America’s Dirty War on Immigrant Children

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

“These aren’t people. These are animals”

– Donald Trump, May 17, 2018

President Trump is right about one thing: there is an emergency; indeed we would call it a humanitarian catastrophe at the U.S. Southern Border.[1] It is also a demographic, political and moral catastrophe. However, the chaotic ‘solutions’ devised by former Attorney General Sessions and embraced by ICE and Homeland Security has brought us ever deeper into the unthinkable, Primo Levi’s ‘Grey Zone’. Nine months after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunite thousands of immigrant children taken from their parents at the border, the whereabouts of thousands of children remains unresolved. Some 15,000 migrant children are in government detention. That figure is growing by the day as the number of migrant families crossing southern border reached an 11-year high this February with “unauthorized entries nearly double what they were a year ago.”[2] The most recent Border Patrol data shows that 76,103 migrants were apprehended at the border—two thirds more than during the prior month.[3] More than 40,000 were families travelling together. Children and newborns continue to be taken from their parents even as the Administration claims to have rescinded the order to forcibly separate migrant families.[4]

America’s littlest desaparecidos, some of them still in diapers, crying inconsolably, begging and screaming for their mothers, wetting their beds, became so traumatized that they stopped speaking to their government-supplied caretakers. These motherless children began to give up and move inside their little selves, eventually accommodating to a cruel new world, bereft of tenderness and abandoned to caretaker strangers who were not allowed to touch them, lest they be accused of physical or sexual assault. Months later we have learned that many of these missing children will never be reunited with their parents. It is possible that some of these separated children will fill the emptiness of kindly American families seeking to foster or to adopt them. States have different laws on foster care and on adoption, and the judges who will decide the outcome often due so by sealing the case.

The chaos of parent-child separations, the missing records, missing parents, and missing children echoes other historical traumas in the history of childhood in the United States: African slavery, for one, US government Indian boarding schools for another. The underlying rationale behind these government policies is that white, wealthy and middle class parents are deemed as more able, more intelligent and more worthy than the migrant children’s parents who risked their lives to protect their children. Here lies the foundation for a dirty war against Latino migrants fleeing from violence and extreme poverty to  risk their lives to save their children.

These events bring to mind aspects of Argentina’s Dirty War during the military dictatorship when parents and their children, including infants, were confiscated from suspected ‘radicals’ who were arrested and interrogated (sometimes to the death) as alien enemies to the neo-fascist order. During the Dirty War (1976-1983) some 500 infants and children were separated from their parents and given to right wing military families and their friends who could raise them as good Christian fascists. When democracy returned to the country in 1984 the biological grandmothers, led by the famous Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, in Buenos Aires sought the help of Professor Mary-Clare King, a UC Berkeley geneticist (now at the University of Washington, Seattle) to set up a Grandparents Index and applying DNA matching to reunite them with their grandchildren.

The use of DNA to identify the Argentine children who had been separated many years earlier by Argentina’s state-sponsored terror and returned to their natural parents and grandparents is reminiscent of the Trump administration’s scrambled attempt  to meet a federal judge’s order to reunite thousands of children and parents who had been forcibly separated after crossing the border in search of asylum. The administration was forced to admit it had no records to link several hundred children who had been separated from their parents. Alex Azar, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, proposed to use DNA to match separated children to their parents. But by this time the parents of some 200 separated children had already been deported to Central America. The DNA detour was a diversion that led to nothing more than the “Wow!” exclaimed by Dr. Azar in response to the many ordinary Americans who had signed up to help in the DNA reunifications. [5]

The Argentine dirty war is an extreme example, but it began with a declaration of a state of emergency by Mrs. Perón in November 1974 who was leading a civilian government that was besieged by rampant inflation, corruption and violence by university students, unions and leftist organizations.She gave the military a free hand and General Videla responded with his Proceso, that dissidents renamed as the dirty war.  The majority of people who were  disappeared and killed by the military state, were young people.  The Dirty War was primarily a war against youth and young adults  who were dissidents and activists  who were not seen as citizens but rather as dangerous ‘aliens’. The word ‘animals’ was also applied to them.

While United States is in no imminent danger of becoming a dictatorship, the totalitarian tendencies of an increasingly authoritarian President is worrisome. The US dirty war is not a war against internal aliens, as in Argentina, but a dirty war against migrants and refugees seeking asylum in the United States.  The President’s attempt to declare a US state of emergency at the Southern US border is politically and morally perverse.

So yes, the  real emergency is from the other side of the Southern borderland, the mass migrations of desperate asylum seekers coming mostly from the Northern Triangle—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—are fleeing astronomical homicide rates, political and economic instability that did not arise in a vacuum. It is the legacy of decades of US intervention and exploitation of what used to be called the banana republics, run by ruthless dictators, supported by US foreign policies since the mid 20th century. The result was revolutions, massacres, and ethnocides, “small wars and invisible genocides.” [6]

The real emergency is the miserable deaths in the desert of thousands of Latino migrants forced to take extreme risks to escape poverty, violence, and terror at home. Some migrants sent their older children alone praying that the United States is still the land of open arms but the arms that greeted them carried automatic military rifles at the borderlands. At the southern border, an archeology of misery and death is been excavated.

Left behind are the remnants of backpacks, fragments of letters, photos, Bibles. Human remains are scattered across the divide. Next to sunbaked human bones are bits and pieces of clothing, a soiled pair of shorts, a T-shirts in shreds, a sandal, discovered and collected by forensic anthropologists. Thanks to their ghastly work we know the so-called terrorists and rapists of Trump’s imaginary died of thirst, of heat stroke, of hypothermia, of rattlesnake bites, of vultures preying on moribund bodies.

