Tag Archives: interview

Monsters or Victims? Let the Viewer Decide.

by DinahRmfacmt Posted on July 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a trailer park outside St. Petersburg, Florida, where around 120 convicted sex offenders live and receive counseling, Tracy Hutchinson broke down on camera. Hutchinson, a convicted sex offender, had never told her story before, even in therapy. Now, she was revealing to Frida and Lasse Barkfors, a pair of Scandinavian filmmakers documenting the lives of the trailer park’s inhabitants, what her father had done to her: “We went down the hall to the bedroom, and he locked the door, and he said, ‘You know that you’re daddy’s girl, and I love you, and I just want to share this with you.”

Many years later, as an adult, Hutchinson sexually abused her son. He, in turn, abused a three-year-old child. Lasse, listening to her story from behind the camera, had tears in his eyes. Every few minutes, Frida gently asked a question. Otherwise, she just let Hutchinson talk.

“It was like a need in her almost, to tell her story, that no one had wanted to listen to before,” Frida says. “That we came in the park with an open mind and said that we just wanted to listen—was very unusual for them.”

The Barkfors’ documentary, Pervert Park, doesn’t flinch from the crimes of its subjects, but it refuses to define them solely by their offenses. The result is a provocative look at the lives of convicted sex offenders and the cycle of abuse—as well as at a counseling program that could offer a model for rehabilitation. (According to the film, less than 1 percent of the park’s residents have been convicted of another sex offense after completing the two-year program.)

“When we made the film, we were quite certain that no one wanted to see it,” Lasse says. That goes especially for American viewers, whom the pair expected to be particularly hostile to the notion of humanizing sex offenders. But Pervert Park will debut on PBS tonight (10 pm ET) after months collecting praise on the festival circuit. I caught up with the filmmakers to discuss how one tells such stories responsibly, and why it’s important that they be told.

Mother Jones: The idea for this film came from a newspaper article about Florida Justice Transitions. How did you pick it up from there?

Frida Barkfors: We started out believing we were going to make a film that was a little more anthropological about the place itself. We read this article about five years ago, and the park was described as this parallel society where the sex offenders didn’t want to reintegrate into society—and couldn’t. As soon as we got to the park, we realized that what’s stated in the article wasn’t really accurate. They did try really hard to reintegrate to society, and they had this housing program where they were trying to be contributing citizens.

MJ: What were your attitudes toward the sex offenders when you began?

Frida: We had completely bought into the mainstream media portrait and didn’t think there was much more to tell. Meeting the sex offenders was kind of a journey for us. In the beginning we were quite cautious. We wanted to stick together while we were shooting. But we got less and less scared, because we saw the people behind the crimes. It’s not like sex offenders are sex offenders only. The story’s much more complex. That provoked a lot of emotions and thought processes in us, and that’s what we wanted to share with the audience.

Lasse Barkfors: It’s also a very simple idea, in the end, to listen to someone who is seldom asked to speak. What happens if we see what they have to say? Is that useful for us?

MJ: You said you completely bought into the mainstream portrayal of sex offenders. And what would that be?

Frida: We see them as monsters controlled by their sexual lust, with a lack of morals. We see them as dangerous. But there’s a really fine line between the victim and the abuser, because there are so many abusers who are untreated victims. They were once these innocent victims. But they weren’t able to get treatment, so they acted out and became abusers themselves.

Lasse: Of course, the stories that always comes up in the media are the very harsh ones and the awful ones.

Frida: We see sex offenders as the worst of the worst. We talk mostly about these stories where they’re hiding in the bushes, waiting for a child to kidnap and molest and maybe even murder. But those incidents are extremely rare. We were trying to show the diversity of the sex offender label. From Patrick—who kidnapped a five-year-old girl in Mexico and raped her in the desert and left her there—to Jamie, who was looking for a 30-year-old sex worker and was caught in a sting when the prostitute wanted to include her 14-year-old daughter. It turned out to be a police officer. There are also stories of people in the park who have urinated in public and are now convicted sex offenders.

MJ: What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your work?

Frida: People say we made a film about pedophiles. In fact, there’s no pedophile featured in our film. Not even Patrick is a pedophile, because being a pedophile is a sexual orientation. Being a sex offender means you have abused someone sexually, but it doesn’t mean that you have a lust to be together with kids. There are many pedophiles who will never act out because they know the emotions they have, the lust they have, are wrong. Then there’s the combination of a pedophile and a sadist, and that’s really dangerous. Those are the cases we read about in the newspaper, and those are the cases that we base our laws on.

MJ: Compassion for sex offenders is central to the film. But relating to them, especially those convicted of really violent crimes, had to be a challenge. How did you accomplish that?

