Author: Susan J. Douglas

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Opinion Viewpoint

Die Hard

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says that if he had been present for the Paris terror attacks, he would have personally shot the attackers. “I’m licensed to carry,” he explains. “If I were there, if somebody were there, if we had some firepower in the opposite direction, those people would’ve been gone.” Such shoot-from-the-hip rhetoric, which has swollen Trump’s poll numb

ers, has defied conventional wisdom about what you can let your id blurt out on the campaign trail.

Much attention and analysis — too much — has been commmited to the bizarre phenomenon of a bombastic, self-promoting reality-TV star and real estate mogul capturing Republican primary voters’ hearts by spurning traditional scripts. But that’s the point with Trump. We need to think about him not through the frameworks of politics or how the mainstream news media cover current affairs. Rather, we must recognize that Trump is a canny performer who taps into enduring fantasies Americans have imbibed for decades — not from the news or political talk shows, but from TV, movie, and console screens.

Too often we forget how political values are embedded in and advanced by what passes for “just entertainment.” Some of these values are progressive, others quite regressive, but a persistent trope is that there are simple solutions to complex problems.

One incarnation of this fantasy, a noble one, is about politicians speaking truth to power and, in the end, redeeming national politics. This is the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington dream, in which James Stewart takes on the press (to one reporter, “Why don’t you tell the truth for a change?”) and corrupt politicians, filibustering for truth and decency on the Senate floor and shaming a colleague into confessing his wrongdoing. An impressed radio commentator casts him as “one lone and simple American holding the greatest floor in the land. What he lacked in experience, he’s made up in fight.” Only an outsider could see and speak the truth.

A more recent version of this fantasy was Warren Beatty’s 1998 film, Bulworth, in which a corrupt politician, thinking he’s about to die, spouts obscenity-laced raps about almost every injustice he sees — from the mass incarceration of black men to the need for socialism — and experiences a spike in his popularity as a result. While these media dreams, which Trump both channels and perverts, speak to our better angels, a lone hero simply speaking his “truth” to the establishment has rarely, by itself, changed anything.

Another version of this mass-entertainment fantasy exploited by Trump features the tough, massively armed lone hero — think Die Hard, or most Schwarzenegger films — who triumphs against murderous hordes, be they terrorists, criminals, or foreign armies. In her 1993 book, Hard Bodies, Susan Jeffords laid out how these action films of the 1980s meshed beautifully with both Ronald Reagan’s cowboy image and his foreign policy stances, and came to stand for a vision of our national character as “heroic, aggressive and determined.” As Trump proclaimed in a recent Republican debate, “We need toughness. We need strength.”

Trump also relentlessly promotes the delusion that stereotypes are true and thus should guide our public policies. For most Americans, entertainment and news media are the primary sources of information about Arabs and Muslims (two groups that are often conflated). What they see, overwhelmingly, are both groups portrayed as terrorists.

As the author of a 2013 study on stereotypes in video games put it, “Being an Arab video game character is almost synonymous with being a terrorist.” Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States draws from this stereotype to present the illusion that racial profiling is a simple way to keep us safe. Add the proposal to “take out the families” of terrorists and you have a strategy straight from the Godfather movies.

These media-driven, macho fantasies are clearly providing sustenance to some, given the size of Trump’s rallies and his standing in the polls. But they are also why, according to the most recent polls from Wall Street Journal/MSNBC, 56 percent of Americans have a “somewhat negative” or “very negative” view of him; for women 18-49, the “very negative” ratings are 58 percent. In the real world, when politicians pervert “truth telling” to propose violent and hateful policies, fantasy can morph into nightmare.

Susan J. Douglas writes for Featurewell.com.

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Opinion Viewpoint

“Rape Culture”

A male student at Dartmouth College recently published an online “rape guide” advising how a first-year female student, whom he named, could be persuaded to perform oral sex. She says she was subsequently sexually assaulted at a fraternity party.

Such high-profile incidents of campus sexual assault have prompted an explosive debate in the media and online: Does America have a “rape culture”? Time magazine recently featured a bright red and white pennant on its cover that read “RAPE” with the subheadline, “The Crisis in Higher Education.” The New York Times published an extensive Sunday front-page story focusing on the failure by Columbia University (and other institutions) to respond aggressively to student charges of rape by fellow students. The prestigious Peabody Awards, which honor distinguished achievement in electronic media, this year awarded an online video about sexual violence that went viral: the instantly famous “A Needed Response,” produced by University of Oregon students outraged by CNN’s sympathetic coverage of the Steubenville, Ohio, athletes convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl. And the feminist organization UltraViolet launched a Facebook ad campaign targeting high school students, asking, “Accepted to Dartmouth? You should know about its rape problem before you attend. Learn more now.”