The desolate and silent deaths at the border are manufactured by an immigration policy of deterrence by death, a barbaric approach that purposefully channels ever more desperate migrants to cross the most forbidden areas of extreme danger and high risk. For two decades this policy has turned the rugged terrain of southern Arizona and Texas into a killing field. It is an early 21st Century adaptation of the Roman damnatio ad bestias(“condemnation to beasts”), a form of capital punishment in which the condemned was executed by wild animals. The U.S. “deterrence strategy” to make the border impassable was first outlined in a July 1994 planning document: “Border Patrol Strategic Plan: 1994 and Beyond.” [7] These documents are heartbreaking and constitute what the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) would declare a crime against humanity.

A longer wall at the southern border with Mexico is yesterday’s answer to yesterday’s problem. By 2017 the undocumented population from Mexico fell by 400,000 for the first time in the last half-century. Mexican migrants constitute less than half all undocumented immigrants in the United States. [8] Over the last seven years more undocumented people have entered the United States—by a ratio of nearly two to one—via airplane and other legitimate ports of entry, than as “entries without inspection,” or crossing undetected via the border.

As cross border migration from Mexico declined in 2012, Central Americans began their exodus to the United States. From 2016 to 2018, the number of families from Honduras and Guatemala apprehended at the southern border almost doubled, rising from 23,067 to 50,401 for family units from Guatemala and from 20,226 to 39,439 for Honduras during the same period. Migration from El Salvador tripled between 2013 and 2016, with more than 27,000 family units and 17,500 unaccompanied children apprehended at the U.S. Southern Border in 2016. Overall the number of families seeking refuge shot up again with Border Patrol agents detaining 136,150 children and parents during the first five months of this fiscal year “compared with 107,212 during all of fiscal 2018.”[9]

There are many reasons for the rapid kinetic expansion of migrants fleeing from the northern triangle of Central America—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. In Guatemala, the source of most recent border crossers, environmental malfeasance and land tenure clashes in the Western highlands, engenders violence. Furthermore, depressed prices in global markets for Guatemalan commodities are pushing farmers up north. Climate change and severe drought in El Salvador has resulted in food insecurity for millions, while deforestation has left Honduras more vulnerable to Hurricanes. Hurricane Mitch left more than 11,000 dead and displaced more than 2.5 million Hondurans in 1998 before governments or the media understood the dangers of global warming. According to a study by Brown University School of Medicine nearly a half-million adults age fifteen or older living in Honduras experienced post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of Hurricane Mitch. It was then that Hondurans first migrated in significant numbers to the United States. But above all, war and terror are behind the humanitarian catastrophe. [10]

The United States has a long history of involvement in the so-called dirty wars south of the border. John Chatsworth’s research enumerates 41 occasions of United States-led regime change in Latin America and the Caribbean between 1898 and 2004. As Jeffrey Sachs has noted “violent, extra-constitutional overthrows of Latin American governments by the United States through a variety of means, including wars, coups, assassinations, electoral manipulation, acts of provocation” has led to a giant humanitarian crisis. [11]

State terrorism in Central America killed more than 200,000 civilians in Guatemala and more than 75,000 in El Salvador in recent decades. Likewise what is driving the most recent cycle of Honduran migrants across the US border is the residue of the violent military coup in 2009 that overthrew Honduras’ democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. The coup was financially supported by the US Department of State. [12]

In each of these countries the institutions of society—including schooling, healthcare and the rule of law—has been decimated. Nothing about the so-called push-pull causes of Central American migrations competes with the decades of unending civil wars, drug wars, death squads, and military coups—initiated or supported by the United States.

As a young man for Central America put it, “we are here because you were there.”

The administration’s fabricated hysteria about brown terrorists, gangsters, rapists, and drug addicts using small children as human shields is cynical theatre. In the coliseum of sadism our immigration policy has become, desperate migrants are thrown to the lions for the insatiable rapaciousness of the professional haters.

Trump is right – there is a crisis but it is a humanitarian crisis at the border. Medieval walls and cages are inimical to a humanitarian response.

Zero Tolerance / Zero Competence / Zero Transparency

As families continue to arrive at the southern border seeking mercy and shelter, they find chaos, cruelty, and incompetence in the name of the administration’s policy of “Zero Tolerance.” In fact, there was no blueprint, no action plan, and no thought given to implementing the administration’s decision. Zero Tolerance was the brainchild of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, famously dubbed a “Dumb Southerner” by his boss, President Donald Trump. Both men are avid practitioners of race baiting, but Trump envisions himself as a self-made, sophisticated global corporate capitalist, whereas Jeff Sessions is nothing more than a ‘white cracker’, a cantankerous Southerner, who still grieves the ‘night they drove old Dixie down’.

Sessions described brown brothers and sisters arriving from across the border as inhuman aliens, a position that echoes his lifelong fury at the civil rights movement for our African American citizens. Sessions’ dedication to racial supremacy goes back to his years as Alabama’s attorney general when he was known for demeaning his Black associates as “boys” and his deep hostility to civil rights workers. He perfected the art of harassing black voters and oversaw the executions of mentally and cognitively disabled people. In a move of Pharaohic cruelty, Sessions claimed that parents who fled to the U.S. with their children, “were scarcely better than human smugglers secreting contraband. ‘If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you,’ he said. ‘That child will be separated from you as required by law.’”