Frida: That’s the core question for us. How can we listen to these people without minimizing their crimes? What we realized is that you can actually have empathy for a person at the same time that you despise their crimes. We have this tendency to paint people in good colors and bad colors, but it’s more than that. These people need treatment. Some of them are still minimizing, and some of them are still excusing, and they’re not completely healed, but I feel that a lot of them are working on becoming better people. So it’s very complex.

MJ: Why did you not include the voices of the victims?

Frida: There are so many films that are made from the classical victim perspective. We wanted to give a voice to the people who are normally not heard. And there are victims in our film. You can be a victim and an abuser at the same time. I think we show very clearly—for instance, in the interview with Tracy—how it’s passed on throughout generations.

MJ: Still, I’m sure some viewers would feel that giving voice to the abusers silences the victims.

Frida: I was once like that, so I understand. I remember thinking, “I don’t want to listen to their story.” But we’re trying to help widen the debate. Making this film, we worked very closely with victim organizations, lawyers, and defenders of victims of sexual abuse, and also psychologists and therapists. They all say this is crucial for victims to heal, the abuser’s story being told. That was the purpose: We made the film because we thought that it was helpful for everyone.

Lasse: These people walk around with this their whole life without telling anyone, because it’s so shameful. I think a lot of them really need to talk about it in order to move on.

Frida: After a screening, people have come up to us and said, “I am a victim of sexual abuse, and thank you for making this film. I now understand my abuser much better than I used to.” They struggle with a lot of emotions, but if they can understand their abuser, it’s easier for them to heal.

MJ: I suppose it would help answer the question, “Why did this happen to me?”

Frida: Don’t get me wrong—the victims have no responsibility whatsoever. I completely understand why we as a society don’t want to talk about the offenders, because we think that we’re protecting the victims. But that’s counterproductive.

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Monsters or Victims? Let the Viewer Decide.

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This Is the Sound of Two Black Holes Colliding

by FawnMXEYwxkz Posted on July 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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When black holes collide, they release a power greater than all the stars shining in the universe. They also make a really big sound. In September 2015, scientists detected the merger of two black holes, an event that took place more than a billion light years away. It produced a whooshing sound picked up by machines designed to detect the activity. You can hear that sound—the hum of gravitational waves produced by the collision—on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast.

On Inquiring Minds, Kishore Hari talks with Janna Levin, a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College and author of a book on this unlikely discovery of the black hole collision heard round the world.

The discovery was a project decades—and more than $1 billion—in the making. And it was truly groundbreaking. “I sometimes liken it to the first time Galileo pointed the telescope at the sky,” Levin said.

When Albert Einstein came up with his theory of relativity, he posited that gravitational waves ripple across space-time when hit with the force of moving objects such as black holes. The sound picked up by the machines proved Einstein was right.

As Levin pointed out, the remarkable discovery makes other revelations seem possible. When Galileo first set his eyes on the sky, she said, he was looking at Saturn, the moon, and the sun; he could never have predicted the discovery of remote galaxies or objects such as quasars. Centuries later, when a team of physicists went looking for neutron stars, they discovered colliding black holes.

“Who knows what else is out there?” Levin said.

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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This Is the Sound of Two Black Holes Colliding

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"Dear Susan, I Have Some Interesting News for You…"

by WilsonRobbins52 Posted on July 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 2004, a decade or so before Transparent debuted and Bruce Jenner came out as Caitlyn, journalist Susan Faludi—author of the 1991 bestseller Backlash: The Undeclared War on American Women—got an email from her 77-year-old Hungarian father. He’d moved back to Budapest after a long career as a photographer in the United States, and the two had “barely spoken” in 25 years. “Dear Susan,” the message read, “I have some interesting news for you. I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.”

Her father had gone to Thailand, undergone sex-reassignment surgery, and was no longer Steven Faludi, but Stefánie. His announcement marked the beginning of an extraordinary father-daughter reconciliation and a personal exploration of gender fluidity that culminated in Faludi’s latest book, In the Darkroom. I caught up with Faludi to talk about gender extremes, her own identity crises, and what post-Soviet Hungary has in common with Donald Trump’s America.

Mother Jones: Your book title works on several levels. The first refers to your father’s profession as a photographer. Let’s talk about the others.

Susan Faludi: I felt like my father was in a dark room of her own making—always in a state of hiding one way or another. And then there is the terrible darkness of the past, of my father’s childhood and Holocaust experience. And all the ways my father was trying to convert herself—or back then, himself—into something else, and trying to save his life to pass as something other than what he was. There was a lot of darkness.

MJ: Your dad was very violent when you were growing up, but through this journey, you discovered her vulnerability, warmth, and bravery. Was it difficult for you to reconcile these aspects of her personality with the father of your youth?

