aaron Swartz was, like you guys mentioned, I still remember my folks coming home with those bulk packs of burnable disks, because the idea that you could download and mix your own CDs, not as arduous as making a mix tape à la High Fidelity and all that stuff.

    There was something just so catalytic from that. Everyone was doing it. Everyone was excited by it. It really introduced people to a lot of different kinds of music and ways of remixing that music, so on and so forth. And then at the same time I think we all ran up against the same sort of begrudging frustrations as the backlash inevitably came and the tightening of copyright, the pursuit of piracy online, just the receding of that open access back into what felt like a familiar form, what felt like the digital version of going into a Tower Records, and once again, being feeling like, “Well, I have enough money for one of these albums,” or if that. So just I would say that that was a thought that has been really rattling around in my brain while I’ve been preparing for this conversation. But the other thing I’ll say, and then I’ll shut up is, I think that one of the aspects of Aaron Swartz’s life and work and the movement that he was a part of that really started to sink in for me over the past decade is the way that our sense of self and our sense of individual agency is conditioned by the digital environment in ways that many of us don’t ever see. And that was one of Aaron’s big things, right? It’s like once you learn to see the sort of structures and rules and institutions and code, all these things that condition us to believe that reality is meant to look a certain way and that it is permanently supposed to look that way, naturally supposed to look that way, once you see the cracks in that ideological artifice, there’s really no going back.

    And I think that the epiphany that I had when I first left the United States to study abroad, overseas, it was like my first time ever being across the Atlantic. I was very nervous. I was very scared. We did not have the money to be taking trips to Europe when I was a kid. So it was a very new experience to me. And I remember just wanting to walk around everywhere that I was, whether it was Paris or Bristol, England and stuff like that. And I did. And it was great to walk around and explore these places that I’d never been before. And then I realized that I started to walk the same streets while I was there. I started to beat a path as it were, and then I would keep taking that path.

    That was the sort of metaphor for how we navigate the digital realm that I think Aaron was really trying to get us to understand is that there’s so much about the digital era and the technologies that we all take for granted now, whether they be our smartphones, our smart TVs, our computers, our web browsers, our social media apps, so on and so forth. It really does give you the sort of feeling, the illusion of individual agency, like the internet is open for you to navigate and find yourself in whatever corridors you choose to go down, the infinity of all human knowledge is at your fingertips, so on and so forth. And yet we all go to the same five websites. We walk a similar beaten path and there are algorithms and a myriad, other digital functions and forms of conditioning that sort of set us in these paths that make us still believe that we’re free, but act as if we are not.

    In the same way that I think being in a place and thinking, man, I could walk all over this town and find something new, and yet I don’t. I just keep taking the same bus to work and I take the same route back. It’s like I need the fiction of the access that I’m never going to take advantage of to keep me in place. But what I think Aaron and the Open Access movement really pointed out was like, actually, you don’t have as open access as you think of. You think the rest of the city is there for you to walk, but you never actually go down this alleyway. And if you did, you would find that your path was barred.

    Shawn Vulliez: We were kind of sold this vision of a liberatory internet and what’s happened over time, including in the time since Aaron’s passing. On one hand, we have this sort of vision of this open, ultimately accessible internet where everything is at your fingertips, where it’s a participatory world and everyone’s finally empowered. That really is part of the story of the internet. There is incredible potential in the internet, but the Open Access movement is looking to actually actualize those potentialities.

    For example, there’s stuff in the public domain that no one’s able to access online, so people don’t have easy access to it. And by definition it’s public domain. It belongs to everyone. It should be something that people have access to. So then you have things like archive.org steps in there to be the change as it were, and try to create a space for the public domain to be made public. But without that political intervention, without the political intervention of Aaron Swartz and other activists, we have an internet that’s increasingly closed off, increasingly monopolized, increasingly run for profit with paywall after paywall, after paywall that takes the complete liberatory potential of the internet and instead turns it into a shopping mall.

    Aaron Moritz: Yeah. One of the things I really loved about that early period you were describing, and too, I remember bugging my parents to get me a CD burner because the idea was so wild to me that I could just put any songs I wanted on my own CD and just make it, that shift you were describing, I think I was 13 at the time, is very palpable to me. But one of the things I really loved about the early internet culture, and one of the ways Shawn and I met initially actually was because I was making these little video essays on YouTube and wasn’t really thinking of it as something that would make me money.

    So I was using all this copyrighted images, copyrighted footage from TV shows and movies and copyrighted music and feeling like, oh, all these things that have inspired me from the world around me, I can just mix them all together into these little videos I’m making and create something new with them. You can still kind of do that, but there’s a good chance your video will get taken down. It’ll definitely get demonetized and ads put up on it at the very least, but there’s a good chance it would just be taken off the website completely for using copyrighted stuff. So there’s been this real limiting in how you can remix and reuse creative works online. That’s really, it’s felt like a decrease in the available freedom between now and 10 years ago when I was doing those YouTube videos.

    Shawn Vulliez: Yeah. There was a feeling you could just do anything back then in the Napster days and still the sites exist. And actually, I think in some ways the Open Access movement has had some of the biggest successes in the last 10 years. Things like Sci-Hub, Z-Lib, Rest in Peace, LibGen, there’s a number of online libraries that have just been completely awesome, completely in the spirit of this stuff. But at the same time, there is this sort of closing in these walled gardens, the Netflixes, the Spotifys, the things that use the copyright system and all the right ways. And unlike you, nasty, dirty pirates, we’ll give artists one penny for every 10 million downloads they get because we’re not thieves like you dirty, dirty pirates. There’s definitely been a shift over time and talking about the era of CD burners really makes me nostalgic. I wish I could share that feeling with some younger people who maybe never had that era.

    Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. I mean, I’m feeling quite nostalgic about it too, for more reasons than one. I mean, I think that obviously it was still a moment where it felt legitimately open what the future of the internet was going to be and what the future was going to be with the internet in it. And I don’t know, I just don’t feel that anymore. I feel like, again, the sort of forces of control and formalization and surveillance and profit extraction and the enclosure of knowledge, the sort of domination of certain tech giants, whether they be Google or Facebook or something like that, it just feels like as we have progressed down that historical path, my sense of the open potentiality of the future in the digital era feels way less exhilarating, feels way less open as it were.

    And I don’t know, I may be wrong, but that is certainly a distinctively different feeling that I have now compared to the one that I had in, say, the late ’90s and early ’00s, just as an average millennial user of this newfangled thing called the internet. But just by way of getting us to the manifesto itself, we’ll kind of round out by doing a bit of a close reading of that. But I think maybe to make the metaphor a bit stronger, maybe if I can try to salvage this a bit, do you guys remember the movie with Jim Carrey, The Truman Show?

    Aaron Moritz: Yeah. Yeah, I love that.

    Shawn Vulliez: Absolutely. Great film.

    Maximillian Alvarez: We should do an episode about that someday, because I really liked that movie and I don’t think I realized how much I liked it when I first watched it. But I think that’s a perfect example. I mean, one of the creepiest things about that movie, I guess for anyone who hasn’t seen it, it’s this kind of psychological satire movie where Jim Carrey is the first human being to be essentially owned by a corporation. And this god-like director, producer, decides to build an entire world to make a show out of this man Truman, this boy Truman’s life. And so everything in his life is filmed, everyone but him is an actor. Everything is filmed in this giant indoor microcosm where Truman lives his life. And it’s not until, I don’t know, his late 20s, early 30s where he starts to realize that something’s wrong and starts to yearn to escape.

    But what always struck me as a kid watching that and as an adolescent watching that was like, man, he went that long in his life without realizing that something was off. That’s what I’m talking about, right? Because you can create this sort of world that is in fact very enclosed like the world in The Truman Show is, but if you are able to maintain the fiction of openness, if you are able to keep the viability of the dream of exploring someday or someone else could explore if they wanted to, even if I’m not doing that now, even if I’m just going through the same routine, that’s all you need to maintain that system. And that’s what happens in The Truman Show. And that’s like what I think the sort of dissolution, the gradual fading away of the techno utopianism of Web 1.0, right? It started to become clear to me as like, okay, maybe when we talk about the internet as opening all of human knowledge to us and putting it at our fingertips, is that knowledge actually accessible? What do we do with it? Who has access to it?

    And that’s where I think we really get into the meat and potatoes of Aaron Swartz and the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. We’re going to link to it in the show notes for this episode, but I’m sure many folks are familiar with the kind of contents of this manifesto. Or if you’re not, you’re going to at least be familiar with the target of the manifesto. And this is the last thing I’ll say by way of prefacing my connection to Swartz and the manifesto is like, this is something anyone who’s ever spent time on a university campus has experienced, right? Because you go there and through your library access, you now have access to these vast archives that have aggregated all academic journals, academic monographs. I mean, one of the great digitalization projects was Google Books going to libraries and scanning a billion of them. And yet whenever anyone searches for it, you can only see one or two pages of that book. So you know it’s there, but it’s like who gets to actually see it?

    And that’s how it feels when you go trying to do academic research is like you begin to realize how weird it is that all of this knowledge that has been produced, not just recently but in human history, but if you’re talking about recent scholarship, the vast bulk of it, which has been subsidized by public funds for public universities, is now captured and enclosed by for-profit academic journals hidden behind these aggregator archives like JSTOR that are only accessible to people who are paying a lifetimes’ worth of debt in the form of tuition to get access to. There’s something fundamentally fucked up about that. And that is in fact what Aaron Swartz felt. That is why at MIT, he downloaded so many files from the JSTOR archives and that inevitably led to the tragic circumstances and string of events that ultimately led the US government to try to make an example out of him and drive him to taking his own life.

    But I don’t know, it can just seem both so incredibly huge when you think about what he was fighting for. And it can also seem just incredibly, not mundane, but when people hear it, that it’s like, “Wait, Aaron Swartz died because of JSTOR? How the fuck did that happen? These are academic journals?” There does seem to still be some sort of, I think, cognitive dissonance for people in wrapping their heads around why this was such a commitment for Aaron and for other folks who were part of that movement, and also why the government saw such a threat in what he and others were doing in relationship to JSTOR.

    So with that in mind, we’re going to kind of take a page from the Srsly Wrong Podcast, which again, everyone should listen to. Aaron and Shawn not only do great analysis and interviews, but they do incredibly fun and well-produced skits and dramatic readings. So I thought, why don’t we actually read this manifesto because it’s short enough for us to read it, really put people in the mind frame of Aaron Swartz and the co-authors that also helped produce this. Aaron’s name is the one that is on the byline of this manifesto, but others contributed to it. And it was in fact because Aaron’s name was on the manifesto, that the federal government felt justified in saying that they knew exactly what Aaron intended to do with all the files that he downloaded from JSTOR, from the MIT library. And so with that in mind, Aaron, Shawn and I are going to do a dramatic reading of this manifest for you guys…

    Shawn Vulliez (reading Aaron Swartz’s manifesto): Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

    Maximillian Alvarez (reading Aaron Swartz’s manifesto): There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

    Aaron Moritz (reading Aaron Swartz’s manifesto): That is too high of a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

    Shawn Vulliez (reading Aaron Swartz’s manifesto): “I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal, there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

    Maximillian Alvarez (reading Aaron Swartz’s manifesto): Those with access to these resources, students, librarians, scientists, you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not, indeed, morally, you cannot, keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

    Aaron Moritz (reading Aaron Swartz’s manifesto): Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by publishers and sharing them with your friends.

    Shawn Vulliez (reading Aaron Swartz’s manifesto): But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral, it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

    Maximillian Alvarez (reading Aaron Swartz’s manifesto): Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it. Their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

    Aaron Moritz (reading Aaron Swartz’s manifesto): There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

    Shawn Vulliez (reading Aaron Swartz’s manifesto): We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that is out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

    Maximillian Alvarez (reading Aaron Swartz’s manifesto): With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge, we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

    Shawn Vulliez: Aaron Swartz is right about information and history has only proven him more right. The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto is like 110% right. The only critique I have is that he didn’t read Marcus Rediker on pirates. They didn’t actually plunder and kill crews historically. But that’s a really minor point. The whole thing is on fucking point and more relevant than ever. It gets more relevant with every passing year. It’s absolutely knockout true. And when I think about the shape of my political development and the access to illicit streams of information, legal online libraries, which I used to access books that I wanted to read, I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it weren’t for the civil disobedience of people who break those copyrights.

    And so I owe a debt. I owe a lifetime development. I am who I am today because of this civil disobedience. I wouldn’t be the person I am without it. And it’s something I get really passionate about because there are people… It talks about, okay, people at Google can read whatever book they want, and then there are people at universities in the developing world who can access whatever they want. Their schools don’t have the subscriptions to the publishers. We’re talking about a legacy of information that goes back to the enlightenment. Hundreds of years of scientific articles, hundreds of years of studies and information that can help people to better understand the world, to create their own experiments, to participate in public science, to participate in public technology, to develop the world in a better direction through shared knowledge. It’s being shut down for profit, for a small group of people who don’t even create the knowledge, that have no reasonable claim to the knowledge because it’s an enormous industry.

    And out of all the things in the world, why is the government trying to make an example of the person who stands up to this of all things? We’re talking about someone who’s involved in a variety of political actions. We’re talking about a political milieu, which has a variety of political actions, some more legal than others. But for some reason, Aaron Swartz downloading articles from JSTOR, he gets the book thrown at him. They charge him with things that are unreasonable. There’s no argument to say that he’s committing two counts of wire fraud. There’s no argument to say that he is violating computer espionage laws. Even if you look at this article and what it says, what this manifesto says, and you take it at its word that this is his exact motivation for doing what he’s doing. He’s talking about breaking copyright law. He’s talking about violating the terms of service of JSTOR. Fair enough. Civil disobedience, he violated the terms of JSTOR well, maybe there should be a proportionate response to that and he can serve time or he can be criminally punished, however, proportionally to what he’s actually done. And then there can be a public discussion in public politically. We can talk about the values of it. That’s how civil disobedience works. But instead, the secret police of the United States surveilled him creating 1500 pages of documents about his movement, about his politics, about his connections. They opened up his computers.

    They looked at all of his private communications, including with his lover, and they threatened and humiliate him with it to the point where it compounded with invisible disabilities. He had been struggling with his whole life, autoimmune issues and depression. And he tragically took his own life because they wanted to use him as an example because he was arguing politically something correct, that people 100s of years from now are going to read aloud and say, he was right. He’s talking about the future of politics. He’s talking about the future of information society. And he was made a martyr for it. And it’s absolutely disgusting. The government killed him. That’s what his dad said. And his dad is right. The government killed him because these ideas about information are too true for the secret police’s mind. The literal secret police fucking tracked him. They threatened him.

    They opened up all his communications. They charged him with things that were totally disproportionate to what he was doing, and they hounded him into suicide because of these ideas. And it’s not because these ideas are so ineffectual, they’re so irrelevant. It’s because these ideas are the most impactful, most relevant ideas of our political generation. Things that deserve to be shouted from the rooftops that everyone should actively participate in, that everyone should actively underline and integrate as core of their politics. And I don’t care what other political trajectories you come on, what you’re interested in, integrate this into your politics. This is the politics of the digital age. Aaron Swartz was right. He was fucking right. You read his other political blogs. He’s right about most stuff he says. He’s a very right guy. And it is extremely, extremely tragic that we haven’t had 10 years of his work behind us. The last 10 years missing out on Aaron Swartz.

    That’s part of the reason why we don’t have the utopianism of the internet anymore. People have this sense of the internet is not a utopian place anymore, is because they fucking killed the Aaron Swartz. Political leaders who are prosecuted and chased down and humiliated because of their impact, shape the trajectory of how people think about the internet. And this is a little bit of a tangent, but I think another reason why the utopianism of the internet has kind of faded over the last however many years is because of Bitcoin, taking all the energy out of the room, both literally and figuratively. Bitcoin became this sort of utopian project of the internet, even though it fundamentally never made sense. And it was a money-making grift. And that’s part of the reason why we don’t see the internet as a utopian place anymore.

    I think the loss of Aaron Swartz is another part of that reason. And what we need I think, is to integrate these into our politics actively and to make sure that we facilitate and help grow and develop the next generation of truth tellers. The next generation of people like Aaron Swartz, who can see through the bullshit of society and have moral clarity on issues that are dominated by rapacious profit-seeking. And the way that we do that is by valuing the voices of youth. Aaron Swartz became who he was because he was a youth on the internet. On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog. He was taken seriously. He deserved to be taken seriously. As we de-anonymize the internet, we risk losing that, if we devalue the voices of young people, we risk losing that. We need their clarity. We need their voices. We need to work together. We need to integrate this as not just part of our politics, but core to our politics. That information belongs to everyone. The legacy of human knowledge belongs to everyone. It doesn’t belong to a small group of publishers and Aaron Swartz was right.

    Maximillian Alvarez: Man, preach, brother. I think that was beautifully put. And honestly, this is another reason why I thought having you both on, granted, I was being a little bit selfish because as I afore mentioned, there are parts of this story, Aaron’s story, the movement that he was a part of, the movement that he was an integral part of that, that I still feel like an outsider looking in about. But I think that actually I mentioned, Dear Real News listeners, that I have been on Aaron and Shawn’s show Seriously Wrong before. The first time that we collaborated was for a big crossover episode between Seriously Wrong and my show Working People on the Winnipeg General strike of 1919 to date the largest strike in Canada’s history. And we did a deep dive into the history of that. We did some fun skits, but we recorded for a long time really trying to unpack the ins and outs of that historic strike that happened over a century ago in Winnipeg.

    And one of the things that I recall us talking about in the beginning of that episode was the fact that just in doing the research about the Winnipeg General strike, there is about, I’m trying to recall because I feel like this archival discovery was made around the 1980s, if I recall correctly. So there was over 50 years in 20th century history where essentially no one knew how involved this infamous collection of the local bourgeois Z in Winnipeg at the time, right? They called themselves, it’s like the Council of a 100 or something like that. They called themselves the Citizens Committee of 1000. And it truly was a handful of mustache twirling top hat wearing rich people essentially meeting in secret and talking about how they were going to conspire to crush the strike. Even going beyond the bounds of the law or even forcing the government to essentially deputize this local bourgeois Z to exceed the limits of legal recourse into essentially take control of the local governance for the explicit purpose of squashing this general worker’s strike.

    And it was in the trials that were held after the strike was over, that a judge essentially granted the request from the members of the Citizens Committee 1000 to have their records permanently sealed. And the judge granted that request. And so again, entire books of history were written about the Winnipeg General Strike, documentaries were made about the Winnipeg General Strike, with no access to those communications of the people who were most integrally involved in breaking the strike. And it wasn’t until a random sociologists just happened to be in a certain archive and got access to those files that suddenly the history of this momentous event in Canadian history and labor history in general became a lot clearer. And we talked about how fucked up it was that what the judge essentially did that day, what the ruling class serving establishments that we entrust with maintaining and upholding the order of our society for ostensibly just and righteous reasons.

    What this judge did was denying the people their ability to know their own history and just how sinister that is. And now magnify that by truly incalculable amounts because that is what is Aaron Swartz saw in the system that we’re talking about. That’s what we read in the Gorilla Open Access Manifesto, is that you have this incredible wealth of human knowledge, not just recent scholarship that’s been produced since the Internet’s been around, but everything before that that has been digitized, all of that has made accessible in that it can be accessed, but then that access is dramatically cut and dramatically cinched. Rebecca Gibbon and Cory Doctorow, I had the honor of interviewing them here in Baltimore a couple months ago about their incredible new book, Choke Point Capitalism. But that’s the image I think of. And in fact, they talk a lot about academic publishing as an example of Choke Point Capitalism because it’s like all that knowledge is there.

    And again, a lot of it has either already been produced for the public domain or it has been publicly subsidized in some way. And there are people who have devoted their entire lives of researching these things, writing these papers. And then at the very point that they’re ready to share it with the world, they’re supposed to just give up all rights to it, hand them over to bloodsucking institutions like Taylor and Francis Academic Publishers who then just choke point that thing. They grip it like a hand squeezing the neck because they are not producing any value, they’re not producing the research. They are literally just at the choke point where the producers of that knowledge and the people who want to access it meet. They are just the vampiric middlemen squeezing as much value out of something that they offer no value to. And that is a crime, especially when you think about what the example I just gave, how consequential this is in that documentary I mentioned in the introduction. Which everyone should go read for a fuller accounting of Aaron’s life and the trial and all of that.

    It’s called The Internet’s Own Boy. And thank you to Shawn for actually reminding me about that documentary. But I just mentioned Cory Doctorow. Cory has a great example at the end of that documentary where he says, there was a kid here in Baltimore who ended up becoming, basically making the discovery that would allow us to detect pancreatic cancer sooner because he had access to the kind of medical journals that he was able to just fart around and look around through and eventually hit on an idea that saved countless lives. We can’t predict what the effects of opening that access would be, but what we do know is we live in a world of very curtailed access and that limits the capacities of what we as people can do and what we as people can even know about ourselves and our own history. And I believe that is as much of a crime as Aaron said it was.

    Shawn Vulliez: It is a question of what type of society do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a society where people waste their lives doing drudgery and toil things that they would never be interested in doing if it weren’t necessary to make their living? Or do we want to live in a society where people are actively involved? Everyone is actively involved in the curation and re-curation of information, the interpretation of our shared history, the interpretation of science. Another great example of an every man layman contributing greatly to progress of our understanding of our history and science is there’s this recent example from the UK where there was a guy who works in furniture, he works at, I can’t remember his specific job. He works in the furniture industry and he took it on himself to try to understand the meaning of Neanderthal cave paintings and determined that these little dots that they were drawing near the animals on these famous cave paintings actually represented lunar cycles or reproductive cycles of the animals.

    And he passed that on to experts in the field who took them seriously, even though he’s a layman. Because of his access to information, he was able to formulate this hypothesis, pass it on to people in the field who thankfully took him seriously and then were able to prove that he was correct. And there’s numerous examples of everyday people participating in history, participating in science, and by giving the basis of the hypothesis is the information, the shared information, it’s usually funded publicly. There’s all these different various reasons to argue that these things are public knowledge or should be public knowledge. And then from having access to that information, they’re able to contribute greatly. And you just think about the scale of an entire planet full of people, full of thinking minds. I’m also reminded of the Stephen J. Gould quote about, I don’t care about the weight of Einstein’s brain only that there’s similar brain powers and sweatshops and factories, et cetera.

    When you’re talking about, there’s brilliant, brilliant people all over the world who have no access to the legacy of human scientific knowledge. So we’re missing out on all of the things that they would have to contribute if they had the basis to form their own hypotheses, the basis to participate in their own things. So on one hand, going on [inaudible 00:57:21] Hub and being able to look up something I want without having to bother one of my friends with institutional access to get them to download it for me, that’s incredible. But what it also represents in the world stage, if we can step out of where we are in the world and look at the overall context, we’ve got a world where the vast majority of knowledge is pay walled and held off to people who are essentially a global financial elite. People who go to the biggest universities in the world, and there are billions of people who have things to contribute that are locked out.

    And so I think the question is, the information question is really fundamental and it’s a question of what type of society do we want to live in? How do we want to value and encourage people to participate actively in the co-development of knowledge, which is where all knowledge comes from, all knowledge advancement comes from. So the more people that we can bring into the system of thinking through these things together and having access to the information that’s required to make sense of it all, the potential for social scientific technological progress that’s unlocked for that, that is incredible. And that still remains to be the libratory potentiality of the internet, which is still with us. The flame is still lit, they’re still numerous information clearing houses on the internet where you can find illicit libraries. And I think if we ever lost them, it would be a profound tragedy. It’s hard to overstate what a profound tragedy that would be, when you’re talking about shutting out billions of people from human scientific knowledge, historical knowledge and so on.

    Aaron Moritz: I also just want to tie the open access of information to the open access of resources in general. We’re talking a lot about how much people could contribute if not for being held back by these vampiric corporations who insert themselves as middle men in the access to human knowledge and in the realm of human knowledge, and with the internet, their role in this situation is more clear than any other part of the human endeavor of having a society where we interact and take care of one another because you can copy things for almost free technically, and you have to invent these paywalls to put up in between things.

    Whereas with physical items, it works a little bit differently, but a lot of the principles are the same where you have people spending their days working to produce useful items for people, whether that’s food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, et cetera. And then you have these corporate boards and corporations, profit-seeking entities that insert themselves as middlemen, taking the profit from the sales of these items that they didn’t produce themselves, that they paid workers to produce for them, inserting themselves as the people who get the vast majority of the benefit, while limiting the access to these vital things that we all need, our physical needs.

    Through this process of corporate profit seeking and just having access to information for all people would greatly accelerate the amount of progress and the amount of good ideas and innovation that we could have as a species, providing everybody with all of the basic things that they need to live would do the same thing on a much greater scale. I’m just thinking about the history of it and when I first got into piracy and information, open access and seeing those kind of things, I didn’t identify as a socialist or a communist or anything like that.

    But I think over time seeing the same principles, applying the same ways in which the output of human creativity and human labor was being instrumentalized for the benefit of a very small amount of people, really just led me directly from this type of political awareness about open access to information, to thinking about open access of the entire common heritage of human people, that all human resources, all of the planet’s resources should be commonly held property used for the benefit of all people and not just for the benefit of a small group of people and also the ways that they’re erecting these artificial barriers in the information space have started to move into the real world space of physical objects as well.

    With so many things now, having computer chips in them, you have things like ventilators or tractors or these really physical mechanical objects that are being locked behind DRM codes where your machine is perfectly fine, but you don’t have the intellectual property rights to run your ventilator. So sorry, we can’t repair this one. We don’t have the rights to do it. They’re bringing these artificial barriers into the real world to be able to monetize even more and to limit access to things people need for their own profit. Even more so, even if you see the information access thing as not the biggest deal compared to some of those more vital human needs, the two issues are really deeply interlinked and becoming more interlinked as the digital is making its way into so much of the analog world.

    Shawn Vulliez: Another great example of that, interlinked-ness. I think a lot of the absurdities of intellectual property are more apparent for the reasons that Aaron mentioned, but it’s also a lot of these absurdities apply just to private property, full stop. And an example of one of these overlaps is we were recently researching the history of libraries and the history of the written word for an upcoming episode of our show. And one of the things that I found in research about ancient libraries when reading about the origin of libraries is that the premiere ancient library experts in the world don’t have access to all the information that humans as a whole have on ancient libraries. Because there was this treasure hunting, there was this phase of history where there was this big boom of treasure hunting. So untrained people who didn’t know anything about history were doing all these basically, I guess tasteless, I’m trying to think of the best term for it.

    These just like scoop and grab all the historic artifacts you can. Put them away in archives, sell them to rich guys. There was like this gold rush boom for historic artifacts. And so people as a whole in private containers owned mostly by the rich. We have huge amounts of our human legacy. These are fundamental questions. Where did writing come from? Is a question that we haven’t fully answered. What were the reasons for early libraries? Why did the leaders of the ancient world value libraries so much? What was the philosophy behind that? These are questions that we don’t have full answers to because private treasure hunters did tasteless expeditions to smash and grab as much as they could and sell it to the rich, and they’re sitting un-analyzed in archives as investment commodities right now. So that is another example of this intersection between information, private property, intellectual property, and our shared legacy as a species.

    These are fundamental questions. I would love nothing more than to know more than humanity does about ancient libraries. For my research, I reached the limit. It’s like, this is what we know, this is what the best experts in ancient libraries in the world don’t know. And it’s because we don’t have all the documents. We don’t have all the surviving clay tablet records. Things have been removed from their context where if all these objects had been together at the same time using our expertise brains from all of our studying, we could figure out how they relate to each other. But that was all taken away by, again, the rapacious search of prophet and a tasteless exploitation of our common heritage.

    Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, I think that’s beautifully put. The example that I always think of is all the Maya codices that were deliberately destroyed by the Spanish conquistadores because they were viewed as un-Christian, this savage knowledge, just like vast, vast stores of knowledge from people in Mesoamerica that had been accrued over centuries just suddenly smashed. And the only reason we know about them is because this famous, or infamous, I believe he was a bishop from Spain, basically wrote his own version of them and preserved some form of them. But it’s just so much of what we know about our past is contingent on things like that, like you both were just sort of saying. We either know a shockingly small amount about our own past because the records and the people have been destroyed for greed, for conquest and domination, or just unfortunate historical accidents like a library burning down.

    But I mentioned that just by way of kind of rounding us out, because I know I got to let you guys go, but I think that’s a really important point to note both kind of connecting us to the legacy of Aaron Swartz and also thinking about what that legacy looks like for all of us who are fighting the good fight wherever we are, however we can, in the year of our Lord 2023, as we continue down the gullet of what I think is shaping up to be a pretty horrifying century. There is so much absurdity that results from the efforts to preserve those mechanisms for protecting private property, for prioritizing the needs of profit seeking, rent seeking enterprises.

    In a past life, I was a media historian. That was the through line of my academic work. And I remember reading about just the cluster fuck it caused when Xerox technology was made kind of widely available because publishers were freaking out about people being able to copy their books and pass them on to people. Or there’s always been concerns about the “secondary market” of used books because once that initial sale is made, any revenue that comes in isn’t going to the publishers. And so I would encourage folks, I’m not going to go through it all here, but I would encourage folks to look at examples that, read up on that, because then you’ll start to see how the things we take for granted, the systems we take for granted, the protocols we take for granted, the laws we take for granted, how actually so many of them are founded in an absurd fucking premise, and have actually produced absurd results because it’s an unnatural jerry rigging of the potential of technologies.

    It’s a jerry rigging of the law to defend the indefensible, to create systems of capture and control that benefit these otherwise pointless and useless and vampiric entities like the ones that are retaining all the copyrights to academic publications. We have created these ghastly, absurd systems to support these ghastly, absurd premises of denying people access to information that is part of the public domain. All the ways that, like you said Aaron, these middlemen kind of insert themselves and extract value, but do nothing other than limit access. And I think there’s something really important there that I wanted to for us end on, because obviously the absurdity… There’s perhaps no more absurd conclusion to what we’re talking about than humanity essentially destroying itself and our shared civilization, and even endangering our potential continued existence on this planet for many of the same reasons.

    For many of the same reasons that we have built entire economies around the notion of people as consumers who all have to have their personal copy of the same product, instead of sharing one of those things between 10 people or sharing in general. We have built up such a Frankenstein’s monster of consumer culture, of an economy to the point that we have produced our way to destroying the ecosystem that we all depend on. And that’s why I thought of you guys when I was rereading the Gorilla Open Access Manifesto, because I know that that library socialism, the concept of library socialism as a different way of approaching this kind of thing, is fundamental to what you all do on the show seriously wrong. And I thought of you when I read this one sentence from the Gorilla Open Access Manifesto where Aaron writes, “Sharing isn’t immoral, it’s a moral imperative.” I wanted to, by way of rounding us out, just sort of ask you guys what that sentence means to you.

    Shawn Vulliez: I mean, at a basic level, all human sociality, all human progress, everything that’s worth anything in life is predicated on people sharing with each other, people not locking things down, but being open and social. And inhuman systems that would tell us that having a friend over to listen to music together is immoral unless both of you buy the CD, that’s the level of absurdity we’re talking about with these intellectual property extremists. It’s inhuman, it’s bizarre, it’s robotic. And it’s fundamentally contrary to I think the things that make us human, the things that caused humans to develop into the species that we are over time. It’s absolutely correct and another great example of Aaron Swartz being completely fucking right. Sharing is a moral imperative. It’s not immoral to share information, it’s not immoral to share experiences. It’s important. It’s what makes the world work, it’s what makes everything good in the world work.

    Aaron Moritz: Yeah. And I think possibly going far beyond what Aaron meant when he said that in this context of information, information freedom, like you were saying, our sort of determination as a society right now to never share things, that everybody should buy a new bicycle, everyone should own their own lawnmower, everybody should have their own everything. And then when you’re done with it, you should throw it out and someone else should buy a new one, has led to a situation where we are burning through the resources of the planet at a rate that is unsustainable. And we’re not integrating our human society with the natural imperatives of the ecosystem under which we exist.