But Sessions was likely more a two-bit player— he wanted to prove his stuff by suggesting a plan, if not a coherent policy that he knew would resonate deeply in the reptilian brain of his boss. The President’s atavistic war cries — animals invading the country — struck a powerful cord with his adoring jingoistic followers. In dehumanizing the poorest and most vulnerable among us the President revealed a total gap in compassion, once a core American value (“There but by the grace of God go I.”) The administration’s Zero Compassion was in plain sight again in the sinister semiotics “I REALLY DON’T CARE. DO U?” logo scribbled on the First Lady’s jacket— no matter to whom it was addressed: to the President, the news media, or to the confiscated and caged children. Her attempts at conversation with the children were robotic and banal. “I’m here to learn about your facility,” Melania Trump said as she received a briefing about the work of Upbringing the New Hope Children’s Shelter. She asked the directors how she could “help these children be reunited with their families as quickly as possible.” Rogelio De La Cerda Jr., the shelter’s program director, told the First Lady not to worry as the separated children were “in a safe environment, free from abuse.” [13] We have heard nothing more on the topic from the First Lady who soon after left for an African safari—effortlessly transitioning from petting caged children to petting caged animals.

Last summer a New York Timesheadline announced that ‘Four Military Bases Prepare to Hold 20,000 Children’. This is the ghost yet to come. The new military bases were for a new generation of child migrants not for the ‘lost generation’ of children who may never be reunited with their parents and are being kept in a hodge-podge of detention centers, abandoned buildings, and tent cities furnished with cages but no books for children. Trump’s voice, Fox news, referred to cages as if they were a normal way to house children. The right-wing media suggested that ‘hygiene’ was the most important concern, and cages allowed the custodians to uses hoses to clean them. Meanwhile dozens of adult migrants and young children faced acute medical emergencies. For millions of Americans the hullabaloo about containing Brown migrant children and youth in cages was much ado about nothing. It was a simple case of their President fulfilling his promises to his anti-immigration white constituency.

Soon enough the children in cages begin to smell like all caged animals: proof that “shit-hole” nations to the South of the border were sending their garbage, their refuse. Meanwhile, Trump the famed germ-phobic President washed his hands of any responsibility. He declared “Any deaths of children or others at the Border are strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies that allow people to make the long trek thinking they can enter our country illegally. They can’t. If we had a Wall, they wouldn’t even try!”

Words can kill. The confiscation of children, babies and toddlers is necessary, the administration claims, for their own safety. The primal cries of babies and toddlers begging for their mamas and their papas has kept a great many Americans awake at night, even as professional haters like Anne Coulter warn the President Trump not to be fooled by child actors.  Instead we are told that these children are being cared for in ‘tender age’ shelters before being transferred to foster care homes and from there, to upright families eager to resocialize them into real Americans.

With Zero Transparency the devil-in-the-details are coming out coming in slow, harrowing detail. In the immigrant camps rape and sexual abuse was rampant. Children and youth were handcuffed, assaulted and drugged with powerful antipsychotics and sedatives.  According to data from the Department of Health and Human Service, “178 of the complaints were against staff at the shelters — in particular, youth-care workers who escort the children everywhere they go. The complaints range from inappropriate romantic relationships between children and adults, to touching genitals, to watching children shower.”

The purposeful use of children to punish the parents is not new. Violently separating children from the parents, caging children, abusing them, mocking them, placing them with families sympathetic to the “regime” are all signature moves of dirty wars past and present.

While the specter of fascism – “Jews will not replace us,” spikes in hate crimes, the return of anti-Semitism to broad daylight, has been rightly registered, it is the tactics of state terrorism perfected in dirty wars of South of the Border that most resemble the current dirty war on immigrant children. The danger we are facing in America today is not a Holocaust, but rather a dirty war such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile experienced in the 1970s-1980s. We know, because he has told us so many times, that President Trump admires strength and power, especially leaders who are strong macho men. We could laugh this off, but it would be a terrible mistake. What is happening in front of our eyes is a vulnerable democracy entering stage 4-cancer as we incrementally move toward a dictatorship by election rather than by a coup d’état.

At our southern border we are veering at a dizzying speed into the terrorist tactics of the Argentine Dirty War. On November 24, 1976, eight months after a military junta took power in Argentina, launching the Dirty War introduced the term los desaparecidos—“the disappeared” to the rest of the world. During the Process of National Reorganization—the junta’s grandiose name for the period of its rule, from

1976 to 1983—as many as thirty thousand people, mostly young Argentines, were separated from their families, kept in detention camps, tortured and disappeared.

The government justified its tactics as part of a war against a revolutionary insurrection waged by “subversive terrorists,” though the junta’s first leader, General Jorge Rafael Videla, defined a “terrorist” as “a person whose ideas are contrary to Western, Christian civilization.”

Approximately thirty per cent of the disappeared were women. Some were abducted with their small children. In perhaps three per cent of the abductions women were pregnant, or became so while in detention, usually through rape by guards and torturers. Pregnant prisoners were kept alive until they’d given birth. “The regime’s depravity reached its outer limit with pregnant detainees,” Marguerite Feitlowitz, then a Harvard professor, wrote in her groundbreaking study of the Argentine nightmare, The Lexicon of Terror. One former detainee told Feitlowitz, “Our bodies were a source of special fascination. They said my swollen nipples invited the ‘prod’ ”—the electric cattle prod, which was used in torture. “They presented a truly sickening combination—the curiosity of little boys, the intense arousal of twisted men.”  Sometimes the mothers were able to nurse their newborns, at least sporadically, for a few days, or even weeks, before the babies were taken from them and the mothers were “transferred”—sent to their deaths, in the Dirty War’s notorious nomenclature.

