Trump's Trolls

A recent article in the Atlantic about Trump adviser Stephen Miller has forced me to re-examine his tactics as a politician. Because for certain, though 45 seems to beclown himself at every turn, Donald Trump (or at least the people who advise him) is an extraordinarily canny media manipulator. It's time to gird our egos against the fact that Donald Trump, and the people behind him, are not stupid. They may even be smarter than we are, and they are definitely winning. His rudeness is a ruse, and we are being played by assholes mistaken for morons.

When he was in high school, Stephen Miller was running for student government and asked his fellow students: "Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?" John Oliver ran a clip of this on his show, to jeers from his audience and a punchline comparing Miller to a minion. It may seem as though Oliver got one up on him, only if you discount that this is exactly the reaction Miller wanted. He admitted as much in his Atlantic interview. By responding with smug outrage, his fellow students--and John Oliver, and those of us who laughed with him--are following a script Stephen Miller himself has spent years writing.

Those of us with a moral centre have a hard time accepting this. We've been taught that nice guys win. That disrespect is intolerable. Faced with a person who does not want to be liked, we convince ourselves that they do really care what they think, and are just socially incompetent. In this way we can feel superior to the Stephen Millers and Donald Trumps of the world, consoling ourselves with the belief that they must be stupid.

Donald Trump won the election, despite a host of outrages that I'm sure I don't need to remind you of here, and his base continues to support him through scandal after scandal. Your liberal tears are not Republican Kryptonite. If they were, Trump and his cronies would not be harvesting them so diligently. And they are harvesting them. None of this is accidental.

Consider the G7 which ran June 8-9 this year (the precise dates are actually important). The summit was played in the media as a disaster for President Trump. And though it was certainly a disaster for America's standing in the free world, there is no reason to believe it played out any way other than how Trump and co. intended.

The G7 is not a surprise, impromptu gathering. These summits happen annually and their dates and locations are agreed upon far in advance. Meaning Trump's decision on June 1st to not exempt key allies from steel and aluminum tariffs barely a week before the summit was an engineered insult, and not merely a buffoon falling ass-backwards into international outrage. So agrees Bruce Heyman, the former U.S. ambassador to Canada. Appearing on The Agenda With Steve Paikin he said:

"Of course a lot of the allies were shocked over this, but said of course we're going to have to respond and retaliate. And the White House sat there and pretended to be shocked by that. I think it was...it had to be anticipated."

Heyman goes further, regarding Trump's incediary tweet after the Prime Minister politely reaffirmed that he would retaliate with tariffs, he adds --"[He] could have just come out and said 'Thank You' to everyone for coming, and I think that they would have sent that tweet out and been upset because I think it was staged."

Trump showed up to the summit late and made it his first priority to ask that Russia be readmitted to the "G8", knowing full well there was no way that request would be granted. The G8 became the G7 when Russia invaded Crimea. Putin has not returned the disputed territory, and in the mean time has been interfering in elections, shooting down passenger jets and poisoning people on British soil. We know this. It's time to recognize that Trump also knows this, and begin by asking ourselves what he has to gain from it.

Trump adviser David Navarro more or less admitted the G7 fiasco was a calculated show of strength to impress the leader of North Korea, though Donald Trump also never shies away from a chance to appear under attack by a biased media, who seemed to take the bait and accept that Trump really is dumb enough to expect the G7 to forsake their own trade interests and forgive Russia just because he asked.

The latest "scandal" just wrapped up on the border: 2,300 children separated from their parents and caged in facilities which include an abandoned WalMart, sleeping on the floor under thermal blankets, all for the crime of fleeing a home country torn apart by war and gang violence.

Cable news airwaves filled up with heartrending footage of children in cages. The U.N. Human Rights Council condemned it (the U.S. responded by withdrawing, claiming that in doing so they were defending Israel).  It was a public relations nightmare. A humanitarian disgrace.

And also the best thing that's happened to the Trump camp all year.

It's difficult to imagine how a democratically elected person could benefit from such callous, cruel behaviour out in the open. But lets give it a shot: Trump has made so many false statements, it gets hard to distinguish the truly dangerous from the merely annoying  or silly (especially when so many people are determined to have a laugh at his supposed stupidity). But this one is important:

Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California - so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias - big problem!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2016

There is no evidence to support his claim that millions of people are voting illegally. And yet in the dark recesses of the internet, the belief sunk its claws into a substantial slice of the voting public, so much so that CNN was able to find so called "normal" Americans who believed it when they did a round table discussion with Trump voters.

He went on:

Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California - so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias - big problem!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2016

Through this humanitarian nightmare, American T.V.s are now covered in images of illegal immigrants. News anchors urgently emphasize the staggering number of children being held: after only six weeks of enforcing their "zero tolerance" policy, more than two thousand children have been separated from their parents. Democratic lawmakers make a show of trying to gain access to the facilities holding them only to be turned away. Recall that another of Donald Trump's favorite tropes is the idea that Democrats are soft on immigration because they want the illegals to vote for them (in the millions, or so he would have you believe).