SP: I always knew something didn’t add up. Growing up, I saw my father trying on one role after another, whether it was Alpine mountaineer or all-American commuter dad with the workbench in the basement, wearing the fedora, and catching the 5:09 train home from the city. Then there was his fascination with manipulating photos, altering images.

It seemed a general confusion. But when I look back on his preoccupation with hyper-masculinity—all the rock climbing and marathon bicycling, ice climbing, and crossing glaciers in the Alps—I realize that I could have read that as compensatory behavior, a struggle to deny something much deeper. I wondered if perhaps my father as a woman felt that she had to go to the extreme—to exhibit hyperfemininity as the only way to release herself from the hypermasculinity she had encased herself in as a man. There were so many odd, idiosyncratic personality traits that I couldn’t put at the doorstep of anyone or any culture. On the other hand, there were qualities that my father had that I thought were strange until I got to Hungary and realized, “Oh, no, my father is Hungarian!”

MJ: Did you know from the moment your father told you about her operation that you would write this book?

SF: I write to figure out what I am thinking: What does my life mean? Who am I in relation to this person? It’s a familiar and comforting way of finding my bearings. My father immediately invited me to write her story. And we proceeded early on—me armed with reporters’ notebooks and tape recorders. But whether it would be for my bureau drawer or an actual book, I didn’t know. It was hard to grapple with how to turn it into a book—the whole personal story. Then I became consumed with the question of Hungarian history and the utterly tortured relationship between Hungarians and Jews, and the insistence that never the twain shall meet. And then the whole history of transgenderism. I often felt as if I were playing six-dimensional chess.

MJ: You reflect that your father is “exactly the kind of girl I’d always thought of as ‘false’.” Will you elaborate?

SF: In part, it applied to my father’s initial presentation of herself as this Doris Day, happy homemaker, just-couldn’t-wait-to-put-on-a-frilly-apron-and-go-into-a kitchen-and-be-taken-care-of woman. It’s kind of funny, because she never actually got taken care of after transition—that was more a fantasy than reality. There was a neighbor who fixed things around the house, but in fact my father was always very handy.

My father and I weren’t in contact during the five years or so—probably longer—before the operation, but she saved all the clothing and high heels, boas, and what-not. I was certainly privy to what then-he was wearing. Post-surgery, my father settled into a more, as she put it, “sedate” presentation of womanhood. But clichéd in other ways: “Here I am being this traditional frilly Magyar matron of a certain bourgeois class from 1925.” In the last several years of her life, she kind of settled into a more of an in-between state, one that wasn’t that far off from how I would dress. And a lot of that had to do with just being older, and having varicose veins—so much for the heels!

By the end, my father was wearing tennis sneakers and a hoodie and comfortable baggy pants. Also, in the very last years, my father began talking about herself as trans, instead of as a woman. Whereas early on he would say, “I am completely a woman.” The needle moved around a bit on the record. But the first few years, the piles of makeup and the insistence on frills and ribbons and bows was not at all attuned to my feminist views on what should be the defining attributes of womanhood. In fact, I don’t believe in any defining attributes. It’s fine to dress in polka dots and pink crinoline if you want. What I recoil from is the idea that that alone is the only way to be female.

MJ: It has been 25 years since Backlash came out. Looking around now, how would you say transgender issues fit in with feminist theory?

SF: I think there’s great overlap. I’ve never believed that women have some special, essentialist qualities, or were more nurturing, cooperative, and morally superior. My feminist view—that gender is on a continuum and we are all better off dropping a lot of those binary notions—is one that is shared by the more recent generation of trans activists and theorists. I know there’s this notion of a battle between the “turfs”—the trans-exclusionary radical feminists who are opposed to trans people. There are a handful of such separatist feminists, but they are really the exception. While it initially really challenged, or frustrated, my feminist notions to see my father running around in stilettos and push-up bras, ultimately the whole experience reaffirmed my feminist view that gender is really varied and complicated and sort of infinitely individualistic.

MJ: At one point, you steal a psychologist’s assessment of your father, and you begin to sort of question who you are at that moment. Girl reporter? Daughter? Was it difficult to toggle among these identities?

SF: I had these moments often, the question of which of my personas will kick in: Daughter? Journalist? Feminist? Having that journalistic guise to fall back on helped me get through the really difficult parts of sticking with my father. If I had just come over to talk, it would have been a lot harder for me to stay with it. I wouldn’t have had the security blanket of my reporter’s notebook and my list of questions, which allowed me to create a little distance so I could breathe and not just feel overwhelmed and suffocated—because my father could often be overwhelming and suffocating. My father was going through this transition from being behind the camera to being in front of it. And by writing about my father, I was going from behind the reporter’s notebook into looking at my own life and assumptions. We were both being pushed out of our comfort zones.

MJ: Beyond your father, this book tells the story of a nation in transition.