Baby thefts arose partly from the military’s collusion with retrograde sectors of the Catholic Church, which gave its blessing to the transfers of “terrorists” but not to the murder of unborn babies or young children. Children—whether in the dirty war or our detention camps, always inspire totalitarian fantasies of molding the citizens of the future. The junta wanted to define and create “authentic Argentines.” The children of “terrorists” were seen, Feitlowitz explained, as “seeds of the tree of evil.”  Perhaps through adoption, those seeds could be replanted in healthy soil. Baby-theft cases provided one small loophole to the amnesty laws: parents who were judged in court to be guilty of having adopted—or “appropriated”—the children of the disappeared while knowing the truth about their origins could be prosecuted.

Until his death General Videla defended the kidnapping of young dissidents and the confiscation of their infants and young children. He explained: “There was no other alternative [to the disappearances]… It was necessary to eliminate a large group of people who could not be brought to justice nor [openly] shot either.”  “The women giving birth, who I respect as mothers, were militants who were active in the machine of terror… Many used their unborn children as human shields.

The very same rhetoric against adult migrants using their children “as human shields” has been used by the Trump administration echoing the words of a Latin American terrorist dictator who was finally convicted of grave humans rights and crimes against humanity.

President Trump was eventually forced by the courts to replace the separation of parents and children with a policy of detaining entire families together. But alas the legal time limits on the detention of minors led to thousands of children still being kept in tents, cages, and even in old Wal-Mart stores run by a mix of government and private agencies. Chaos remains the shiny coin of the current regime. Mayor Bill De Blasio NYC announced that he had no idea how many children have been taken (by train, bus, and plane) to New York City shelters run by Christian charities sympathetic to the regime. In a moment of moral clarity three airlines outright refused to host the travel of separated children accompanied by U.S. federal agents. American Airlines took an especially strong position.

The progressive American media has noted parallels between what is happening today with political refugees and traumatized migrants with the Holocaust. Letters to the New York Times by survivors of the Holocaust who are re-traumatized by the current events articulate the horrific parallels. One of these letters to the editor from a child Holocaust survivor shared her memory of screaming as she was put on a train to England to escape the Nazis making the point that any child ripped from the family under any circumstances will certainly be traumatized for life. We found uncanny parallels to the Argentine dirty war.

Zero Tolerance is based on the confiscation and separation of migrant children while their parents are either detained or sent back to Central America. Private charities have been implicated in the adoption of taken children by respectable White Christian families tasked with turning child immigrant “animals” into real Americans. The current dirty war on immigrant children is not a new story but part of the history of childhood in the American South under slavery, and to this day among poor Black tenant farmers who had their children removed or recycled through foster homes. There are yet other parallels in the history of Native Americans who have had their children confiscated from their families and sent to U.S. government boarding schools where they were forcibly ‘socialized’ to adapt to Anglo and White America.

Our history is rift with hidden tortures and violent separations of families that were later described by sociologists as “broken.” Today’s torture is the separation of children from their parents, too many of which will be permanent. We are being made complicit in this political and moral catastrophe.

Marcelo Suárez-Orozco is a psychological anthropologist. He has taught at Harvard, NYU, UCLA as well as in Paris (EHESS), University of Barcelona, and the Catholic University of Leuven. He has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and the Center for Advanced Studies (Stanford).  In January 2018 His Holiness Pope Francis appointed Suárez-Orozco Academician, the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, the Holy See. His most recent book, Humanitarianism and Mass Migration: Confronting the World Crisis was published last month by the University of California Press. 

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Chancellor’s Professor Emerita, Medical Anthropology, UC Berkeley. She is the author of award winning ethnographies, Death Without Weeping (UC Press), Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics( UC Press, 3rd edition), and several edited volumes including Commodifying Bodies (UK Sage) with Loic Wacquant, Violence in War and Peace (Wiley-Blackwell) with Philippe Bourgois, and, Violence at the Urban Margins (2015), Oxford University Press), with J. Auyero and P. Bourgois. She has taught at U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as well as in Paris (EHESS), the University of Cape Town (South Africa), Utrecht University, University of Salvador, Bahia, FLASCO (Argentina), the American University in Cairo, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem among others. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim award, the Margaret Mead Prize, UK Wellcome Trust Medal, the AAA Award for public policy, and the J. I. Staley Prize, School of Advanced Study, Santa Fe.

Notes.

[1]Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M., ed. Humanitarianism and Mass Migration: Confronting the World Crisis. Univ of California Press, 2019.

[2] Dickerson, Caitlin. “Border at ‘Breaking Point’ as More Than 76,000 Unauthorized Migrants Cross in a Month.” The New York Times, March 5, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/border-crossing-increase.html

[3] Jordan, Miriam and Caitlin Dickerson. “U.S. Continues to Separate Migrant Families Despite Rollback of Policy.” The New York Times. March 9, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/us/migrant-family-separations-border.html

[4]Ibid.

[5]CBS News. “DNA testing used to reunite undocumented parents and children, HHS secretary says.” July 5, 2018. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dna-testing-used-reunite-undocumented-parents-children-hhs-secretary-alex-azar-today-2018-07-05/

[6]Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Carolyn F. Sargent, eds. Small wars: The cultural politics of childhood. Univ of California Press, 1998.