    And sharing is a key way that we can change that, that we can produce less, get more use out of it, provide more positive experiences, more ability to access the things that they need to everyone while producing fewer things, and therefore acting in a more ecologically sustainable way. The power of sharing, again, is really obvious online where it takes a few cents of data and half a second of processing speed to copy a file, to copy an academic paper or a book. And you can just see how absurd it is to prevent people from doing that. But the fact that we have the entire social system set up, not to maybe prevent people from sharing physical items, but certainly not to facilitate it on an institutional level, has had massive consequences for the planet and for our society.

    Maximillian Alvarez: And I mean really just as a final kind of postscript to that, I think that there’s also something really important in the line from the manifesto that says, “There’s no justice in following unjust laws.” Because I just really wanted to underline what you both said about that during this incredible conversation. And I thank you guys so much for giving me so much of your time to talk about this. But that’s the other, I think, real essential lesson that all of us have to sit with. Thinking about Aaron, his death, and what lies ahead for all of us is that Aaron, like everyone that I imagine has had similar versions of the conversation that we’re having now, or similar thoughts to the ones we’re expressing now, has realized that there is, again, a fundamentally abhorrent absurdity at the center of laws that are designed to prohibit sharing, laws that are designed to restrict people’s access to information and knowledge.

    And laws that, again, are there, that are the sort of prosthetic outgrowths of the absurd system, that are there to serve the absurd function of protecting that system, even if it comes at the expense of us knowing our own history, even if it comes at the expense of our ability to create lifesaving vaccines or conduct medical research because we have access to the research that’s been done previously. Going from that and the Kafkaesque absurdity that Aaron Swartz died to the Kafkaesque absurdity of grocery store workers getting arrested if they take home any of the food that’s expired and is going to be thrown out anyway. You look at that and you just see, “Oh no, the law says this has to be wasted because it can’t be recouped for a profit, therefore no one gets it.”

    Or we’re in the midst of a pretty much global housing crisis right now, and yet Wall Street has turned housing into a financial instrument to the point that there are just innumerable apartment buildings, condo complexes, and even houses lying empty because they’re worth more to their investors and owners in that position than they are serving their actual function, which is to house people. So I just want to leave people with that sort of thought, as we again confront the reality of the climate crisis, as we continue to head into pretty what has already been a pretty terrifying century and I’m sure has a lot of other things in store for us.

    I think we all have an imperative, as Aaron himself would say, to question the absurdities and the arbitrariness of these sorts of laws, these sorts of systems that are ultimately designed to protect property and profit at all of our collective expense. And it was very baffling to me reviewing all of this to think, how can we live in a country that is just constantly, almost by a desperate existential need, we are constantly reminding ourselves of the righteousness of the police and the criminal justice system and all that it’s meant to uphold and protect. And yet there’s so many examples like the tragic death of Aaron Swartz, where you’re just like, “This system was designed to impose and enforce the law, even if the law itself is incredibly unjust.”

    And I feel like everyone can look at Aaron Swartz and see that and be like, “The government killed this man for a reason that it was fundamentally absurd and abhorrent, but was still defined as illegal.” And I think that I’m not going to get us in trouble here and say, “Everyone go out and do crime.” But again, it’s a truly Kafkaesque story, and I think it’s incumbent upon all of us to carry on that fight by not just accepting the immorality and the unchangeability of these unjust and absurd systems that are designed to enclose rather than open, to control rather than liberate. That I think is a really important way that all of us can carry on Aaron Swartz’s fight. So Aaron, Shawn, co-hosts of the SRSLY Wrong podcast and co-creators of the animated series, Papa and Boy, which you can watch on Means TV. Shout out to our friends over there at Means TV. Aaron, Shawn, any other final words or plugs that you’ve got for the good Real News listeners before I let you go?

    Shawn Vulliez: Yeah, there’s something I kind of want to say about the story of Aaron Swartz, and I’ve been reflecting on it for a little while and I guess I have two takeaway lessons that I think are really important, and a kind of request to people listening. And the first lesson is that Aaron Swartz shows the incredible power of one person dedicating themself to doing things. He shows that any of us can do what we set out to do and we can have a profound impact in the world, a more profound impact than we’d ever imagine, and we don’t even notice our impact while we’re doing it. I don’t think that Aaron Swartz had a full idea of how impactful he was, unfortunately. And I think that’s a really key lesson is that if we’re bold enough to step to the plate and participate, we can shape the future of our society. And Aaron Swartz shows that.

    The second lesson is that you, all of us, everyone here, everyone listening, is worth more to all of us alive than dead. Fuck martyrdom. Aaron Swartz dying did nothing for information freedom. The things that Aaron Swartz did when he was alive contributed to information freedom, and we’d all be so much better off if we had 10 more years of Aaron Swartz contributing to our culture and helping move us along, and being an intellectual leader, and being someone who contributes through code and through discourse and through writing. Fuck martyrdom. You’re worth more alive than dead. And my plea is to activists, there’s a lot of things that distract us as activists: interpersonal drama, fighting over micro-celebrities’ aggression, micro-celebrities’ mistakes, re-litigating the historical disputes that are so far removed from our everyday experience.

    And it’s tempting and it’s fun and it’s so tempting as an activist to get caught up on disputes and sectarianism and arguing about the political policies of some country and some obscure year and stuff, but my plea is to take Aaron Swartz seriously, to take these ideas of information openness seriously, and to integrate them in your politics as fundamental. There’s no politics which is more contemporary than this. There’s no politics which is more egalitarian than this, which is more liberatory than this. And it doesn’t need to overwrite the other things you care about, but I hope that someone listening to this thinks about this very deeply and helps all of us by becoming more of a relative expert on this issue and contributing, using their time and energy to contribute to all of us understanding this better. So that’s my sincere, deep request, if you’re listening. And the two lessons are, you can do anything you want and you’re worth a lot more to me alive than dead. So thank you for bearing with me through that.

    Aaron Moritz: Yeah, I just want to say thanks for having us on. I agree with Shawn.

    Shawn Vulliez: I agree with Aaron. Thanks for having us on.

    Maximillian Alvarez: Well, Aaron, Shawn, again, thank you both so much for sharing so much of your time and brilliance and insight with us on the Real News Network podcast. I really appreciate it. To everyone listening, you should definitely go check out Aaron and Shawn’s Show, the SRSLY Wrong podcast, spelled S-R-S-L-Y W-R-O-N-G. We will link to it in the show notes. And also definitely go check out their animated series on Means TV, Papa and Boy. Before you go, please head on over to the realnews.com/support and become a monthly sustainer of our work here at The Real News so we can keep bringing y’all important coverage and conversations just like this. Thank you so much for listening.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Editor’s note: This video was recorded prior to Ray Liotta’s passing.

    Police Accountability Report show hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis kick off the holidays with a spoilers-free review of the exceptional film Cop Land. Taya and Stephen take a tour behind the scenes of police culture and explore how difficult it really is for individual officers to hold other police accountable for their crimes. Decades later, Cop Land remains one of the most revealing and honest movies about the current state of policing in America. As copaganda only becomes more pervasive, this blast from the past is a breath of fresh air  that offers a more realistic look at the commonplace corruption and impunity rife in police departments around the country.

    Studio: Taya Graham, Stephen Janis
    Post-Production: Taya Graham, Stephen Janis


    Transcript

    Taya Graham: Hello. My name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible. And today we’re going to do so by striking back at one of the key enablers of bad policing: Copaganda. That’s right. The movies and popular culture that tout police as underpaid heroes who dutifully enforce the law, which is sometimes true, but sometimes is not.

    Well we’re going to do so by using a piece of popular culture that has long been forgotten but actually might be the best antidote to copaganda we have ever seen. It’s a movie called Cop Land, and we’re going to break down how this story of police corruption and mayhem is actually the most accurate and telling depiction of law enforcement in the history of Hollywood.

    But before we get started, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com, and please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and that I appreciate them. And of course you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And of course there’s a Patreon donate link pinned in the comments below, and we do have some extras for our PAR family. Okay. We’ve gotten that all out of the way.

    Now, as we’ve discussed before on this show, American culture is awash in what we call copaganda. Movies and TV series that paint police not just as a savior of our democracy, but literally the human dividing line between good and evil. And that type of mythos has become more extreme as policing has expanded its grip on our country. Let’s remember American taxpayers fund police to the tune of $120 billion per year, a number that continues to grow. Meanwhile, even as the funding for police has increased in 2020, homicides have shot up by 30%.

    My point is that if police were really the solution to crime and violence, then all the spending we devote to it should produce better results. And that’s where copaganda comes in. Because if you can’t deliver the basic underlying premise on which the entire institution is based, then you have to use other means to keep the dollars flowing. I mean, let’s remember that many of the stories we cover on this show are illustrative of the fact that police spend far more time writing bogus tickets and making unnecessary car stops than they do investigating serious crimes. And let’s not forget that we have reported time and time again how police abuse their powers even when there are clearly enumerated laws that are supposed to limit what they can do, but often don’t.

    So as the godfather of modern propaganda and advertising Edward Bernays explained, the best way to convince people to accept bad policy is to use clever techniques to appeal to their emotions and make the worst appear the better cause. And no industry has done a better job at this task for American law enforcement than our prodigious American culture industry. I mean, it’s not just how these shows portray cops; Always honest, hardworking upholders of civilization. It’s also how many darn cop shows there are. I mean, it’s almost like no story can be told about us unless it’s through the eyes of a cop. Take, for example, a show produced in our hometown in Baltimore called The Wire. The Wire is often touted as an auteur’s honest take on the intersection of poverty, politics, and policing. A riveting deep dive into the realities of a crumbling urban core.

    But don’t you think it’s odd that the entire narrative of the series is told through the eyes of the police? I mean, isn’t it strange that the primary characters of the show who explore urban decay have a badge and a gun? I mean, it seems a little strange that police have become the primary narrator of our lives. But of course that’s why in this show we’re going to review a movie that actually gets policing right. A film that has been relegated to the dustbin of history, but actually depicts the true imperative of contemporary policing better than any piece of popular culture we know of. It’s called Cop Land. A movie starring Sylvester Stallone who plays a small town New Jersey sheriff in a town that is quite literally owned by the cops with a stellar cast, including Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Harvey Keitel, Michael Rapaport, and Robert Patrick. It was released in 1996 and it opened to mixed reviews and meager box office success. But like many pieces of great art it has gotten better with age and become more relevant now than ever when it first hit theaters more than 25 years ago.

    That’s because the film does something many films do not, which is to reveal through expert storytelling the underlying forces that drive the problematic law enforcement-industrial complex we live with today. And the film accomplishes this goal not by proselytizing, but instead reveals these truisms through complex characters, expert acting, and a riveting narrative. And to show you exactly how this film accomplishes this and also contradicts the aforementioned copaganda, I’m joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janis. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me. Stephen? Hold on. I think we’re having a technical problem, but you know, Stephen does spend an awful lot of time outside and some people are even concerned that we just leave him out there. So to be nice for the holiday season, just this once, I’m going to go get him.

    Stephen Janis:  Taya, thank you for… Taya? Taya? Can you hear me?

    Taya Graham:        Hey, Stephen.

    Stephen Janis:   Huh?

    Taya Graham:        Surprise.

    Stephen Janis:      What?

    Taya Graham:        Just this once –

    Stephen Janis:         What are you doing here?

    Taya Graham:     You can come inside.

    Stephen Janis:     You’re going to let me… I really feel much more comfortable being outside.

    Taya Graham:         Look, there have been some requests from our kind viewers who are a little bit worried about you, and they said you should come inside, just this once for the holidays.

    Stephen Janis:      All right. Great. I guess I’ll do it. Sure. Why not? I’ll see you guys later.

    Taya Graham:     Come on in.

    Stephen Janis:    Okay. Oh, we’re going –

    Taya Graham:        Come on over.

    Stephen Janis:        Okay. You want me to sit here?

    Taya Graham:          Right here.

    Stephen Janis:          All right. This is just weird. I’m sorry. I’m just not used to being inside.

    Taya Graham:         I know.

    Stephen Janis:       I know it seems a little strange, but I spent the past year outside.

    Taya Graham:          That’s true.

    Stephen Janis:         So being inside is a little weird.

    Taya Graham:         I don’t want him to get used to it. This is a one time deal.

    Stephen Janis:       Okay.

    Taya Graham:          So let’s set the scene for Cop Land. Sylvester Stallone is the sheriff of the small town in Garrison, New Jersey, just over the George Washington Bridge. And let’s listen to Robert De Niro, who plays Moe Tilden, talk a little bit about what Cop Land is.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Robert De Niro:      Back in the seventies, every cop wanted out of the city, but the only cops allowed to live outside New York were transit cops because the Transit Authority was also run by Jersey and Connecticut. So these guys I knew at the 3-7, they started pulling overtime at subway stations and got the city to declare them auxiliary transit cops. They bought some land in Jersey, got some cheap loans from people they knew. They made themselves a place where the shit couldn’t touch them.

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Taya Graham:           So there’s this arrangement that’s alluded to but is not fully discussed. It gives us the idea that perhaps there’s something more sinister behind Cop Land, right?

    Stephen Janis:        Right. Because what basically Moe Tilden tells us, or what we learn later on, is that this town was sort of bought and paid for by the mob, so that those cops that got out of New York would allow them to run drugs through that neighborhood, which I assume is in the Bronx. But nevertheless, the point is that there’s a separation between the police and the community. And not only do the police leave the community but they also use the community to finance their little suburban paradise in utopia. So it sets up a very interesting premise. We don’t know this at first, but it’s kind of alluded to that they got themselves out, they were working as transit cops. They kind of game the system but also separate themselves from the community that they were supposed to serve which is, I think, a big, big theme in American policing right now.

    Taya Graham:          Absolutely. Now, one of the things that is so extraordinary about this movie is how many times police officers actually commit crimes during this movie. So we have our sheriff, our hero, Freddy Heflin, who, one of the first acts we see him do is, he’s in a bar playing pinball. He runs out of quarters, so he breaks into a parking meter to help himself, right?

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Sylvester Stallone: [Sound of coins falling] Shit. Dammit. [Coins clinking together]

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Stephen Janis:  Yeah, no, it’s an extraordinary sort of casual event. Ray Liotta, who’s one of his friends, is watching him and kind of chuckling, when really he’s committing misconduct in office clearly. Clearly you can’t, as a cop, just help yourself to a parking meter, but it kind of sets the tone for the movie because he says, you know what? There’s different rules for us. If I need quarters for my pinball machine, I’ll just go into a parking meter. I think it’s a really important, it’s subtle, it’s small. But at the same time, it speaks volumes about how Cop Land is run and how laws are one for cops and one for everybody else.

    Taya Graham:      Okay. So a big scene that moves the movie forward is when Michael Rapaport, who plays the character Super Boy, is driving along – And he may have actually been intoxicated during this drive, but we don’t know for certain – But he is driving along and he ends up in a hit and run situation with two other gentlemen in a car. He ends up shooting those two unarmed young men. Let’s take a quick look at what happens.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Michael Rapaport:     [Music playing on radio][car crashing, tires screeching] Oh fuck.

    Radio Announcer:  …Angels today. Chili Davis had two run homers from either side…

    Michael Rapaport:     Hey! Pull over. NYPD, pull over. Hey, you hear me? Pull over. [tires screeching, car crashing] Fuck, shit. [gunshots] Fuck, cocksucker. [tires screeching, car crashing]

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Taya Graham:   All right. So Stephen, what’s happening here and why is it so important?

    Stephen Janis:     Well, this is really the conflict that sets up everything that cascades from it. And when Super Boy’s car is hit, he thinks that these young men are shooting at him, but all they have is a tire iron. So then the scene that evolves on the bridge is really, really illustrative, because after he shoots and kills these guys it’s like the sort of mechanisms of policing all jump into action. And you have the union rep, both union reps are on the bridge, including Harvey Keitel. Who immediately says, oh, I’ve got a gun in the trunk and we’ll plant the gun. One of the cop friends of Super Boy plants the gun and then all chaos breaks out.

    So what’s interesting is you see how police protect themselves. First of all, you can’t just shoot someone running away from you. Even if they hit your car, get their license plate. But he shoots them. After he kills them, then they go into another coverup. Rather than investigating this properly they literally start a cascade coverup where, as you know, Super Boy jumps off the bridge.

    Taya Graham:       Now, what I thought was really interesting is that when Super Boy finds out that he has killed two young men, the first thing he says is, they’re going to take my shield.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Michael Rapaport: [crosstalk] Take my fucking shield away from me.

    Speaker 1:           Hey, put it down, chico.

    Speaker 2:               Chico this, motherfucker. What?

    Speaker 1:          Frankie, don’t be starting anything.

    Speaker 2:            What the fuck you going to do? [crosstalk].

    Speaker 1:            [crosstalk] Oh my God. Oh my God, Leo. Jesus. He jumped, oh my God. Jumped. He jumped. Shine a light down there.

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Taya Graham:      Why do you think that is so important? I think this says so much that his first thought was not for the young men, but for his badge, his gun, and his authority.

    Stephen Janis:        Well, it’s like the shield is like a barrier, right? It’s literally a shield. It’s like a social shield. It says, I’m not going to be… I can’t be part of the regular population where I have to follow the rules of everybody else. I can’t just be a normal citizen of this city. I’ve got my shield. And I think that’s really great that you brought that up, because it’s a very interesting word. He didn’t say, I’m going to lose my job, or I’m going to go to jail. I’m going to lose my shield. And I think that’s a metaphor, an effective metaphor, for what it means to be a cop in Cop Land and in New York in this movie.

    Taya Graham:        So one of the things that we promised at the beginning of this is that we were going to talk about how copaganda works and the strange way that crime, or what our idea of crime is, is normalized and set by law enforcement officers. Stephen, maybe you can talk a little bit about this effect.

    Stephen Janis:       Well, one of the things really interesting is that when you start getting into the movie, and you see Super Boy jump, and you see Sylvester Stallone break into the parking meter, and you see the gun pulled out and planted, and you see crime after crime, after crime. And you start realizing that in this world of policing that’s just the way things are. They’re not cognizant. It’s not like someone says, oh, don’t plant that gun. That’s a crime. Or someone says, hey, Freddy, Heflin, stop taking the quarters. And of course, Sylvester Stallone’s character gets into an accident just shortly after that. And he’s trying to come up with excuses. He said, what did you tell the people down at the station what happened? And let’s just watch that for a second, because it’s very revealing.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Sylvester Stallone: What’d you tell Lenny about the accident?

    Speaker 3:             Chasing the speeder.

    Sylvester Stallone: What?

    Speaker 3:          Sheriff was chasing the speeder.

    Sylvester Stallone: [scoffs]

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Stephen Janis:    So of course even this sort of everyday sheriff is in on this… Freddy Heflin or Sylvester Stallone’s character is not immune to this sort of feeling of… He didn’t say, you know what, that’s not true. I wasn’t chasing a speeder. I was a little intoxicated and hit a deer. He’s like, oh, okay. And I think it’s really interesting because when we talk about policing this country and the scene we talk about being one set of laws for police and one set of laws for the rest of us. I think this sort of tells you, or shows, gives you a sense of how that culture develops and how it becomes sort of calcified in policing. Yeah.

    Taya Graham:      Now one thing that I thought was also interesting, and this is when the plan is that Super Boy allegedly jumps off this bridge. When you mentioned how one of the officers ran to immediately plant a gun in order to make Super Boy’s assailants look dangerous and as if they deserved to be shot. There was an EMT there, and the EMT stood up to the police officers and said, you’re planting that gun. You can’t do this. And the EMT does something amazing. Let’s watch.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Speaker 3:       We got it.

    Speaker 4:       Yo, yo, yo, yo. What the fuck are you doing, man?

    Speaker 3:            I found their piece.

    Speaker 4:            Found their piece?

    Speaker 5:             Oh Jesus.

    Speaker 4:          That wasn’t in there.

    Speaker 3:              What do you mean it wasn’t in there? It was underneath the floor mat.

    Speaker 4:                Bullshit, man. You can’t do that.

    Speaker 1:             – Come on. Shut the fuck up.

    Speaker 3:            Do what? It was underneath the fucking floor mat. [crosstalk].

    Michael Rapaport:  Take my fucking shield away from me.

    Speaker 1:             Hey, put it down. Put it down, chico.

    Speaker 2:             Chico this, motherfucker.

    Speaker 1:              What?

    Speaker 3:             Frankie, don’t be starting anything.

    Speaker 2:         What the fuck you going to do?

    Speaker ?:              Kiss my ass.

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Taya Graham:     Now, when I saw this scene, I couldn’t help but think about all the times that I read about EMTs being pressured. For example, in Colorado, EMTs have been pressured to administer ketamine to suspects, perhaps against their own better medical judgment. They’ve been influenced by the police to do so. And there have been other instances where I know EMTs have been asked to turn their heads and not see what’s going on. What did that scene say to you?

    Stephen Janis:         Well, that scene said to me that that’s not a normal EMT because I mean it was… But it also, I think, demonstrated that there was a tension, existing tension. You had two African American young men, you had an African American EMT. He was very conscious of what was going on and he wasn’t going to stand for it. And I think he was very frustrated by what he saw as a corrupt police force sticking up for itself. And I think that frustration boiled over pretty early. And I think it was a very interesting scene to say that this type of corruption affects the community. Right away, we see the community represented there saying, hey, what are you doing? And I think that’s a very important scene because you’re so in this insular Cop Land world, like I said, everything’s upside down. But in this case, we saw the community pushing back.

    Taya Graham:      So now we know for certain that Super Boy did not jump off the bridge, and it is part of an elaborate coverup being created by these cops. And this is where the crimes that these officers commit really begins to accelerate. And there’s a scene with one of my favorite actors, Robert De Niro, and he’s playing an internal affairs officer, an officer who is tasked with investigating the wrongdoings of other cops. There’s an interesting scene where he approaches Freddy Heflin, the Sylvester Stallone character, and explains to him why they have to investigate.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Robert De Niro:  My jurisdiction ends, in a sense, at the George Washington Bridge. About half the men I watch live beyond that bridge where no one’s watching.

    Sylvester Stallone: I’m watching.

    Robert De Niro:     I can see that. You got a crime right here of about what?

    Sylvester Stallone:  Lowest in northern New Jersey.

    Speaker 5:       Yeah. You got Hoboken and Jersey City over here. Newark.

    Sylvester Stallone: Well, we try to do a good job with what we have.

    Robert De Niro:         With a staff of three? No, sheriff. What you got here is a town that scares the shit out of certain people.

    Sylvester Stallone: Lieutenant, I told you, I’m watching. I mean, if you look around you see none of these people are wearing silk shirts. Their pools are above ground. You know? You know, you raise your family somewhere decent, I guess that’s a crime now.

    Robert De Niro:    We buried a suit today. That doesn’t bother you?

    Sylvester Stallone: He jumped off the GWB.

    Robert De Niro:     Yeah, but his body never hit the water. That doesn’t bother you? What does? That I investigate cops? Being a man who always pined to be a cop?

    Sylvester Stallone: I am a cop.

    Robert De Niro:  Pined to be NYPD. Three, four saps in 10 years. Appeals of hearing tests. Right? You may be law enforcement, and so am I, but you are not a cop. Now I may watch cops, but tell me if I’m wrong. Every day, out these windows so do you. You watch cops too. And since we are both law enforcement, we share a duty. Do we not? If there is a stink, we must investigate. We must gather evidence because evidence makes us see the truth. Is this a stink of a criminal act or is it a turd in a bag? Babitch isn’t dead. You know that and I know that. Ray got him off that bridge alive before he could talk. But he wasn’t so lucky the last time when the shit hit the fan with Tunny. That boy he took care of later.

    Robert De Niro:       But now what? What does Ray do now? That’s the $64,000 question. And that’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m here, sheriff. Because you’re on the inside. And besides the church traffic and the cats in the trees and all that other bullshit, okay. There isn’t much here for you to do to keep your mind busy. But I look at you, sheriff and I see a man who’s waiting for something to do. And here I am. Here I am saying, sheriff, I got something for you to do.

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Stephen Janis:   Taya, I love this scene because, I think, it’s where the rubber meets the road, where Sylvester Stallone has to make this weird decision. To actually enforce the law, he has to betray law enforcement in some ways is what Robert De Niro… And then Robert De Niro kind of says, you got nothing going on in your life. You might as well do something exceptional with it. Here I am. I think no other actor could pull that off. But I think what’s extremely important about this is the fact that Sylvester Stallone’s choice is A, do I stick with my law enforcement friends, or B, do I betray them by actually investigating a crime which has become a citywide thing. Yeah. And so how do you feel about Robert De Niro’s performance there?

    Taya Graham:     Okay. First off Robert De Niro’s performance was, as usual, exceptional. But I think what was really interesting is the way that it was set up as if it was going to be a betrayal. If Freddy Heflin helps him investigate these cops, who are committing a crime, it’s somehow a betrayal. It’s somehow a betrayal of their oath, it’s somehow a betrayal of the blue brotherhood. And that’s what I found really interesting, because I thought the task of a law enforcement officer is to enforce laws wherever they’re broken and wherever that is found. So I thought that had a… It was a really interesting conundrum.

    Stephen Janis:   That’s a really great point. He says their pools are all above ground. They don’t wear silk shirts. I guess it’s a crime to raise your family someplace nice. That is so manipulative. That’s perfect copaganda.

    Taya Graham:   So I think the way that the police officers in this movie perceive internal affairs is really interesting. There’s a moment where the character played by Harvey Keitel, Ray Donlan, says this.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Harvey Keitel:       Hey, Moe.

    Robert De Niro:  Hey, Ray. Sorry to hear about your nephew.

    Harvey Keitel:       Yeah, he was a good kid. We were up all night with him. I know you need to talk to me. I’ll come in next week sometime. How’s that? Jackie here is coming in early for you tomorrow.

    Robert De Niro:      Right, Jackie. Moe Tilden.

    Speaker 6:              Hey.

    Robert De Niro:       Moe Tilden.

    Harvey Keitel:       [inaudible] Moe here was my classmate at the academy back in the day. Before he fell in love with this redhead at IA and transferred.

    Robert De Niro:   Is that how it went, Ray?

    Harvey Keitel:         So what brings you to our fair city? Checking up on us?

    Robert De Niro:     I heard it was a way of life out here. Thought I’d check it out for myself.

    Harvey Keitel:        What are we, like the Amish now?

    Robert De Niro:    See you tomorrow.

    Harvey Keitel:     Fucking rat.

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Taya Graham:         So I think the scene says a lot about how police do not like to have anyone looking over their shoulder.

    Stephen Janis:      And how difficult it is to look over their shoulders. Because you’ve got veteran cops with a long history calling him a rat. I mean, he’s just doing his job, but no one likes to be investigated, but all the inner relationships to the police are made clear in this movie. Moe Tilden knows Harvey Keitel’s character from way back. It shows you sort of how entangled they are, how difficult it is to have an agency investigate itself. I think it’s pretty clear.

    Taya Graham:          So one thing I think the movie got really on target here was the way the police were able to feed a narrative to the media, and the media swallowed it whole and gave it out to the public. Let’s take a listen, and keep in mind, we know that Super Boy is alive. We know these other officers are committing crimes, but listen to what the public is being fed.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Speaker 7:      It was the system that drove Murray “Super Boy” Babitch off that bridge. Murray Babitch was a hero cop. He deserved a fair hearing, but he knew this would not happen. Not in this city.

    Speaker 8:      Activists Johns met the parents of the slain teens calling for a human blockade on the bridge tomorrow.

    Speaker 9:           A drunk cop jumps off a bridge but does not embrace the murder of two Black children.

    Speaker 8:           Attending the Yankee game, Mayor Ferelli responded to reports of cops attempting to plant evidence on the bridge.

    Speaker 10:        We are looking into it. There may have been some irregularity on the bridge, but as I say, [crosstalk] we are looking into it. No more comments, please. I’m here to enjoy the ball game with my wife. Thank you very much.

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Stephen Janis:  Yeah, Taya, I love the way that they’re all kind of sitting in the bar kind of chuckling, right? I mean, they’ve got this kid who supposedly jumped off a bridge, an entire investigation of the city and they’re all sitting in the bar, it’s kind of like, whoa, look what we did?

    Taya Graham:   Right? They’re in the bar.

    Stephen Janis:      Hugging, they’re kind of on top of each other.

    Taya Graham:           They’re literally celebrating while they’ve essentially fooled the entire city.

    Stephen Janis:    You make a really good point. We don’t notice any reporters driving out to Garrison, New Jersey, looking around for Super Boy. Everyone kind of, the mainstream media kind of swallows the narrative. And that is a really important point. Because if one reporter kind of drives out to Garrison and said, is he really dead?

    Taya Graham:   If one reporter had shown up to that bar to interview any of the officers about him, they might have actually seen Super Boy was alive.

    Stephen Janis:    But instead, as you point out, the narrative is a hero cop takes his life because he thinks the justice system is unfair to cops. That’s an extraordinary narrative.

    Taya Graham:    And it’s an amazing twist that the public was swallowing whole except for a few community leaders that we see in the movie.

    Stephen Janis:       Yep. Great point.

    Taya Graham:        So I think there’s a really important moment where the character Ray, played by Harvey Keitel who’s a union rep, essentially gets the entire investigation shut down with a single phone call. And Ray Liotta tries to explain to Sheriff Freddy why this is happening, why it was so easy for him to do it, and why it’s going to be so difficult for him to do an investigation. And I think this is one of your favorite scenes.

    Stephen Janis:     Yeah. Well it’s one of my favorite lines from the scene. Because I think it sort of embodies many, many types of things. You want to watch? Let’s watch it.

    Taya Graham:           Yeah. Let’s watch.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Speaker 8:            The New York Times is quoting one friend [knocking on door] of Royster as saying that the guy had an IQ of 160.

    Michael Rapaport:  I need your help. They’re trying to kill me.

    Ray Liotta:        Who?

    Michael Rapaport:  Who? My friends tried to kill me. Ray Donlan tried to kill me.

    Ray Liotta:   Shit. Holy shit. [footsteps] Speak of the devil. [running footsteps].

    Speaker ?:          Ray. Forget it.

    Speaker 11:           I don’t get this. This doesn’t make any sense. Why did you get Super Boy off the bridge and bring him back here to kill him?

    Speaker ?:           Ray had a plan. It got very fucked up.

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Stephen Janis:  I just like the way he says it.

    Taya Graham:      I know, Ray Liotta’s such a great actor.

    Stephen Janis:       He says, things got really fucked… Ray had a plan and it got –

    Taya Graham:     Really F’d up.

    Stephen Janis:      Well and the way he said it, kind of pauses. it got really –

    Taya Graham:     And that little chuckle that comes out when he’s saying it, it was just perfect.

    Stephen Janis: Yeah. And I think it shows the absurdity of this kind of thing that Ray had conjured this plan. Did he ever think about how, what are you going to do –

    Taya Graham:       What are you going to do if he supposedly jumped off the bridge and committed suicide, what are you going to do when he’s alive?

    Stephen Janis:   Right. And which brings us a scene where not only have they committed the murder of two young men, not only have they covered up the murder, but then they try to murder Super Boy.

    Taya Graham:  Right.

    Stephen Janis:     Let’s watch.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Michael Rapaport: I always said to my mom, Uncle Ray doesn’t like me, but…

    Harvey Keitel:  I always liked you, Murray. You just sweat too much.

    Speaker 12: Hey, let’s do it. Hey, Super Boy.

    Michael Rapaport:  So what are we going to do now? I’m going to go meet some people. How does this work? I got all my bags packed and everything, Ray. I’m just, I’m a little buzzed. You know, maybe we could do this tomorrow or something. I’m really tired, Ray. Where’s Joey?

    Harvey Keitel:     He’s working tonight, kid.

    Michael Rapaport: Yeah?

    Harvey Keitel:          Yeah.

    Speaker 12:          Sorry it came out this way, Murray.

    Michael Rapaport: It’s not that bad, Jack.

    Speaker 12:             Yeah, it is, Murray. [crosstalk][sounds of drowning][motor revs][gunshots][shouting].

    Speaker 13:        What is this? What are you doing? What are you doing? What the fuck is this. Ray, you said PDA was going to set him up with a new life.