SF: The journalism goddess provided an obvious metaphor here. It struck me that Hungary’s transition from communism to capitalism—”the change”—was also what my father called her gender transition. I felt as if I was looking at these twin dramas, around identity in Hungary’s case, but also a cautionary tale. This is what happens when things go wrong. It has been just an endless stretch of identity crises in a country that feels so dominated and invaded and defeated, and so desirous of some fantastical mythological past to hang the culture on. There are so many debates. What is a Hungarian? Who is a Hungarian? But the debates often become a kind of substitute for a reckoning with really hard social and economic problems, and the failure to deal with the reality of a dark past; substituting that struggle for flag-waving, hyperpatriotic neo-fascism. Coming back home and watching the same thing with Trump has been really dispiriting—this grandiosity mixed with extreme self pity.

MJ: Your father is quite insistent about her feminine nature, which challenges a lot of your previous work. Did your sense of gender change while watching your father and writing this book?

SF: The tragedy of it was: If only my father—if only all of us—could be ourselves in our own messy in-between category-ness. My father was so much more interesting in an ambiguous state, which she didn’t reach until the last three or four years of her life. Also, she talked to me so much more, saying, “Now that I’m a woman I feel I can communicate more. As a man I felt I couldn’t communicate.” One of the things that gave her real relief was not feeling isolated at the end of her life. The other aspect of how my father found, I wouldn’t say peace, because no one fully changes—toward the end of her life, my father was willing to look into her own past. She was talking a lot more about being Jewish and her family and the history that she had spent so much time covering up. I think that was freeing for her. To stop trying to put on a mask and just begin to confront all the circumstances and historical conditions that shaped who she became.

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"Dear Susan, I Have Some Interesting News for You…"

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People don’t trust hypocritical climate scientists, study finds

by GeorgetDabney Posted on June 21, 2016

Snakes on a plane

People don’t trust hypocritical climate scientists, study finds

By on Jun 21, 2016 6:01 amShare

Climate scientists face a conundrum: To get their message out and conduct research, they often have to hop on a plane — but flying is exactly the sort of carbon-intensive behavior they discourage others from doing. And according to a new study from Indiana University, climate researchers lose credibility with their audience when they don’t follow their own advice.

That inconsistency is one that the general public is starting to notice. Shahzeen Attari, an author of the study, told Grist she was presenting on energy consumption a couple of years ago when an audience member asked her, “Hey, how did you come to the conference? Did you fly here?”

She was inspired to look into hypocrisy and how it changes the dynamic between climate experts and their audiences. Through two online surveys taken by almost 5,000 Americans, participants read a narrative about a researcher who offers advice on reducing personal energy use by flying less, conserving energy at home, and taking public transportation. The survey included one of several of statements about the researcher’s personal energy consumption. For example:

You later find out that the researcher flew across the country to the talk that you attended and that he/she regularly flies to lectures and conferences all over the world. Flying like this leads to increased negative climate impacts.

Then, the survey had participants rate the researcher’s credibility. When participants stated their own intentions to reduce energy use, their answers varied based on the researcher’s behavior. To put it simply: It turned out they were much more likely to take advice from someone who, well, takes their own advice.

But the effect wasn’t equally strong for all energy-consuming activities. According to the research, people are more forgiving of a climate scientist who flies often than one who lives in an enormous mansion. “If I live in a huge, gargantuan house … my credibility completely plummets,” Attari says. She suspects this is because people are more likely to understand that climate researchers are required to fly for work, while they have more choice over what they do at home.

Some climate researchers have started to limit their flights, but it’s really hard, Attari says. (Read the account of one climate scientist who decided not to fly.) During our interview, she admitted that she couldn’t talk very long since she had to catch a plane. “I know it’s ironic,” she said.

In a time where climate advocates like Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore have been lambasted for private-jet lifestyles, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that communicating with the public about climate change is a tricky business. Attari’s advice for climate experts: “Talk to your audience about your own carbon footprint and the ways you’ve been able to actually change it.”

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People don’t trust hypocritical climate scientists, study finds

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We Watched "Roots" With a "Roots" Expert (Part III)

by Heidi3118kgekm Posted on June 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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So, we’ve been watching A&E/History’s Roots remake with Matthew Delmont, an Arizona State University historian who literally wrote the book on this: Out in August, Making Roots: A Nation Captivated covers the creation of Alex Haley’s fictionalized family history and the resulting 1977 miniseries on ABC—the most-watched drama in the history of television.

Yesterday, Matt and I talked about the Roots remake as an action flick, and the re-envisioning of Kizzy, Kunta Kinte’s daughter, as a warrior. (You can stream past episodes here.) Today we dig into episode 3—and, yes, there will be spoilers. This penultimate episode revolves around the upbringing of Kizzy’s son “Chicken George” (Regé-Jean Page) and George’s tricky relationship with Tom Lea (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), his ne’er-do-well master and unacknowledged father.