[7]Shivone, Gabe. “Death as ‘Deterrence’: the Desert as a Weapon.” Alliance For Global Justice. https://afgj.org/death-as-deterrence-the-desert-as-a-weapon

[8]Warren, Robert. “US Undocumented Population Continued to Fall from 2016 to 2017, and Visa Overstays Significantly Exceeded Illegal Crossings for the Seventh Consecutive Year.” Center for Migration Studies. https://cmsny.org/publications/essay-2017-undocumented-and-overstays/

[9] Jordan, Miriam. “More Migrants Are Crossing the Border This Year. What’s Changed?” The New York Times. March 5, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/crossing-the-border-statistics.html

[10] Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M., ed. Humanitarianism and Mass Migration: Confronting the World Crisis. Univ of California Press, 2019.

[11] Sachs, Jeffrey D. “Ending America’s War of Choice in the Middle East.” Horizons. Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development. Spring 2018 issue. https://www.cirsd.org/en/horizons/horizons-spring-2018-issue-no-11/ending-americas-war-of-choice-in-the-middle-east

[12]Noriega, David. “The U.S. is propping up a dictatorship in Honduras.” Vice News. February 9, 2018. https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/kzpabe/the-us-is-propping-up-a-dictatorship-in-honduras

[13] Gearan, Anne. “First lady Melania Trump visits a Texas child detention center as administration backtracks on harsh policy.” Washington Post. June 21, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2018/06/21/first-lady-melania-trump-visits-a-texas-child-detention-center-as-administration-backtracks-on-harsh-policy/

'EMPIRE' Writers Taunt Smollett Critics, Slam Journalists…

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Empire Writers Taunt Smollett Critics, Slam Chicago Journalists: ‘You Reported a Bunch of False Information’

While many expressed bewilderment after all charges were dropped Empire actor Jussie Smollett for allegedly staging a hate crime, there is one group of people who are happy with the news: the writers of Empire.

Tweeting a picture of the T.V. showing the news on their Twitter account, they said “see y’all Wednesday”:

? see y’all Wednesday. #empire #empirefox pic.twitter.com/jQUtsHcQBF

— Empire Writers (@EmpireWriters) March 26, 2019

Empire writer Cameron Johnson took it a step further and tweeted at Rob Elgas, a Chicago-based reporter for ABC 7 who has been covering the case since it first broke in January.

Johnson accused Elgas of reporting “a bunch of false information and never retracted it”:

You reported a bunch of false information and never retracted it. Do your job, yes. But reporting on leaks that have been proven false is beneath you.

— Cameron Johnson (@cameronjawesome) March 26, 2019

When Elgas asked what he got wrong, Johnson simply tweeted emojis at Elags:

??

— Cameron Johnson (@cameronjawesome) March 26, 2019

WELP. pic.twitter.com/Dz85Xl4TH8

— Cameron Johnson (@cameronjawesome) March 26, 2019

Joe Magats, the first assistant state’s attorney, told reporters that while they are no longer prosecuting Smollett, it does not mean they exonerated him.

NEW from Chicago: Joe Magats, the first assistant state’s attorney who made the final decision to drop the charges against Jussie Smollett, says in an interview: “We didn’t exonerate him.”

— Julie Bosman (@juliebosman) March 26, 2019

More from the asst state’s attorney: “Here’s the thing — we work to prioritize violent crime and the drivers of violent crime. Public safety is our number one priority. I don’t see Jussie Smollett as a threat to public safety.”

— Julie Bosman (@juliebosman) March 26, 2019

Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com

Sally Rooney’s Great Expectations

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Toward the end of Sally Rooney’s new novel, Normal People, Connell, an aspiring writer, assures his girlfriend, Marianne, a politics student, that the woman he was speaking with at a party the night before “wouldn’t be remotely my type.” Marianne replies with a banality that she acknowledges as banal: “you can never know another person, and so on.”

Yeah. Do you actually think that, though?
It’s what people say.
What do I not know about you? he says.
Marianne smiles, yawns, lifts her hands in a shrug.
People are a lot more knowable than they think they are, he adds.

True enough, though it depends on who’s doing the knowing, doesn’t it?

In every generation, there are writers who speak for that generation, who bottle some essential current or mode of thinking and being, and arrange it in letters on the page. The 28-year-old Rooney has been hailed, not implausibly, as “the first great millennial author.” Her debut, Conversations With Friends, was as star-making as White Teeth and as zeitgeisty as Less Than Zero. Rooney, who is Irish, has an uncanny sense of how people under 35 talk and text, how they use the internet, how they voice their passionate yet casual Marxism, how it feels to come of age after the 2008 crash. She has a knack for dialogue, a faultless grasp of pacing, and the ability to situate the reader instantly in a place and a feeling. But what makes her a great novelist is her freakish psychological acuity. She has a keen eye for the desires and anxieties expressed in everyday behavior—how someone holds a coffee stirrer, or “presses his hands down slightly further into his pockets, as if trying to store his entire body in his pockets all at once.” Her books are like strangely pleasurable medical exams, in which she opens her characters on the table and goes over their insides with a scalpel.

The word that gets used to describe Rooney’s style is “spare.” Her paragraphs are built for the Instagram age. They are plain as white walls, empty rooms with one beautiful accent, like a potted fern. She brings an early-dawn feeling to the subject of human intimacy—usually portrayed as messy and chaotic—and an analytic philosopher’s interest in clearing away problems, in scrubbing things down to their parts, so that they can be built anew. Her images are striking, and her wit subtle and dry; the reader doesn’t share the jokes as much as she admires them. “Cherries hang on the dark-green trees like earrings,” thinks Connell at one point. “He thinks about this phrase once or twice. He would put it in an email to Marianne, but he can’t email her when she’s downstairs.”