    Harvey Keitel:     You think I’m all that, Joey?

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Stephen Janis:    I mean, come on. You’re talking about multiple counts –

    Taya Graham:          How many counts of murder? So there’s a murder. There’s a conspiracy to commit murder. There is planting evidence. Then we have an attempted murder, an assault. I mean, it’s just mayhem. And I think actually, I’ve actually caused mayhem actually, that might be a crime too.

    Stephen Janis:      Well, yeah. I mean, it’s extraordinary when you think about it. If these guys had lawyers, they would be spending the rest of their life. I mean, the series of crimes that are committed by the time they try to kill Super Boy, and then they’re going to just dump him in the river so that someone can find him. I mean, that’s pretty ruthless.

    Taya Graham:        So this brings me to one of my favorite scenes with Ray Liotta. He is having an issue with the cops in the bar. He feels like they’re not keeping him in the loop, that they’re making these plans, and that they’re going to try to push him out. And they essentially say to Ray Liotta’s character, well, you do drugs, you steal evidence. And this is how Ray Liotta’s character responds.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Ray Liotta:      What is this, [inaudible 00:31:19]? Huh? Listen, if IA’s going to fucking hang me by the balls, it ain’t going to be over some fucking missing evidence.

    Speaker 14:            Figgsy. You’ve been a cop 12 years. Six grams missing. It’s not a white size violation, babe.

    Ray Liotta:          Come on.

    Speaker 15:          You bought that big old house. Maybe you’re trying to get out from under.

    Speaker 16:            Hey Jack.

    Ray Liotta:             What the fuck’s up your ass? You can tell me you’re getting by without gravy, any of you?

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Taya Graham:       So I thought that was really interesting because he says, Hey, isn’t there any, there’s nobody here that’s not getting by without some gravy. So think about it –

    Stephen Janis:    He didn’t mean gravy.

    Taya Graham:        No, he meant being on the tape, getting money.

    Stephen Janis:       Because they were talking about six ounces is not a white, six ounces of cocaine. That’s pretty expensive.

    Taya Graham:       Right. And he’s saying that all of you are getting some form of cash. All of you are somehow on the tape.

    Stephen Janis:       Taking it off of suspects, selling drugs, whatever. I mean…

    Taya Graham:    Right. It’s amazing. And the thing is that these officers, when they say it’s gravy, that’s a euphemism that I think helps keep some distance between the impact of their crime and the crime itself. They don’t have to admit to committing crimes because they’re the good guys that chase criminals. Instead they’re like, we just get some gravy. We just take a little money off the top. We just take a little money from the bad guys. We’re not actually doing anything wrong. And I think that euphemistic way of talking and thinking is really a point of psychology that’s very, very specific and very, very, it has a strong imperative behind it.

    Stephen Janis:    Well, he didn’t say, is anyone getting by without stealing. And the gravy sort of sounds like a tip or something. Something that is a –

    Taya Graham:     Just a little on the top.

    Stephen Janis:     We saw this in Baltimore and the police, when they would regularly take all this overtime. It was kind of like, we just deserve it. We don’t have to work it. There were lots of people, we had the gun trace task force, where they literally would say easy money. They would joke about getting overtime while they’re on vacation. But it was more, I think, entitlement. And I think that’s what you see with –

    Taya Graham:      That’s the word, that’s the imperative behind it.

    Stephen Janis:       What Ray Liotta is talking about. We’re entitled to this because we’re going into that horrible city. And when we go over there, we’re entitled to take whatever we want and it doesn’t matter. So I think that’s a great point, Taya.

    Taya Graham:     Okay. So there is another great scene where Ray Liotta and Sheriff Freddy Heflin, Sylvester Stallone’s character, are talking, and Stallone’s character is trying, is basically saying, well, I think I’m going to have to do this. I think I’m going to have to investigate these crimes. And Ray’s character gives him some advice.

    [VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

    Ray Liotta:           All right, brother’s in deep shit. He’s down, he’s bleeding and you’ve got to get there, but there’s lights, right? All over the city, red lights.

    Sylvester Stallone: You go through the red lights.

    Ray Liotta:               Sure. You fire up the roof. You wail, you go through the red lights. But that’s slow, Freddy, fighting your way through traffic. The goal is perpetual motion. You turn the wheel when you hit a red light, right? You don’t drive down Broadway to get to Broadway.

    Sylvester Stallone: But how does this apply to what you were saying?

    Ray Liotta:                It applies, Freddy. It’s just as easy to tail a man walking in front of him. Now you butt heads with these friends of ours, you’re going to come at them head on. They got lives, Freddy. Families. No, you move diagonal. You jag.

    [VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

    Taya Graham:        So Stephen, you love this diagonal rule. Why don’t you talk a little bit about what you think this means?

    Stephen Janis:        Well, I think first of all, I think it means that Ray Liotta does a lot of coke during the movie.

    Taya Graham:        Oh my goodness. Whether it was Goodfellas or this movie, he plays someone on cocaine the best I’ve ever seen.

    Stephen Janis:      Makes one wonder. But I think what’s interesting about this is that Ray Liotta is saying you can’t confront this power. This power is so immense and it kind of gives you a sense of how powerful cops can be when they’re corrupt. Because there’s no way to confront them head on. You would think you could say, okay, they broke the law. We’re going to go and arrest them. And he’s like, no, Freddy, if you confront these people head on, these are cops. These aren’t, these are like the worst mob or the worst gangsters you’re ever going to confront. And in our own town, we saw that with the gun trace task force, who was robbing residents and a group –

    Taya Graham:      Dealing drugs and stealing overtime.

    Stephen Janis:     While the Department of Justice was in town investigating the department. So I think what’s important about it, when you have a force like this, like policing or people with guns and badges, who are going to say we’re going to do what we want to do. What Ray Liotta is saying in his coke-infused haze is, hey, you can’t come at these people. You’re going to have to find a way around this to be kind of sneaky and make this happen. And that is very illustrative of the power of a badge when it’s corrupted. It’s almost omnipotent, it almost has all power.

    Taya Graham:         Okay. So I hate to do this, but we are going to end the review here so that we don’t spoil the rest of the movie for you. And I hope everyone who’s watching this is inspired to go rent my favorite movie, and I’m sure it’s Stephen’s, Cop Land.

    Stephen Janis:         Yeah. And one thing I want to make sure is clear and sort of takeaway, we talk about how this movie is a metaphor for American policing as a whole. And I think what’s important is that there is an underlying premise of the movie, which is that these guys got cop land, they’re in Garrison, because the mob gave them loans, low interest loans to buy houses so that they’d let them run drugs. But what that really is to talk about is a relationship between elites, economic elites, sort of profligate capitalism, and policing, and how police sort of have this special relationship with the powerful, the rich, who they really police and who they… Not really police, but really protect. And it gives them, affords them a certain social status and a certain amount of economic security that the people they police don’t have.

    Taya Graham:      Right. Pensions, lifetime health benefits.

    Stephen Janis:        Overtime. Yeah, it’s amazing. I mean, we have so many cops in Baltimore making $100,000 a year that only have a high school education. You couldn’t get a job like that anywhere else. And so I think that’s what makes this movie a different kind of cop movie, because it’s really exposing the relationship. It’s not hitting you over the head with it. It’s saying, think about this. So these cops escape to a suburb, they all get houses. They’re really given a land of economic opportunity and utopia that cannot be afforded to the people they left behind in the Bronx. And because they have a special relationship with mob, which I think really is the economic elite to this country, and because of that –

    Taya Graham:        You could definitely call some of our uber capitalists members of a mob.

    Stephen Janis:        Right. In a sense, also an original sin, right? Because from that sin of not really being a part of the community, of being economically separate, they then commit a myriad of sins. They feel empowered to set the rules for themselves and break any law they want.

    Taya Graham:    And I just want you to know that if you have a favorite cop movie, please be sure to leave it in the comments for us, for us to discuss. And I might even post the list, I went through the movie and wrote down every single crime that I could find. I might post that as a little list. And if you see any crimes I missed, please let me know because I kind of love geeking out over this movie. So please feel free to do so.

    So I wanted to thank you for joining us for our special end of the year PAR. We wanted to do something a little bit lighter for the holidays. And we also wanted to just say thank you to everyone that is in our PAR audience. We read your comments. We appreciate that you watch us because we know that it means that you really care about fairness in your community. We know that because we’ve read your comments, we’ve read your thoughts. And we know that the reason why police accountability matters so much to you is because you care.

    Stephen Janis:  And you want to make a better community.

    Taya Graham:         Absolutely.

    Stephen Janis:   And that’s why we do it. We want to do it because better policing means a better community, and you can’t give power to someone without holding them accountable. And that’s why we do what we do. And we appreciate the fact that you watch our show because it gives us the ability to report on this. So it’s very important. Now, Taya, do I have to go outside?

    Taya Graham:       You will.

    Stephen Janis:        Okay.

    Taya Graham:            You will have to go outside, but before we do, I just wanted to say, if you have any evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please feel free to email it to us privately ar par@therealnews.com. Of course, you can always reach out to us on Facebook or on Twitter at Police Accountability Report. On Twitter, it’s @eyesonpolice. On Instagram, it’s @PoliceAccountabilityReport. And of course you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook and Twitter. And please do like and comment on this video. You know I read your comments and appreciate them, and I’ll try to answer your questions if I can. I’m Taya Graham.

    Stephen Janis:      I’m Stephen Janis.

    Taya Graham:        And we are the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there and have a great holiday.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Mint Press Logo

    This story originally appeared in MintPress News on Nov. 18, 2022. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

    Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II has only been available since Oct. 27, but it is already making waves. Breaking records, within ten days, the first-person military shooter video game earned more than $1 billion in revenue. Yet it has also been shrouded in controversy, not least because missions include assassinating an Iranian general clearly based on Qassem Soleimani, a statesman and military leader slain by the Trump administration in 2020, and a level where players must shoot “drug traffickers” attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border.

    The Call of Duty franchise is an entertainment juggernaut, having sold close to half a billion games since it was launched in 2003. Its publisher, Activision Blizzard, is a giant in the industry, behind titles games as the Guitar Hero, Warcraft, Starcraft, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crash Bandicoot and Candy Crush Saga series.

    Yet a closer inspection of Activision Blizzard’s key staff and their connections to state power, as well as details gleaned from documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Call of Duty is not a neutral first-person shooter, but a carefully constructed piece of military propaganda, designed to advance the interests of the U.S. national security state.


    Military-Entertainment Complex

    It has long been a matter of public record that American spies have targeted and penetrated Activision Blizzard games. Documents released by Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA, CIA, FBI and Department of Defense infiltrated the vast online realms such as World of Warcraft, creating make-believe characters to monitor potential illegal activity and recruit informers. Indeed, at one point, there were so many U.S. spies in one video game that they had to create a “deconfliction” group as they were wasting time unwittingly surveilling each other. Virtual games, the NSA wrote, were an “opportunity” and a “target-rich communication network”.

    Video games are a massive business and a huge center of soft power and ideology. The medium makes for particularly persuasive propaganda because children and adolescents consume them, often for weeks or months on end, and because they are light entertainment. But it is the very notion that these are unimportant sources of fun that makes their message all the more potent.

    However, documents obtained legally under the Freedom of Information Act by journalist and researcher Tom Secker and shared with MintPress News show that the connections between the national security state and the video game industry go far beyond this, and into active collaboration.

    In September 2018, for example, the United States Air Force flew a group of entertainment executives – including Call of Duty/Activision Blizzard producer Coco Francini – to their headquarters at Hurlburt Field, Florida. The explicit reason for doing so, they wrote, was to “showcase” their hardware and to make the entertainment industry more “credible advocates” for the U.S. war machine.

    “We’ve got a bunch of people working on future blockbusters (think Marvel, Call of Duty, etc.) stoked about this trip!” wrote one Air Force officer. Another email notes that the point of the visit was to provide “heavy-hitter” producers with “AFSOC [Air Force Special Operations Command] immersion focused on Special Tactics Airmen and air-to-ground capabilities.”

    “This is a great opportunity to educate this community and make them more credible advocates for us in the production of any future movies/television productions on the Air Force and our Special Tactics community,” wrote the AFSOC community relations chief.

    Francini and others were shown CV-22 helicopters and AC-130 planes in action, both of which feature heavily in Call of Duty games.

    Yet Call of Duty collaboration with the military goes back much further. The documents show that the United States Marine Corps (USMC) was involved in the production of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty 5. The games’ producers approached the USMC at the 2010 E3 entertainment convention in Los Angeles, requesting access to hovercrafts (vehicles which later appeared in the game). Call of Duty 5 executives also asked for use of a hovercraft, a tank and a C-130 aircraft.

    This collaboration continued in 2012 with the release of Modern Warfare 4, where producers requested access to all manner of air and ground vehicles.

    Secker told MintPress that, by collaborating with the gaming industry, the military ensures a positive portrayal that can help it reach recruitment targets, stating that,

    For certain demographics of gamers it’s a recruitment portal, some first-person shooters have embedded adverts within the games themselves…Even without this sort of explicit recruitment effort, games like Call of Duty make warfare seem fun, exciting, an escape from the drudgery of their normal lives.”

    Secker’s documentary, “Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood” was released earlier this year.

    The military clearly held considerable influence over the direction of Call of Duty games. In 2010, its producers approached the Department of Defense (DoD) for help on a game set in 2075. However, the DoD liaison “expressed concern that [the] scenario being considered involves future war with China.” As a result, Activision Blizzard began “looking at other possible conflicts to design the game around.” In the end, due in part to military objections, the game was permanently abandoned.


    From War on Terror to first-person shooters

    Not only does Activision Blizzard work with the U.S. military to shape its products, but its leadership board is also full of former high state officials. Chief amongst these is Frances Townsend, Activision Blizzard’s senior counsel, and, until September, its chief compliance officer and executive vice president for corporate affairs.

    Prior to joining Activision Blizzard, Townsend spent her life working her way up the rungs of the national security state.

    Prior to joining Activision Blizzard, Townsend spent her life working her way up the rungs of the national security state. Previously serving as head of intelligence for the Coast Guard and as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s counterterrorism deputy, in 2004, President Bush appointed her to his Intelligence Advisory Board.

    As the White House’s most senior advisor on terrorism and homeland security, Townsend worked closely with Bush and Rice, and became one of the faces of the administration’s War on Terror. One of her principal achievements was to whip the American public into a constant state of fear about the supposed threat of more Al-Qaeda attacks (which never came).

    As part of her job, Townsend helped popularize the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” – a Bush-era euphemism for torturing detainees. Worse still, Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, the officer in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, alleged that Townsend put pressure on him to ramp up the torture program, reminding him “many, many times” that he needed to improve the intelligence output from the Iraqi jail.

    Townsend has denied these allegations. She also later condemned the “handcuff[ing]” and “humiliation” surrounding Abu Ghraib. She was not referring to the prisoners, however. In an interview with CNN, she lamented that “these career professionals” – CIA torturers – had been subject to “humiliation and opprobrium” after details of their actions were made public, meaning that future administrations would be “handcuffed” by the fear of bad publicity, while the intelligence community would become more “risk-averse”.

    During the Trump administration, Townsend was hotly tipped to become the Director of National Intelligence or the Secretary of Homeland Security. President Trump also approached her for the role of director of the FBI. Instead, however, Townsend took a seemingly incongruous career detour to become an executive at a video games company.


    Enter the War planners

    In addition to this role, Townsend is a director of the NATO offshoot, the Atlantic Council, a director at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a trustee of the hawkish think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a group MintPress News has previously covered in detail.

    Funded by weapons companies, NATO and the U.S. government, the Atlantic Council serves as the military alliance’s brain trust, devising strategies on how best to manage the world. Also on its board of directors are high statespersons like Henry Kissinger and Conzoleezza Rice, virtually every retired U.S. general of note, and no fewer than seven former directors of the CIA. As such, the Atlantic Council represents the collective opinion of the national security state.

    Two more key Call of Duty staff also work for the Atlantic Council. Chance Glasco, a co-founder of Infinity Ward developers who oversaw the game franchise’s rapid rise, is the council’s nonresident senior fellow, advising top generals and political leaders on the latest developments in tech.

    Game designer and producer Dave Anthony, crucial to Call of Duty’s success, is also an Atlantic Council employee, joining the group in 2014. There, he advises them on what the future of warfare will look like, and devises strategies for NATO to fight in upcoming conflicts.

    Anthony has made no secret that he collaborated with the U.S. national security state while making the Call of Duty franchise. “My greatest honor was to consult with Lieut. Col. Oliver North on the story of Black Ops 2,” he stated publicly, adding, There are so many small details we could never have known about if it wasn’t for his involvement.”

    Oliver North is a high government official gained worldwide infamy after being convicted for his role in the Iran-Contra Affair, whereby his team secretly sold weapons to the government of Iran, using the money to arm and train fascist death squads in Central America – groups who attempted to overthrow the government of Nicaragua and carried out waves of massacres and ethnic cleansing in the process.


    Republicans for hire

    Another eyebrow-raising hire is Activision Blizzard’s chief administration officer, Brian Bulatao. A former Army captain and consultant for McKinsey & Company, until 2018, he was chief operating officer for the CIA, placing him third in command of the agency. When CIA Director Mike Pompeo moved over to the State Department, becoming Trump’s Secretary of State, Bulatao went with him, and was appointed Under Secretary of State for Management.

    After the Trump administration’s electoral defeat, Bulatao went straight from the State Department into the highest echelons of Activision Blizzard, despite no experience in the entertainment industry.

    There, by some accounts, he served as Pompeo’s personal “attack dog,” with former colleagues describing him as a “bully” who brought a “cloud of intimidation” over the workplace, repeatedly pressing them to ignore potential illegalities happening at the department. Thus, it is unclear if Bulatao is the man to improve Activision Blizzard’s notoriously “toxic” workplace environment that caused dozens of employees to walk out en masse last summer.

    After the Trump administration’s electoral defeat, Bulatao went straight from the State Department into the highest echelons of Activision Blizzard, despite no experience in the entertainment industry.

    The third senior Republican official Activision Blizzard has recruited to its upper ranks is Grant Dixton. Between 2003 and 2006, Dixton served as associate counsel to President Bush, advising him on many of his administration’s most controversial legal activities (such as torture and the rapid expansion of the surveillance state). A lawyer by trade, he later went on to work for weapons manufacturer Boeing, rising to become its senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary. In June 2021, he left Boeing to join Activision Blizzard as its chief legal officer.

    Other Activision Blizzard executives with backgrounds in national security include senior vice president and chief information security officer Brett Wahlin, who was a U.S. Army counterintelligence agent, and chief of staff, Angela Alvarez, who, until 2016, was an Army chemical operations specialist.

    That the same government that was infiltrating games 10-15 years ago now has so many former officials controlling the very game companies raises serious questions around privacy and state control over media, and mirrors the national security state penetration of social media that has occurred over the same timeframe.


    War games

    These deep connections to the U.S. national security state can perhaps help partly explain why, for years, many have complained about the blatant pro-U.S. propaganda apparent throughout the games.

    The latest installment, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, is no exception. In the game’s first mission, players must carry out a drone strike against a character named General Ghorbrani. The mission is obviously a recreation of the Trump administration’s illegal 2020 drone strike against Iranian General Qassem Soleimani – the in game general even bears a striking resemblance to Soleimani.

    Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II ludicrously presents the general as under Russia’s thumb and claims that Ghorbrani is “supplying terrorists” with aid. In reality, Soleimani was the key force in defeating ISIS terror across the Middle East – actions for which even Western media declared him a “hero”. U.S.-run polls found that Soleimani was perhaps the most popular leader in the Middle East, with over 80% of Iranians holding a positive opinion of him.

    Just as Activision Blizzard is recruiting top State Department officials to its upper ranks, its games are celebrating the same State Department’s most controversial assassinations.

    Straight after the assassination, Pompeo’s State Department floated the falsehood that the reason they killed Soleimani was that he was on the verge of carrying out a terror attack against Americans. In reality, Soleimani was in Baghdad, Iraq, for peace talks with Saudi Arabia.

    These negotiations could have led to peace between the two nations, something that the U.S. government is dead against. Then-Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi revealed that he had personally asked President Trump for permission to invite Soleimani. Trump agreed, then used the opportunity to carry out the killing.

    Therefore, just as Activision Blizzard is recruiting top State Department officials to its upper ranks, its games are celebrating the same State Department’s most controversial assassinations.

    This is far from the first time Call of Duty has instructed impressionable young gamers to kill foreign leaders, however. In Call of Duty Black Ops (2010), players must complete a mission to murder Cuban leader Fidel Castro. If they manage to shoot him in the head, they are rewarded with an extra gory slow motion scene and obtain a bronze “Death to Dictators” trophy. Thus, players are forced to carry out digitally what Washington failed to do on over 600 occasions.

    Likewise, Call of Duty: Ghosts is set in Venezuela, where players fight against General Almagro, a socialist military leader clearly modelled on former president Hugo Chavez. Like Chavez, Almagro wears a red beret and uses Venezuela’s oil wealth to forge an alliance of independent Latin American nations against the U.S. Washington attempted to overthrow Chavez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, multiple times. During the sixth mission of the game, players must shoot and kill Almagro from close range.

    The anti-Russian propaganda is also turned up to 11 in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019). One mission recreates the infamous Highway of Death incident. During the First Iraq War, U.S.-led forces trapped fleeing Iraqi troops on Highway 80. What followed was what then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell described as “wanton killing” and “slaughter for slaughter’s sake” as U.S. troops and their allies pummeled the Iraqi convoy for hours, killing hundreds and destroying thousands of vehicles. U.S. forces also reportedly shot hundreds of Iraqi civilians and surrendered soldiers in their care.

    Call of Duty: Modern Warfare recreates this scene for dramatic effect. However, in their version, it is not the U.S.-led forces doing the killing, but Russia, thereby whitewashing a war crime by pinning the blame on official enemies.

    Call of Duty, in particular, has been flagged up for recreating real events as game missions and manipulating them for geopolitical purposes,” Secker told MintPress, referring to the Highway of Death, adding,

    In a culture where most people’s exposure to games (and films, TV shows and so on) is far greater than their knowledge of historical and current events, these manipulations help frame the gamers’ emotional, intellectual and political reactions. This helps them turn into more general advocates for militarism, even if they don’t sign up in any formal way.”

    Secker’s latest book, “Superheroes, Movies and the State: How the U.S. Government Shapes Cinematic Universes,” was published earlier this year.


    Game Over

    In today’s digitized era, the worlds of war and video games increasingly resemble one another. Many have commented on the similarities between piloting drones in real life and in games such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Prince Harry, who was a helicopter gunner in Afghanistan, described his “joy” at firing missiles at enemies. “I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think I’m probably quite useful,” he said. “If there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game,” he added, explicitly comparing the two activities. U.S. forces even control drones with Xbox controllers, blurring the lines between war games and war games even further.

    The military has also directly produced video games as promotional and recruitment tools. One is a U.S. Air Force game called Airman Challenge. Featuring 16 missions to complete, interspersed with facts and recruitment information about how to become a drone operator yourself. In its latest attempts to market active service to young people, players move through missions escorting U.S. vehicles through countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, serving up death from above to all those designated “insurgents” by the game.

    Players earn medals and achievements for most effectively destroying moving targets. All the while, there is a prominent “apply now” button on screen if players feel like enlisting and conducting real drone strikes on the Middle East.

    U.S. Armed Forces use the popularity of video games to recruit heavily among young people, sponsoring gaming tournaments, fielding their own U.S. Army Esports team, and directly trying to recruit teens on streaming sites such as Twitch. The Amazon-owned platform eventually had to clamp down on the practice after the military used fake prize giveaways that lured impressionable young viewers onto recruitment websites.

    Video games are a massive business and a huge center of soft power and ideology. The medium makes for particularly persuasive propaganda because children and adolescents consume them, often for weeks or months on end, and because they are light entertainment. Because of this, users do not have their guards up like if they were listening to a politician speaking. Their power is often overlooked by scholars and journalists because of the supposed frivolity of the medium. But it is the very notion that these are unimportant sources of fun that makes their message all the more potent.

    The Call of Duty franchise is particularly egregious, not only in its messaging, but because who the messengers are. Increasingly, the games appear to be little more than American propaganda masquerading as fun first-person shooters. For gamers, the point is to enjoy its fast-paced entertainment. But for those involved in their production, the goal is not just making money; it is about serving the imperial war machine.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez joins Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow for the launch of their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back. This event was hosted by The Peale Museum in Baltimore.

    Rebecca Giblin is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor at Melbourne Law School. She is director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA) and heads up the Author’s Interest and eLending projects, as well as Untapped: the Australian Literary Heritage ProjectChokepoint Capitalism is her latest book.

    Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books. Chokepoint Capitalism is his most recent non-fiction work. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

    Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino


    Transcript

    Nancy Proctor:  My name’s Nancy Proctor. I just want to welcome you all to The Peale. And for those of you who may not have been to The Peale before, you can be forgiven. We were actually shuttered for 20 years starting in 1997, and we just recently reopened after five years of renovations. So we have reinvented ourselves as Baltimore’s community museum. But I did want to tell you a little bit about our past. We’re the site of many, many firsts, if you will, for the city and for the country. This is the oldest museum building in the Western Hemisphere, actually. It was opened in 1814 by Rembrandt Peale back in a time when there were very few museums anywhere in the world, and certainly very few that had been purpose-built to be museums. This museum was very eclectic, for our times, anyway. It exhibited everything from fine art to natural history.

    The first prehistoric animal in the world was exhibited in a museum here, and a companion in the family’s Philadelphia museum. And it ran very well. But unfortunately, despite the founder having also been dabbling in new technologies; he introduced gaslight technology to the city by using it to illuminate his galleries at night. Eventually was invited to create the first gas streetlight network in the country and thereby founded BGE, now known as Baltimore Gas and Electric, but then Baltimore Gas and Light Company. Unfortunately none of that, let alone the museum business, was enough to pay back the investors who had paid for the building of this building. So in 1829, Rembrandt and his brother Rubens Peale – You can recognize the pattern in the family naming here. There was no question what their father wanted them to grow up to be – They were forced to sell the museum in a fire sale, and the city of Baltimore bought it in 1829 and made it the city’s first City Hall.

    When the new City Hall was built across the street here, catty-corner to us, the building was repurposed to be male and female colored school number one. Now we’re now in the Reconstruction era, and the first public schools are being built for Blacks in this city school. Public schools had been available to white citizens for more than 50 years at this point, and when the first schools were opened, they were really only allowed to have elementary school curriculum. It was considered neither necessary nor desirable, and that’s almost a direct quote, for there to be a secondary school education available to people of color in this state. Thanks, however, to the activism of Isaac Myers and the Brotherhood of Liberty and others, the city was pressured into adding a secondary school curriculum.

    And this was the school that had that first high school class, that first high school education available to people of color in the city. The school that was founded here quickly outgrew the building. It got a new purpose-built school called The Colored High School by 1894. That school now is called the Frederick Douglas High School, which is one of the most historic high schools in the country. So the very first Black teachers who had been public school educated came through this building, because of course you couldn’t become a teacher until you had a high school degree. So up until that point, even all of the instructors in the Black schools were white. So it’s a place that had many transformative moments.

    When the school left this building, it started being used for manufacturing of all sorts, and it almost destroyed the building. And they were going to in fact tear it down until some citizens and journalists came together and said, no, actually this is too important a part of our history. And so they agreed to renovate the building and convert it into Baltimore’s first municipal museum. So it opened as that in 1930, and it ran until 1997 when, due to another financial crisis, the city shut this museum and several other city owned museums down and basically abandoned the building for 20 years.

    So the collection at that time was transferred to what was called the Maryland Historical Society. You can still see it at the Maryland Center for History and Culture. But this building is really the only physical artifact we have left. We are a collection such as it is, Born Digital. It is recorded Baltimore stories of the people and the people who come to the city and use this building. And we’re also a platform and a stage for the city’s creators and storytellers in all media. So that might be artists creating exhibitions, historians doing workshops, or community groups organizing and having their own events.

    So this is your museum and I really hope you will use it. Everything that we do here comes from the community. It’s driven grassroots up. So if there’s anything that you’d like to do here at The Peale, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. My name’s Nancy, my contact info is out there, and my colleagues will be happy to help you as well. One thing that you might want to come back for is on Dec. 3 we’re having a festive fundraiser. It’ll be a great party at The Peale, so you can pick up one of these and take them away.

    All right, so enough about the history of The Peale. I appreciate your letting me give you all of that. I know in 208 years you amass a lot of stories. It’s hard to compress them into a sound bite.

    So I also want to now very quickly introduce our wonderful speakers here today. Immediately here on my left is Maximilian Alvarez, whom you might know well as the editor-in-chief of the Real News Network, just two doors down. They’ve been fabulous partners and neighbors for The Peale and have done a number of events here with us. So we were thrilled when Max said he would be available to interview our other great friends, Cory Doctorow and Professor Rebecca Giblin, who are visiting here from LA and Australia respectively. You probably don’t need much more of an introduction than that. So I’m going to shut up and hand this over to Max.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  Thank you, Nancy.

    Nancy Proctor:  Thank you for being here.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, well geez, thank you all so much for coming out in the cold. Thank you to Nancy and to everyone here at The Peale for hosting this incredible event and for doing all the great work that they do. Please do support them. Please, as Nancy said, make this your own space, because we need spaces like this. And of course, thank you to my amazing interlocutors, Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin, A for writing such an important book, and B, for schlepping across the world, spreading the good word, and for putting us on your schedule. We really, really appreciate y’all making it out here.

    And I do mean it when I say this is a vital book. And the examples for what Cory and Rebecca talk about in Chokepoint Capitalism are everywhere. We just got a hilariously and awfully poignant example this week, and now it looks like the Department of Justice is going to be investigating the parent company of Ticketmaster on antitrust grounds after hashtag Swift Gate.

    So the name of the book is Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back. And I’m going to read a passage from it in a second, but to frame this for us. Competition, we’re told, is the lifeblood of capitalism. It is the foundation undergirding the entire system upon which capitalism depends. It is the basis, supposedly, for the entire social contract that we enter into in capitalist society. And yet, as Cory and Rebecca brilliantly detail in this book, as they term them, pathologies endemic to capitalism and to the entire capitalist system, naturally and inevitably tend towards concentration. Towards anti-competition, monopoly, monopsony, exploitation, rent-seeking, so on and so forth. This is where it all heads. And again, I think we can all feel that on a day-to-day level.

    Corporate concentration is on steroids right now. Record profits are across the board in different industries, all while workers’ wages have remained stagnant for decades, all while suppliers are being squeezed. So there seems to be one clear group that is making out bandits in all of this while the rest of us collectively suffer in innumerable ways. And I think that the work that Cory and Rebecca have done in this book not only helps us better diagnose this problem, but I think in a truly remarkable accomplishment of the book, they spend a great deal of time talking about how we get ourselves out of this mess. And as I mentioned in the subtitle to the book, they do focus intently on creative labor markets, as we’re going to talk about in a minute, as the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. And as go the creative workers, so will go the rest of us, I think, is really one of the taglines here, and we’re going to understand why.

    So here’s something that Cory and Rebecca write in the final chapter of their book. “Knowledge and culture are vital to human thriving. Art gives expression to new ideas and movements and cultures, making an experience that can be an act of solidarity or protest. It can sucker our traumas and heightened moments of joy. Music, poetry, fiction, memoir, sculpture, painting, and dance are all necessary to making sense of and bearing being human. We need people to be able to dedicate their professional lives to these crafts. Creative workers and producers deserve a better deal, one that delivers them a dignified and fair share of the wealth generated by their work. We’ve shown some of the key actions that can get them there like enshrining…” Let me skip ahead actually, I didn’t want to mark up Nancy’s book.

    So ,”In the ongoing war of capital versus labor, between oligarchy and democracy, capital is clearly ascendant. Wages in most developed nations have stagnated over the last 40 years, though productivity has risen steeply. At the same time, profit margins in concentrated industries are rising. Anti-competitive flywheels are everywhere, locking in users and suppliers, making markets hostile to new entrants and leveraging that power to force suppliers and workers to accept ever lower prices. We are sharing less in the returns of our work because choke points are sapping our ability to bargain for improved conditions and pay.