All of this has led to controversy around the extent to which an acceptance of rape might be woven into the underlying weft and warp of our culture. Anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, unsurprisingly, said the “rape-culture crusade is turning ugly” and, without citing any evidence, that the “list of falsely accused young men subject to kangaroo-court justice is growing.” But RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), the nation’s largest anti-sexual-violence organization, also repudiated the notion that rape is caused by cultural factors, issuing a set of recommendations urging the White House to remain focused on the true cause of the problem: “the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime.”

And, in an op-ed piece for Time, Caroline Kitchens of the conservative American Enterprise Institute cast the term “rape culture” as “hysteria” and argued that to accept it is to “implicate all men in a social atrocity,” that most people regard rape as a horrific crime, and that rapists are “despised.”

Sadly, at many colleges and universities, men who sexually assault women are hardly despised. Rather, they sometimes brag about and are admired for their conquests. The blog Jezebel recently revealed 70 pages of emails from a secret fraternity at American University that included the line, “she’s a girl you need to f**k hard and rape in the woods,” and the assertion that rape is about “dumb bitches learning their place.”

The main criticism of the term “rape culture” seems to be that rape is a crime in our society, that it is recognized as such, and that when a rape occurs, the act is condemned. Of course, only certain rapes receive this treatment — that of a child, or that of a woman who is white, has not had a drop to drink, is not scantily clad and is assaulted by a total stranger. But more broadly, “culture” is not just about our explicit, proclaimed, and “official” values, but rather includes how we live every day, and the beliefs, attitudes, and practices that permeate our media, our institutions, our places of worship, where we work, and where we play.

So, when one in five undergraduate women is a victim of sexual assault while in college, when an estimated 26,000 soldiers were sexually assaulted in 2012 alone, when a hit show like HBO’s Game of Thrones incessantly depicts women getting raped, when video games like Metal Gear Solid V or Tomb Raider include actual or attempted sexual assaults (with many gamers saying “you just got raped!” to mean “you lost”), when some cops and judges continue to assume that a raped woman who had too much to drink was “asking for it,” when Daniel Tosh (and other comics) make jokes about a woman getting gang-raped, when a deranged 22-year-old kills six people, and then himself, out of a determination to “slaughter all of those evil, slutty bitches who rejected me,” then there is indeed a tolerance for this despicable crime embedded in our culture that we have yet to exterminate.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Hype Deluge

Like millions of Americans this winter, I sat in front of the TV, freezing and wrapped in a blanket. I kept waiting for the network news shows to utter the two most obvious words raised by the weather patterns of the past several months: climate change. We heard, repeatedly, about yet another “arctic blast,” the “inescapable winter,” and various efforts to describe the wayward ways of the “polar vortex” — “a cyclone that sits over the poles” with a counterclockwise rotation, one CBS meteorologist offered.

But we waited in vain for reporters to interview scientists about how these dramatic weather extremes are related to — and, in fact, evince — what has been unfortunately named “global warming,” a term suggesting that only heat waves could be evidence of climate change. CBS News did, however, interview the general manager of the Edinburgh Golf Course in Minnesota about how the course came through the winter.

Rather than using the drought in California, the oddly tropical weather at the Sochi Olympics, or the unrelentingly frigid temperatures throughout much of the United States as pegs for serious coverage of the costs of climate change, the Weather Channel, went into a naming frenzy, with each storm, however fearsome or tepid, getting a moniker like Kronos or Maximus or, my favorite, Seneca (the wise storm?), all proposed by Bozeman, Montana, high school kids. The channel started personifying storms in 2012, explaining that this was “the best possible ways to communicate severe weather information on all distribution platforms.” But their anthropomorphizing of storms as toga-clad gods trivializes the rise of extreme weather and contributes to what has come to be called “weather porn”: the rabid flogging of the disasterous aspects of storms at the expense of all else.

In February, CBS Morning News sought to explain why northern California was being run over by something named the “Pineapple Express.”