Many good writers and all the great ones have only one story to tell, even if they find different ways of telling it. With Rooney this is especially pronounced. Conversations With Friends was the story of two university students, Frances and Bobbi, who are ex-girlfriends and best friends. They become entangled with a thirtysomething couple, Nick and Melissa; Frances and Nick have an affair. The plot was old—naïve young woman falls in love with broken married man, heartbreak and suffering ensue—but the novel felt entirely new. It’s fitting that Rooney’s subject is love—the thing that has been done countless times by others, but can only be felt by each person as if it were the first time for anyone, because, for that person, it is.

Normal People, too, is the story of first love. Connell and Marianne come from Carricklea, way out in the provinces of west Ireland. She is rich, and he is poor; his single mother cleans Marianne’s house. Marianne is unpopular and brilliant and has been physically and emotionally abused by her family for years. Connell is a popular and good-looking soccer player who reads The Communist Manifesto at night. In their last year of school, they begin a secret sexual relationship that continues, on and off, through their years at Trinity College.

Normal People has the feeling of having been either rushed into publication following the success of Conversations With Friends or a draft for Conversations With Friends. It’s most useful to read them together, as one book or project. The female protagonists in both novels are extremely thin, neurotic geniuses with at least one terrible or outright abusive parent. They physically suffer and seek out forms of pain. They ask men to hit them during sex. Their male love interests are athletic, a little passive, smart enough to understand how smart the women are, and perceptive enough to find them beautiful. They are also handsome—the kind of objective, ridiculous good-looking that, “even covered in blood . . . radiates good health and charisma,” and obviates the need to find any other reason for desiring them. Both books involve close intimacies between a poor person and a rich person. In both, the poor person is recognized as a literary talent and writes a short story, which immediately leads to professional reward and the ascent up a rung in the literary world, while the rich person accepts a more humble fate.

The biggest difference between the two books is that Conversations With Friends is set in the past tense, told by a first-person narrator (Frances), and Normal People is in the present, with alternating third-person narrators. Where one would expect a present-tense narration to be more comedic and quicker, Normal People is slower, and sadder. It gives us no sense of Marianne or Connell in the future, or how their later adulthood inflects their memories. The book doesn’t look back at youth, it looks out from it. Rooney’s interest in this time of life has less to do with the irony that characterizes novels like Sentimental Education or The Age of Innocence and more to do with a sincere and documentary parsing of confusions and discoveries. In some ways, this gives the reader less to hold on to, and the book threatens to slip from memory in much the way that one’s own youth does. The power of Normal People is that, without the presence of a compromised thirtysomething character like Nick, the book speaks entirely without regard for middle age, insisting, rightfully, on the truth of its own time.

Economic anxiety blows like a sharp wind through Rooney’s world. Her characters know they won’t have pensions and that jobs are hard to come by. Frances, who at one point is too broke to buy groceries, is judgmental of Melissa and Nick’s large house and easy lifestyle but admits that she was seduced by them, too. “I wasn’t trying to trash your life,” she tells Melissa in a rare moment of disclosure. “I was trying to steal it.” In Normal People, Connell’s life changes when he wins a scholarship. His rent is paid, and he can afford to take a trip through Europe with his friends. “Suddenly he can spend an afternoon in Vienna looking at Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, and it’s hot outside, and if he wants he can buy himself a cheap cold glass of beer afterward.” How elegantly Rooney interweaves consciousness and place; suddenly the reader is seated in a sunlit café, beverage in hand, feeling the condensation running down the side. Connell steps into a world that had looked like “a painted backdrop,” and he can’t believe it can bear his weight, his inclusion. “That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.”

In a bildungsroman, the hero is supposed to find his social footing, to be educated into adulthood, and take his place in society. But for many, education means moving out of one world and into a no-man’s land, some kind of limbo. In college, the previously awkward and despised Marianne ably navigates social hierarchies, while Connell flails. Through his connection with Marianne, he is accepted as “rich-adjacent: someone for whom surprise birthday parties are thrown and cushy jobs are procured out of nowhere.” He has nothing in common with these people, and he can’t really speak to them at all. Their parents caused the financial crash. They don’t care about doing the reading or studying. They spout off opinions in class, and stand around comparing their families’ wealth. He won the scholarship, but he doesn’t belong. “I just feel like I left Carricklea thinking I could have a different life,” he says to the college mental health counselor when he crashes into a major depression. “But I hate it here, and now I can never go back there again.”

Rooney is a keen observer of class and its behaviors— Marianne’s creepy boyfriend Jamie gets worked up over drinking champagne out of coupe glasses, which only shows what a Philistine he is. But manners per se are not her concern. Sociological rituals and class behavior provide the background for devastating summations—executions, really—of motive and psychology. “Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn’t make him happy,” Marianne thinks. Or this:

Jamie is somehow both boring and hostile at the same time, always yawning and rolling his eyes when other people are speaking. And yet he is the most effortlessly confident person Connell has ever met. Nothing fazes him. He doesn’t seem capable of internal conflict. Connell can imagine him choking Marianne with his bare hands and feeling completely relaxed about it, which according to her he in fact does.

Rooney narrates very plainly, allowing the rhythm of what looks like ordinary speech to build, until she introduces a startling fact or perfect image. Her language is effortless, never overwrought. “The sky is a thrilling chlorine-blue, stretched taut and featureless like silk.” Her descriptions of emotions can be bluntly accurate—“Marianne felt a relief so high and sudden that it was almost like panic”—or evocative—“He carried the secret around like something large and hot, like an overfull tray of hot drinks that he had to carry everywhere and never spill.” She can even make a pathetic fallacy work: “Outside her breath rises in a fine mist and the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake.”