    “Monopolies and monopsonies have become endemic, squeezing the life out of customers and suppliers. And then there are the uncountable corporations who don’t quite meet the extraordinarily high standards required by US antitrust law to earn that label, but which also use their control over choke points to siphon away a disproportionate share of value, particularly from other people’s labor.”

    Now, Cory, Rebecca, I don’t want to ask you all to rehash the analytical breakdown that you give of what chokepoint capitalism is, how it came to be, what it looks like. I was hoping, in fact, that we could start by demonstrating what chokepoint capitalism is to people by looking at different people in this system and how this system affects them. So sticking with some of the examples that we’ve already mentioned, let’s talk about your average Joe Schmo Amazon Prime subscriber who orders a lot of stuff on Amazon Prime.

    Who here orders from Amazon Prime? It’s okay, you can admit it. All right. So let’s talk about, from the average Amazon customer side, Amazon small vendor who has to use Amazon’s marketplace to sell whatever it is that they’re producing, and even an Amazon worker at a fulfillment center like the one that we have down the road. And then on the other side, you all do an incredible job talking about services like Spotify and what they mean for musicians. And so I was wondering if we could also weave in like, if I’m an independent musician trying to get my music out there, or if I’m someone who listens to Spotify to find new music, in those sorts of subject positions. What does chokepoint capitalism look like?

    Cory Doctorow:  Do you want to start or shall I?

    Rebecca Giblin:  You start, I’m still writing down a whole of the, before I forget, all of the ones that we’re going to talk about.

    Cory Doctorow:  Well, so Amazon’s an interesting example. And it’s interesting in part because the DC Attorney General brought a landmark antitrust case against Amazon. So antitrust law, you should understand, doesn’t do much. It’s been a dead letter for about 40 years. But the one thing that it’s supposed to protect us against is high prices. Basically the posture of antitrust regulators these days is so long as you’re not making prices go up, you can form a monopoly that does anything at once to everybody except for the consumer. And if prices go up, then the regulator will step. In practice, they rarely do. And it is this very narrow eye of the needle that people keep trying to thread their antitrust cases through with varying degrees of success. Lots of people are arguing that we should have a more expansive view. But in the DC case, they actually just try to thread this one little needle.

    So if you want to sell goods, you have to sell on Amazon because they’ve got Prime. Once you get Prime, you’re almost certain not to look anywhere except Amazon if you’re trying to buy goods. You’ve already spent your $150, so you’re definitely going to shop Amazon first if you can get there. So that’s all the users being corralled, all the customers being corralled into Amazon’s little walled garden there.

    So the sellers want to be there, but it’s not enough to merely sell through Amazon, because if you’re not a Prime seller on Amazon, then you’re not going to show up in the search results. So to be Prime, you have to do things like fulfillment by Amazon, which means that you’ve got to send your stuff to Amazon’s warehouse to be shipped and so on. And then if you want to show up in the first couple of pages of results, you probably have to pay what they call advertising fees.

    It’s just payola to be on those front pages. They have a $31 billion a year advertising market. Almost all of that advertising is just people who sell on Amazon bidding against each other to be at the top of those listings. So it’s very hard to make money on Amazon. North of 50% of what the consumer pays for goods on Amazon from these independent sellers is just gobbled up by Amazon’s fees. And so what they do is they raise the prices. But they don’t just raise the prices on Amazon. Because Amazon has something called most favored nation status, which you’ll hear about, I think Rebecca might talk about Spotify.

    Rebecca Giblin:  Yeah, you talk about Amazon and I’ll talk [inaudible] –

    Cory Doctorow:  And we’ll talk about how most favored nation status shows up in all of these scams. So most favored nation status means you can’t sell more cheaply anywhere than you sell on Amazon. And so that means that if you take the same goods and you want to sell them at Target or at the local hardware store or the local bodega, you can’t charge less than you charge on Amazon. So even if you never shop on Amazon, you pay higher prices because of how Amazon works.

    So let’s look at how this plays out for the people who want to write books and sell them on Amazon. Amazon has a subsidiary called Audible. Audible is the world’s most successful audiobook marketplace. Depending on what genre you’re talking about, they control 90% or more of the marketplace. Audible has a condition that if you want to sell your books on Audible, you have to agree that they can wrap your audiobook in an encryption technology called Digital Rights Management. And under a law from the Clinton era, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s illegal to remove digital rights management even if you have permission from the copyright holder.

    So if you buy my audiobook on Audible and I say, you know what? You can remove the DRM, you can move that audiobook to a player that Audible doesn’t control, I can’t authorize you to do it. And if I give you a tool to do that, I commit a felony which is punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. So there’s a stick that locks in all of those listeners for audiobooks, but there’s also a carrot. And the carrot is that if you are an Audible subscriber and you get that one credit every month until very recently, until labor organizing, Audible had this incredibly generous deal where if you were done listening to your audiobook, they would say at the end of it, hey, just in case, if you didn’t like that audiobook, you can return it for your credit back.

    You can get a second audiobook with your one audiobook a month subscription. In fact, you can return it months after you’ve listened to it. You can return it after you’ve listened to it several times. And they would bombard their listeners with these enticements to return the book because if you return the book, they would claw back the royalty from the author whose book they had sold on the platform. Now, if you’re an independent author and you wanted to sell on Audible’s platform, you use something called ACX. And again, until a recent spate of labor organizing, if you put your book on ACX, the book that you personally finance out of your own pocket, you couldn’t sell it anywhere else for seven years. So you’re stuck in this platform where you can only sell there for seven years, and Audible gets to give back the credit to the listeners and take it out of your pocket, which means that the subscription is worth more.

    So they’ve wrapped the listener in bonds of iron, they’ve said you may not remove the DMR from the books you’ve bought and go somewhere else, and in silk ribbons: we will give you back your credit. All you have to do is say, I didn’t like that book as much as I thought I would, even though I listened to it three times and I’ve had it for a year. And they’ll give you back that credit. So this was called Audible Gate. The authors who discovered it did some more digging. One of the authors involved is a forensic accountant who now writes mystery novels. Wrong person –

    Rebecca Giblin:  Forensic fraud thrillers.

    Cory Doctorow:  …Forensic fraud thrillers. She estimates hundreds of millions of dollars in wage theft. So you can see how this lock-in, this choke point allows the firms to sometimes screw their buyers, the customers, as it is the case with all the hard goods you buy from Amazon whether you’re buying them on Amazon or not, but also screw the producers. So these independent authors are getting the shitty end of the stick from Audible and having their pockets picked at every turn. And that’s how these monopsonistic markets work. A monopsony is like a monopoly except the buyer has power instead of the seller. The only place you can sell your audiobooks is Audible, and so Audible is the buyer for your creative labor. They have all the power, they can set the terms and they can treat you in extraordinarily bad ways. That’s a pattern that we see throughout the creative industries.

    Rebecca Giblin:  So let me talk a little bit about the music markets, but for recorded music. And these markets, we spend a lot of time on music markets in the book, but they are rigged in just about every way that you can imagine. And then the compounding effect on this, particularly for independent musicians, is really extraordinary. So let me unpack at least some of them, not all of them, because then we’ll be here for many hours and I will miss my flight.

    All right, so let’s start with, first of all, record contracts. Record contracts have been traditionally extraordinarily abusive because record labels were previously the only way that if you were a recording artist, really the only way that you could get your music out to audiences. And particularly the majors which controlled the physical distribution into stores. That allowed them to gain a lot of control.

    And then they had the resources to buy up lots of other catalogs of recorded music after file sharing began. And there was blood on the walls and a lot of these companies were going under. So they came to control, these big three record labels came to control almost 70% of the world’s global recorded music market. And they owned the three music publishers. They control the song rights as distinct to the sound recordings that control almost 60% of global song rights. And so even though we don’t need them in the same way today for artists to get their music out to audiences, the fact that they control those copyrights which can last close to a century has allowed them to not only shake down artists in their contracts but also to shape the future of recorded music markets, which they’ve done with streaming.

    And so it might be, you’ve heard a lot about how streaming royalties are really low and not many artists make much money from that. But you might have less awareness that the reason they work the way that they do is because the big three designed them that way. And certainly they work a lot better for the major labels than they do for any other form of label. And so there’s a whole bunch of reasons for that, but we probably don’t have much time for me to get into it. But one of the really critical ones is that the major labels, in order to let Spotify get off the ground, they were acting as if they’re doing Spotify a huge favor to let it try and create a market to replace the revenue that was lost to peer-to-peer file sharing. When, of course we know now that, and I think a lot of us knew at the time, but we know now from the empirical research the reason why people were infringing so much is because they were really interested in having access to the entirety of the history of the world’s music at their fingertips. The convenience of that and the range of it instead of being limited to what you could get in a tiny record store was what was really the killer app for that.

    And so as soon as people had a reasonable, legitimate alternative like they do with music streaming, they came to pay. The same we see with movies and TV shows. But the major labels said, okay, well if you want to have a go at doing this, you’re going to have to give us a whole bunch of equity in your company, and then we’ll give you permission to do this. So the biggest labels had this huge equity stake in Spotify which gave it a massive conflict of interest. Because when they were negotiating for the royalty rates, they were also thinking about, hm, what kinds of royalties are going to maximize the amount of money that we are going to make through our equity?

    Now the thing with that equity share is that when they negotiated it, they had this really neat little thing that they had put in their contracts and they’d had that for decades, that any money that they brought in that was from use of music but was not attributable to any particular song, they didn’t have to share with artists at all. And the equity stakes were like that.

    And so when they came… And look, that’s subsequently been reformed again because we got a bit of transparency. There was a Sony contract with Spotify that was leaked, and all of the musicians who had suspected that these deals were being structured to cut them out saw for sure that these deals were being structured to cut them out. And there was a big hullabaloo, and they did, through a big public shaming campaign, managed to get some reform to that. But at the time, this is exactly what was going on. So what happened, if we fast forward to when we get to Spotify’s IPO, it was time to renegotiate the royalty rates that the artists were going to get. Now you might think that’s a time when the labels have really got leverage to do the best that they can for their artists. That’s not actually what happened.

    The major labels, even though they had Spotify over a barrel because Spotify needed those catalogs in order to be able to do its IPO, they negotiated for lower royalty rates for their artists because as shareholders, they knew that was the thing that was going to give them the biggest bump in their shareholding. And so what this means for independent artists is that when those independent labels came back to the negotiating table because it was their turn to renegotiate their contracts, all those major labels had something called a most favored nation clause, which is what Corey alluded to, which sets the ceiling, the most that anybody can get. And so those independent labels who didn’t have the benefit of that potential upside from the equity, they came back to the negotiating table to find the ceiling was actually lower than before, not higher. And so their artists were getting less than what they were getting in order to subsidize the huge windfall payday that the majors were going to get.

    And so what we are seeing here is exactly the same playbook across all of the creative industries that we look at. And Amazon actually made a picture for it, we’ve put it in the book, they call it this Virtuous Flywheel. They talk about how this is the secret to their success, that they’ve got all of these efficiencies, they’ve got this lower cost structure, which means lower prices that attracts more customers that brings more traffic and so then we’ve got more sellers. It’s all delightful. It’s a beautiful cycle and it all continues.

    But we hired an amazing illustrator called Lauren Canard to draw our idea of what was really going on instead. So this is not a virtuous cycle, it’s an anti-competitive one. What we are seeing here is that these companies are locking in their customers so that they can then lock in their suppliers, the artists, the people who actually make the stuff that we care about. And then once they’ve got their customers and their suppliers locked in, they use the revenue that they make from that to eliminate their competitors so that those people have less and less choice about somewhere else to go.

    This is why so many people raise their hands with the question, who’s a Prime Member? Because what are the alternatives in so many places? How many hours would it take you to replicate the convenience of getting that? Because local shops and commerce have been hollowed out by Amazon’s dominance as a result of it using these price structures to force out those competitors. And then once they’ve done that, that’s when they really put the squeeze on. The final part of this flower that’s really going around is that they’re forcing their workers, their suppliers, these creative laborers to accept an unsustainable and unfair low share of value. So that’s really what’s going on, what we try to show in the first half of the book.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, and to really emphasize the visual of the Chokepoint, Corey and Rebecca frequently invoke the image of the hourglass. So imagine that type of shape. And you’ve got sellers, producers on one side, and then you’ve got buyers, consumers on the other side, and you’ve got this vice grip on the neck of the middle point. That’s what Amazon’s doing. That’s what Spotify’s doing. Frankly, that’s what all of these massive corporations are doing because of what y’all detail in the book. And one thing I wanted to also emphasize, picking up the role of the Amazon worker, this impacts all of us.

    And again, there’s one clear group, a small group that’s making out bandits here while everyone else is pissed off at what’s going on, but no one really feels like they have any power to do anything about it. Almost two years ago for The Real News, I drove down to Alabama and spoke with workers at the Bessemer Fulfillment Center that was attempting to unionize with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union down there. And they got two shots at an election because Amazon was found to have cheated and broke the law during the first election, because they can. And when I say that this impacts everyone, and something that Corey and Rebecca write, they talk about this paradigmatic shift that occurred in the last half century where the calculus by which we determine whether or not there’s an antitrust problem is focused on consumer prices.

    If prices are low, there’s essentially no problem. There’s no smoke, no fire. That’s what Amazon is able to do with this system. And one of the ways it is able to do that is by grinding its workers into dust. And a lot of these workers are also, purportedly, the consumers who are going to buy the stuff on Amazon. And so when I spoke to workers down in Bessemer, a de-industrialized town, majority Black, twice the national poverty rate, yes, the wages at Amazon were higher than the average low wage worker in Bessemer. But as the union and the organizers pointed out, if you look at the greater Birmingham area, Amazon is paying at least $2 less than unionized warehouses in that area. So you are grinding workers down, Amazon’s fulfillment centers have a turnover rate of 150%. Amazon itself, by its own internal studies, has said, we’re going to run out of human beings to churn through our warehouses by 2024 at this rate.

    That also has an impact, because you can artificially keep costs low, but it comes at the expense of the human beings who are making that process happen. We all know the horror stories, and I heard them firsthand: Workers work to the bone walking multiple football field lengths to retrieve something to fulfill an order, their knees breaking down, so on and so forth. And so that is a part of this too. So if you have lower wages, you’re being taken advantage of, you’re being exploited, you’re being run into the ground. That is the cost of these artificially low prices.

    And one thing that I wanted to ask y’all about is this notion that creative workers are, as I said before, the proverbial canaries in the coal mine because you write in the book, “Today’s creative labor markets give us a glimpse of what a geographically unbound labor market might look like.” So there’s something very telling in what chokepoint capitalism is doing to creative labor markets that we should all be worried about because it’s not just creatives who are experiencing this, but this feels like the trend towards which all other labor markets are going. I was wondering if y’all could talk a bit more about that.

    Cory Doctorow:  Well, yeah. Do you want to talk about the location independent stuff and then…

    Rebecca Giblin:  Well, I guess we all found that with COVID, that we have been told for a long time that, for blue collar workers, robots are going to take their jobs. Have you ever seen a robot try and open a door, or those hilarious videos where you try and get a robot to do a really basic task and it’s just laughably bad at it? So we’re actually surprisingly far from that for a lot of things that humans can just do without even thinking about it. But do you know what we are not far away from? As we discovered when COVID put us all at home and suddenly, within a matter of days in some cases, our employers discovered that we didn’t really need offices anymore and that the job could be done very, very well from home. But if the job can be done very, very well from home, it can be done very, very well from home anywhere in the world.

    And do you know what’s much easier than getting robots to learn how to open doors? It’s just to give a couple decades of socializations and skills acquisition to people in lower income countries and then the jobs, white collar jobs, are geographically unbound from the places that they’re in many, many cases. And so this is really sobering, these companies that are extracting… It’s an extraction mindset. And we’re actually starting to see some of the wealthiest people on the planet coming around to the idea of a universal basic income because they’re realizing that they’re pretty close, in many cases, to taking everything that there is to take. And if they want to take more, they’re going to have to arrange for more to be given to those people so that they can extract it. So it’s like a strip mining kind of mindset.

    And so I think that that’s a danger that we’ve got to be thinking about. It’s not that those of us who are still in secure, well paying jobs have that because the corporations that employ us do so out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s because they haven’t figured out a way of taking that away from us yet. But they’re working on it.

    Cory Doctorow:  And creative workers are among the more vulnerable kinds of workers, because creators work for reasons that aren’t entirely economic. There’s that joke about the kid who runs away and joins the circus and his dad finds him shoveling elephant shit and he says, son, come home. And the kid says, what, and quit show business? Creative work is one of those kinds of work where even if there’s no good expectation that you’ll be able to get a fair wage from it, you just keep doing it. And there are other trades like this. What was the term that came up in yesterday’s seminar? It was something like mission valorization or something. Do you remember?

    Rebecca Giblin:  Yeah. Vocational awe.

    Cory Doctorow:  Vocational awe, yes there’s a paper about this.

    Rebecca Giblin:  If it looks like a [inaudible] are very familiar with.

    Cory Doctorow:  Where you feel like you owe something to your job because it’s a mission. Maybe you run a community museum, maybe you work at a library, teachers, care workers, nurses, and so on, they’re often in a position where even if their wages are cut, even if they don’t know that they can get paid, they still show up for work because the job matters.

    Rebecca Giblin:  Yeah.

    Cory Doctorow:  There’s a –

    Rebecca Giblin:  Yeah. That’s a phrase that we use in the book is we point at all of the situations where people’s passion is being weaponized to facilitate their exploitation.

    Cory Doctorow:  There’s a great book by David Graeber, RIP, called Bullshit Jobs. And in that book he identifies this weird premium we assign to labor that means something. Where we say to people who have a meaningful job, why do you want to get a fair wage for it? Isn’t the satisfaction of the job enough? Surely a fair wage should be reserved for people who have to do the soul-deadening work of representing a box and a dotted line in an org chart for a princeling at a Fortune 100 company and know that their work doesn’t matter at all and whether they live or die will make no difference. Those people need a real reason to show up for work. But if you get the intrinsic satisfaction of helping toddlers, you should be okay with going to the food bank twice a week. So creative workers are vulnerable, not in exactly the same way, but they’re part and parcel of that kind of vulnerable workforce.

    But creative workers have another area in which they’re vulnerable, which is that we have a labor protection regime that is not well suited for purpose, which is copyright. So copyright has some efficacy for creators in extracting revenue from the intermediaries, the publishers, labels, and the studios that represent them. But only when there’s some bargaining leverage. Only when you can go to the label, the studio, the publisher and say, in exchange for my copyright, if you want my copyright, you and I are going to have to dicker, and I’m going to get a better deal out of you.

    And when there’s only a small number of firms and the only way to reach your audience is to go through them when they have the choke point, more copyright for creators is like more lunch money for bullied kids. Doesn’t matter how much lunch money you give that bullied kid, the bullies are going to take the lunch money. And the fact that the bullies are out there using some of that lunch money to run a campaign arguing for more lunch money for the hungry kids of America doesn’t mean that they’re ever going to feed your kid, no matter how much lunch money your kid gets.

    And so from the two examples we gave, Spotify and Audible, the only role that copyright plays in that is to the detriment of creators. The three big labels were able to structure the future of Spotify because they had these extraordinary long, live, century-long copyright portfolios. The only reason that Audible listeners can’t take their collections with them somewhere else is because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which gives more power to corporations that wrap a file with an encryption wrapper than it does to the workers who produce the creative work that is in that file.

    This isn’t to say that copyright is never the answer, but if all we have in our toolbox is copyright we will never solve this problem. And so that’s why the book emphasizes all kinds of solutions that are not just about copyright law. A lot of them are about labor law, some of them are about contract law, some of them are about technology law, and they’re about how you can actually intervene in these markets to do things that make a material difference in creators’ lives. At this point, giving a creator more copyright is just giving them the right to be angry at their audience. It’s not going to give them more groceries, it’s not going to help them pay the rent.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, and I want us to end the panel portion talking about some of those solutions. And again, I think it’s a real testament to the work that Cory and Rebecca have done that so much of the book does focus on potential solutions. None of them is a silver bullet, but all of them are essential tools in the toolkit. Mixed metaphor but you get what I’m saying. But by way of getting there, I want to address something in what you both just said, because I think there is the potential for us to see this problem and to think, oh, maybe something happened in the digital age that threw off the balance. That these corporations had access to types of technologies that allowed them to cheat what was before an okay system, a system that was working fine. But I think this is not going to shock anyone who knows anything about me or, I imagine, any of us, but I’m all for ripping apart the problematic and, I think, unsustainable foundations of capitalism as such, not just as an end in itself.

    But I think one thing that really speaks clearly in Rebecca and Cory’s book is how there are pathologies endemic to capitalism that make it so that capitalists literally cannot stop themselves from doing this shit. They cannot stop themselves. We have enough history, we have 200 years of history showing that it is always going to trend in this direction, towards anti-competition, towards rent-seeking, towards monopoly, monopsony, market control, and so on and so forth. And so I wanted to ask you both if you could say a little more about that inherent pathological nature that shows that the solution to this problem is not fine-tuning, twisting some knobs and adjusting things at the margins, but that this is a systemic problem that leads to the systemic issues that we’ve been talking about.

    Rebecca Giblin:  Yeah, these richest people on the planet, Peter Thiel says, “Competition is for losers.” Warren Buffett salivates over businesses that have wide sustainable modes. This is the orthodoxy being taught in business schools now. It’s that you don’t compete, it’s that you find ways to prevent competition. You find ways to take that vice grip, that was a really beautiful way of putting it. You find ways of getting that vice grip in the hourglass so that you can take away the value of other people’s labor without actually having to do it. And that’s why when you look around at the richest people on the planet, they didn’t get that way from making things or providing services themselves, but just from finding ways of extracting the value of the people that actually did. That’s bananas to me. It’s completely backwards. And we’ve reached the stage now where rich people are not even contemplating making. It’s just like…

    Douglas Rushkoff has this great new book out as well called Survival of the Richest, where he also talks about this, the idea of the mindset and going meta, and that this is the only way that people are thinking about making wealth. So we are so far down this track now. But if we want to think about, well, what does this mean for us? What actually does trickle down when we have this kind of mindset in society? Because we’re always told it’s going to trickle down. What does trickle down? What I think trickles down is emptiness and disconnection from these economic systems and these conditions. And it’s actually a feature, not a bug. We’re supposed to feel disconnected and empty because then we will fill that with evermore consumption and evermore production. But we are more than ambulatory wallets. We’re much more than that.

    But I’m not convinced that humans are great at figuring out what are the conditions of a good life. And part of the reason for that, I think, is often we’re so burnt out and exhausted from having to deal with the lives that we are living, which again is deliberate so that we don’t have the energy to be able to challenge the status quo. And so I think what we have to do about that is we have to start making the first steps towards changing this system.

    As we sometimes say, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. You’re going to make those first steps and then start maybe freeing up some resources and some energy, getting some hope and motivation to be able to do more. Because all of the people, I’m sure there’s lots of people in this room who do activist work and organizing work and know how much burnout accompanies that, it’s just exhausting. But finding ways that we can share the load and take those first bites is really what we’re trying to urge with this book, and join the calls for other people who are trying to create a movement to understand that this is all part of the same fight.

    Cory Doctorow:  Yeah, I think that this idea that our markets have become very concentrated because of some technological factor, it doesn’t bear up to scrutiny. I think the tech giants would like us to think so. I think they would like us to think that they’re evil geniuses because if they’re going to be evil, at least we can call them geniuses. And there’s no point in fighting back because they’re so much smarter than the rest of us. When you look closely at what they’ve done, it doesn’t require genius. It just requires no regulation on unlimited access to the capital markets.

    Google did not become this giant dominant company by inventing the greatest products in the world. They did invent one great product. They had a really good search engine, a pretty good Hotmail clone, a browser that’s okay if it isn’t a little creepily surveillant, but what they do have is a lot of money. Everything that they’ve done that’s successful that isn’t those three things is something they bought from someone else: Their whole ad-tech stack, their whole video stack and display advertising platform, their mobile stack, their server management tools, their customer management tools, their HR tools. They bought all of that stuff from someone else. When they tried to make their own versions of it, it crashed and burned because they’re not an idea factory, they’re a buying things company. That was conduct that we historically prohibited firms from doing. We didn’t let them buy their rivals.

    The great forces of history did not create a moment in which monopolies occurred because of things that were beyond our power. We got monopolies because we stopped enforcing monopoly laws. It’s like, how did the paint on your house get so faded? Well you stopped repainting your house. It wasn’t because the sun changed. It was because you stopped doing the thing that you used to do to maintain the system that you had, and when you stopped, it broke down. I think we’re about to see a version of this at Twitter. Twitter is not going to fail because the great forces of history bore down on the moment, Twitter’s going to fail because they fired the engineers that kept the systems running.

    When we address ourselves to solutions in the book, we don’t address ourselves to individual solutions that are about how we drag Jeff Bezos out of his mansion to a guillotine or something. We talk about systemic solutions because if it wasn’t Jeff Bezos it would be someone else. It’s the system we have to fix, not these individuals, as colorful as they are, and as rent-free as they live in our heads, they’re not the problem. The problem is the system that lets them be there.

    For example, at one point in the book, we have a chapter on contracting terms. Contract is a matter of state law. State law is relatively easy to change compared to federal law. All entertainment contracts are signed, to a first approximation anyway, in California and New York, Washington State because of Amazon and the games companies, and Tennessee because of Nashville.

    If you have a royalty basis in your contract, your contract probably gives you the right to audit the basis on which your royalty is calculated. When you go and you do those audits, you’ll often find that money is owed to you. We cite one company in the book that does record industry audits. They’ve done tens of thousands of them over decades, and this is going to shock you and surprise you, but in all but one instance where they found an error, it was in the favor of the label and not the artist. We have no explanation for this. Some kind of horrible localized probability storm. Must be very hard to be an accountant in a world in which every time you roll the dice it lands on its corner just hovering and never flips onto a face.

    It is terrible stuff, and when you find those errors, we have a source in our book who had a six figure error in their favor, and you say to the label, I’d like the money you stole from me now, they’ll say, you are adorable, but artists can’t do math and you’ve just misunderstood the royalty statements. But I tell you what, no hard feelings, we’re good natured slobs. We will cut you a deal, like 50 cents on the dollar. You don’t have to sue us because you can’t afford to. But if you want that settlement, you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and your auditor has to promise that they won’t audit us again. This is like the murderer being able to say to the forensics crew, welcome gentlemen, dig anywhere in my garden you’d like for those missing bodies, but not in that back corner on the left. I’m very sentimental about it.

    Again, contract is a matter of state law. We could amend our state contract law in four states, we could do it in any one of those states and make a difference, and we could just amend it to say, as a matter of public policy, non-disclosure cannot be enforced where pertains to material omissions or errors that were down to the detriment of people who are owed a royalty for creative work. In that one short bill, you put more money into the pockets of more creators than all the copyright term extensions of the last 40 years combined. There’s a crack in the machine, and if we stick a crowbar in it, we wiggle it around, money will pour out of the machine and into the pockets of artists.

    This is a thing that we’re starting to see in some state laws, that the state law on eBooks for libraries that is proposed in Delaware, as I understand it, has a prohibition on non-disclosure on libraries so that they can tell other library systems the deal they’re getting from the publishers on this.

    Because when you’re not allowed to talk to other people about the deal you’re getting, it lets the firms play us off against each other, it lets these monopolists play us off against each other. The book is full of these systemic solutions, none of them are individual solutions. You’re not going to recycle your way out of climate change and you’re not going to shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. That can be dispiriting to think that there’s nothing you as an individual can do. But there is one thing you can do as an individual, which is to join a movement. As part of a movement, you can demand these big systemic changes.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  I thought that was a great spot to end on. We can carry the conversation over to Q and A, but that was beautiful. Can we give another round of applause [applause]? Anyone got a question on their minds? Yes sir.

    Michael:  You spoke about laws related to eBooks and states and in Maryland, we were the only state that didn’t –

    Cory Doctorow:  Maryland. I said Delaware, I met Maryland.

    Rebecca Giblin:  Actually, could we give Michael a mic? Because I think this would be really good to have on the recording, actually. Michael is a real expert on this and has been leading the fight.

    Michael:  I wanted to go somewhere slightly different than the law, just to say, but what happened when we had that was that Senator Tillis from North Carolina attacked the State and set the copyright office against us. We ultimately didn’t prevail in that. But the law was found to be unconstitutional at the federal level, so we’re going to have to tweak it. But my question to you is, even at a state level, although we had unanimous passing in Maryland, we know that there were states where this law came forward, where the legislators came forward to kill it.

    At a federal level, we actually tried an ebook law, and in Rhode Island, and when the CEO of Disney calls up the legislator and says, uh-uh (negative), and the legislator listens, how are we going to be able to affect change when there’s powerful forces at work in legislation to keep things exactly the way they are and there’s billions of dollars against us?

    Rebecca Giblin:  This is what I was talking about, about how we eat the elephant. Another analogy is you are a mountain climber and you’ve got a whole mountain ahead of you, and that’s where we are right now. I love it when Corey says, well, if you wanted to get there, you wouldn’t start from here. This is a really tricky spot to be starting to climb the mountain from because we have allowed these companies to grow so strong and to have so many resources and to drain the rest of us of ours.

    When you are a mountain climber in those circumstances, you can’t map out the whole path from the beginning, but you can start to see the first few holds. Really, that’s what we are trying to map out in this book. What are all the ways in which we can sap this excessive corporate power?

    Now, we’ve used the word monopsony before, we had it a lot more in this book on the first draft, and all of our readers begged us to take it out because it’s a horrible, horrible word. We think we can make it sexy.

    The thing about monopsony that’s really, really important, these powerful buyers, like the way that Amazon’s a powerful buyer when it comes to publishers and authors, the way that the big three record labels are powerful buyers when it comes to recording artists and so on, it arises at way lower market concentrations than monopoly does. That’s one thing that makes it way more dangerous. Another thing that makes it way more dangerous is traditional antitrust remedies, conduct remedies, which is where you get companies to pinky swear they won’t abuse their power like we did with Live Nation as a condition of it being allowed to swallow up TicketMaster. How well did that work out? Really not so well. And then the structural remedies as well. That means things like breaking companies up. These remedies don’t work particularly well. It can take, how long was it with IBM?

    Cory Doctorow:  With the AT&T? It took 69 years from the first antitrust action until they were broken up in 1982.

    Rebecca Giblin:  So that’s not awesome, and really, really expensive as well. But do you know what? These remedies we know are even less effective when it comes to monopsony than it does for monopoly. But we do know what does work, and there are three things: Directly regulating excessive buyer power, encouraging new market entrants, and supporting the building of countervailing power in workers and suppliers.

    In the context of libraries, for example, initiatives like the one that we were talking about earlier, to ban NDAs so that libraries are allowed to talk to each other about the contractual terms that they’ve managed to negotiate so that they’re able to get a little bit of extra power in their negotiations with these behemoth companies.

    That kind of intervention is the kind of thing that we can do to start taking those first little steps up the mountain. I think that rather than… And that’s what Max was talking about, that we didn’t have silver bullets here, because there is no silver bullet. If there was a silver bullet, we would’ve found it already.

    What we have to do is these many, many, many interventions and keep the pressure, on and keep talking to Congress people, our representatives, to be demanding that they don’t just do things like give more support bills for more copyright, but they actually support targeted interventions that are going to achieve the things that they say they want to achieve. That’s what I would say. Cory, do you want to add anything to that?

    Cory Doctorow:  Yeah, I mean I think that as beloved as libraries are, and as important as creative work is, and as large as the megaphone as some creative workers have, we are not a force to be reckoned with. But if you add to us everyone else who’s on the wrong side of one of those hourglass shaped markets, if you understand that we’re all actually fighting different facets of the same fight, then we become a coalition that I think will be unstoppable. I think that’s what we’re going to need as well.