“So, what’s causing all this?” asked host Charlie Rose. “Well,” responded CBS contributor Michio Kaku, “the wacky weather could get even wackier.” Kaku, a physics professor, then explained that the polar vortex was like a “swirling bucket of cold air” that was spilling into the continental United States because the North Pole is melting and tied it to the broader problem of climate change. “I’m really trying to follow you,” said anchor Gayle King, struggling to connect the dots. She then asked, “What can be done about it?”

“Well,” Kaku responded, “it seems to be irreversible at a certain point, so we may have to get used to a new normal.”

How’s that for promoting utter resignation and inaction?

As for the Sunday talk shows, according to Media Matters, they devoted only 27 minutes, collectively, to climate change in 2013. In February, ABC’s This Week and NBC’s Meet the Press finally gave the topic real airtime. However, they did so in the most irresponsible way possible. NBC staged a “debate” between Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” and a climate-change denier, Tennessee Congressman Marsha Blackburn, who asserted, falsely, that “there is not agreement around the fact of exactly what is causing” climate change.

ABC pitted climatologist Heidi Cullen against Republican Governor Pat McCrory of North Carolina, who said in 2008 that “climate change is in God’s hands” (though he later backtracked). While both shows sought to refute the vacuous bromides of these GOP dunces, the fact that they gave them equal time, when 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is a fact and is human-influenced, suggests there is a real debate when there isn’t and legitimates doing nothing in response.

Of course, if you watch Fox News, the frigid weather “proves” that “global warming” is a myth. Indeed, Fox mentioned climate change nine times in one week in January in order to ridicule it. As its contributor, George Will, asserts, “the climate is always changing.” Well, yes, especially in the past two decades, which were the hottest in 400 years.

We’ve become resigned to event-driven, decontextualized news, but when the issue is as pressing, costly, and dangerous as climate change (floods, water shortages, severe hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts), we need fewer storms named after Greek gods, fewer numbskull climate change deniers, and more coverage about what’s actually happening, what we can and must do, and how we can do it.

Susan J. Douglas writes on a variety of topics for In These Times.

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Opinion Viewpoint

The Dumbing of America

Among the many visionary goals of our nation’s right wing — impoverish older people, starve the poor, deny climate change, outlaw abortion and contraception, eliminate health care for millions — few are more foundational than defunding education in general, and higher education in particular.

Public colleges and universities nationwide have seen significant funding cuts over the past five years. While the recession is usually blamed, conservatives keep the fiscal screws tight by cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations. In Michigan, for example, in Republican governer Rick Snyder’s first budget, there was a 15 percent cut in state aid to universities and a $1.8 billion tax cut for businesses. It equaled a win-win for the right: It kept the fat cats in their corner and constrained the opportunity for young people to get educated — and maybe learn some things that might make them question government policies.

The Pew Research Center and others have found that lower income and less-educated whites are becoming more likely to vote Republican, with 54 percent of those without a college degree identifying as Republican in 2012. Only 37 percent identified themselves as Democrats, so the gap is wide.

And here’s the ideological bonus: Public universities, when clobbered by defunding, raise tuition. Then conservative pundits like S.E. Cupp can scream about the outrageous unaffordability (and elitism, of course) of a college degree and claim that it’s money down a rat hole. As she put it, colleges are “not meeting the demand of manufacturers and employers who want people who can’t just, you know, read Freud and Nietzsche, but who can actually read a business plan.” She’s hardly alone. Stories asking “Is College Worth It?” are everywhere now. Few put two and two together: that providing higher education costs money and the government cuts have to be made up somehow.

The recent assaults on the value of a college degree have borne fruit: According to a College Board and National Journal poll, 46 percent of respondents believe a college degree isn’t necessary for success; only 37 percent held that opinion in the previous year’s poll. It is another victory of opinion over fact. Even with the high cost of college, graduates make an average $365,000 more during their lifetimes — even after you subtract all the costs of going to school — than their counterparts with only a high school degree.

Take California as an example. Disinvestment has been so massive — 9 percent over the past 10 years — that according to the Public Policy Institute of California, the state now spends more on its prison system than on its public universities. With few choices but to raise tuition, the University of California and California state schools have seen enrollments drop by one-fifth over the past five years. If the trend persists, the state faces a significant drop in college graduates just at the time when more and more jobs — some estimate as many as 60 percent — will require some post-secondary education.