Michael Mechanic: Good morning, Matt! So, Snoop Dogg rants aside, people of all races seem to be welcoming this history. More than 5 million Americans watched the Roots premiere live on Monday, despite overlap with Game 7 of the NBA’s Western Conference finals. (Go Warriors!) And the remake has spawned an interesting Twitter hashtag: #RootsSyllabus.

Chicken George Steve Deitl/History

Matthew Delmont: Yes, like #FergusonSyllabus, #CharlestonSyllabus, #LemonadeSyllabus, people are using this hashtag to share books, articles, films, and other resources related to slavery and African-American history and culture. Five million viewers doesn’t seem like a lot compared to the massive audience that watched Roots in 1977, but there’s a whole different level of viewer engagement with this new Roots. Seeing people express their thoughts in real time on Kizzy, Chicken George, and Tom Lea is amazing, and then having some of the leading historians on slavery tweet to help contextualize this historical fiction is pretty cool.

MM: It’s hard not to love Chicken George. He’s this cocky, vibrant young guy who is allowed to train and fight his master’s gamecocks rather than working the fields. He’s optimistic and trusting, whereas everyone around him, from his mom to old Mingo—who teaches him everything he knows about the birds—has learned by experience that white people are not to be trusted. We also get to know Tom Lea, Kizzy’s serial rapist. He’s a small-time slave owner, an Irishman who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and aspires to be accepted by the Southern gentry. I thought the acting was superb.

MD: The dynamic among Chicken George, Tom Lea, and Kizzy was really well done. The scenes with Kizzy and Lea were difficult to watch, but they painted a clear picture of what surviving slavery looked like for Kizzy.

MM: Every time she sees George showing any kinship with master Tom—his father—it’s like a knife wound for her.

MD: Yes, and I liked the way they slowly revealed how much George knew. In the original series, there’s this tearful reveal where Kizzy tells George that the master is his father. Here he seems to surprise Kizzy by telling her he figured it out on his own. The whole dynamic again shows how tangled the idea of family is during slavery.

MM: At one point, Lea says something that hints at it, and George sort of does a double-take. I think he basically knew, but repressed the thought because he doesn’t want to endanger his position of privilege. He’s light-skinned, gets to travel with the master, gets money and prestige for his showmanship, and some nice clothes—and he isn’t subject to brutal field work. But inside, he knows.

MD: He has to deal with the knowledge that his father owns him. This episode also did a nice job of portraying a dynamic where Lea only owns a handful of slaves. When he talks to Chicken George about the possibility of George getting married, he is very clear that he expects him to keep his wife’s “belly full” in order to “increase my stock.”

MM: Let’s talk about Mingo. Chad Coleman was in The Wire, The Walking Dead—lots of stuff. And he’s perfect as the old slave who has been through the ringer and no longer trusts anyone but his roosters.

MD: Yes, Coleman was really great in this role. I like these moments when you have different black characters sort of mentoring each other, even if they do so reluctantly at first.

MM: Like with Fiddler. Both of these guys had places of relative privilege and were loath to put that at risk.

MD: It also showed how many of these enslaved characters have specialized knowledge that is really valuable. We didn’t talk about that in the last episode, but Kunta had skill with the horses, and Mingo and Chicken George have these valuable skills training the birds. What did you make of all the cockfighting? This has to be the most cockfighting on television this decade, right?

MM: Cockfighting was huge in the South—it’s still popular in some circles, although it’s now illegal in every state. But the fights were a good vehicle for the writers to get off the plantation and get outside characters involved—we get to see a wider range of Southern society and the storyline of Tom Lea’s social ambitions. He’s desperate to prove he’s not trash, and George is his means to get there. As for skills, yeah, master Tom doesn’t know shit about training roosters, which gives George leverage. At one point, George actually says to the master something like, “Well, then you can find somebody else to fight your birds.” He uses his power. Of course, it’s limited—and his cash value is obviously a double-edged sword.

MD: I think Alex Haley would have loved this episode. He did tons of research on cockfighting when he was writing Roots, and it’s clear from his notes that he was captivated by Chicken George. I was surprised at how much time we spent with Tom Lea in this episode, though. The duel scene helped convey Lea’s class-status anxiety and it also cemented his relationship with Chicken George, but it seemed thrown in to gesture toward Game of Thrones or something. Like, “Let’s get a sword fight in here!”

MM: Hmm. Was there never a duel in the original? In any case, I felt like it served a purpose: Because George saves his master’s life, Tom Lea is now beholden to him—and so it’s an even bigger deal when he betrays George.