    James Boyle, who runs the Center for the Public Domain with Jennifer Jenkins at Duke University, wonderful law professor, he tells a story about how before the term ecology was in widespread use, people didn’t know they were fighting the same fight. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer. What do your nocturnal avians have to do with the gaseous composition of the atmosphere? It’s the terminology that turns a thousand issues into a movement. The number of people who struggle under monopoly and monopsony, it’s really just nearly everyone, with the exception of a few shareholders of a few large firms.

    If you’re angry because all the beer comes from two companies, you’re angry about monopoly. If you’re angry because all of the world’s shipping is done by three companies who for years have been telling their regulators to shut up whenever the regulators said, hey, those economies of scale you’re getting from making your ships bigger, they’re going to run into problems when one of them gets stuck into the Suez Canal. You’re also pissed about this kind of market concentration.

    If you’re a glasses wearer and you’ve noticed that your glasses cost a 1000% more than they did a decade ago, it’s because one company, Luxottica Essilor, owns every eyewear brand you’ve ever heard of: Coach, Dolce & Gabbana, Oliver Peoples, Bausch and Lomb, Oakley, all one company. They also own LensCrafter, Sears Optical, Target Optical, and Sunglass Hut. They also own the largest lens lab in the world, more than half the world’s lenses come from them, and iMed, which is probably your insurer because it’s the single largest eyewear insurer in the world. And they’ve hiked prices 1000% over a decade.

    We’re all on the same side. We’re all on the same side with the people who are angry that the professional wrestlers they grew up watching are now begging for pennies so they can die with dignity of their workplace related injuries on GoFundMe. The reason they’re doing that is because instead of 30 leagues there’s one, and the rapey, Trumpy billionaire who owns it reclassified them all as contractors and took away their health insurance.

    We are all fighting the same fight. And once we realize that we’re all fighting the same fight along with all the people who are angry about the concentrated power of the oil companies and the coal companies, then we can make real change.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  So what you’re saying is when Swifties unite with Amazon workers, it’s an unstoppable force.

    Cory Doctorow:  Damn right.

    Rebecca Giblin:  I think that’s actually all we need.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah, I would not want to get in the way of that.

    Yes, sir?

    Speaker 1:  Yeah, thanks.

    I wonder if you guys can talk about this a little bit from a cultural standpoint. I sort of see these challenges as emergent properties of systems like you guys do. I also see systems as sort of emergent properties of culture.

    One thing that turned my head a couple of decades ago was there was somebody who was working from you who’s like a recovering Wall Street broker, and he helped me understand over a few months period that this ethos of raping and pillaging is not a bunch of people going, oh, I bet we can get away with this kind of nefarious thing, culturally. There’s actually a strong belief that it’s the right thing to do, that it’s the moral thing to do, that the rightness in the world happens when there’s winners and losers, and the people who know how to tune these technocracies to really take advantage of people deserve what they get.

    It’s a system of justification, and it’s amazing to me how much Americans tolerate this really alien cultural ethos among us, almost like a caste system where we believe that we’re really owed this kind of [inaudible].

    Cory Doctorow:  Yeah. The question, for the video, is about this ideology of greed not just being good in a Gordon Gecko sense, but greed being a mechanism and inequality whereby we create these engines of productivity and produce shared prosperity, that it’s only by being as big a bastard as you can possibly be, that we can unleash the power of markets.

    You may have seen this report in ProPublica about the company that helps landlords jack up rents. Part of their argument is that if you let humans decide when to jack up the rents their sentimentality will get in the way of charging what the rent should really be. When you drill into it, they’ll say, oh, well the thing is, if the rents go high enough that it will tempt in more developers to build more properties and then you’ll get the rents falling, and so the only way that you resolve the housing crisis is by letting thousands of people be put into housing precarity or homelessness because that’s what lures capital into the market.

    They have a kind of side tale, which is that governments can’t build housing. They point to the problems of public housing in the United States. What they never mention is all the places where public housing does work. To the extent that you even talk about, say, Vienna or the UK before Thatcher sold off the council estates, there’s a kind of weird American exceptionalism where this country that is billed as the greatest country in the world suddenly becomes the worst one. Americans are just too stupid and greedy to build housing the way the Viennese did. There’s something in the schnitzel that makes you capable of building housing that Americans could never build.

    I think that the good news is that this ideology takes work. It’s not a thing that comes to us naturally. And Yochai Benkler is one of the fathers of the free software movement. He talks about how if you go to Wall Street, you go to Zuccotti Park and you see the kids playing in the playgrounds surrounded by their broker parents, you’ll hear those broker parents leaning over the gate of the park and saying, Timmy, share! Because nobody wants to live with a toddler who acts like we are told in business school we all need to act. It is a miserable existence.

    Just like after World War II they found that a large plurality of soldiers just aimed over the enemy’s head because no one wants to shoot a stranger, and it took work to figure out how to turn people into people who would shoot at strangers who they had no beef with except that your boss had ordered you to shoot at them and their boss had ordered them to shoot at you. It takes work to convince people to be greedy, to be jerks. And to a certain extent, if we take our foot off the gas, that vehicle is going to roll to a stop. It’s going to take some work, but I think we can do it.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, also, in terms of the broad spectrum of potential solutions or partial solutions, I’m hoping that this week is another chink in the armor of the capitalist ideology that leads us to believe that if someone is a billionaire, they’re inherently smarter than us and more deserving than us, and we are watching in real time how untrue that is. Elon Musk is a dipshit and everyone is seeing in full view… And this is not just about Musk and the tech geniuses who fancy themselves as such, but also the old school capitalists who love cashing in on that same sort of adoration that we pour on the rich and powerful.

    One example that I would give is Warren Buffet. Warren Buffet, people teach whole business classes about this guy. He’s like a business genius, so on and so forth. At The Real News, we’ve spent all year reporting on how people like Warren Buffet have taken our supply chain and driven it into the ground by driving workers into the ground, by jacking up costs for shippers.

    So everyone is off. Workers are quitting in record numbers after having their numbers slashed by, geez, 80% over the past 40 years. We are not moving nearly as much freight as we should be in this country. Everything in the system is getting worse, and yet profits are record high. Stock buybacks are sky high. The only genius that Warren Buffet has is that he located a fixed infrastructure, like no one’s going to be building more freight rail lines in this country. It’s not a competitive market, it’s a cartel. The main companies that own the freight rail lines, they each got their lines picked out, they’re not competing with anyone, so they can just, again, squeeze that resource, charge more to shippers, and slash their workforce to pile more work onto fewer workers, move less freight, and just rake in a bunch of money.

    Sorry, we had a hand up there.

    Speaker 2:  I didn’t mean to interrupt.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  No, no. This isn’t about me.

    Speaker 2:  I’m curious what you think about, and this is a little outside of the purview of the book, which is obviously about capital and specifically about creatives who produce goods that are sold in the private market, which is usually an individual to market relationship.

    But I’m curious what you think about academia, broadly, and maybe broader than that, the nonprofit-industrial complex. Because it seems to me that particularly, this has been happening for a while, but particularly post COVID, there’s been a move to try to capture the intellectual property of intellectuals who are within either public universities or private universities that are funded by the public through the tax statement of their nonprofit status.

    An anecdote is a friend of mine who’s faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, as soon as the pandemic began and classes were all moved to remote, she was asked to record all of her courses, which she’d previously refused to do. There had been some kind of suggestion of this in the past, but all of a sudden this became a sort of mandate that people were being asked to sign off on, which was to sign off on recording their lectures and giving over the intellectual property of those lectures to the university in perpetuity so that they could then be used… Have the class with no teacher, imagine the savings.

    I’m curious if you have any thoughts, I realize it’s a little outside of what your specific area is, but it seems like the university is becoming more privatized and trying to do a similar thing to capital in these big capital markets, and it seems like there’s a relationship there.

    Rebecca Giblin:  Well, again, I would say it’s all part of the same thing. I’m a professor at a law school in Australia. In Australia, we relied very heavily on international students to subsidize the running of the universities. When COVID hit, there were no more international students. We saw the vulnerability of these economic structures, and it’s been carnage. Like tens of thousands of university workers laid off. We in universities are also people who are really passionate about our work, passionate about our students and our research, and always give more when we are asked for more. But what was really, really clear when that happened was that a lot of these universities that had even quite large endowments or cash reserves or real estate holdings that they could have cashed in in order to support their labor force, they did none of that. We were the first ones to go. And I think that this demonstrates exactly the same pathology, that it’s not about the people, it’s about the money.

    And I was thinking when you were talking before, it’s something that I think about quite often. I literally do fantasize about this. What if instead of valorizing people like Warren Buffett, we valorize the people who are kind and who dedicate their lives to their communities and who build connections and who make things better? What would that society look like in terms of taking your foot off the gas pedal?

    And what’s been kind of wild to me, so many things following Twitter in the last week, but every thread talking about another absolutely batshit thing that Elon has done, is there will be Elon fans in there going, oh, you just don’t get it. He’s so smart. Right? It’s wild to me. So these people just really valorize that. But what if we valorize something really different? And how do we go about building a society that does that? So I think this is a very circular and probably unsatisfactory answer to your question, but I do think that’s absolutely happening.

    It’s been happening for decades in the academic publishing markets as well, where these massive corporations have been extracting huge amounts of value, billions of dollars every year from academic labor forces that are subsidized by the public, and we’ve just allowed that to happen too. We have to stop allowing these things to happen. We have to demand different. We have to demand better.

    Cory Doctorow:  I want to maybe have a slight pushback. I agree with your point that academic workers need to be fairly compensated and that they should be treated with dignity and so on. But I think that we run the risk of saying, in the Spotify example, say, that the problem is that all the music is available and not that the problem is that the artists aren’t being well compensated. I think pedagogically there’s a good reason to record lectures. I just think the problem isn’t that students can access a lecture later if they miss a class, they can go back and look at it, we can make it open access. I’m a visiting professor at the Open University in the UK where we sort of invented MOOCs. Our classes are available for free. We used to broadcast them over the terrestrial airways. We still do for some of our courses, but if you want to get credentialed you have to pay to get the examinations and the invigilation and the evaluation and so on.

    Rebecca Giblin:  Recorded lectures are incredibly helpful as well for people who don’t have the same first language as the lecturer and so on. There are so many –

    Cory Doctorow:  So all of that to me is fine. But the problem isn’t, just like the problem with Spotify isn’t that we can get all the stuff, the problem with tertiary education having recordings of professors, is not the recording of the professor, it’s the economic arrangement that accompanies it. But I’m all in favor of in particular public universities making the stuff that is financed through public financing public. Again, the problem isn’t that if you do work on a vaccine at a public university with an NIH grant that then doesn’t become your patent that you get to exploit. The problem is that once you file that patent, the university’s technology transfer office sends it to a rapacious pharmaceutical giant that makes sure that the 2.5 billion people in the 125 poorest countries in the world don’t get a COVID vaccine until 2025. That’s the problem. And we should fund our universities well and we should make sure that those researchers are well compensated and so on. But it shouldn’t be through the creation of exclusive rights regimes over publicly funded work.

    I think that one of the tricks that large firms and corporate mindsets like to play is to try and trick us into thinking that we have to take the good with the bad, or the bad with the good, rather. So Google wants you to think that it’s impossible to search the internet without being spied on in every conceivable way from asshole to appetite. But Google ran a non surveilling search engine for the first five years, and it was the best search engine on the internet. And it wasn’t until five years into their business that they were like, we should monetize this by spying on people. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think that there’s no way you can talk to your friends without being spied on. Facebook used to bill itself as the non-surveilling alternative to MySpace, and they didn’t spy on you.

    So these are totally separable. We can have universal access to all human knowledge and well-compensated academics. We don’t need to choose between those two. We can do both. You could have universities where students get a lot of individualized attention and where there’s not just a professor but lots of people helping the professors without having precarious adjuncts who have to go to food banks.

    The problem isn’t that there are lots of adjuncts on the payroll, the problem is that they’re paid so badly. And so I agree with you entirely that the corporate mindset within the university that sees the academic workers as a resource to be squeezed is a huge problem. But I just want to be clear that the answer isn’t to enclose knowledge that’s produced at public expense. It’s to fairly compensate the workers who do that work.

    Rebecca Giblin:  But I do think… Yeah, definitely clap for him [applause]. But I do think that the fact that, in this example, that that professor sees that providing that access to that knowledge is a direct route to her potentially losing her job, this is a huge problem. And this is, again, it’s the exact same pathology, because she is almost certainly right.

    Speaker 2:  [inaudible] I mean I agree with you that recording of lectures and having recorded lectures be available is good and it certainly should be the case with publicly funded universities. But I think exactly what you’re saying, if what you’re being asked to sign is that this is no longer your intellectual property and it can be used for whatever, including replacing you –

    Rebecca Giblin:  But see, I think the only reason that that’s a problem is because you know that these universities will replace you if they possibly can. And this is exactly the same thing that we’re talking about.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  And it feels like the lunch money example. It’s like the problem is that even in higher ed these choke points are there. I mean right now in the largest strike in the country, does anyone know what the largest strike in the country is right now?

    Cory Doctorow:  UC System.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  UC system. 48,000 academic workers are on strike across the state right now. On the other end of the country, part-time faculty at the New School are on strike as we speak. And the thing is that both of these groups, it’s bonkers because at the New School, an ostensibly progressive institution that does great work, has great people, 87% of its teaching is done by part-time faculty, by contingent faculty. That is a choke point. That knowledge is there. That’s the service that the university is ostensibly there to give, but workers are being ground to dust, students are being asked to pay more for it. Someone is in the middle controlling all of that crap.

    Cory Doctorow:  You’re getting at an important point here which is that when there’s monopolies within the supply chain, the whole supply chain starts to look like a monopoly, because the alternative is that the monopoly crushes the other parts of its supply chain. So the university will doubtless say something like, well, all of academic publishing is concentrated into just a few hands, and they’re screwing us. All of scholarly publishing is concentrated into a few hands. They’re screwing us even worse. So our faculty need to publish in top-tier journals. And then those journals charge us five and six figures to subscribe to them. Our students want to get the textbooks, but the textbooks cost more than they ever did and we have to figure out how to subsidize them. So we have to figure out how to concentrate. You see this in every industry.

    So in the US when pharmaceutical companies were allowed to concentrate, they turned around, they started raising the prices, they charged hospitals. Hospitals then started to create regional monopolies so they could bargain back and they would say, oh, you want a hundred times more for your chemotherapy drug than you were charging us last year? Fine. Well, no hospital within 300 miles of this place is going to buy your chemotherapy drug anymore, and they could get the pharma companies to budge on prices. But then they turned around and they screwed the insurers, and then the insurers formed monopolies so they could push back on pricing. So then you have this fully monopolized supply chain, insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, pharmaceutical companies, hospital supply companies. Hospital beds are a monopoly. They’re a monopoly that’s merged with the coffin monopoly which is super creepy. But saline is a monopoly. All the saline in America is made in one factory in Puerto Rico, which is why after Hurricane Maria you couldn’t get a bag of salt water.

    And in every one of these cases, they’re merged into monopoly to fight each other. The only groups that aren’t monopolized in that supply chain are the healthcare workers at one end who have worse wages and worse working conditions and the patients at the other end who pay higher prices and get worse care. And everyone else, yeah, they fight with each other a little about who’s going to get what. But the one thing they all agree on, the one thing they’re all on the same side, is that these guys and these guys can go fuck themselves because they’re just there for the taking. And this is true in publishing. We just saw a wonderful thing where the DOJ, or the FTC rather, managed to convince a court not to allow Simon & Schuster to be bought by Penguin Random House. Penguin and Random House used to be two separate companies too. Now they’re one.

    Rebecca Giblin:  Before that it was hundreds of separate companies.

    Cory Doctorow:  Yeah, you list out all the imprints they bought. It just goes on forever. It’s farcical. But about a decade ago, there was a big antitrust case because all the publishers got together to conspire with Apple not to allow their books to be sold on Kindles, only on iPads, because Amazon was selling e-books below cost because they wanted to lock in all of the readers to the Kindle platform.

    When the six big publishers get together and they collude to raise prices on e-books, that is illegal, and they got slaughtered by the FTC. But if those six companies become one company, and instead of the CEO of Random House, the CEO of Penguin and the CEO of Simon & Schuster meeting in a smoke-filled room to fix prices, the president of Penguin, who works for Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, the president of Random House who works for Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and the president of Simon & Schuster who works for the President of Random House, Simon & Schuster get together and do the same thing, that’s just business.

    So yeah, we’ve now stopped those firms from further concentrating. That’s good news. Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House had this bizarre thing that they said, which was that they would bid against each other for books if writers wrote really good books. And Stephen King went in and said that’s just nonsense, right? That’s like a husband and wife bidding against each other for the same house. It’s crazy. It’s never going to happen. But we’ve left them exposed because there is this giant monopoly in their supply chain. So they’ve got work to do there.

    And it’s just important to remember that there’s never just one ant, there’s never just one monopolized part of your supply chain. As soon as you get some, you get it all the way up and down the supply chain and they crush all the businesses that don’t form monopolies. And in the end you get monopolies up and down and then the only people who are left are customers and workers, and they’re the ones who really get shafted.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  So I know you guys got to get to the airport. So I think we have one more question, and I just wanted to check if we had time. Yeah, in the back, please.

    Speaker 3:  Thank you. I really appreciate your work and what you brought up. But I think what I keep coming back to is what do we do and where do we have power? Because it sounds like a lot of the solutions that you point to or that you’ve highlighted come back to changing laws. But the problem that you’re describing is capitalism. It’s an exploitative system that concentrates capital, that capital is owned by a minority of the population. And that’s the thing that we have to change. And we have the advantage of being workers that actually work and produce value. And the fact that they own that value right now is something we have to change. But I’m curious where you see examples of workers organizing. And really it comes down to class struggle, if we will be frank, of where we would have power to break the monopolies or to break the power that they hold over us is us organizing and us looking to each other, and to us looking at the millions and billions of workers around the world that have immense power.

    But as soon as we get funneled into their system of laws and their system of, you can’t strike because your union says this and your contracts say that, then we’ll be waiting around forever. But we didn’t get any of the gains that we have from –

    Cory Doctorow:  Obeying the law.

    Speaker 3:  So I’m really curious if you can speak to more examples about where workers in Spotify or Audible or these other places or outside of even the technical world have organized and where that benefits everyone.

    Cory Doctorow:  So before we answer that, for the cameras, the question is about what the role of labor and labor organizing is in all of this and where that fits besides just changing laws.

    Rebecca Giblin:  One of my favorite stories in the book is from the Writers Guild of America and their recent strike against the big four Hollywood talent agencies. We worked with them and particularly David Goodman who was the president of the Guild over the course of that strike. And we could see what a toll this was having on him. So basically what was happening here is that the Hollywood talent agencies had sewed up the talent, particularly writers, in exactly the same way, exactly the same playbook that we’ve been talking about. And even though it’s the so-called golden age of television, writers’ share was declining, their conditions were getting worse and they realized that they needed to take action. Now they do have a strong history of unionization in Hollywood, and that really helps because they’ve got that shared history and that shared experience of knowing that solidarity does work.

    But still, it was huge. The Guild changed their code of conduct to get rid of these conflicts of interest and shakedowns that the big four agencies were particularly engaging in. And then all of the writers in Hollywood said, if you don’t comply with the new code of conduct, you don’t work with us anymore. And then in a single week, 7,000 Hollywood writers fired their agents. And the agents couldn’t believe it. They’re like, you can’t operate without us. And David was actually our interlocutor at our US Launch Day event in Beverly Hills in September, and he told the story of how it took some time. And, in fact, he was a bit sheepish to say his wife noticed way before him. It took some time before the writers noticed that, in fact, there could be Hollywood without the agents, but there couldn’t be Hollywood without the writers, and that they were the ones that had the power.

    And what he said was so powerful. He said, we’ve realized they only had the power that we gave them. And this is what we all have to understand, that we are the ones, the workers and the customers, we are the ones that do have the power ultimately, individually nothing at all, but collectively we’ve got all of it. So we have to realize that and we have to find ways of exercising that power and doing what’s necessary to achieve that.

    Speaker 4:  May I say something as a small business owner, and I know you got to go. So we opened a store in Pigtown in Baltimore and we were told that we were stupid and crazy for doing that for all kinds of different reasons. And we’ve been there three years now. My wife owns it. We work there. We have three part-time employees. We prioritize their wages over our own. We budget about 20 hours a week for each of us at $17 an hour while paying a minimum of $15 when you start. And our manager makes $21 and budgets more hours. So we are some place that is attempting to do things in a subversive way, a backwards-ass way, a way that might drive us out of business. I don’t know.

    But we are doing everything we can, and we serve our community, we provide a bunch of affordable opportunities. We give books out every single day, and the bookmarks you see are sourced from a local printer. The shirts that we wear are sourced from a local printer. So we are practicing cooperative economics. And I just want to say it is that hard. It is that hard and it’s set up that it’s so difficult to do things in an ethical way, especially when you claim to be about community and you claim to be about equity. And then when you back it up by doing it, there’s a cost and there’s a deep, deep risk and it’s very, very difficult. And I just thank you for this work, [inaudible] you’re interested because I’m excited to see this.

    Cory Doctorow:  It’s an excellent time to point out that we can make your books non-returnable if you would like to get one from Term City Books back there. We’ll deface the hell out of them. So if anyone’s interested.

    Rebecca Giblin:  But this is exactly the kind of business and the more businesses we have like this working together and then that’s a different kind of flywheel we can create. Congratulations on doing this and I’m really glad to hear that.

    Speaker 4:  We’ve raised the property value of our landlord.

    Rebecca Giblin:  Oh good.

    Speaker 4:  That’s the other thing, right? You have these landlords in Baltimore, and that’s where I want to see the laws change. We talk about crime in Baltimore, but we don’t talk about the economic crime of out of town development and investors holding us hostage.

    Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, and on that note, just to close out, I think the thing to emphasize, and I’m seeing a lot of workers do this and they’re telling me this. In fact, a lot of folks that I’ve interviewed are bringing this fight to their workplaces. I’ll give one example. Vincent Quiles, an incredible organizer who led the unionization effort in Philadelphia at Home Depot, a horribly anti-union company. And he realized in the process of this unionization effort that everyone was pissed off about something. Everyone was being overworked, including the managers. And then he was like, the person who’s responsible for our misery is not in the store. So you’re not the enemy. As a small business, you’re trying to practice cooperative economics. In a city like Baltimore, the enemies are the developers who are getting tens of millions of dollars from the city and the politicians who are just rubber stamping that and all of that money’s going out of the city.

    What Vince Quiles said to the union busting consultants who said, we don’t have enough money to pay you guys what you want, and also we already invested a billion dollars in our workforce last year. Vince responded immediately. He was like, you guys spent $15 billion dollars on stock buybacks. So you spent 15 times more on your shareholders than you did on the 500,000 employees who make your business run. The enemies are actually doing us a service because they’re making themselves a smaller target. And to Corey and Rebecca’s point, we have to keep our eyes fixed on that target and build solidarity wherever we can. If we’re all like Care Bears focusing our shit on the people at the top, we can win. So let’s give one more round of applause for Rebecca and Corey [applause]. And thank you again to all of you. Thank you to Nancy. Thank you to The Peale for hosting us. Please go buy this incredible book, and let’s get Rebecca and Corey to the airport.

    Nancy Proctor:  I just want to thank Real News Network. Thank you, Max. I want to thank Karan, our interpreter. And if anybody wants, The Peale is open. We’re usually open in the afternoons, the evenings, early evenings, Thursdays and Fridays 3:00 to 7:00. If you want to go see the Lee Boots exhibition on the second floor, the Sankofa Dance exhibition on the third floor, you still got time to do that. And also, if you would like to take away books from the Muse Web Conference, who have kindly underwritten this event, they’re on the back corner there and they are free. Thank you all for coming.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Jim Thorpe’s athletic career was a marvel. As a two-time Olympic gold medal winner, as well as a professional football, baseball, and basketball player, Thorpe left his mark across a wide array of sports disciplines. A new biography from David Maraniss, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, offers us a deeper look into Thorpe’s life. Raised as a member of the Sac and Fox nation, the young Thorpe was shuttled between Indian boarding schools as a child, where he was subjected to the genocidal assimilation policies of such institutions. He lost his brother to pneumonia at an Indian Agency school, and his mother later passed away from childbirth in Thorpe’s teenage years. Although he would later achieve monumental athletic acclaim, Thorpe’s career was also marked by setbacks. His Olympic medals were stripped from him (and only posthumously restored) after it was discovered that he had played minor league baseball earlier in his life. Thorpe further struggled with alcoholism, financial difficulties, and broken marriages towards the end of his life. Author David Maraniss joins The Marc Steiner Show to examine Thorpe’s life, and what it can teach us about US history.

    Studio: Cameron Granadino, Dwayne Gladden
    Post-Production: Brent Tomchik


    Transcript

    Marc Steiner:  Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s good to have you all with us. We’re about to have a conversation with David Maraniss, one of America’s great writers, who’s explored our nation’s history, culture, and life through the lives of well-known figures. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, wrote about Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, Vince Lombardi, along with a trilogy about the ’60s.

    He’s also an associate editor at The Washington Post and professor at Vanderbilt. Now he’s outdone himself, I think, with his 13th book called Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe. The title is Thorpe – Sac and Fox is his real name, and this book weaves a tale of the United States and Indigenous people through the life and lens of one of the greatest, if not the greatest athlete in our history, Jim Thorpe.

    Dave Maraniss:  I have to be obsessed to write a book. I consider Path Lit by Lightning the third biography in a trilogy of sports figures who transcend sports. I’m looking for two things in those books. The first is just that it has to be a heck of a story, and a lot of great athletic achievement in it, and drama. But beyond that, I wanted to illuminate American history and sociology through the story of that human being, of that athlete. The first of those books was about Vince Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered, was the book.

    I saw it not just as a means of writing about a winning football coach, for whom the Super Bowl trophy is named. But also a way to explore the mythology of competition and success in American life, what it takes and what it costs. The second book about Roberto Clemente, the beautiful ball player. It’s not just about baseball, but also about the experience of Latinos on the American mainland. Even more than that, a story about so many sports figures are called heroes and almost none really are. But Clemente was in the way he lived his life and the way he died, trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Nicaragua after an earthquake.

    Then there’s Jim Thorpe, not just an athlete of unparalleled achievement, but also through his life and the obstacles he faced, I could write about the entire Native American experience.

    Marc Steiner:  Let’s talk about Jim Thorpe and those boarding schools for a moment. I know we all knew about them, many of us know about them, and knew the name Jim Thorpe, but I’m really interested in all that I read about in the book. What really grabbed you about those boarding schools that you didn’t expect, and how they affected the lives of people like Jim Thorpe? How they turned them around, but it affected those lives. Because we can know about it, that they existed. But what you did, you took a huge deep dive into those schools and into three superintendents and their attitudes. Tell me what really hit you the most, in terms of what you discovered?

    Dave Maraniss:  Well, of course, we wouldn’t even know about Jim Thorpe if not for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. That’s where he gained fame as an athlete in football and track and field. In that sense, the boarding schools are responsible for our understanding of Jim Thorpe. But just start from the very beginning of the creation of that school in Carlisle. Founded in 1879 by a military officer, Richard Henry Pratt, whose motto was kill the Indian, save the man.

    I guess what struck me so deeply, Marc, is that Pratt and many of the other founders of boarding schools, whether they were Quakers or Catholics or the government, thought they were doing good. They thought that they were literally saving a race, and this was the only way it could be done. They were unaware or unwitting of the dehumanizing aspects of that.

    Now, there were positive aspects as well, largely because so many of those students figured ways around the system or to survive it, then learn from it and grow from it, but it was, in its essence, dehumanizing. Those first students at the school in 1879 were mostly Lakota Sioux. This was only three years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. They were brought there as a means of “taming them” and ridding them of their Indianness. The most famous of those first students, Luther Standing Bear, who became a pretty well-known writer, said he thought he was going there to die and to show his bravery to his parents.

    Many of them, sadly of those first waves, did die at the boarding schools. Their braids were shorn. They were dressed in the uniforms of the US Cavalry, which had fought against their ancestors. They were not allowed to speak their native languages or practice their native religions. It was really an effort at forced acculturation from the beginning. It had, as I said, some positive effects on Jim Thorpe and many of the others who went there, but it was largely because they figured out how to turn it into a positive.

    It was only meant to turn them into white people. And luckily it sort of happened, but it didn’t happen. That’s exactly what the Native race had to figure out over that course of that period from the 1870s to the 1940s, is how to survive, how to adapt to a dominant white society, and still maintain their integrity and their heritage.

    Marc Steiner:  Two things pop in my head before we jump right into Jim Thorpe, for it gets to the heart of it. Is that you had these superintendents like Mercer, you talk about, who actually was at Wounded Knee where people were massacred. And Moses Friedman, who was Jewish, became a Baptist, and was probably the harshest of all of them. To me, this laid bare the contradictions. Inside those contradictions is a weird hope that was going on. You really finessed that story in a good way, I think.

    Dave Maraniss:  Well, there were two types of attitudes. One was Richard Henry Pratt, the founders and the first superintendents, who believed that he could better his students and help them succeed in society. Then you had Mercer, who was another military officer, who really didn’t care. He didn’t believe one way or he didn’t have the ideology that Pratt did. Pratt’s ideology was well intentioned but wrong. Mercer’s was just wrong [Marc laughs].

    That’s the difference between them. Then you had Friedman, who was essentially a weak superintendent. And really the institutions started to disintegrate during his period there, leading to a congressional investigation, which we can talk about later, which really led to the demise of the boarding schools, or at least of that one.

    Marc Steiner:  Then Jim Thorpe in all of this, he became America’s athletic hero because of his time at that school. But also, all the contradictions of living where he lived and grew up and what happened to him at the school also defined him as a man who was deeply troubled, as he was a deeply good human being.

    There was a real complexity about him that, I think, you touched on. I’m very curious to talk about that and to talk about when you tackle a character and create a book, you don’t know what you’re going to find. Within that, I’d like to hear your thoughts about what you found out about Jim Thorpe that really changed your view, that opened something up?

    Dave Maraniss:  That’s a great question, Marc. It really was the question I posed to myself before I started the book. Could I figure him out? Could I get inside him? Could I see what those demons were inside him and how he tried to overcome them? I wasn’t sure, honestly, because athletes tend not to write too much. He was fairly laconic. Part of it was my understanding of the whole context around him. Then, to my benefit, at one point in my research, I was able to accumulate dozens of letters that he wrote.

    This was after his period as a great athlete, but they showed the humanity of him, his yearning. A part of it was almost Willy Loman-esque. He kept wanting to find something better and hoping that the next job would be the one. It never happens throughout that whole period of his, what I call the afterlife, after his athletic career was over. I really got to see deeply that frustration and yearning, along with his romantic side, his sexual desires. All these things that I wasn’t sure I would find were in those letters.

    They were very important to me. Then, understanding the contradictions of being a great Indian athlete at that period. I think the most profound understanding I came to was that the Carlisle Indian football team was the most popular team on the East Coast. When they would go to play Harvard or Penn, or Yale, or Princeton, or West Point, there’d be a sellout crowd. It’d be a big crowd to come see the exotic, Native American football team. These were great players.

    Thorpe was the greatest of them, but there were many really wonderful Indian athletes on those teams. But here they were being an attraction because of their exoticism, and yet they were playing for a school that was trying to knock that out of them and turn them into white people. That contradiction was another part of it. I came to see how Thorpe and his teammates would understand that contradiction and understand that they had to play the game to a certain extent.

    At various times, they would have half-time performances where they would play the white stereotype of what an Indian is supposed to be like. They did that as a means of survival. It was almost like the Wild West shows of these exotic Indians coming to town.

    Marc Steiner:  That’s how they were seen. I think that what you captured in this also was the overt and covert racism against and about Indigenous people that came out in every headline and story that you quote and the rest of the book. They come popping out. And I think that it was really illuminating. It was not the same as what happened with African Americans, but it touched on it, for one of a better term, it was like a dialectical mix. Those things were really important to understand, and you pulled all of that out.