“Eventually Nick looked over and I looked back,” she wrote in Conversations With Friends. “I felt a key turning hard inside my body, turning so forcefully that I could do nothing to stop it.” This is perfect, heart-stopping, and simple. We speak all the time in the cliché of someone “unlocking” this or that inside of us. All Rooney has done is take that familiar language and alter it a little, and by doing so, emphasized the passivity of the lock. It’s a small and exact moment, and her novels are filled with ones like it. She writes about sex with the same care and attention and plainness that she writes about everything else. “He touches his lips to her skin and she feels holy, like a shrine.” And then, the words that everyone has said to someone, somewhere, so bare and final: “It’s not like this with other people.”

As an investigation of sexual power dynamics, Normal People goes further, or into more specifics, than Conversations With Friends did. Marianne’s relationship is defined by her desire to submit to Connell, a desire of which they are both aware. At first this manifests as her willingness to keep their attachment secret, to never speak to him in the hallway or tell a living soul about what they do after school hours. (She knew from the start that “she would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted.”) Connell senses immediately that Marianne would never break their confidence, which is both intoxicating and disturbing. Marianne is comfortable in secrecy, which is to say that she is used to being bullied.

In Conversations With Friends, the intensity—the truth—of love is also wrapped up with the woman’s willingness to do anything for the man. “You can do whatever you want with me,” Frances says to Nick. The women show their love by making themselves vulnerable, which puts the man into a bind: Act on it, hit the woman, let her feel how much she will give herself, and you’re a sadist; don’t, and she feels exposed and judged, rejected. When Marianne is not with Connell, she seeks out joyless sexual relationships where she, too, asks men to do whatever they want to her. With unethical actors, her submissiveness provokes cruelty. “She’s conscious by now of being able to desire in some sense what she does not want,” Rooney writes. “The quality of gratification is thin and hard, arriving too quickly and then leaving her sick and shivery.”

Sex creates privacy. It divides the world: the things we do out there, and the things we do in here. But the privacy of Connell and Marianne’s relationship surpasses that usual division. Its privacy is rooted in shame. When, after a juvenile miscommunication, Connell withdraws from the relationship, he pursues something more “normal”—which is to say, something containable, something social. He finds that with Helen, a normal medical student who does normal things: She goes to the gym, posts photos of her friends on Facebook. It’s easy for Connell to walk down the street holding her hand. There are people you would die for and other people that you can live with, and they are not always the same people. Connell’s love for Helen doesn’t cut to his marrow; it leaves him alone.

“Normal” is a word that comes up a lot in Rooney. “Things matter to me more than they do to normal people,” Frances thinks. Rooney imagines neurotics and writers on the one hand, women who want to be hit during sex and don’t eat enough, and on the other, the people who go to work and don’t obsess for hours over whether to send an email. But more is at stake than feeling like you don’t fit in with the jocks. At one point, Bobbi explains to Frances that she’d like to get a job in a university. “I just don’t see you as a small-jobs person,” says Frances. By “small jobs” Frances means “raising children, picking fruit, cleaning.” Such occupations feel like disappointments, comedowns, anti-creative, as opposed to what she had expected—that Bobbi would smash global capitalism, burn bright. Bobbi explains that she’s “just a normal person.” If Frances needs to see her otherwise, that has more to do with Frances than with her.

The history of the novel is full of characters who mature by reconciling themselves to a more limited and circumscribed fate than they had felt entitled to. In interviews, Rooney speaks openly about her discomfort with receiving media attention for writing novels, and her wish that nurses and bus drivers would be profiled, instead. In her books, however, rich characters accommodate themselves to their inability to change the world, and poor characters pursue an artistic vocation with optimism and openness to the future.

Normal People’s version of this moment occurs at a protest against the war in Gaza. Marianne, who is in the crowd, experiences both the desire for revolution and her own disappointment at being no longer able to believe in such revolution. She suddenly grows up.

Marianne wanted her life to mean something then, she wanted to stop all violence committed by the strong against the weak, and she remembered a time several years ago when she had felt so intelligent and young and powerful that she almost could have achieved such a thing, and now she knew she wasn’t at all powerful, and she would live and die in a world of extreme violence against the innocent, and at most she could help only a few people.

The education that all Rooney’s characters undergo involves the embrace of personal attachments. They give up seeing themselves, if they ever really did, as individual agents and accept their dependence on each other. This, in some ways, is the traditional work of the novel—to solve a political conflict through romance—but in Rooney the attachments are unconventional. No one settles on a traditional relationship. Things are open. Her characters are aptly designed for such experiments. They are well-meaning and progressive. If they do unkind things, they have some good reason for it, and they apologize. Her minor characters—villains—might be petty or have bad politics (centrists), but her protagonists lack spite and bile. They are unable to hold a grudge.

Normal People ends sweetly. It’s presumed that Connell will be leaving Dublin for New York, but Marianne, who can’t be more than 21, approaches this departure with gracious nostalgia and generous sangfroid. There is no accusation of betrayal, and we are not permitted to find Connell’s action selfish or cruel. “People can really change one another,” is how the book ends. “You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.” Rooney’s vision of intimacy and romance is fundamentally redemptive. Her young students have not been ruined by the world, and still believe in changing it—a few people at a time.

Netflix’s Our Planet Says What Other Nature Series Have Omitted

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

On-screen eagles lock talons in aerial combat, and humpback whales engulf herring by the shoal. Birds of paradise, hunting dogs, leafcutter ants—they’re all there. This is Our Planet—Netflix’s new, big-budget nature documentary—and, without the sound on, viewers could easily think that they’re watching Planet Earth III.