But this is also part of the problem: the monetizing of higher education, as if the potential increase in wages is the most important metric of going to college. The liberal arts are especially under seige. Why study literature or history, anyway? Parents ask, “How will this degree help my kid get a job?” Of course, they want a return on investment.

But a liberal arts education, given the new work environment of the 21st century, when people will have multiple career trajectories during their lives, may be more crucial than ever. It trains students to probe and ask questions; to look at more than one side of an argument; to open their hearts and minds to other worldviews; to do research to try to figure out the best solutions to problems; to develop analytical thinking; to write and speak clearly and forcefully; to accept failure as part of the process of success; and to be flexible in adapting to new work routines and challenges.

This habit of mind — adaptive, open to new ideas and challenges, accepting of difference, understanding of history — is exactly what young people need to succeed now more than ever, and precisely what the defunders of higher education do not want young people to acquire.

Susan J. Douglas writes for numerous publications, and for Featurewell.com.

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Opinion Viewpoint

JFK: 50 Years On

We are sure to be awash with remembrances of President John F. Kennedy as we mark the 50th anniversary of his assassination this month. There will be much hagiography, some of it deserved, some of it utterly blindered. But what is true is that back then, with Kennedy’s “New Frontier” rhetoric about “unfilled hopes, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, and unanswered questions of poverty and surplus,” there was a sense of moving forward, especially to address the persistent problems of poverty and inequality.

John F. Kennedy

So as we look back, why not take this moment to compare where we were then to where we are now? How much better and how much worse off are most of us, 50 years later?

Back then, on average, women were making 59 cents to a man’s dollar, consigned to a narrow range of jobs — schoolteacher, waitress, nurse — and virtually barred from a host of others — doctor, electrician, Newsweek reporter, you name it. The median income for African-American and other racial minority families was 53 percent that of white families. And in parts of the country, blacks were subjected to poll taxes, literacy tests, and other restrictions on their right to vote. Connecticut prohibited the use of contraceptives. Gay people had to remain closeted in the face of deep and widespread bigotry.

We can, of course, see progress today: In 2013, we have our first mixed-race president; women make roughly 77 cents to a white man’s dollar (though the gap is larger for African-American and Latina women); and gay people can legally marry in 13 states. But there has been a sea change for the worse in the “common sense” of the nation, thanks to a long-term war of position by conservatives.

Established during the New Deal and cemented during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations was the notion that the government had a responsibility to protect people from the vagaries of capitalism and, with the rise of the civil rights movement, to try to promote and ensure equal rights for all citizens. Let’s remember, for instance, that in the summer of 1963, Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law, which abolished wage discrimination based on gender. Today, even after the financial crisis, Republicans continue to insist on an ideological and unrealistic market fundamentalism that strips the government of any responsibility for people’s well-being or security. New polling data shows that among Republicans and independents, support for government solutions to public policy problems actually decreased after 2008.

This leads us to another sharp contrast between then and now: Back in 1963, the John Birch Society (a far-right radical group) was so marginalized that conservative patriarch William F. Buckley Jr. denounced its members as “far removed from common sense.” Now, right-wingers just as far removed from common sense — the climate-change deniers, contraception revokers, and Affordable Care Act scorchers — actually control large parts of Congress, a state of affairs unimaginable 50 years ago.

And here are the real costs of that shift: Economic inequality in the U.S. has soared. The middle class continues to disintegrate as the faltering economic recovery benefits the upper 1 percent; CEOs make 201 times the wages of regular workers, compared to 20 times as much in the 1960s. In 1963, the highest marginal tax rate on the rich (those making more than $400,000 a year) was 91 percent; today, even the super-rich pay no more than 39.6 percent, and they’re still moaning, despite the fact that by taking advantage of tax breaks and offshore assets, few of the super-rich actually pay anywhere near that percentage. And the wealth gaps between whites and minorities are at their widest in a quarter century.

In 1963, the prevailing discourse of progress and modernity, of equality for increasing numbers of Americans, was gaining serious moral purchase, however virulently the Birchers and others fought it. Today, the radical right assaults this discourse and seeks to have everyday Americans buy into its reactionary agenda. It’s not that they’re winning, but they are obstructing the country in profound ways. Where’s our sense of progress, of being at the vanguard of history, now? It’s been thwarted; smothered.