    Dave Maraniss:  Well, you couldn’t read a story in that period, in that era. Newspapers were how the myths were created and how stories were told. There was no television. Without seeing a story about Carlisle or any of the Indian athletes, they would be on the warpath. They’d be taking scalps. They’d all be called chief. They weren’t chiefs. They’d all be called chief.

    All of the white stereotypes were there in every single article. These were written by sports writers who, for the most part, thought they were being sympathetic. They thought they were the champions of the Carlisle Indian team, but yet it was so deeply ingrained in the lexicon of white society that that’s the way they were always written about and then regarded because of that.

    Marc Steiner:  We need to talk about Jim Thorpe, that’s the book [laughs]. I do want to start with one place that’s towards the middle of the book, but it was your description of the game against West Point. Then we’ll get more into Jim Thorpe, but I really want to talk about this for just a minute because it was the statue of Custer. It was the symbolism of that war on the playing fields between those who looked at a statue of Custer and those whose parents and grandparents may have suffered under Custer, or people like Custer. You really take that story out, and I think that says a lot about what happened with Jim Thorpe on that day, who he was. And it was symbolic of the entire nature of that football team in Carlisle and what they did.

    Dave Maraniss:  That was Nov. 9, 1912. It was in Thorpe’s final season. He had already won his gold medals in Stockholm. He was the greatest football player in America, and Carlisle went to West Point. The Army against the Indians on a level playing field at last, as you said, not far from Custer’s tomb, on the plain where the West Point Long Gray Line would march. Those were the sons of the soldiers in the West who had fought against the Indians. The Indians were, many of them, the sons and grandsons of the warriors who’d fought against the Army.

    But this was a level playing field. And usually a football game is just a football game. But this one had such a larger resonance to it, that even the Carlisle coach, Pop Warner, spoke about it before the game and that this was the chance for retribution. I call it the greatest act of athletic retribution in American history, because the Carlisle Indians thumped the Army 27 to six. Thorpe was the star. One of the players on the West Point team was none other than Dwight David Eisenhower, the future president.

    Omar Bradley was watching from the bench, these great figures. Eisenhower, interestingly, before the game was conspiring with one of his teammates to try to knock Thorpe out of the game. They said, we’ll hit him high and low and knock him out. They did hit him high and low, and he was on the ground for about a minute, but he rose up and kept playing, and played brilliantly, and knocked Eisenhower out of the game not long after that. 27 to six was the final score, and that game just had so much symbolism to it beyond just football that I couldn’t help but write a whole chapter about it.

    Marc Steiner:  It was wonderful. Your love of sports and sports figures, but sports, came out in that section. It was just so vivid. You were like in the field. We were watching the game. You were there. It was great. I just had to bring that up.

    Dave Maraniss:  I compare it to the chapter in my Lombardi book where I write a whole chapter about the Ice Bowl.

    Marc Steiner:  Yes. Yes.

    Dave Maraniss:  Like that.

    Marc Steiner:  Yes. Yes, very similar. Then you mentioned, we got to get to Jim Thorpe, but you said something here I’ve got to say, then I promise we’re into Jim Thorpe in more depth. You mentioned Pop Warner, who was a huge figure in Jim Thorpe’s life. Who, for any of us who grew up here in the ’50s and ’60s, remember the Pop Warner Leagues and how this guy was lionized. But talk a bit about Pop Warner, his relationship with Jim Thorpe and who he really was, what he really stood for in all of this.

    Dave Maraniss:  Pop Warner is a fascinating, contradictory figure. He was a brilliant football coach and not a brilliant man, by any means. He was incredibly innovative. He was an early proponent of the forward pass, used that. It was only legalized in 1905 while he was at Carlisle. He developed various formations, the double wing formation and many others. He was a winning football coach, first at Carlisle, and then at Pitt, where he won a few national championships, and Stanford.

    As you said, the Pop Warner Youth Leagues are named after him. He was also a trickster. This was an era, Marc, where one year he had a kangaroo pocket sewn into one of the uniforms, and that was the original hidden ball trick. They’d stuff it into the uniform. He had one of his ends line up near the opposition sidelines, and then run around the bench of the opposition, come out on the other side and catch a pass. You could do that then, which, crazy, but fun.

    Anyway, he was innovative, a brilliant coach, but in so many ways I found him to be a disappointment as a human being. The largest reason had to do with Jim Thorpe. In my story, where at the moment of Thorpe’s crisis, and we can get to that later, when he lost his gold medals, Pop Warner lied about it to save his own reputation.

    But beyond that, a congressional investigation of Carlisle shortly after Thorpe was there found many of Warner’s Indian athletes testifying against him, saying that he was mentally and physically abusive. That he was also morally bankrupt. He would sell tickets in the hotel lobbies and bet on the games, all kinds of things that they found wrong about him. He would yell at them all the time and swear at them, as well as hit them. I don’t know whether the Pop Warner Leagues know that part of the history. It was written out by him and others after he left Carlisle. But the Carlisle days are a story of great achievement and really poor behavior on the part of Pop Warner.

    Marc Steiner:  Let’s talk a bit about here, let’s get into Jim Thorpe with all this. You alluded to Pop Warner’s role. What most people in America associate Jim Thorpe with today was what he did in the Olympics in 1912. The pentathlon, decathlon victories, the amazing feats and his being stripped of those medals.

    You get under that, talking about what really happened there and the twisted story that it was. Let’s talk a bit about that. Because he was still associated with Carlisle, even now playing Minor League ball, whatever you call it back then, playing baseball, which was different leagues. Let’s talk about that story.

    Dave Maraniss:  He came back from the Olympics, starred in football in the fall of 1912. Then in January of 1913, a story appeared in the Worcester Telegram in Massachusetts. An interview with a manager from the Eastern Carolina League, who said that he had managed Jim Thorpe, which was true. In 1909 and 1910, Thorpe had played bush league baseball in that Eastern Carolina League for the Rocky Mount Railroaders and the Fayetteville Highlanders, for about two bucks a game or $30 a month.

    There’s so many levels to the injustice of what happened to Thorpe because of that. The first is that literally scores of college athletes were playing baseball in the summers for a little pay then. Most of them were doing it under aliases so they wouldn’t lose their eligibility. There were so many aliases in the Eastern Carolina League that it was jokingly called the Pocahontas League, because everyone was named John Smith. Dwight Eisenhower, here comes Eisenhower again.

    He played in the Kansas State League under the name Wilson. Jim Thorpe played under the name Jim Thorpe. He never tried to hide it. His name was in the papers, in the box scores in North Carolina in 1909 and 1910. It only became a story, “a scandal” after he’d won the gold medals. That’s one aspect of it. Then there’s the question of what’s an amateur and what’s a professional? Jim Thorpe competed in Stockholm in events that had nothing to do with baseball.

    Whereas another member of that American Olympic team, another future general, George S. Patton, competed in something called the modern pentathlon. Separate from what Jim Thorpe won the pentathlon for, the modern pentathlon were all basically military events: fencing, equestrian, target shooting. Patton was being paid by the US Army for years to basically practice those events. Was he a professional or was he an amateur? The entire Swedish team was given a leave of absence six months before the Olympics were to start at full pay to practice.

    Were they professionals then or amateurs? Jim Thorpe, as I said, was playing baseball, nothing to do with the sports he was playing. Then you have the hypocrisy of major figures including Pop Warner, Jim’s coach, who knew precisely what Thorpe was doing, and yet feigned ignorance about it. He had his Carlisle Indian athletes playing summer baseball for years before that. Thorpe was scouted to go down to that league by one of Pop Warner’s best friends in Pennsylvania, a scout. He definitely knew what Thorpe was doing.

    Yet when the story broke, Warner said he had no clue and feigned innocence to save his own reputation. As did Moses Friedman, the superintendent, who I found letters that he wrote to Thorpe, urging him not to play summer baseball. He definitely knew but claimed he didn’t. And so did James E. Sullivan, the president of the American Olympic Committee and of the Amateur Athletic Union, who was also on the board of directors or advisors of the Carlisle Athletic Association. He too knew what was going on.All three of these important figures knew it, but they’re the ones who made the decision to send Thorpe’s trophies and medals back and have his records rescinded.

    So that’s the hypocrisy. Finally, there’s even a technical argument, which is that the Olympic rules said that to challenge someone’s amateurism, a challenge had to be filed within 30 days of the end of the Olympics. That story in the Worcester Telegram broke six months later. It didn’t happen until then.

    Even technically, along with morally, and the morality and the hypocrisy and wrongness of it, it shouldn’t have happened. Thorpe suffered in all those ways, whether it was because he was Native American, surely that was part of it. He was an easy fall guy for a semi-corrupt system.

    Marc Steiner:  He was. Really, as that story weaves its way through the book, it comes up again and again, in terms of his life and people he confronted about it. While, in many ways, the way you write about him, he dealt with it and moved on, he really didn’t.

    Dave Maraniss:  I think that you could say that while he was in sports, it wasn’t top of mind. After he lost his medals, he played professional football, professional baseball. And really for maybe the next 10 years, he didn’t focus too much on the injustice that happened to him.

    But as his athletic skills diminished, he started to feel it more strongly. For the rest of his life, from the 1930s until he died in 1952, it was a constant theme of how he had been done wrong and trying to get those medals and records restored. It didn’t happen in his lifetime.

    Marc Steiner:  It did not. He actually confronted many of the people in power when he had a chance to.

    Dave Maraniss:  The most interesting of whom was Avery Brundage, who was not only the future head of the US Olympic Committee and of the International Olympic Committee. Consistently denying Thorpe his due, making it sound like everybody was picking on Avery Brundage for not giving Thorpe back his medals, as opposed to the injustice of what happened in the first place.

    But interesting to me, because I think of Avery Brundage as a plutocrat. A fat cat living high on the hog in European hotels. He was actually a decathlete himself in those 1912 Olympics, competing against Jim Thorpe. Thorpe crushed him so fast.

    Marc Steiner:  He didn’t do so well.

    Dave Maraniss:  No, he dropped out after eight events.

    Marc Steiner:  Right.

    Dave Maraniss:  Whether that jealousy was part of why he reacted the rest of his life, I can’t say that. You can probably assume some of that. But in any case, he more than anyone, mistreated Thorpe for the rest of his life.

    Just one of many sins of Avery Brundage, the most awful of which was the way he cozied up to the Nazis in 1936 and helped them spread propaganda saying that the Jews were being treated well in Germany. It was only the Americans who were sending fake news about it.

    Marc Steiner:  I was really shocked about that. I never heard that story before your book. It just made me realize how much of your life in writing this book, you were just consumed by this period of history, consumed by Jim Thorpe. You had to be to pull out all that you pulled out. It’s like being an actor, preparing for a role.

    Dave Maraniss:  It is an obsession. There was a time when I was driving down a street in DC with my wife, and supposed to turn left and I turned into a fire station instead. She softly slapped me and said, David, what chapter are you on? The level of my obsession that she understands.

    Marc Steiner:  That’s great. Jim Thorpe, you talked about him as a migrant athletic warrior almost, in terms of what he did with his life, and how he continued to play and wouldn’t stop, even if they took him from the Major Leagues and put him in the Minor Leagues and everything after that, up to the point where he joined the Merchant Marine. He never wanted to give up his place in the sun. It was both, it was heroic, but it was tragic, because he was stuck.

    Dave Maraniss:  Yeah. It was a combination of those two things, Marc. There was a period when I was researching and writing the book where I thought, come on, something good’s got to happen to him. It really doesn’t, in a sense. You’re right. He kept playing sports until well, his final time was when he was 45 years old. He was the player coach for a traveling all-Native baseball team called Harjo’s Indians, which was fun to write about, because they played against the great Negro League teams. He played against Josh Gibson and Satchel Page and Cool Papa Bell with this all-Indian team traveling the country.

    But that evoked his entire life from then on. I think I document he lived in 20 different states. He took jobs ranging from, at one point during the depression, digging ditches in Los Angeles, to being a greeter at taverns and bars like Joe Lewis, that style of fallen grace, in a sense. But he kept trying. I finally came to the realization about, why did I write this book?

    It’s not a tragedy, even though there are tragic elements to it, because I wrote it to try to use Thorpe’s life to convey the experience of Native Americans. All of those obstacles that he faced, many by society, some of his own. He struggled with alcoholism, he wasn’t home much. He had three wives and seven children. There’s a scene where he goes to the Haskell Institute and Indian boarding school in Kansas, where one of his daughters is a seven-year-old. She doesn’t recognize him because she hasn’t seen him much.

    There are elements of personal difficulty and trauma in the story, but there’s also a larger story of perseverance. The way I try to explain it goes back to 1915, when the most popular sculpture in America was a statue called End of the Trail. It showed an Indian slumped on a slumped horse, on horseback. The connotation was it’s all over for this race. Manifest destiny is prevailed. The Indian has been rendered in anachronism. The race is dying, if not dead.

    There were fewer than 300,000 Native Americans left in this country at that point, but it didn’t happen. The race figured out how to survive in the system rigged against them. There are now a couple million Native Americans in this country. The efforts to rid them of all of their Indianness didn’t really hold. They figured out how to survive in white America for the most part, but they also are going back to their culture and their languages and trying to reteach that now.

    Jim Thorpe represents that in the fact that he appeared to be dying, but he kept going. Kept trying, persevering, time after time, all the way until he finally did die at age 65 in a trailer in Southern California of a heart attack. But that notion of figuring out ways to survive, and then his legacy, which I also think is important. It’s not just what he represents, but also his personal legacy. His seven children were all successful.

    Three of the sons were military officers. The daughters got college degrees. They became Indian activists of various sorts. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren have all been successful, so he also produced something by his survival that transcends him.

    Marc Steiner:  That’s really well said. You have to ask this question before we conclude, a couple quick things. How have his children and grandchildren responded to your book?

    Dave Maraniss:  I would say that the most meaningful aspect of the way the book has been received, beyond the sales or the reviews, was the way the Native American community has embraced the book. That includes some of his relatives and leaders of the American Indian movements throughout the country.

    I was interviewed at one point by Kevin Gover, who was a Pawnee from Oklahoma, and was the first director of the National Museum of the American Indians in Washington, and also a deputy superintendent of the Smithsonian. At the end, he thanked me for writing this book. That reception means more to me than anything else.

    Marc Steiner:  I’ll let you go here and go about your day and get back to your family. But I was thinking about the complexity of Jim Thorpe having this football association that actually ended up becoming the NFL, remaining, it’s never wanted to give up. You can tell a bit about that.

    What do you think, because this is the heart of what you do in some ways, what do you think that the story of Jim Thorpe says about us? What does it say about America? About our past, where we are, and where we might be able to go? What does this story say to you? What did it do to you in that sense?

    Dave Maraniss:  Well, I think that question is never more important than it is today, when there are forces in this country that are trying to basically wipe out, erase history or whitewash it in so many ways. I think we can only understand ourselves and improve by understanding our history. The way that this country dealt with its Indigenous peoples is an essential part of understanding ourselves. And how even well-intentioned efforts can be misguided if they come from the wrong place. If they don’t try to look at somebody through their experience and their eyes, as opposed to imposing things on people.

    I think that’s at the heart of what I try to do, is to try to understand anybody from the forces that shaped them. I think it’s only when we understand that, and certainly that’s true of our first people. We have to understand what we did to them and how they view that before we can move forward.

    Marc Steiner:  Well, Dave Maraniss, I just want to say I appreciate you taking the time away from your family to have this conversation. The book is amazing. Once again, I’ll show it to you folks. It’s just an amazing book. No, it’s not a tome, it’s long, but it rolls. I’m telling you, pick it up, and you just roll right through it.

    Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe. It’s inspirational. We have to understand that one of the greatest American heroes we’ve had and delving into what this means for not just Jim Thorpe, but for the entire nation. David Maraniss, thanks once again for probing deeply about who we are as a people through the life of somebody we need to know.

    Dave Maraniss:  Thank you. I really enjoyed this conversation.

    Marc Steiner:  Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us today. Once again, let me thank David Maraniss for this book and bringing this era to life and Jim Thorpe to life and for joining us today. While you’re here, go to mss@therealnews.com. Let me know what you thought. Write to me and I’ll write right back to you.

    If you have an extra minute, try www.therealnews.com/support to become a monthly donor, become part of the future with us. For Cameron Grandino, Stephen Frank, Dwayne Gladden, Kayla Rivara, and the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Marcel Proust’s 4,000 page magnum opus, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) was written shortly before his death in 1922Proust’s sprawling work is a meditation on the human condition in all its complexities and foibles. To mark the 100-year anniversary of Proust’s death, philosopher Justin E. H. Smith joins Chris Hedges to discuss this towering achievement of 20th century literature.

    Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of history and the philosophy of science at University of Paris 7 – Denis Diderot. The main-belt asteroid 13585 Justinsmith is named after him. You can find him on Substack at Justin E. H. Smith’s Hinternet.

    Studio: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden
    Post-Production: Cameron Granadino


    Transcript

    Chris Hedges:  A century ago on Nov. 18, 1922, Marcel Proust died. He worked feverishly in his final hours on his masterpiece, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, In Search of Lost Time. His 4,000 page novel is one of the most remarkable works of literature of the 20th century. During the war in Bosnia, I plowed my way through its seven volumes populated with 400 characters not as an escape from the war, for the specter of death and the twilight of an expiring society haunts Proust’s work, but as a way to reflect on the disintegration around me. Proust, like all great writers, gave me the words to describe aspects of the human condition I knew instinctively but had trouble articulating.

    Proust understood the conflicting ways we perceive reality and come to our own peculiar self-serving truths. He illuminated human folly with its illusions, ambiguities, and contradictions. He reminded his readers that empathy is the most important virtue in life, especially for the vulnerable. He explored the fragility of human goodness, the seduction and hollowness of power and social status, the inconsistency of the human heart, racism, especially antisemitism, and our looming mortality, which hovers over every page, as it did for the sickly Proust as he struggled to finish his masterpiece, dictating changes on the last night he was alive in his hermetically sealed, cork-lined bedroom in Paris.

    Those who see in his work a retreat from the world are poor readers of Proust, for his power is his Freudian understanding of the unconscious and subterranean forces that define and shape human existence. There are very few writers who are his equal.

    Joining me to discuss Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is Justin E.H. Smith, a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. The main-belt asteroid 13585 Justinsmith is named after him. You can find him on Substack at Justin E.H. Smith’s Hinternet.

    So Justin, the passage of time haunts the novel, especially at the end. It exposes as we age, as the character’s age, the vanity of our youthful pretensions. I think this is true for most of the characters, including Berma, who’s a thinly disguised Sarah Bernhardt, abandoned by her admirers in her old age; the main courtesan, Odette, the passion of Swann and the Comte de Forcheville, who was once a beauty and a seductress who enchanted, certainly, male Paris, is, in the end, relegated to the corner of her daughter’s salon where she’s ignored, even ridiculed. Proust writes about Odette. “And this woman, adulated and worshiped her whole life, now a human wreck in formal dress and grande toilette looks out alarmed and bewildered at the ferocious social world and seems, to me, for the first time likable.” So I wondered if you could address time, the passage of time and its effects, which is certainly one of the themes that is central to Proust’s novel.

    Justin E. H. Smith:  Absolutely. Thanks, Chris. I know you want to talk about Proust and philosophy later, but I think it’s hard, at least for me, to talk about time without engaging at least a bit with the question of Proust’s relationship to philosophy, in particular to the reflections on the nature of time as something experienced that are unfolding in the early 20th century, of which Proust is, I would say, vaguely aware, interested. I wouldn’t call him a dabbler. I would call him a thorough reader who is also intelligent enough to absorb reflections from phenomenology, from figures like [inaudible], from Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time and to translate this into something that, on the face of it, is a sort of auto fiction. It’s an auto fiction, but it’s also a philosophy of time.

    For me, that really only becomes clear, or the payoff really only emerges, in the seventh and final volume, Le Temps retrouvé, Time Regained, as we usually translate it. And it’s funny that you mentioned your coverage of the war in Bosnia in the 1990s and your encounter with Proust in the context of war because for me, it’s the ravages of World War I that are recounted in the seventh volume that really make us understand what it means for the things we value to slip into the past and for our world to collapse. So obviously throughout the previous six volumes, there are the, let’s say, gentler ravages of time with La Berma getting old and wrinkly, and of course also the several little deaths of falling out of love with the people he has at least thought he was in love with. That’s debatable, and we can get back to that. And also, of course, the more signature moments of the madeleine and the tea and the unsolicited memories that come back to us that make us realize what’s been lost.

    But nothing makes this clearer than his ghost-like stalking throughout Paris when there are curfews because of the air raids and his sense that everything is really in the past. And of course the real Proust, not the narrator, but the real Proust during World War I already surely has a sharp sense of his own declining health and his own near-ghost status already.

    So that’s where it really comes through, to my mind, and that’s where we start getting le Temps capitalized with a big capital T, and his, so to speak, discovery of time as something approaching transcendent or divine worship-able and awesome and terrible entity. That’s the culmination of the previous six volumes. That’s one thing that’s so striking about À la Recherche, is the way that there’s often, for the most important themes, a very slow buildup where you only realize the full depth or the full awesomeness of the theme he’s exploring little by little. And that is, above all, the case with time. But we can talk more about this when we get back to philosophy.

    Chris Hedges:  So let’s just stay on that because there’s two… When I read the last volume, they were like death charges. You really needed everything that came before to get there. He talks a lot about masks. That pervades the entire novel, but can you just address that issue of masks, which he suddenly becomes cognizant of at the end?

    Justin E. H. Smith:  Well, it’s especially haunting when we think of Man Ray’s famous photograph of Proust on his deathbed when he’s grown a long beard and he’s very close to death and he has a face that looks very much, as Proust himself puts it, like Marcel Proust the Assyrian. Very dark, a very stark nose that looks like something sculpted in deep antiquity. And I don’t know if Man Ray is trying to show in a visual form this notion of mask that had become so important to Proust, but it’s certainly an important datum in our reflection on Proust and masks.

    But also, of course, the example that you bring up of La Berma, the famous actress modeled broadly on Sarah Bernhardt, who is such a focus of Proust’s or of the narrator’s fascination and adoration in his youth. And of course, he already loses the fascination long before she has been relegated to a corner of her daughter’s salon. But he loses it when he goes – And this is one of my favorite scenes in the whole novel, when he watches her perfect gestures on stage and he contemplates the fact that there are parts of the actress’s body, like for example between the wrist and the elbow, over which the actress has no control. So this part of my arm cannot be transfigured by art no matter how great a genius artist I am. And Proust sees this on the stage and loses it. Basically he thinks, why was I so impressed by La Berma? She’s got a forearm just like I do. And it’s such a weird thing to discover, or at least to articulate, but Proust does it.

    And of course, this has something to do with the whole novel’s long reflection on the relationship between art and life. Ordinarily, you couldn’t put a mask on a forearm, that’s not the sort of thing that is masked, but it is still the sort of thing that shows the limits of transfiguration by art. And then when she is elderly and relegated to a corner of her daughter’s salon and evidently overly made up as some old women who are not going gently into the good night often are, this is literally a mask. It’s cosmetics or mascara that are showing the futility of the fight against time and, ultimately, I suppose, showing the futility of trying, struggling to live in a world that is perpetually transfiguration in the name of art against death. Something like that.

    Chris Hedges:  Well, he’s constantly uncovering masks. He holds up from the beginning [inaudible] and he idolizes the elite, and these turn out to be very banal, disappointing figures. I think there’s an undercurrent of disillusionment that runs constantly throughout the book. We are going to have to talk about the tea madeleine. I loathe mentioning it. [crosstalk]

    Justin E. H. Smith:  You gotta do it. You gotta do it. Yeah.

    Chris Hedges:  But this unconscious, involuntary memory, and it’s not just with the madeleine and the tea. But are there any examples of this that evoke the past? And I wondered if you could… These dim fragments, these brief flashes of recognition in an unexamined life, which keeps that life fragmented and unknown and void of context. And I just wondered how, for Proust, do we locate the past? How do we give it context? And then if you can talk about the importance of involuntary memory and illuminating the reality of experience.

    I’m just going to read a little quote from Proust. “I find the Celtic belief very reasonable that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some inferior creature, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate thing, effectively lost to us until the day, which for many never comes, when we happen to pass close to the tree, come into possession of the object that is their prison. Then they quiver. They call out to us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and they return to live with us.” So that’s a lot, but maybe you can address those issues.

    Justin E. H. Smith:  Oh, yeah. Can I say something first about unmasking, the last thing we were talking about?

    Chris Hedges:  Sure.

    Justin E. H. Smith:  One of the most striking parts of the whole novel, for me, is the scene when we know Swann is dying, and he comes to the home of the [foreign language] and the Duke and his wife, Basin and Oriane, are leaving for some social engagement and she’s worried about which shoes to wear, and basically he’s trying to tell them he’s dying and they’re not going to see him anymore, and they’re just chattering back and forth about whether the shoes match the robe.

    Somehow I always picture that couple – This is my dumb American pop culture orientation – As Thurston Howell and his wife on Gilligan’s Island. And it’s fascinating indeed the way they are unmasked, taken down so many notches from their early exalted status. And this is why I really hate the commentary by people like Maxim Gorky on Proust who say that he is a slavish, adoring lackey of the aristocrats. Obviously that’s not all that’s going on. This is more like an exposé of how base and petty these people are, just like all of us. It’s definitely not any sort of class consciousness of the sort Gorky would like to see, but it’s also not sycophancy towards the nobility. All right. So that’s just one thing. We can go back to –

    Chris Hedges:  I’m going to just stop you on that scene, because first of all, Gorky ends up becoming a tool of Stalin. But he eviscerates the ruling… I don’t know how you can read Proust and not see that.

    Justin E. H. Smith:  I don’t know. I don’t know.

    Chris Hedges:  But just that scene that you pointed out, because they dismiss him, and the way they dismiss Swann is by saying, oh, you’re not really that sick. You’ll be fine. And then they’re saying, well, we have to go. We’re in a hurry. And then the Duke sees that his wife’s shoes don’t match her outfit and sends her back inside for a half hour to get another pair of shoes. So they’re in the face of death. I think it says it all. Like you, I found that scene haunting. But let’s address the other issues.

    Justin E. H. Smith:  Yeah. Sure, sure. So I have to say, it’s not like my interest in the novel trailed, but I think there’s no more powerful part than the opening maybe third of the first volume of the whole novel when he is a child and when he is very much an animist describing the natural milieu of Combray and the flowers and the grass and the weather. And he is very, very good at evoking natural landscapes.

    And it’s in this connection rather early on that the allusion to the Celts and their beliefs… I think this comes from Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, where there’s some reflection on druidic religion, and then it becomes commonplace in French history of ancient peoples of France that the druids did indeed believe that we are reincarnated in trees. I see this a lot in 17th century texts. But it’s a way for Proust to indulge this proximity to nature and also to pursue the themes of memory.

    And I love the scenes in the early parts of the novel, particularly surrounding asparagus and the idea that a stalk of asparagus is some kind of nature sprite or fairy. That is presumably rooted in Northern French folk beliefs, and that it’s this supernatural entity in turn that causes the peculiar bouquet, as he would put it, in your urine some hours after you eat asparagus. And it’s such an intense engagement with the smells and colors and sensations of nature that he practically goes metempsychotic himself and inhabits a tree for a while.

    I just love all that stuff. And I think it’s at its strongest in the first volume where he is, of course, a boy, and you’re supposed to get over that when you get older and enter society. So he retreats from the intense engagement with nature as he becomes an adult and leaves behind childish things. But in the particular sequence of images associated with the Celtic or druidic beliefs, I think, indeed, the idea seems to be that, in this reduced state, you have a dimmer sense of who you are and it has to be coaxed back out in order for the ancestor to rejoin us. And that, in a sense, to evoke this image of the soul lodged in a tree is to give an account of the condition we are all actually in, where we can scarcely hold onto our pasts and they only come back to us in dim fragments.

    Chris Hedges:  What’s interesting is that they do come back to everyone in a smell, a sound, a something, but Proust… Here maybe we can talk about art. While they can evoke the past, they’re largely meaningless unless we are able to interpret them through artistic expression. I don’t know if you would agree.

    Justin E. H. Smith:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s absolutely right. And of course, he covers, really, all of the great arts, not just literature, but also certainly music and painting. These are leitmotifs of the whole novel. And indeed, they do seem to be the answer to the question, what are these dim fragments of memory for, anyway? Well, that can be catalyzed or sublimated into a great musical idea like, for example, the phrase in Vinteuil’s sonata that seems to hold the secret to our existence. And we really get this towards the very end of the novel, the seventh volume, again, functioning as the payoff for so much of the long-windedness of the whole thing. The realization that the narrator has of himself that he needs to conjure out of himself something as valuable, as redeeming as Vinteuil’s sonata in order to make this whole lifetime of dim fragmentary memories do anything for him at all.

    Chris Hedges:  I want to talk about the mutation of the self, especially around grief. Albertine, who he has a relationship with, modeled after his driver who was killed. But there’s that lamentation… And of course of the death of his grandmother, which is probably modeled on the death of his mother. He had pretty much a nervous breakdown after his mother died. But he doesn’t fear grieving. I thought this was brilliant. He fears the day he no longer grieves, because the self that was once in love with those we lost no longer exists. I wonder if you could talk about that.

    Justin E. H. Smith:  Sure. Well, we already alluded to the several small deaths, not in the sense of orgasms, but in the sense of falling out of love, with Gilberte in particular, that so much surprise him, that make him really, I think, question the nature of love, that you can fall out of love with someone and sit in a room with them and be like, oh yeah, I used to be in love with this person, makes it seem very fragile and far from transcendental, and that seems to worry him a great deal. At the same time, it seems like the love that he has for his grandmother is, in some respects, of a different character than these various romantic loves that he has, that the narrator has.

    And I should say, incidentally, that I’m not a Proust scholar. I’m a scholar of other things. And weirdly, since I started writing about Proust on Substack, I’ve had journals send me requests to referee Proust scholarship. And I have to say, sorry, I’m not your guy. That’s not my field. And in fact, for that reason, this helps to explain why I do not read secondary literature on Proust. I don’t want to read it. I think it would make me fall out of love, so to speak. It would take away the magic if I learned much more than I know about Proust’s life.

    I know, at least, that the female love objects that the narrator has are transformed versions of his own same sex love objects. That much I know, but I don’t know exactly how the transformation is affected. What I can say is that Marcel Proust, whatever his sexual orientation, is remarkably good at describing heterosexual desire and obsession. He’s certainly capable of imagining his way into other people’s desires. So that’s just a little parenthesis.

    So this falling out of love is something that, again, seems to be what… I just read Mary Shelley. A lovely line. It’s a weaning from the things of this earth, and in that sense a rehearsal for death. And I think the narrator sees it this way. The question of whether the narrator ever experiences true love or whether it’s just obsession… And certainly I find the narrator rather morally abhorrent and someone who really never figures some basic things out about how to be good to other people. I think the whole fifth volume, The Prisoner, is just shocking.

    Chris Hedges:  [inaudible], which essentially Albertine… His lover becomes his prisoner.

    Justin E. H. Smith:  Yeah. Yeah. And he’s extremely sadistic for no good reason and doesn’t seem to have any compunction about this. He doesn’t seem to have any interest in his own moral growth. And you might say that his attachment to his grandmother, and having to knock on the wall is an example you mentioned earlier, having to knock on the wall of the hotel so that she’ll hear him in his room and feeling reassured when he hears her knock back. That’s already a bit like the relationship to Albertine, right? And yet, his love for his grandmother is, in many respects, the best thing he’s got going, and it is, indeed, very sad when she dies.

    Let me also add that there’s another person towards whom the narrator is morally abhorrent, who I think is a really key figure for understanding the whole novel. She’s the backbone of the novel, and that’s Françoise, the maid, the nanny who is, of course, alive until the very end, witnesses it all, has a wisdom that aristocrats can never have and that he can never have, and really, really holds things together. He’s nasty to her, too, but I think it’s pretty clear he loves her.