MD: This duel scene was not in the book or the original series. I agree that it fits in the narrative. I could also see a more subtle commentary on what “civilized” white culture looks like—that you go out in a field and shoot at each other. I couldn’t help laughing when Chicken George has to encourage Lea by saying, “You the gamecock now!”

MM: Ha, yeah! There’s another purpose to that scene as well: It highlights how, if something bad happens to a master, slave families can be torn apart and sold. Which is why George and his free friend attend the duel, and why they push so hard to make sure Tom triumphs. Also, just as an aesthetic thing, this seemed like a more realistic version of what a duel might actually look like than what I’ve ever seen on TV. I mean, usually it’s the old 50 paces, turn, and shoot—and then one or both men go down. But this was a very messy affair: Tom Lea’s hand shaking with nervousness, missing the first shot, then stripping away part of his rival’s face with the second, after which the men fight on, gravely wounded, in the dirt and mud with their short swords. Very, very gritty, and so unlike the past Hollywood depictions of an old-fashioned duel.

MD: Yes, this was a very violent episode, wasn’t it? And in very different ways: The duel is bloody, Lea rapes Kizzy repeatedly, and then the gamecocks are fighting to the death every other scene. Each one has an impact on the lives and futures of the enslaved characters. One thing I liked about the cockfighting theme was the absurdity of Chicken George’s freedom turning on whether that bird won or lost.

Tom Lea Steve Deitl/History

MM: George is so grateful for the opportunity, yet he’s being fucked with in a major way. Lea is betting his own son’s freedom! And then he reneges—I guess we saw that coming.

MD: And that’s why the scene and that story arc works. Things can look like they are going well, or like the master might care for his slaves (and in this case, children), but the fates of enslaved people were still tied up with the whims of slave owners. What did you think of Kizzy in this episode?

MM: She was excellent. She really captured the painful dynamic of having trained up as Kunta’s little warrior child, and here she’s losing her son to this rapist master. I also wanted to bring up the pivot around Nat Turner’s rebellion. When master Tom is told that murderous slaves are on the loose, he stops trusting George on a dime and chains him to the wagon then and there. Every slave is suddenly suspect. I think that was also the turning point for George, when he realized he was no better than the rest of them in the master’s eyes.

MD: Yes, things turn very quickly there. That line where one of the other white characters says, “Nat Turner’s a fever—you never know which nigger’s gonna catch it,” was a good encapsulation of that charged moment.

Mingo (Chad Coleman) Michelle Short

MM: How the hell is a slave supposed to protect himself from that kind of paranoia?

MD: Chicken George and Mingo become immediately suspect. It’s like it suddenly dawns on Lea and other slaveholders that enslaved people do not want to be held in bondage and might actively resist. The reference to Nat Turner also made me think of how much historical ground the series is trying to cover—how we move from the War of Independence to Nat Turner to in the finale the Civil War. Chunks of time keep passing by.

MM: Yeah, like that jump cut from Kizzy’s initial rape to the delivery of Chicken George. So was Nat Turner in the original Roots? It had to have been.

MD: Yes, and it was a similar kind of moment. They got the date wrong in the original series. I believe they said Nat Turner’s rebellion happened in 1841 rather than 1831. TV and history!

MM: What would you say were the most striking departures from the original Chicken George saga, not counting the duel?

MD: First, the casting: Ben Vereen played Chicken George in the original. He had the charm of the character down, but it was harder to believe that he was the son of Tom Lea, since he is a darker-skinned actor. And Vereen was about the same age as Leslie Uggams, who played his mom, Kizzy, but that’s another story. I thought Regé-Jean Page played Chicken George very well. The second thing is that, in the original, going to England is a positive opportunity. Tom Lea loses the cockfight bet, but going to England is a chance for George to leave America—he wasn’t forcibly taken away at the end of the episode like he is here. And, while I’m generally not a stickler for historical accuracy, slavery wasn’t legal anymore in England by the late 1830s, so I don’t know what is supposed to happen to George once he gets there.

MM: I had precisely the same thought.

MD: The UK passed the Slave Trade Act in 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. So Chicken George should be free.

MM: Well, maybe he’ll get his wish after all. So, um, how can a historian not be a stickler for historical accuracy?

MD: Well, I do a lot of TV and film history, so I try to remember that these things have to be entertaining and commercially viable first and foremost. If they can be sort of historically accurate, all the better! They had some very well-respected historians as advisers on this series and they were much more attuned to getting the details correct.

MM: Okay, best moment in episode 3?