The resemblance to the oeuvre of the BBC’s renowned Natural History Unit is striking. The series is produced by Alastair Fothergill, who was also responsible for the original Planet Earth. Everything is narrated by David Attenborough, whose unctuous tones, somehow both silky and gravelly, have become synonymous with wildlife films.

But this time, the messages delivered by that familiar voice are different. Here, much of the awe is tinged with guilt, the wonder with concern, the entertainment with discomfort.

Repeatedly, unambiguously, and urgently, Our Planet reminds its viewers that the wonders they are witnessing are imperiled through human action. After seeing a pair of mating fossas—a giant, lemur-hunting, Madagascan mongoose—we’re told that the very forests we just saw have since been destroyed. After meeting endearing orangutans Louie, Eden, and Pluto, we are told that 100 of these apes die every week through human activity. We see Borneo’s jungle transforming into oil palm monocultures in a time-lapse shot that is almost painful to watch. We’re told that Louie and Eden’s generation could be the last wild orangutans.

If you muted the series, it would look almost identical to any other wildlife documentary. You could sit back, content and relaxed, gawping at nature’s splendor. But Our Planet seems to have no interest in letting you be contented. Though still entertaining and beautiful, its narration impart its shots with a more complex emotional flavor. It’s like watching an American drug ad, where a voiceover reads out lists of horrific side effects over footage of frolicking, picnicking families.

Frankly, it’s about time.

The BBC’s natural history series have been a gift, enchanting tens of millions of viewers with nature’s wonders. But the shows have also been criticized for whitewashing the decline of the creatures they feature. Disappearing species, shrinking habitats, spreading diseases, accumulating pollutants, changing climates: Planet Earth obliquely hinted at these problems in its final line. “We can now destroy or we can cherish: The choice is ours.”

Read: Planet Earth II[ puts stunning images above all else]

Frozen Planet, a tour of polar fauna, saved its talk of climate change for its final seventh episode—and Fothergill says he had to fight for even that. “There has been a habit of having a 45-minute show where we say that everything’s fine, and in the last five minutes, we say there’s a problem,” he told me. “I think that’s a little bit trite. It doesn’t deal with the issue.”

After Planet Earth II repeated some of these problems, the natural history film producer Martin Hughes-Games wrote that, by showing a pristine world, without context, these series are “lulling the huge worldwide audience into a false sense of security.” The rejoinder has always been that warnings would dissuade viewers. “Every time that image [of a threatened animal] comes up, do you say ‘Remember, they are in danger’?” asked Attenborough in an interview with The Observer. “How often do you say this without becoming a real turn-off?”

The answer from last year’s Blue Planet II—still the greatest nature series of all time—was: At least once an episode. The answer from Our Planet is: Repeatedly, in shot after shot. It does what no other natural history documentary has done. It forces the viewer to acknowledge their own complicity in the destruction of nature—in the moment. It feels sad, but also right.

That’s not to say that Our Planet is a dour, finger-wagging downer—far from it. It is hard not to cheer as an initially incompetent Philippines eagle takes her first flight, or laugh as a treeshrew uses a pitcher plant as a toilet, or marvel at two Arabian leopards meeting and mating—one percent of the surviving individuals, perhaps creating a few more. We’re treated to a rare glimpse of the oarfish—a luminescent, serpentine creature that looks like it has swum out of mythology. We witness the improbably complex dance of the western parotia—a bird of paradise that almost single-handedly justifies the entire group’s name. Most of the series is still joyful, but it is never allowed to be naively so.

“The only reason I worked on this project was that, from day one, conservation was part of it,” says Sophie Lanfear from Silverback Films, who produced the second episode about polar life. “It had to be the heart of every episode.” This commitment is framed from the opening seconds of the first episode, as the camera pans over the pockmarked surface of the Moon to reveal the Earth, and Attenborough intones:

Just 50 years ago, we finally ventured to the Moon. For the very first time, we looked back at our own planet. Since then, the human population has more than doubled. This series will celebrate the natural wonders that remain and reveal what we must preserve to ensure that people and nature thrive.

That remain! What you’re seeing is what is left to see.

The message is clear. It’s bad. It’s urgent. It’s our fault. We can still fix it. Our Planet is a eulogy, a confession, a slap on the wrist, a call to arms. (The task of offering actionable advice is outsourced to the series’ website.)

Read: [What scientists learned from strapping a camera to a polar bear]

There is optimism, too. Amid doom-laden warnings, it highlights success stories where conservation measures have allowed species to start bouncing back. When we watch five cheetah siblings do their best lion impressions and cooperatively bring down a wildebeest, Attenborough tells us that we get to enjoy such dramas only because the Serengeti has been protected for decades. And in a sequence of unexpected poignancy, wild horses, foxes, and wolves are seen thriving among the ruins of Chernobyl, the radiation a minor inconvenience compared to the boon of human absence. “In driving us out the radiation has created space for wildlife to return,” Attenborough says.

The series isn’t faultless. Some episodes still feel as disjointed as those of Planet Earth II did, with few narrative threads connecting the individual sequences. There are a few minor but weird mistakes: Orangutans are described as our ancestors when they’re our distant cousins, and phytoplankton are called plants when most are nothing of the kind. And the score never goes for a subtle musical cue when a saccharine one will do.

But these are minor gripes for a series that audaciously treads where its predecessors have feared, and sets the bar for its successors. “Five years ago, when we started on this journey, it was always hard to get environmental programming onto primetime,” Fothergill says. “That’s definitely changed. Even the BBC are now saying that they want environmental messaging in their programs.” While seeing elephants, we will finally hear about the elephant in the room. And not a moment too soon.