    Chris Hedges:  Great. That was Justin E.H. Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Our contemporary political discourse is rife with claims that certain forms of art, literature or thought are poisoning our culture and advancing the decay of civilization. The right has whipped itself into a frenzy over “critical race theory” bogeymans and campaigns to ban any books that contain even a passing acknowledgment of LGBTQ life. While certainly less zealous, the left can be sanctimonious and counterproductive when it comes to genres and works of fiction we deem politically pernicious—or just bad. Of course, none of this is new. Pop culture has been a terrain of political struggle for about as long as pop culture has been around. In her forthcoming book, Dangerous Fictions, Art for the End Times host Lyta Gold traces the history of these “cultural” conflicts and the deeper social fissures they belie.

    Studio: Maximillian Alvarez

    Post-Production: Brent Tomchik


    Transcript

    The transcript of this story is in progress and will be made available as soon as possible.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • A chill is in the air, the leaves are changing, and the spirits of the vengeful proletariat wander the land. It’s Halloween time—also known as Spooky Season. Once again, staff members at The Real News join Art for the End Times host Lyta Gold for another special episode on our favorite horror flicks. From vintage classics to revisionist takes on the colonial psychology of the horror genre, Maximillian Alvarez, Mel Buer, and Julianne Simitz get Halloween started in the tradition of The Real News.

    Post-Production: Dwayne Gladden


    Transcript

    The transcript of this episode will be made available as soon as possible.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • How does living in a consumer society at war with basic human needs affect our minds and, ultimately, our bodies? In his new book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, Dr. Gabor Maté and his son Daniel argue that our culture’s standards of normalcy are destructive to the health of human beings. In a society where profit and personal attainment are the highest values, traumas abound, and everyday people are left to endure their pain and shame in silence. The consequence of this dark ethic, Dr. Maté illustrates, plays out on our bodies, severely damaging our psyches, and pushing us towards individual and social self-annihilation. Dr. Gabor Maté joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his new book.

    Dr. Gabor Maté is a physician and childhood development specialist who has written several best-selling books, including In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, and Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder.

    Studio: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden
    Post-Production: Dwayne Gladden


    Transcript

    Chris Hedges:  Dr. Gabor Maté in his new book The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, which he wrote with his son Daniel, argues that what is defined as normal in a consumer society is at war with basic human needs. The engine of capitalism, defined by the cult of the self, thrives on the fostering of psychological and physical chronic disorders, including high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, depression, addictions, and suicide. It rewards the core traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.

    Personal style and personal advancement are mistaken for individualism, equated falsely with democratic equality. We have a right in the cult of the self to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. The consequence of this dark ethic Dr. Mate illustrates plays out on our bodies, severely damaging our psyches and pushing us towards individual and social self-annihilation.

    Joining me to discuss his new book is Dr. Gabor Maté, who has written several bestselling books including In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, and Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder.

    So I said before we went on the air, this is a book that could have easily been three or four books, so your readers are rewarded. You write that most of us are in the grip of what you call a distant past, a psycho emotional time warp that prevents us from inhabiting the present moment. This is what the psychotherapist Peter Levine calls the tyranny of the past. Can you explain this process?

    Gabor Maté:  Yes. First of all, thank you for having me on your broadcast. In my own life, coming to reflect on many of my behaviors, I’ve had to realize that often I wasn’t reacting to the present, I was reacting to some interpretation of the present based on old traumatic programming for my early childhood. So often when I get upset, say in my relationship with my spouse, the degree of upset is not related to anything that’s occurring right now, but it’s some dark pain or wound, which is what trauma means, based on a sense of me being rejected or not being loved or not being accepted when I was a very young infant.

    And so that’s what Peter means by the tyranny of the past, that the past colors are… the Buddha said once that with our minds we basically create the world. But what it didn’t say is that before with our minds we create the world, the world creates our minds. So that the mind, in fact the very brain itself, including the physiology of the brain, is programmed very early in childhood by our earliest relationships with our caregivers beginning in utero, and those imprints govern a lot of our behaviors even into adulthood.

    Chris Hedges:  Well, you write about it. One of the things I liked about the book was its honesty. You give voice to your wife and your son, and are quite frank and, I think, courageous about your own failings as a father. We all have them. It’s painful to confront that we failed, in some way, those we love, and I wondered if you could, for people who don’t know your story, just tell us quickly what that trauma – It is in the book – But what that trauma that you endured was.

    Gabor Maté:  So, in a large historical context, the trauma was that I was born in January 1944 in Budapest, two months before the Nazis occupied Hungary, which is when the genocide began, two months after I was born. Now, the day after the Germans marched into Budapest, my mother phoned a pediatrician, I was two months of age, and she said, would you please come and see Gabor, because he’s crying all the time? And the doctor said, of course I will come, but I should tell you, all my Jewish babies are crying. And this is true, you don’t have to have war and genocide for this, infants absorb the stresses of their parents, and that has an impact on their nervous systems.

    So I spent the first year under predictably difficult, even life-threatening circumstances, which culminated with my mother giving me to a total stranger in the street in Budapest, because where we were living, I would not have survived. So I didn’t see her for five or six weeks. Of course, an infant can only experience that as an abandonment, and who gets abandoned? Somebody who’s not lovable, somebody who’s not wanted. So my sense of self, on a deep unconscious level, was somebody who’s not lovable, who’s not wanted. And that then leads to all kinds of behaviors in adulthood. Not to mention that, for the whole year, I’m absorbing the stresses and terrors of my mother, which, infants and children being narcissistic in the sense that they think it’s all about them, naturally I think, she’s suffering so much, it must be my fault.

    So this tremendous sense of guilt and shame that comes with trauma. It does not take historical trauma of those proportions. It doesn’t take war or genocide. In a diary entry, my mother described, when I’m two weeks old, before they were Nazis, before the Germans occupied Hungary, just how she was following doctor’s orders not to pick me up and feed me when I was asking for it because then the ethic was you feed on schedule, not on the child’s demand. That itself is a trauma, because what message do I get as a two-week-old? That my needs aren’t important, that I’m alone, that the person who loves me doesn’t care enough about me to pick me up. And that kind of trauma is very common in all societies, so I don’t want to create the impression that trauma is only under dramatic circumstances such as I endured as an infant.

    Chris Hedges:  Well, you’re writing the book about your mother’s instincts and that she didn’t like it, and of course, I think much of your book is a celebration or holding up those instincts against modern medicine or modern psychotherapy. The psychiatrist, Basil van der Kolk –

    Gabor Maté:  Bessel, if I may say.

    Chris Hedges:  Bessel. Excuse me, yes. Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score, he writes that trauma is when we are not seen and known, and you build on this idea that trauma is a fracturing of the self, of one’s relationship to the world. You define this fracturing as the essence of trauma. What do you mean by fracturing of the self, and how does this fracturing work?

    Gabor Maté:  Well, so trauma means a wound, wounding, a psychic wound, and you can wound people in two major ways, you might say. By doing terrible things to them, such as the abuse that many people endure in childhood, whether at home or in school, but the other way you can hurt people is just not to meet their needs. Now, one of the essential needs of human children – I’m talking about essential needs in a sense that if it’s not met the child suffers – Is to be seen and accepted for exactly who they are. Now, in Bessel’s words, if you’re not seen, that hurts you, because a child develops their self-image, their self-concept based on how he’s seen and treated by the adults around them. If the adults themselves are too limited, too stressed, too traumatized, too preoccupied to see the child in their child’s fullness, with all their emotions, the child will develop a very limited sense of themselves. So that’s part of that fracturing, first of all.

    Secondly, when you’re not being seen, or worse, if you’re being hurt or abused, it’s just too painful to be in your own body and to experience your own emotions. So literally, as a survival adaptation, quite unconsciously, the child will cut off their sense of feeling, their gut feelings, and they even disconnect from their bodies. So that disconnection then fracturing the self, which is the essence of trauma, happens if you’re not seen and accepted just who you are, even more so if you’re hurt.

    Chris Hedges:  You’ve long argued that addiction is an outcome of childhood trauma. You say this is based on shame, a shame-based view of ourselves, negative self-perception, a loss of compassion for one’s self. You write, “The more severe the trauma, the more total that loss.” Can you talk about the loss and its effects?

    Gabor Maté:  Sure. So for 12 years I worked as a physician in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which, I don’t know if you’ve ever been here, Chris.

    Chris Hedges:  I have. I have. And I have gone down to the Eastside.

    Gabor Maté:  It’s shocking for people coming even from the ghettos in the United States. It’s North America’s most concentrated area of drug use. And in 12 years I worked down there, I never met a single female patient who had not been sexually abused as a child, and all the men had been severely abused, sometimes sexually, sometimes in other ways, neglected and so on. Not by accident, 30% of our clients down there were Indigenous First Nations Canadians. They make up 5% of the population. They’re also the most traumatized segment of the Canadian population. A shocking 50% of the women in jail in our country are Indigenous. They make up 5% of the female population. So what that trauma does is it hollows out the self because, again, it’s too painful to be connected to the self, and that pain will break through. And there’s a sense of emptiness, because the sense of fulfillment as a human being needs to come from within.

    It needs to come from an embrace of one’s self as one is. But when it’s treated that badly, one ends up rejecting one’s self as not hurt, as a flawed, deficient individual. So underneath all trauma is a shame-based view of oneself, and that shame is searing. Now, all addictions are an attempt to escape from pain. So I don’t care if you’re addicted to gambling or sex or shopping or the internet or self-cutting or eating or drugs or alcohol, it’s all about soothing the pain of that shame, soothing the pain of what you endured. And when that pain breaks through, you have to soothe the pain by some addictive behavior. So that’s what I meant there. So underneath addiction – People think that they’re ashamed of themselves because they’re addicted, it’s as least as much the other way around. They’re addicted because they’re so ashamed of themselves.

    Chris Hedges:  Well, you write about how consumer society plays on this. You say that if trauma entails a disconnection from the self, then it makes sense to say that we are being collectively flooded with influences that both exploit and reinforce this trauma.

    These are your words, “Work pressures, multitasking, social media news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources, these all induce us to become lost in our thoughts. Frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We’re caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on, not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.” Those are your words.

    So that passage reminded me of the lines from W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1st, 1939”. “Faces along the bar, clinging to the average day. The lights must never go out, the music must always play. All the conventions conspire to make this ford assume the furniture of home. Least we should see where we are, lost in a haunted wood, children afraid of the night who have never been happy or good.”

    Gabor Maté:  I should have just published a book with that poem and forgot everything else, because he says it all. Well, there are two large classes of people who confuse their desires with their needs. One of them is young children. When they want something, they think they need it, and they’re desperate if they don’t get it. In the hands of healthy adults, one learns that needs are not the same as desires. The other class of people who confuse their desires with their needs, of course, are addicts of all kinds. I need to go shopping, I need to have a drink. These aren’t needs, these are desires, but consumer society is based on making addicts out of everybody, to confuse our desires with our needs.

    As the Catholic monk, whose work I’m sure you’re familiar with, Thomas Merton, said, the whole society is geared to raising our desires to this fever pitch so that we can be consuming the products of the film studios and all the factories. And so our whole consumerism is based on creating false needs. And if we weren’t at this fever pitch of desire all the time, we wouldn’t buy all the stuff that we buy, nor would we be coasting on the internet to fill every moment because we’re so empty and we’re so afraid of ourselves that we have to distract ourselves from our own presence by whatever means. Now, if you look on the internet, on YouTube for example, what gets seen by millions?

    There’s, recently, Eli Manning, the former New York Jets, was it? No, Giants quarterback went to this college, and he pretended to be somebody he wasn’t. It doesn’t matter, it’s trivial. 11 million views in three weeks. So the average person in America knows a whole lot about what quarterbacking strategy the Denver Broncos or the Tampa Bay Buccaneers should be pursuing, and then there’s big discussions about this. What does it matter to anybody? But ask the average American or Canadian to string two intelligent sentences together about the history of Afghanistan, or the history of Ukraine, or even about climate change, they’re not able to do it. So the whole society is designed, the whole culture is designed to draw our attention away from what’s important and make us believe that what’s trivial is actually essential. And that’s both a consumer strategy, but it’s also a propaganda imperative.

    Chris Hedges:  Well, you’re right about the dopamine hits, and a constant need because you get a high, but then you fall into a low and you need another hit, and that consumer society depends on this pleasure principle, if we want to quote Freud. But in fact, of course, what makes us content, what provides joy, is outside of that self-destructive behavior.

    Gabor Maté:  Absolutely. And this society is perfectly, I would say designed, but it’s not actually designed. As you and I know, it’s not that there aren’t conspiracies at the top and in all aspects of corporate life, but the whole thing is not a conspiracy as such. It’s almost a self-organizing organism that, on the one hand, deprives us of our genuine needs as children and as young people so that we create false needs to which you can cater. So society both creates these false needs and then creates an economy that caters to them. In fact, the economy couldn’t survive the way it is if it wasn’t based on false needs. So it’s a perfect mechanism, and it couldn’t have been designed better to sustain itself, at the cost of human health, of course, and human life even.

    Chris Hedges:  I want to talk about passing on trauma. That’s something that I’ve had to deal with, that when we don’t resolve that trauma, you write in Ourselves, you say, “The home becomes a place where we unwittingly recreate scenarios reminiscent of those that wounded us when we were small.” Can you talk about how this trauma is passed down?

    Gabor Maté:  I’m reminded of a statement of Primo Levi. I don’t know if you’ve read Primo Levi, but –

    Chris Hedges:  Oh, of course.

    Gabor Maté:  …He’s one of the great writers, one of the very few great writers, actually, on the genocide. He wasn’t somebody who sentimentalized anything. And he said at some point in one of his books that let’s not recreate in our homes the same conditions that existed in the camps. And that may seem like a shocking statement, because how can you possibly compare the two? But in terms of wounding children, again, you don’t need those dramatic historical circumstances. So I talked about my own formative year, the first year of my life, in the sense that I thought I wasn’t lovable and wanted.

    Well, the way I compensated for that, in part, was to go to medical school, because when you go to medical school, you get a sense of self-importance. And it’s very traumatic to go to medical school, but you come out of it with a lot of power and a lot of knowledge that makes you indispensable to the world, and now they’re going to want you all the time. And the beeper’s always going. Every time the beeper goes, you get a dopamine hit. Oh, they want me. I’m so important. But it’s addictive, because it never fills the emptiness inside. So I’m a workaholic physician and I’m carrying my depressions and anxieties and so on, but not on the job. They come out at home.

    Now, what message do my kids get when daddy’s not around because he’s always busy looking after other people, or when he is home, he’s kind of depressed and morose? Same message I got: that they’re not wanted. And this is a middle class Vancouver, British Columbia, home in a leafy, lovely neighborhood, no circumstances of abuse or deprivation or war, and yet my children are getting the same message I got. So this is how we pass it on unwittingly. And not because we don’t love our kids, and not because we don’t do our best, but simply because our best is constrained and informed by our own unresolved trauma. And most of us, or many of us have children when we’re very young, before we actually have resolved or even recognized our traumas.

    Chris Hedges:  Yes. That was something I’ve dealt with. I remember helping my kids build a gingerbread house when they were little and then just without thinking, I said, let’s play Bosnia and burn it down.

    You say that all illnesses, if not psychosomatic in origin, have psychosomatic components, and there are long passages in the book where you tie trauma of individuals, often childhood trauma, to a variety of diseases. You argue that confronting the underlying trauma often mitigates and even, at times, eradicates the disease. Stress, you say, may disable our immune system’s capacity to control and eliminate malignancy. That’s a big topic, and people are going to have to buy the book, which they should do, but can you touch on that?

    Gabor Maté:  Yeah. I’ve discussed this in a previous book of mine which you mentioned, When the Body Says No. But this is what’s so frustrating, Chris, is that I’m talking here not about conjecture or intuition, I’m talking about science. So in the 1860s or ’70s, whenever it was, Jean Martin-Charcot, the French neurologist who first described multiple sclerosis, said that this is a stress-driven disease. James Paget, a British surgeon around the same time, talked about breast cancer in women and how it’s inescapable to link between emotions and breast cancer. Sir William Osler, one of the founding physicians at John Hopkins in Baltimore, said in the 1890s, I think, that rheumatoid arthritis was a stress-driven disease.

    Without going into, in 1938, a great lecturer at Harvard, a physician whose name is still honored at Harvard in a research day named after him, Dr. Soma Weiss, like myself from Hungary, he said that emotional factors are at least as important in the causation of illness as physical elements and should be at least as important in the treatment. This lecture was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Now, they had no science to back it up, they just had their intuition. Since then, we’ve had 80 years of science showing the relationship between emotions and physiology, because you can’t separate the mind from the body. Scientifically speaking, you cannot separate the mind from the body, and the emotional apparatus is part and parcel of the same system that runs the immune apparatus as well. So when I say psychosomatic, I’m not meaning imagined, I’m meaning literally the oneness of psyche and soma, the mind and the emotional circuits of the body and the brain with the physiology of the rest of the body.

    Chris Hedges:  Is this what you mean by neurogenic inflammation?

    Gabor Maté:  Well, neurogenic inflammation simply means that the nervous system can trigger inflammation in the body, and of course the nervous system, as easy to demonstrate, is very much influenced by emotions. You have a certain emotional state, your nervous system changes by definition, and that can initiate inflammation in a body. A recent study three weeks ago showed that a single episode of racism will instigate inflammation in the body and suppress the immune system. So everything is psychosomatic in that sense, not in the sense of imagined, but that the psyche is influencing the soma because they’re one system.

    Long-term stress, long-term release of stress hormones like cortisol, suppresses the immune system and makes it less able to resist malignant transformation, and also can turn the immune system against oneself so that one has more of a chance of developing autoimmune disease, which not surprisingly, who’s most prone for? Women of color. Because A, they’re women, so they’re more stressed over gender reasons, and of color because they’re more stressed because of racist reasons. So the more intersection there is of gender and race, the more autoimmune disease you have. It’s strict science. And the frustrating part of it is the average medical student doesn’t get a single lecture on any of this stuff despite the voluminous science. It’s incredible, the gap between science and medical practice.

    Chris Hedges:  On pages 101 and 102, you drop a list of personality features that you say are most often present in people with chronic illnesses. What are the traits, and why do so many chronically ill people have those traits?

    Gabor Maté:  Yes. So in family practice, which I pursued for 22 years, I think, some of which I also was the medical coordinator of the palliative care unit at Vancouver Hospital, I noticed that who got sick and who didn’t wasn’t accidental. And as a family physician, I did have an advantage over my specialist colleagues in that I knew my patients as people. I knew them before they got sick. I knew them in their families of origin. I knew them in their multi-generational family context, so I began to notice that people that developed chronic illness had certain character traits. These were an automatic regard for the emotional needs of others while ignoring their own, rigid identification with duty, role, and responsibilities. So in other words, their duty out in the world, their responsibility out there rather than who they were as individuals, a repression of healthy anger.

    Healthy anger. There’s a distinction between rage and unhealthy and healthy anger. And finally, two fatal beliefs that one is responsible for how other people feel, and one must never disappoint anybody. Now, these traits, it’s not, again, fanciful they lead to illness because they all impose tremendous stress on the individual. If you’ve ever been angry and if you know what a perturbation of the nervous system and the visceral anger involves, imagine not feeling anger, what energetic demand it is to repress the anger so much so you don’t even feel it, so one of these really nice people that never gets angry. It’s a tremendous diversion of body energy. That wears on the immune system and the nervous system.

    So it’s that long-term stress, then, that leads to the illness. Not these traits cause the illness, but these traits make you much more prone to be stressed without even you knowing it, and therefore you’re more prone to illness. It’s a very straightforward correlation.

    Chris Hedges:  I see that play out in the prison, because my students in the prison cannot express anger to the guards, and it’s just an epidemic. Diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, everything because, of course, if they express that anger, they’re immediately punished.

    Gabor Maté:  Yeah. And no wonder, you see, like James Baldwin once said, I think that to be an American Black is to be in a constant state of suppressed anger.

    Chris Hedges:  Yes.

    Gabor Maté:  And the question is what to do with that anger? It’s no wonder that Black American males have a much higher risk of high blood pressure. It’s got nothing to do with genetics. Their genetic relatives in Africa do not have the same risk. It has to do with the stress of being American and Black and not being allowed to be angry.

    Chris Hedges:  I want to talk about the tension or the clash between what you call two essential needs: attachment and authenticity. You call this ground zero for the most widespread form of trauma in our society. Can you explain that idea?

    Gabor Maté:  Sure. So attachment is simply the drive to be close to somebody. It’s a biological, instinctive, psychological drive that’s part of our evolutionary heritage. And we share that with other mammals, because without attachment, the drive to be close between parent and infant, no mammalian infant would survive. So we’re simply wired for it, and especially the young child is wired to attach because without that attachment, there’s just no life, period.

    Now, we also have another need as well, which is what I call authenticity, and that comes from the word auto, for the self, and being in touch with our feelings, knowing what we feel and being able to act on that. Now, don’t forget, we evolved out there in nature for millions of years and for hundreds of thousands of years until a blink of an eye ago in humans, even in existence of our own species, we lived out in nature. How long does any creature survive in nature if they’re not in touch with their gut feelings? And that’s what I mean by authenticity, is being in connection with our bodies and our emotions.

    However, according to much of the toxic parenting advice that is doled out, the tiger mom and Emily Oster’s Parenting by the Numbers, it is designed to teach parents to ignore their parenting instincts. And if a child shows up angry, for example, they should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal, according to a very famous psychologist who, blessedly, will remain unnamed in this program. But he’s Canadian –

    Chris Hedges:  He’s named in your book, isn’t he?

    Gabor Maté:  He’s named in my book. And he says that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal. So anger in a child is not normal. I got news for that psychologist. Anger is built into our brain as one of our essential brain circuits because it’s an important boundary defense. Now, if a child gets the message, or Hillary Clinton, who I talk about, who runs into her mother’s home at age four seeking protection from bullies and she’s told there’s no room for cards in this house, that you get out there and deal with it, when a child’s natural fear is not acceptable and a child’s desire for help is not acceptable, when the child’s natural anger is not acceptable, the child has a decision to make.

    Am I going to be authentic and be rejected by my parents, or should I reject myself and be accepted by my parents? Well, the tragic tension invariably gets resolved in favor of attachment, and a person adaptively suppresses their authenticity, but then that becomes a lifelong paradigm and we live out of a false sense of self. We don’t know what we feel, we dare not ask for help. We dare not say no at the demands of the world, and that makes us sick. So that’s what the tragic tension is. And a lot of people, when they get sick, they actually learn to be themselves. And when they do, not just as documented by myself but by others as well, there’s a much better chance for health.

    Chris Hedges:  Yeah. I think this is why you write that the personality traits we come to believe are us, and perhaps even take pride and actually bear the scars of where we lost connection to ourselves.

    I’m going to stop there. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Editor’s note: Both Adam and Tish Turl use they/them pronouns.

    Adam and Tish Turl, two of the co-founders of the avant-garde Locust Arts & Letters Collective, are the big booming hearts behind its brick-and-mortar manifestation, the Born Again Labor Museum, in Carbondale, Illinois. They inaugurated their immersive art and left movement space in March earlier this year. Like a lot of their works, visual and literary, the name is meant to be lighthearted (as is their fanciful locust-filled “origin story”). Changing the world for the better is certainly a task they take seriously, but a lot of their charm comes from the fact that they don’t take themselves too seriously. They’re not exactly your prototypical evangelical Marxists proselytizing scripture from the sacred texts of 19th-century German philosophers. As you’ll see for yourself if you ever happen to visit the Born Again Labor Museum, Adam and Tish uphold no orthodoxies, artistic or political. They did, however, post signs around town offering free copies of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. (Eight people so far have responded to the offer.) 

    Sign posted in Carbondale, Illinois, saying “Need a free Communist Manifesto? Call 614-768-BALM.” Inspired by similar signs posted around Southern Illinois advertising free Bibles, Adam and Tish Turl have posted their signs around town as part of the Born Again Labor Museum’s Communist Manifesto Distribution Project. Photo courtesy of Adam and Tish Turl.

    “So far, we only got one negative call. We’d put up a sign on the side of one of the dorms on [the Southern Illinois University] campus and a libertarian called us to tell us to go fuck ourselves,” Tish explained with a laugh. “We used his message in the intro to one of our podcasts.” 

    Aesthetically, BALM is a museum of the radical weird infused with what Tish calls “aspirational escapism” (as opposed to “acquiescent escapism”). Aspirational escapism is about you writing potential alternatives and lives for yourself, they say. Acquiescent escapism, however, is something different—something that requires giving up being the author of yourself altogether and just hiding from the world for a while. 

    Joking aside, catering to rich patrons is wholly besides BALM’s point. Tish writes about eating them.

    Even though it’s devoted to the working class, BALM is not anything like The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which offers informative displays for visitors detailing working-class immigrant life in downtown Manhattan in an actual tenement, and everything inside is suffused with the tint of the American Dream. BALM is also definitely not like the immersive arts and entertainment company Meow Wolf, which, while structured as an artists’ cooperative that revels in the weird, has no radical political core (but does have a history of mistreating its own workers). Moreover, BALM is not at all like the splendid four-story Andy Warhol museum in downtown Pittsburgh: the contents of the museum track and curate the (market-driven concept of) Warhol’s singular genius, from working-class art prodigy to international art superstar; the museum itself, on the other hand, is a sterling example of how cultural institutions can be catalysts for gentrification

    The Turls refuse to be gentrifiers. 

    “Opening an art space just to make art and share it—that’s something that’s alien in most cities now,” Adam told me. “I’m not making a moral argument exactly, and I especially don’t blame artists who got caught up in this 40 or 50 years ago, but it’s so obvious now, and you can’t pretend to wash your hands of it.”

    They see Carbondale as gentrification-proof, at least for now. 14,000 of its 25,000 residents are college students.

    “For Carbondale to gentrify, something huge would have to happen,” Adam noted, gesturing outside. “There would have to be a critical mass of well-paid professionals, and that’s not gonna happen here. And it’s definitely not happening at the strip mall.” 

    BALM’s neighbors in the run-of-the-mill strip mall located two miles from the university’s campus include a head shop, a record store, a music store, and a “hippie place where you can get a tarot card reading.”

    “The most important thing about having the space,” Tish said, “is to provide working people with a place where they can walk in and see themselves.

    Adam, a self-described Brechtian, thinks every art space is a theatrical space that tells a story. “So what is the white-cube fancy art gallery saying about rich people in new shoes, having mid-shelf wine, looking at really expensive paintings? Because that changes the meaning of the work in there, in a big way,” they said. And the story told by hoity toity exclusive art galleries is the story of bourgeois rot and cultural constipation. BALM, of course, hopes to tell a different kind of story with the space and resources available (Adam kidded that they’re “not poor, just broke,” but also that they wouldn’t mind if the occasional rich person wandered in to support the museum). 

    Joking aside, catering to rich patrons is wholly besides BALM’s point. Tish writes about eating them. In their short essay “Class Revenge Fanfiction,” published in the winter ’22 issue of Locust Review, Tish doesn’t mince words:

    I want to create characters not that people aspire to be like but whom people see themselves in who end up doing things they already aspire to do but won’t, for whatever reason. Probably this penchant for fictional violence against wealth hoarders will get me into trouble eventually. Until then, however, I will continue to write about working class robots in sewers trying to shoot the evil meat above.

    “The most important thing about having the space,” Tish said, “is to provide working people with a place where they can walk in and see themselves. And [where they can] also know that it’s safe here to start doing the stuff that they need to do, which is not safe to do elsewhere. We can disagree on some finer points of things, we don’t all have exactly the same ideology, we can discuss things. But we’re not tolerating certain kinds of passive aggressions, microaggressions—things like that don’t fly here.”

    BALM has a central meeting area where local Starbucks workers organized their successful unionization campaign (the union election, which took place on Aug. 11, had a final tally of 11 “Yes” votes and 2 “No” votes). In that same meeting area, pro-choice activists have made protest signs and hashed out plans to support a new abortion clinic in town. The Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) chapter holds its political education movie nights there, too, viewing films like 9 to 5, Matewan, Land and Freedom, United in Anger (a documentary about Act Up), and The Janes (a recent HBO documentary on the underground abortion rights group in Chicago before Roe). 

    On display where the mostly young people gather are photos and posters of revolutionary leaders and iconic scenes of working-class, radical, and socialist struggles, all finished with gritty touches of cotton and ash. The images are hung so high on a wire affixed by clothespins that most people have to look up to see them. They are part of the intentionally never-finished installation—an unspoken but purposeful reminder to activists to document our actions for posterity, lest they be forgotten. 

    Adam, who is older than Tish by more than a decade, can name each photo’s subject with the kind of nonchalant expertise of a diehard sports fan rattling off key player stats and team lore: “This is Paris in ’68, Memphis in ’68, the WTO protest in Seattle in 1999, a Black Panther poster by Emory Douglas, a still from Harlan County USA,” they explained. “The cotton is a reference to the slave crop and the ash is a reference to General Sherman’s march to the sea. One of my ancestors came over from England, went right into the army, and was part of the march to the sea.” 

    Like many socialists, Tish and Adam have thought long and hard about how unfairly society is currently structured and how it could be remade in a more just way. And that desire to restructure comes from a place of love—for the world, and for other people.

    Like many socialists, Tish and Adam have thought long and hard about how unfairly society is currently structured and how it could be remade in a more just way. And that desire to restructure comes from a place of love—for the world, and for other people. Contra the Fredric Jameson axiom, popularized by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism, it’s far easier for these two to imagine the end of the capitalist order than the end of the their earthly home. Adam grew up in Carbondale, which is surrounded by natural beauty.

    “When I was a little kid, I thought everybody lived in the forest,” Adam said. “I’m not religious or anything, but those forests are sacred. That’s the closest thing I have to cathedrals, and they’re in trouble.”

    Neither Tish nor Adam believes that the climate catastrophe has even the remotest chance of being solved by market-driven solutions.

    “If you can’t imagine anything else other than capitalism, over time that narrows your options considerably. The amount of space to think outside of the market, outside of hustling every day, is narrowed,” explained Adam. 

    BALM is meant to be a bulwark against that constriction of imagination. Tish and Adam are swashbuckling.

    In every BALM gallery, original artwork by the Turls will spin you round and stop you in your tracks, even though, as Adam confessed, “sometimes it’s not even necessarily fun to make it, but it’s something you have to… try to do.” There is a room, for instance, where handcuffs dangle off fry baskets. It takes a minute to register their startling reminder that what happens in workplaces is often traumatic and cruel—and that workers’ subjugation is mandatory. In the Slow Apocalypse Room, an angel’s wings are attached to a toilet paper display, prompting one to wonder what happened to all of those essential workers stocking the shelves during the toilet paper frenzy at the outset of the pandemic. Also on display is a Wounded Tool Library, where the stories of the tools themselves, and how they came to be broken and wrecked, are told. Passing through space, the personification of the tools conjures in one’s chest an uneasy sense of the ways flesh-and-blood working people, whose stories are rarely told or listened to, are objectified.

    The Turls are deeply in love with each other—and with their communities of struggle, in Southern Illinois and beyond. Like so many others in the international working class, despite having a multitude of oppressive forces bearing down on them daily, they still have everything to live for. They will not be relinquishing their happiness to the ruling class anytime soon. After all, it is that same class that, if it considers them at all, sees queer, non-binary low-wage-earners like them—who give their all to the world while they themselves are just barely scraping by—as little more than swarming insects to be avoided. Nonetheless, as Adam and Tish believe, there is power in the swarm. 

    “If you can’t imagine anything else other than capitalism, over time that narrows your options considerably. The amount of space to think outside of the market, outside of hustling every day, is narrowed.”

    Adam Turl, co-founder of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective and its Born Again Labor Museum, in Carbondale, Illinois.

    “The amount of trauma that I have experienced in my life,” Tish said, “not even related to capitalism, but also the capitalism on top… Even if you’re not necessarily conscious of it, if you’re doing writing and creating, you’re processing that trauma. It’s either moments of vengefulness that I wish could’ve happened or, ‘Look at this thing that is a fact of our life that is disgusting. We have to stop it.’”

    Exercising (or, more precisely, weaponizing) their imaginations in the service of the working class is one of their primary daily joys. Over breakfast, Tish might tell Adam a dream they just had.