MD: Two moments stood out: The opening scene, where we see Kizzy cleaning herself up after Tom Lea leaves after raping her yet again. These details would never have been shown in the original. Anika Noni Rose does an amazing job throughout, and I thought that opening scene really set the tone. And then Marcellus, the free black man who wants to buy Kizzy’s freedom, when he’s talking about how he’s free but he’s growing tired of pulling out his papers every time a sheriff gets in a mood or “some cracker doesn’t like my look.” That seemed like one of the most relevant lines for our contemporary moment. It echoes a line from episode 2, when a white patroller tells Kunta and Fiddler they can’t be in the road after dark. I have to imagine the writers were thinking about Ferguson, Baltimore, and the curfew rules.

Marcellus (Michael James Shaw) and Kizzy (Anika Noni Rose) Kareem Black/History

MM: We’re fearful for Marcellus—almost more so than for the slaves—because we can see how much he’s got to lose, and how much resentment some of the poor whites might have at seeing this free, fairly well-to-do black man in their midst. He would always have to be watching his back. When he rode off in that wagon alone, just going on his way, I was filled with dread that something terrible would happen to him.

MD: Anything else from this episode?

MM: I think we’ve covered it. Until tomorrow, then!

Stay tuned: Michael Mechanic and Matthew Delmont will be back tomorrow to recap the Roots finale, which airs tonight on History.

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We Watched "Roots" With a "Roots" Expert (Part III)

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Hillary Clinton: "Politics Has to Play Some Role In This"

by ScotHeighway10 Posted on April 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton is famously well briefed, so you can be sure she had no trouble answering question from the Daily News editorial board. “Look, I’m excited about this stuff,” she said. “I’m kind of a wonky person. I’m excited by it.”

Needless to say, this also meant her interview was spectacularly dull. But after a wonky discussion of her idea for a national infrastructure bank, we got at least one revealing tidbit:

Daily News: There are many who believe that the stimulus program that had a lot of infrastructure money was divided up politically.

Clinton: Well, look. Politics has to play some role in this. Let’s not forget we do have to play some role. I got to get it passed through Congress. And I think I’m well-prepared to do that. I was telling you about Buffalo. I got $20 million. Now I got that because it was political. But it worked. And it has created this amazing medical complex. So I don’t disregard the politics, but I believe one of the ways to get to the overall political outcome is by doing a better job than I think was done in the Obama administration, in constantly talking about what this can mean — new jobs, new economic growth and competitiveness.

This isn’t breaking news or anything, but it’s a surprisingly direct defense of plain old politics, which modern politicians are supposed to condemn with extreme prejudice. Politics is the problem, not the solution. It’s why Washington doesn’t work. Too many Beltway folks playing the same old political games.

But as Clinton says, that’s not really true. Like anything, political maneuvering can go too far. But the problem with Washington these days is too little politics, not too much. Bring back earmarks! Bring back logrolling and backscratching! Bring back carrots and sticks! Bring back conference committees! Bring back a bit of give and take.

You don’t hear politicians defend the grubby business of politics very often these days. It’s nice to hear it once in a while.

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Hillary Clinton: "Politics Has to Play Some Role In This"

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Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson Resigns in the Wake of "Panama Papers" Scandal

by AnnetteLorenzo Posted on April 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson announced his resignation on Tuesday amid mounting public anger over evidence that he and his wife owned a secretive offshore company called Wintris that managed millions of dollars of investments in three Icelandic banks that collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis.

Calls to step down were sparked by this weekend’s so-called “Panama Papers” leak, a massive trove of documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonesca that exposed a number of international leaders and their closest confidantes as participating in complex offshore banking arrangements. High-profile leaders linked to the leak include Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

But Gunnlaugsson is the first leader ousted in the international fallout. The public outcry in Iceland is particularly intense due to lasting memories of the 2008 financial crisis, which paralyzed the country’s economy, and sent shock waves around the world. And as our own Kevin Drum noted, Iceland was “ground zero for the European banking crisis.”

Gunnlaugsson had initially insisted on staying in office. When questioned about his ties to Wintris on Monday, the visibly shaken prime minister was unable to properly respond and ended the interview. “You are asking me nonsense,” he is heard telling the reporters conducting the interview.

In the days following the leak, mass demonstrations calling for Gunnlaugsson to step down were held outside Parliament. Some people were seen hurling yogurt at the building in protest:

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Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson Resigns in the Wake of "Panama Papers" Scandal

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Donald Trump Has No Idea What He Said One Day Ago

by MavisFries43 Posted on April 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has apparently decided that he’s the master of the long-form interview, so he’s been giving a bunch of them lately. But they raise a question: does Trump really think he’s impressing people in these interviews? Today we got our answer: he does indeed. Here he is in his latest Q&A with Robert Costa and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post:

I do say this: My media coverage is not honest. It really isn’t. And I’m not saying that as a person with some kind of a complex. I’m just saying, I will be saying words that are written totally differently from what I’ve said. And I see it all — in all fairness, the editorial board of The Washington Post. I was killed on that. I left the room, I thought it was fine.