So as we look back at those black-and-white images of Camelot and the Kennedy years, we can think how far we’ve come. But we also have no choice but to see how far we have fallen back and to see that we have a long battle ahead to reclaim what counts as common sense in America.

Susan J. Douglas is a feminist academic, columnist, and cultural critic who writes about gender issues, media criticism, and American politics.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Benjamin Vess | Dreamstime.com

So I was making dinner recently, and on NPR

I heard, to my amazement, a report by Robert Siegel and

Michele Norris about April 20th being “Marijuana Observance Day.”
“We’re hearing more

talk about legalizing marijuana,” Norris noted, “and not just from
those who are lighting up.”

I lit up — metaphorically — over this. Aside from the
fact that this is a policy change that’s at least 30 years overdue, the
story aired at the same time we were cringing over the long-suspected
yet nonetheless horrific accounts of torture under the Bush regime.
Once again, the right wing of the Republican Party comes off as
addicted to all forms of cruelty, just as it did when it sanctioned
“extreme rendition.” But maybe if right-wing Republicans all smoked a
little pot — the gateway drug to mellowness — the world
would be a better place. Just a thought.

As many critics and commentators — and not just on the left
— have noted repeatedly, the so-called war on drugs is one of the
single most ineffectual, expensive, dangerous, dumb-ass activities our
government engages in, especially the part focused on marijuana. Here’s
what that radical socialist William F. Buckley wrote on the subject in
2004, in what he calls an “exercise in scrupulosity”: “There are
approximately 700,000 marijuana-related arrests made very year. Most of
these — 87 percent — involve nothing more than mere
possession of small amounts of marijuana. … Professor Ethan Nadelmann
of the Drug Policy Alliance estimates at 100,000 the number of
Americans currently behind bars for one or another marijuana
offense.”

Buckley’s conclusion? Legalize it. Glenn Beck has also jumped on the
bandwagon. So has Ron Paul, who called the war on drugs “a total
disaster.”

President Obama recently received multiple questions at a town hall
meeting asking if marijuana shouldn’t be legalized to help the economy,
and Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the federal government,
unlike under Bush, would no longer raid medical marijuana
dispensaries.

In the wake of this, John Burnett and Carl Kasell on NPR imagined a
country in which pot had been legalized for two years. They cited
Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist and expert on the economics of the
marijuana market. What might the economic benefits of legalizing pot
be? While not earth-shattering when compared to, say, never having
invaded Iraq, from a benefit-cost analysis alone, legalization makes
sense.

“Miron figures state and federal taxes on cannabis sales would add
up to $6.7 billion annually,” Burnett reported. “And he calculates the
savings from not having to enforce state and federal marijuana laws, in
arrests, prosecution and incarceration, at $12.9 billion a year.
Excluding additional expenses, such as the public health cost of
marijuana or the cost of administering the new law, Miron figures that
legal pot creates almost a $20 billion bonus.”

This idea seems everywhere in the air this spring. Bruce Mirken, a
spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, notes that government
surveys indicate about 15 million Americans admit to having smoked pot
in the previous month. California assemblyman Tom Ammiano projected
that marijuana is a $14 billion dollar industry in his state alone,
which, if taxed, could bring in $1.3 billion in revenues. So he
introduced a bill to legalize it. D.L. Hughley did a piece on
legalization on his CNN show. The Wall Street Journal (!) ran an
editorial titled “The War on Drugs is a Failure” by three former Latin
American presidents who proposed decriminalization of pot for personal
use.

Some of the new focus on this issue stems, of course, from the
soaring drug-and-gun violence on the Mexican border. It is estimated
that in the last year alone, more than 5,000 people in Mexico have died
in drug-related violence. Some of the impetus is economic. Some is
humanitarian: Since 1970, the government has arrested a staggering 38
million people for nonviolent drug offenses, and the percentage of such
offenders in our prison-industrial complex has soared 2,557 percent
during this time. Currently, nearly half a million people are in jail
on drug charges. There were more arrests for drug violations than for
any other offense in 2007. It is the war on drugs that makes the United
States the world’s largest jailer.

Of course, it is politically impossible for the first
African-American president to legalize pot, isn’t it? And he obviously
has other crucial issues to tackle. But if Republicans, many of whom
might benefit from passing the bong, followed the lead of Buckley,
Beck, and Paul, this extravagant waste of human and financial resources
could end.

Susan J. Douglas writes for In These Times, where this
column first appeared.