    “I was in a room full of people and they weren’t wearing masks, and there was an elephant in the corner with a large knife,” Tish explained, half-groaning. “And I woke up and I told them about it, because I was frustrated at how obvious it was. As a writer you want to plumb your dreams for the weird stuff, but I was like, ‘Really, brain? You’re just gonna give me a big elephant in the room with a knife!” 

    Later Adam will paint that dream scene and make Tish gasp.

    They pass the inspiration back and forth like a glowing baton in a relay race against time—and the stakes of winning that race couldn’t be higher. From the locusts’ point of view, they are able to see how corporate executives and government bureaucrats are normalizing policies of exterminism in the face of rising fascism and climate destabilization

    While “exterminism” may sound too extreme to some, how else are we to characterize the logic on display with an institutional “response” to  COVID-19 that has condemned hundreds of thousands of essential workers in the US to an early grave—and still claims an average of 338 lives a day? “The handling of the pandemic brought a 40% increase in working age deaths according to an insurance industry report,” Adam explained. “They consider a 10% increase in working age deaths to be a catastrophe, and it was 40%. It’s one of those things that’s not talked about in the ‘tight labor market’ discussion, but there were about 400,000 people who are no longer alive, who were working.”

    Maybe it’s one of the weird effects of the curated displays, but BALM can feel a little bit holy at moments, a temple of sorts for the souls of ordinary folk—who are, as Adam and Tish believe, anything but.

    “I don’t think anybody is actually ordinary,” Adam said. “And that’s part of the problem, because everybody’s actually amazing, and I live in a world that doesn’t allow them to be.”

    Exercising (or, more precisely, weaponizing) their imaginations in the service of the working class is one of their primary daily joys.

    The inspiration for BALM stretches all the way back to artisan workers of the 19th-century Parisian working class who would gather in studio garrets and cafés to stay up all night talking about a world more suited to human flourishing than the contemporary, industrializing one taking monstrous shape all around them. “They would talk about what kind of art people should make to help realize [that better world],” Adam said. “It was a normal part of life, and that’s what we should build in working-class communities all over the place. Let’s get together and talk about how we make our life better.”

    One of the ways that Adam and Tish make BALM available to working-class people who are not already politicized and organizing is by renting a room within the museum to the Carbondale Tool Library. It’s a lending library stocked with a good amount of inventory.

    “One of the deficits of meaning in a lot of contemporary art is that it’s situated next to well-heeled people who don’t really care about it,” Adam explained. “If it speaks a little to people who are coming to borrow a drill so they can fix their table, that’s a much better use of it than sitting on a wall 10 feet away from some other artwork.”

    “I don’t think anybody is actually ordinary,” Adam said. “And that’s part of the problem, because everybody’s actually amazing, and I live in a world that doesn’t allow them to be.”

    Burger King Parking Lot’s Wife is a work that gets noticed and commented on … well … a lot. It’s a sculptural column made of salt packets that references Genesis 19, a Bible story about a man named Lot and his wife in the land of Sodom. In the parable, she turns back to look at the sinners being destroyed by God’s wrath and, having disobeyed the angel’s instruction specifically not to look back, is changed into a pillar of salt. The rabbis argue over many things. Was it defiance, or worse, a sign that she loved that fast city life God was in the process of scorching? Or did she see with her own eyes God manifest raining terror down on the Sodomites, a sight so terrible that she could not contain it and remain human? “For us, it’s maybe you look back at your trauma, and then you become salt, in the sense of salting your workplace,” they said.

    The graceful column made of salt balanced on a scalloped pedestal, the salt apportioned and commodified in hundreds of tiny packets. Its construction seems to defy physics, all the constituent parts held loosely together by the lightly netted force of solidarity. Adam and Tish have already made a Wendy’s Parking Lot’s Wife and a Hardee’s Parking Lot’s Wife, and the three columns now stand shoulder to shoulder. Good ideas, like good structures, can multiply and proliferate in a given locus, and ideally can nurture the full flowering of the subjective expression of, by, and for the working class.

    “I want total liberation of the working class,” Tish said unhesitatingly when asked about BALM’s vision for the future. “I want for us to be in charge, to do what we know we have to do to reverse the things that capitalism has done to ruin this planet. I really, really hope that we can get there.”

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Ray Nayler’s novel The Mountain in the Sea asks the kinds of questions about us, our future and our interaction with other living beings that are raised by many great works of science fiction. In his book the marine habitat of a hyperintelligent species of octopus, endowed with its own language and culture, is seized by a global tech corporation determined to harness this non-human intelligence for profit in new systems of artificial intelligence. This dystopian future world is one of total surveillance, vast polluted dead zones, climate breakdown, a pervasive alienation, frequent targeted assassinations by governments and corporations against those who resist bondage as well as the brutal enslavement of workers, especially those from the Global South.

    Ray Nayler joins Chris Hedges to discuss his new novel, the curious consciousness of cephalopods, and what octopod ontology can teach us about capitalism and ourselves.

    Studio: Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, Cameron Granadino
    Post-Production: Cameron Granadino


    Transcript

    The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • In 1973 the organization 9 to 5 was founded as a national association of women office workers advocating for their rights. Organizing women against workplace discrimination and harassment, 9 to 5 brought a new generation of white collar women workers into the labor movement, and remains one of the largest organizations of women workers in the United States. Their experiences inspired the 1980 film 9 to 5, starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton. Now, almost half a century since 9 to 5’s beginnings, founder Ellen Cassedy joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss her new memoir, Working 9 to 5: A Women’s Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie.

    Ellen Cassedy was a founder and longtime leader of 9 to 5, the national association of women office workers. Working 9 to 5 is her first-person account of this exciting movement, which began in the early 1970s, mobilizing women across the country to organize for rights and respect on the job. Ellen is also the award-winning author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust.

    Post-Production: Brent Tomchik


    Transcript

    Marc Steiner:  Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s great to have you all with this once again.

    “Working 9 to 5”, that was the famous song by the great Dolly Parton, created for a film we all love called 9 to 5, with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton. Now, that comedy took a serious look at the lives of clerical workers, women workers. And it was all inspired by the real 9 to 5 movement that organized women across America in a multiracial union of office workers and clerical workers, who are among the lowest paid and oppressed and most numerous. Who underwent sexual harassment, they were unpaid, as I just said, working in servitude at the whim of the mostly male bosses. That movement created a massive change.

    One of those women who built that movement is Ellen Cassedy, who wrote the book Working 9 to 5: A Woman’s Movement, A Labor Union, and An Iconic Movie. As I said, Ellen was one of the founders of the 9to5 movement, and for a time she was even a speech writer for the Clinton administration, wrote a play about her Aunt Jesse, a long time secretary who wore her hair like Jane Fonda, shagged, in a nursing home, and became a film called Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn. Wrote a book called, We Are Here: Memories of Lithuanian Holocaust, and more.

    She joins us now here on The Marc Steiner Show on The Real News. Ellen, welcome, great to have you with us.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Thanks so much, Marc, glad to be here.

    Marc Steiner:  Let me just start just talking about you for just a moment before we get into the heart of the book. Because your life as a union organizer, your life as an activist all through the ’60s and ’70s and beyond in the decades that come, really are in the heart and soul, or in your genetic roots, are inside of you. Something you grew up with, something you learned from childhood. Talk a bit about that and how you grew up.

    Ellen Cassedy:  I guess I can trace it back to my grandfather who was an immigrant from Eastern Europe. He arrived in the United States in 1911 at the age of 19. He used to talk to me about standing in a public square in New York City, listening to this fiery garment worker named Rose Schneiderman who was talking about bread and roses for women garment workers. I never forgot that. Later, when we began organizing in the early 1970s, we came to feel that we were the heirs of those garment workers way back then who fought for their rights and who really not only transformed their own lives, but also transformed the labor movement.

    As I was growing up, I was involved, thanks to my parents, in the Civil Rights Movement in the Baltimore region, and also in the anti-war movement into the ’60s. So by the time I got to the early 1970s, I was like a lot of women at that time who were hitting the workforce out of economic necessity, but also were bringing with them a desire not just for a job, but for a good job, a job that paid fairly, that treated them fairly. One historian has talked about it as the coming together of two rivers; an economic and a cultural. And women looked around, and looked at each other, and looked from side to side, and felt that we were united as women, and a discontent began to brew.

    Marc Steiner:  And brew it did. Let’s get right into the heart of what it brewed for you and these other women, because I think that many people even listening or watching this now are not aware that the film that we saw that clip of, 9 to 5, was a national movement. Was a movement of women in this country that organized women who were unorganized in ways that were never done before. I’d like to talk about that. Let’s just talk about the beginning of that, the inspiration of that, and the women you worked with, and how that began.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Well, 10 of us started sitting around in a circle in Boston. We were women office workers, and we just started talking about our jobs. We talked about low pay, unequal pay, training men to be our own supervisors, and being asked to do all kinds of favors for our bosses. From there we ended up starting a newsletter and distributing it all over town in Boston. We got government agencies working on our side, and we won millions of dollars in back pay and raises from banks, insurance companies, and more. We went on to expand nationwide, and we started a women-led union, and we inspired that movie that you talked about, 9 to 5, 1980 Hollywood hit and Dolly Parton’s toe tapping enduring anthem, which has just been re-released in a duet with Kelly Clarkson just last week.

    Marc Steiner:  Really? I have to check that out, I haven’t heard that one.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Yeah, they re-released it. And one of the messages is that we are still working 9to5 and we’re still needing to organize. I’ve been so thrilled to see the upsurge of labor organizing that’s going on today. It really reminds me of people back when I got started, who, we hadn’t really been involved in demonstrations or the Women’s Movement that much. In fact, a lot of women who we met, women office workers would start out when they sat down across a lunch table with us, start out by saying, I just want to make clear I’m not a feminist. But then as they got involved in the organization they thought, I’m for equal pay, I’m for equal treatment, maybe I am a feminist. But we didn’t create that as a litmus test, you didn’t have to call yourself a feminist to get involved in 9to5.

    Marc Steiner:  That’s interesting. I’d like to get into how different this was. I mean, as I was reading your book, when I was younger, both when I was a school teacher and helped organize the union of my high school, and then before that I was a warehouse worker and I got a Teamsters union at our warehouse and organized that. But what you described in your book was very different in terms of its approach to organizing. A, because the group of people you were organizing didn’t necessarily see themselves as workers, and B how you moved away from the narrowness of a left ideology that would turn people off while you were trying to organize a broader coalition, how you used humor, and more. Talk a bit about how this developed, because it was really a unique and powerful approach that I think also can change the entire nature of how you organize workers.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Yeah, well that’s very insightful. I think what impressed me as I was doing the research for this book was that 9to5, it really was different. We really followed our own noses. We looked around for advice and we asked people for advice and some people said, oh, you’ll never succeed. We’ve tried that before. It’s never going to work. Other people just welcomed us with open arms. But we really had to change where we were going frequently, depending on what happened with the people we were talking to. We listened really carefully to how people talked about their jobs. We went out to lunch with so many people, just countless women. Sometimes I went to lunch three times a day and just listened to how people were talking and what they seemed to be ready to do.

    It was a situation where unions were not in the picture at that point. Even any kind of collective action was really foreign to the people we were talking to. When they had a problem, people tended to think it was their own individual private problem. I should have dressed for success. I should take another class. It’s my fault that I haven’t gotten that promotion. We really had to work on showing people that, while an individual can make a difference, individuals working together can make a bigger difference. Now, the workplace was very authoritarian, in these giant soaring skyscrapers. If you stood up from your seat at the typing pool, your supervisor could see and might come over and say, sit back down, you might get a black mark.

    In leafleting, we had to stay close to the curb because these skyscrapers were situated in the middle of private plazas, often with security guards. So we would be leafleting and skirting from person to person as they streamed in the doors. Then once they got inside the door, leaflet in hand, a lot of times supervisors were waiting there for them and just ripped the leaflets right out of their hand. So we had to come up with all kinds of tactics that would be suited to what people were willing to do. People weren’t even willing to put a pile of leaflets in the bathroom, for example. We thought that’d be pretty easy, but what if they got caught?

    So one thing we used to very great effect was press coverage. One thing was getting government agencies on our side to help us. We didn’t just file a charge and then leave. No, we kept the pressure on them, kept their feet to the fire. And then we used women as whistleblowers. We invented all kinds of crazy ways for women to feed us information about what was going on in the executive suites anonymously. We’d leaflet a company and then people would send in their answers. We’d digest those answers and then feed it back to them with another leaflet the next day, and it drove the employers crazy. We really had them on the run.

    For example, at one bank we leafleted one day about pay at the bank. The next day there was a 5% raise. We targeted the biggest bank in Boston, the First National Bank of Boston, and we called 1979 “the year of the first”. By the end of the year of the first, 51 women had been promoted to management, and there was a 12% raise, and there was job posting and career ladders and a grievance system, and things really started to change. We really had them on the run. I remember that when we targeted a great big insurance company, one of the executives decided that he’d better sleep all night in his office in case we invaded. I don’t know what good he thought that was going to do, but a lot of people changed, and we made countless bosses get their own coffee.

    Marc Steiner:  [laughs] How shocking. There’s a bunch of things here I think that’s really important to understand the harassment that people suffered, women suffered in these jobs. It was just amazing, I’ve heard stories before from these women, but reading it in your book was different, just the way it punctuated and set up how you organized and got women to talk. And when you read passages, many entries talking about what women said to you involved bodily fluids, private parts, personal hygiene. The boss who asked his secretary to clean a spot off his tie was trumped by the one who handed his secretary a warm container of his own urine to carry to a lab. That one was eclipsed by the one who asked his secretary to carry his stool sample to a doctor’s office. A boss asked his secretary to clean his dentures, another to vacuum up the fingernail clippings he scattered on the floor. One boss asked his secretary to wax his back hair, another to snip his nose hairs. The thing is, if this was a rarity, it would be a comedy, but it wasn’t.

    Ellen Cassedy:  That’s right. What you’re talking about is these bad boss contests that we held as –

    Marc Steiner:  Which is great, I love that.

    Ellen Cassedy:  We would invite people to send in the most outrageous thing they’d ever been asked to do on the job. Then, we would take a posse of women to that winning boss, and while the TV cameras were rolling, we would present – For example, there was one boss who had asked a secretary to sew up a hole in his pants while he was wearing them, so we presented him with an executive sewing kit. We also showed up at the office of a lawyer who had fired his secretary for bringing him a corned beef sandwich on white bread instead of rye. I’m sorry to say that that boss did not back down, that woman didn’t get her job back. She might have been glad, in the end.

    But from those things appearing on TV and in the press, a lot of bosses thought, hmm, and a lot of women thought, maybe I can say no. I remember after the 9 to 5 movie came out in theaters in 1980, I was sitting on the bus and I heard this woman saying to the woman next to her, so I said to him, no, I will not make your coffee. I just saw 9 to 5, and I’m not going to make a cup of coffee again, so we really had an impact.

    Marc Steiner:  Talk in greater detail about why it was so difficult, in some ways, to organize women in these offices. Both in terms of who you were facing in terms of the boss and the industry, but also the women themselves who didn’t see themselves as workers. And how difficult it was to make that organization happen, and the tactics you used to change that, to turn it around. Which really, in some ways, reminded me of what it took to be a community organizer and that kind of approach. Talk a bit about that arc.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Yeah, employers were definitely not pleased when we showed up on the scene. It was as if somebody said the wallpaper came alive. In other words, employers were used to just thinking of office workers as just part of the wallpaper. And office workers did not necessarily think of themselves as, we’re just as much workers as a man in a hard hat wielding a wrench, but we were. Employers, especially when we started our union, they pulled out every trick in the book, and they hired union busting consultants and lawyers, and they delayed, and they threatened, and they did all kinds of things, some of them legal, some of them illegal. They got away with a lot of it. And they made it very difficult to organize.

    In the 1980s there was a real downturn in union organizing. And now, as you know, we’re seeing a resurgence of retail workers, restaurant workers, warehouse workers, even grad students are organizing, and support for unions is higher than it’s been in two generations. When you ask what was it about women that made it hard, we didn’t want to talk about that. We didn’t want to talk about what was wrong with women and why women wouldn’t organize. We talked about what they’re up against, that their bosses really were ready to fire them for getting together. And they were oppressed, and we were doing everything we could to have people look at each other, feel united as women across race, across class, across age, and we did that.

    Marc Steiner:  And you did do that. I mean, this was a sojourn. I think if we can, in the time we have together, talk a bit about how that sojourn happened and grew from your organizing in this one place and expanding it into a national union, that really changed in many ways. I mean there are many who didn’t want to have anything to do with you. We can talk a bit about that. But when you did get in, it was almost change… You helped change the nature – People don’t realize this – The nature of unions, the nature of what it means to organize, to build this group, the 925 local and what you did to build that and how that changed the nature of union organizing as well. So talk a bit about that. I mean, because I think that’s a really important journey, when people start isolated and alone in one locality, but it ends up being this national movement of women fighting back.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Yeah, we did expand nationally. We came up with a formula of how you start an organization of women office workers in any city. And wherever we went, there were women who had the exact same problems and were ready to do the exact kind of thing. We also started approaching unions, because we recognized that it’s really only through a union contract that you have it in writing it. The boss can’t go back on it, they’re legally bound to carry out the contract. And eventually we began running into women who were ready to unionize. And our union, which was called District 925, like 9to5 –

    Marc Steiner:  Love it.

    Ellen Cassedy:  …On purpose. The confusion was definitely on purpose. We organized a little differently from some unions. We held meetings at lunchtime, we provided childcare for evening meetings, and we also paid very, very special attention to each woman. And we understood from the inside what it felt like to be afraid to give a speech. We encouraged women to take a wastebasket up to the podium if you’re afraid you’re going to throw up while you’re speaking in public. And we wrote scripts out for women to make phone calls. And, again, we understood ourselves what it was to be scared, and we had a feel for that. So that really had an impact. And our District 925 organized tens of thousands of people across the country. And I also would like to say that, even if you didn’t join the union or join the organization, a lot of people were affected by it.

    And I think issues that had been considered private individual issues became matters of policy for employers, for employees, for the public, and for unions. So today, pregnancy discrimination is illegal, sexual harassment is illegal. We don’t have help wanted male and help wanted female ads in the newspapers anymore. And managerial jobs have opened up to college-educated women. But in many ways, being a worker today is more difficult than it was 50 years ago. In the gig economy it can take two or three jobs to put food on the table. There are fewer workers who have pensions, paid vacation, paid sick days. Computerized monitoring, second by second surveillance of how fast you’re working. That’s something that we didn’t have back then because there weren’t computers.

    But again, as I said before, what’s so exciting is that people are coming together again in unions. And some of them are directly working through the National Labor Relations Act and going workplace by workplace, and other workers are organizing citywide the way we did. The Fight for $15 is a good example of a minimum wage fight. The kind of thing we did, where we’d just go into a city and we’d start just raising a ruckus all over town, and change got made.

    Marc Steiner:  I do want to leap forward for a moment because of what you said. And when you think about the way you organized, you said raising a ruckus, because you did raise a ruckus. You did it with both strategy and humor and mocking the other side while you organized women to stand up and fight for themselves. And what do those lessons say about what we face today? I mean, part of your book you write about, towards the end, about the period where unions kind of began to fall apart, that they stopped organizing, that businesses got the upper hand and started being able to push back. And women became more and more part of the unionized workforce than men, and Black and Latino folks became more and more part of the workforce than white people. So talk about where you think all that means for now.

    We see this surge at Starbucks and other places where people are organizing and standing up, which is really important. But talk about that in the context of what you did and how that translates to the 21st century in terms of what we face and how you organized.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Well even back then, starting in around 1973 was just when we started organizing. The social contract between employers and unions or workers was beginning to fray. Employers were facing globalization, and they pretty much came to a decision. They were done with unions, they were done with the social contract. And so you began to see this really fierce resistance by employers.

    And that continued on through the present day. It’s still happening. The Starbucks workers, the Amazon workers are up against these lawyers who have every trick in the book and every trick outside the book. So I think that the lesson that I draw is that every generation has to come up with its own tactics. And so when you read the history of 9to5, I think it’s really important to learn from history, but to understand that you’re going to need to forge your own path.

    So it’s not a question of reading my book Working 9 To 5 and thinking of it as a manual. Oh, we’ll do that too. You won’t do that. This is a different time. You’re going to have to invent your own tactics. But that’s the point, is that you just keep going and trust yourself, trust your instincts, and come up with the kind of tactics that make sense for today. Because there’s an old union song that says every generation has got to win it again. And we might wish that that weren’t true, but it is true. So every generation’s got to go for it on your own.

    Marc Steiner:  Right. The struggle never ends. I mean, I feel that a lot in terms of when I was reading your book and I was thinking about where we stand now with voting rights and the push against women’s right to choose and all the rest, and pushing back on unions, and how the struggle almost seems like it’s… Not starting over again, but it’s like that we’re facing some of the same obstacles we faced when we were organizing, when we were in our younger years doing that. Talk about how you would talk to people about how you would not let that be a frustration point, but to be a point of optimism that you can fight and win.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Yeah, well I guess if I wanted to convey anything in my book, it was what a ball we had. [Marc laughs] We were in our tiny little office from dawn to after dusk, and we were a feisty team. We were 23 years old, but we were in the newspaper all the time. We were just gleefully dreaming up all these great things to do, and we just kept moving forward. And I think that’s what people have to do. And I see people doing that today, and that’s what’s so exciting to me.

    Marc Steiner:  So I want to kind of digress a moment into part of the book where you talk about the role of the film 9 to 5, in meeting Jane Fonda, getting this story out that way, which was really amazing to me. I mean, I remember the movie when it came out and how we all loved it and it inspired so many people. Because it came out just when I was in the midst of organizing at my high school where I was working. So it was inspirational in that sense for many people to watch it. So talk a bit about that in that process, the movie, and what do you think the movie did, and how important that was?

    Ellen Cassedy:  Jane Fonda knew a member of our group from the anti-Vietnam war movement and she came to us and said that she wanted to make a movie about the concerns of women office workers. We were thrilled. She brought a team to meet with the leaders. And they popped a question that we had never thought to ask on our recruitment lunches, which was, have you ever thought about doing in your boss? And there was a moment of stunned silence and then the room just exploded, because it turned out everybody had. So one woman talked about fantasizing about grinding up her boss in a coffee grinder. And another woman talked about wanting to swivel her boss around in his swivel chair and swivel him right out the window. And those fantasies all went into the script. And the film was a huge hit. The atmosphere in the theaters was electric.

    Even men like the movie, because it turned out some of them had fantasized about doing in their bosses, too. And there’s famous scene in the movie – You should really watch the movie again today because it really stands up – So there’s this one scene where Jane Fonda is new on the job, and they usher her into this room with a huge photocopier that’s about the size of a room, and she very timidly presses the start button, and all these papers start flying out in her face, and she’s scrambling to pick them up and she’s starting to cry. And women would stand up in the theater and say, push the stop button. So people took it really seriously and felt that they were being reflected on the big screen in a way they never had before. And that really changed things.

    Jane Fonda was an amazing partner to have. She really understood how a movie could be inspired by a movement and then propel a movement forward. And we worked really closely with her. And I think the debate, the public debate about whether there is discrimination, whether women are satisfied with the lower jobs and the lower pay, that debate really changed. It made a huge difference.

    Marc Steiner:  For some reason, as you were describing this, I was thinking about parts of your book that I think are really important to pull out here, which is the issue of race. The issue of race and organizing and the issue of race, especially in how effective organizing in the workplace can begin to address racism, change minds and attitudes, especially among white women in this case, but white workers, white women, and how that played out in your world. Because when you started out, you were mostly white women who started this thing out, but it morphed and changed as it grew. And talk a bit about how that really challenges the notion of racism, how important that is in terms of that struggle.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Absolutely. So we started organizing in 1973 in Boston. And Boston at that time was an almost entirely white city, and had a particularly almost entirely white clerical workforce. And so we could have just stopped there and thought, okay, well I guess we’re going to have a white organization, but we didn’t. And one of the reasons we expanded nationally was we wanted to make sure to build a multiracial organization. And so we targeted cities like Milwaukee, Baltimore, Cleveland, Atlanta, that had large numbers of women of color in the clerical workforce, as Boston did not. And as we went along, we were very conscious about making sure that our staff, our leadership, and our membership all reflected the demographics of the workforce. And that meant we had a multiracial organization. It didn’t just happen, and it required hard work, and I’m really proud of what we all did together.

    And we really linked arms and went forward together with our eye on the prize, targeting the boss. And I think a lot of people’s minds were changed in the organization. They had experiences with people of different backgrounds that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. When we organized unions, had union drives, of course you can’t win a union drive if you only are organizing in one department or one race. So we had to have multiracial organizing committees, and we paired a woman of color and a white woman in going into workplaces. So we didn’t just have the white organizers organizing the white people and the women of color organizing workers of color. We used our organizing to break down barriers and to build our multiracial organization.

    Marc Steiner:  I mean that, to me, given what we face in today’s world, is really a critical lesson to understand. I mean, because if you think of racism as… If you look at racism as an underpinning of the society that’s woven into the DNA that destroys our society, and how the role of organizing and unions can actually change that, to me anyway, in my history, more than any other sit down sessions talking about race can. Something about the work together and the struggle together, how that changes things. And the conversations that are ensued because of that struggle actually change ideas and feelings and attitudes.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Yeah, I mean we really, as you said, we started with action rather than with discussion. And I think that really worked to our advantage. So I really agree with that and that approach. A lot of our work had to do with the federal affirmative action regulations. And when I was doing my research for this book, I was just amazed to read this history. Affirmative action, which was passed in 1965, it was an executive order put out by President Johnson. It said that any company getting a certain amount of federal funding had to set goals and timetables for hiring underrepresented groups into every part of the workforce. So companies were required to say, okay, we’ve got X number of women in this kind of job. We’ve got X number of people of color in this kind of job, and our goal over the next three years is to increase those numbers. It seems almost impossible now to imagine that that was true, but it was. And of course it wasn’t happening, don’t get me wrong.

    But when we showed up and waved these regulations in the faces of government enforcers and companies, things began to change. And I can’t tell you what an incredible thrill it was to work side by side with people of different ages, different classes, different races to make those changes and to actually win those victories.

    Marc Steiner:  So talk a bit about, before we close up, how you expanded nationally. Because that’s a really fascinating part of the story. I mean, I know that when you began organizing in Boston, this was not… You weren’t thinking about how to organize an actual union. Maybe some of you were, but it wasn’t there. But how that happened, how that morphed over these 10 years of organizing and working in all these different industries from finance to publishing to all the industries where women were working in these offices, how that morphed into this national organization.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Well, part of it was just combining with other efforts that were out there. We were in Boston, but then immediately people started getting in touch with us from all over the country. And there was a group in San Francisco, and there was a group in New York. And then we formed a group in Cleveland, and we formed a group in Dayton, Ohio. And then, as I said, we targeted Baltimore and Atlanta and Milwaukee. And so it was putting together efforts that were bubbling up all over the country and uniting in one organization. To some extent, we made it happen in and in other respects we just put together what was already there.

    Marc Steiner:  Well, I thought that was an amazing part of the story for me to watch how that grew and how the women you began with, you actually spread out across the country and started doing work in different places.

    Ellen Cassedy:  That’s right, some of the original organizers left Boston and went to Seattle and Hartford and other places to start new 9to5 organizations all over.

    Marc Steiner:  So last couple things here, one has to do with the other story in this story. Because this is a story of organizing and building a national women’s movement, a labor movement. It’s also a love story. It’s the story of you and Jeff Bloom. The way you portrayed it and weaved it into the context of the story, but also how honest you were about your relationship and how it grew, tell a bit about this. As a writer, I’m interested in how you, as a writer, how you did that and why you made that weave between the political organizing and this love you’ve had your entire life.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Well, my goal in writing Working 9 to 5 was to create an intimate perch from which to explore a wider world. And that’s my favorite kind of book, my favorite kind of memoir. And when I was 23, it wasn’t the case that I thought, oh, how do I form a national movement? No, it was, how do I grow up? How do I become… How is it possible to be a girlfriend and an organizer at the same time? And the answer to those, that question was not obvious to me. And so some of the same struggles I was going through at work in 9to5 and before I even was a staff member of 9to5 when I was an office worker, were reflected in my personal life, also, with my boyfriend, Jeff.

    So how do you assert yourself? How do you ask for what you want? How do you make demands? What is coming on too strong and what’s being too timid? And I think that’s the case for so many people, that we ask people to join a movement, but for every person it’s so personal, it feels very personal. And so the issue of how do you ask for what you want at work without getting fired is not all that different from how do you assert yourself and make your needs known as a girlfriend without blowing up the whole relationship. And I wanted to make that connection in the book.

    Marc Steiner:  And you did it very well. I was so real. I just loved that part of the book as well. And also, I must admit to everybody who’s watching or listening that I also went to high school with your husband, so that….

    Ellen Cassedy:  You know how hard it can be. Right?

    Marc Steiner:  So I want to conclude here with your thoughts about how the book you wrote and how your life of organizing with women who are at the forefront of the struggle of change – And there’s no accident, whether it was in the Civil Rights movement or whether it was in the abolition movement, with many of the union movements, women were at the forefront of these struggles. Women across racial lines were at the forefront of the struggles. And when you look at what’s happening now, how do you maintain your optimism about what you see and what’s growing, if you do, and where you think this takes us? I mean, because you wrote in the book at the end about what we face, where we stand, where unions are. So talk a bit about that in the context of your perception of what’s going to happen to us now and where our future takes place, what our future could hold.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Well, that is the question, isn’t it? And I think writing this book really gave me… I went through a whole journey and a whole education. Our hopes at the beginning of this process in 1973 were just huge. We thought we were going to organize women by the tens of millions. We thought we were going to transform the labor movement. We thought we were going to solve all our problems. And that didn’t happen. Our hopes and dreams were way beyond what we achieved, and we didn’t win it all. But I came to understand that in this line of work, you never do. You’re always reaching for the horizon and beyond, and you’re never satisfied. And when you do win something, it just whets your appetite for more.

    So the fact that there’s so much more to do is not news. And we were not unique in what we were able to do. We were just one example of a really exciting, transformative effort. And there have been more and there will be more. So it always goes that way. And as I said before, every generation’s got to win it again. And so I really urge people to study our history, learn from our history, but expect to forge your own path.

    Marc Steiner:  And that’s what we have to do. This is an incredible book, and really well written. I mean, you’re a writer, and you’re an amazing writer, and I really appreciate how you wrote this book. It just brings you in. And I would recommend this book: Working 9 to 5: A Women’s Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie, just an amazing piece of work. And I want to thank Ellen Cassedy for taking her time today with this here. On The Marc Steiner Show for The Real News. Been a pleasure to talk with you and look forward to many more conversations.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Thank you so much, Marc.

    Marc Steiner:  It was great. It was really great.

    And I hope you all enjoyed it as well. And please write to me at mss@therealnews.com. Let me know what you thought and I’ll get right back to you, as I always do. Also, while you’re there, stay there and go to therealnews.com and make a donation to The Real News to keep this place floating and going. We need you out there to help with that. And I want to thank the folks here at Real News for making this show possible and making it work. And again, Ellen, thank you so much for being with us.

    Ellen Cassedy:  Thank you.

    Marc Steiner:  It’s been a pleasure to have you with us.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • From ‘Game of Thrones’ to neo-Nazi viking obsessions, medieval images have a currency in contemporary culture that spans from the mainstream to the fringe. Why does the past have such a hold on us today? And what do we make of debates over medieval ‘authenticity’ that presume the medieval world was uniformly white, misogynistic and hyper-violent? Real medievalists Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan and Ben Bertrand join Art for the End Times to unpack the cultural complexes at work in contemporary medieval representations, and provide an actual historical perspective from their field. You can read Drew and Ben’s Current Affairs article “Medieval Dreams and Far Right Nightmares” here.

    Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

    Ben Bertrand is a History PhD candidate at Fordham University.

    Post-Production: Dwayne Gladden


    Transcript

    This transcript will be made available as soon as possible.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.