Just as a reminder, this is the interview where his comment on racial disparities in law enforcement was “I’ve read where there are and I’ve read where there aren’t.” On Iran: “We should have gone in and said, ‘release our prisoners,’ they would have said ‘no,’ and we would have said, ‘double up the sanctions.'” On his beef with the Ricketts family: “I’ll start doing ads about their baseball team.” On using nukes against ISIS: “I’ll tell you one thing, this is a very good-looking group of people here.” On his hands: “My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay?” On how he’d address racial problems: “I actually think I’d be a great cheerleader for the country.” On taking Iraq’s oil: “For that, I would circle it….I would defend the areas with the oil”—apparently not realizing that the oil is spread throughout nearly the entire country.

That interview was a train wreck. Trump’s ignorance and incoherence was on a Charlie Sheen-esque level—except that Trump didn’t have any pharmaceutical help. But he thought everything went fine. Apparently he can’t read a room quite as well as he thinks.

And he’d better be prepared to get treated badly again. Here he is on the national debt:

DT: We’ve got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt.

BW: How long would that take?

DT: I think I could do it fairly quickly, because of the fact the numbers….

BW: What’s fairly quickly?

DT: Well, I would say over a period of eight years. And I’ll tell you why.

BW: Would you ever be open to tax increases as part of that, to solve the problem?

DT: I don’t think I’ll need to. The power is trade. Our deals are so bad.

So…Trump is somehow going to start running a budget surplus of $2 trillion per year without raising taxes. How? Something to do with trade.

Is this even fact checkable? Or is it, in Wolfgang Pauli’s famous words, so nonsensical that it’s “not even wrong”? In any case, I promise Trump that every quote in this post is a direct quotation. Nobody is making him say words that are totally different from what he’s said. Honestly, there’s no need.

However, the fact that he thinks he’s being constantly misquoted really does make you wonder if he’s all there. He seems awfully sincere about this. He really and truly talks in such a stream of consciousness that he doesn’t even realize what he’s said half the time.

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Donald Trump Has No Idea What He Said One Day Ago

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Does Donald Trump Think His Top Foreign Policy Adviser Is Muslim?

by bileteavioncipru Posted on March 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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In an interview with Fox News on Tuesday morning, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump twice failed to correct host Brian Kilmeade’s mistaken assertion that one of his top foreign policy advisers, Walid Phares, is Muslim.

“Donald, we just talked to Walid Phares,” Kilmeade said. “We talked to Dr. Zuhdi Jasser yesterday, Ambassador Khalilzad—he’s done great things for this country. What do all three have in common? They’re Muslims.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Trump said.

A few minutes later, Kilmeade returned to the topic of Phares, who Trump announced yesterday was advising his campaign. “A lot of people listening right now might be misinterpreting your message in the past and currently that you have a problem with Muslims—you don’t have a problem with Muslims,” Kilmeade said. “In fact you just hired one, Walid Phares, to work for you.” Again, Trump appeared to agree.

But Phares is not Muslim. In fact, he is about as far from being a Muslim as one can get. As Adam Serwer reported five years ago, Phares was once a top political official in a sectarian Christian militia in Lebanon that targeted Muslims:

During the 1980s, Phares, a Maronite Christian, trained Lebanese militants in ideological beliefs justifying the war against Lebanon’s Muslim and Druze factions, according to former colleagues. Phares, they say, advocated the hard-line view that Lebanon’s Christians should work toward creating a separate, independent Christian enclave. A photo obtained by Mother Jones shows him conducting a press conference in 1986 for the Lebanese Forces, an umbrella group of Christian militias that has been accused of committing atrocities.

Later in the interview, Kilmeade offered a correction, noting that Phares is actually a Christian. But Trump was twice asked specifically about Phares’ religious identity and never pushed back.

Maybe it was a lousy earpiece?

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Does Donald Trump Think His Top Foreign Policy Adviser Is Muslim?

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President Obama Adopts Bold, New Policy Toward Islamic State

by SilviaAshmore44 Posted on December 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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According to the New York Times, President Obama said this in an NPR radio interview:

“This is a serious challenge — ISIS is a virulent, nasty organization that has gained a foothold in ungoverned spaces effectively in Syria and parts of western Iraq,” Mr. Obama said, referring to attacks the group organized in Paris and apparently inspired in San Bernardino. “But it is also important for us to keep things in perspective, and this is not an organization that can destroy the United States.”

Seriously? He called it ISIS instead of ISIL? Hallelujah! Can someone please confirm this?

UPDATE: The interview is here. Obama really did say ISIS. Once. He said ISIL the other 22 times he referred to them. But it’s a start!

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President Obama Adopts Bold, New Policy Toward Islamic State

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