One needn't seek out shady Facebook links anymore. The "proof" is broadcast twenty four hours a day by the most trusted name in news. 2,000 children, they say. Well there must be at least 10,000 adults, one might reason. And in only six weeks! Cable news and Liberal outrage have brought scores of illegal immigrants to the forefront of America's mind, lending credence to the premise of Trump's falsehoods: We are flooded with illegals. The Democrats and the media reveal that their true allegiance lies exactly where Trump voters always guessed it did.

Sure, they don't want to see children suffer. Trump said so himself when he made a show of signing an executive order meant to end this nightmare. He claims credit for cleaning up a mess he created, then blamed on Democrats. The real coup is that for the last two weeks the White House has watched their supposed enemies fill the airwaves with "proof" that illegals are, in fact, flooding the country. And that the Democrats do, in fact, feel more kinship to them than "real" Americans.

Are we to keep believing that Trump and his trolls are actually morons, who lucked into this, and every other victory they've had? That one can actually blunder into the White House?

No reasonable person can deny that the Trump administration engineers outrage as a prop. His top adviser admitted as much in his Atlantic profile. Its time to think seriously about what they're gaining from it. It may be hard to accept that you could be outmatched by someone so wholly repugnant, and yet every day it seems clearer that we are all reading from a script written in his hand.

What is there to do then? Should we not stand up to cruelty? Should we keep silent as he alienates allies and cozies up to dictators? Turn a blind eye to racism? Sexism? Corrption?

I don't know. A person this anti-social is hard to outplay because they are willing to do things that decent people wouldn't do. At the very least we would do well to distinguish between scandals generated by Trump himself (i.e. the G7), which can be shown time and time again to be stunts, and the scandals unearthed by other people (i.e. Stormy Daniels, The Trump Foundation, The Steele Dossier). It's hard to say "Don't feed the trolls" when they have 2,300 children in captivity, plus  the nuclear codes and control of your economy. An amendment, then: Don't feed the troll what its asking for.

Why the Facebook News feed is what's wrong with America

Jon Stewart was a master at criticizing a now obsolete delivery system for news. When he took to the Daily Show in the nineties, cable news was the fountainhead from which most peoples' perception of current events sprung. He did a masterful job in highlighting how the 24 hour news cycle thrived on making us dumber, which in turn explained why Americans were so susceptible to manipulation by politicians, corporations, religion, et. al.

His departure from The Daily Show was duly mourned, and I doubt we'll see another like him. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Because cable news' time has passed. It's still where we turn to hear about big events - mass shootings, political conventions, and other tire fires - but not where the meat of our understanding-or lackthereof- comes from. That would be the internet - a jungle of facts, figures and opinions from which we can choose which narrative we wish to believe, then disseminate it among an imagined network of "friends" through social media.

If Cable News was a tabloid magazine - a glamorized, exaggerated vision of real life, overselling drama at the expense of context (or credibility). The internet is a "choose your own adventure" novel. That cable news, and the various other instruments of media manipulation have dumbed down our expectations for current events does not improve things.

"Truthiness" is the word Stephen Colbert coined to describe the intellectual dry rot that had settled into American media by the mid 2000s - that is, how we give something that feels true equal consideration to something that is true. You don't need technical psycho-mumbo-jumbo to understand this concept, just click on any polarizing "trending" topic on Facebook and read the headlines of articles people are linking to.

Generally it looks like this: Person A, writes a few words about how they feel, then link to an article which supports that feeling. Something like these:

Both of those articles are bullshit. This is something that has to be recognized, whether you agree with the feeling that caused them or not.

Republicans who threatened to boycott Bradley Cooper's movies after he appeared at the DNC did not do so because they "can't tell the difference between movies and real life". Such a person would be certifiably mentally incompetent. They did it because 1) they learned Bradley Cooper has a different political orientation than they do, and 2) This is particularly egregious because he achieved the greatest financial and critical success of his career by playing staunch republican Chris Kyle in American Sniper. Whether you agree with these people or not, is up for debate, but first we have to be debating actual people, not a cartoon caricature drawn up by a Huffington Post that tries to maximize clicks by being witty. The news is not witty. An editorial can be witty. And an editorial absolutely cannot be confused with news if you want to be a functioning, intelligent contributor to society.

On the other side, a contributor to The Hill claims Khizr Khan, the father of a fallen soldier who gave a moving anti-Trump speech at the DNC, was "tricked" into his appearance. The suggestion that this educated man somehow he didn't realize his grief would be politicized at a political convention is absurd, condescending and ridiculous. It's an argument that can only be made by someone who is just about to realize they are out of logical arguments, and must invent things to justify their gut feeling.  Since Khan was sympathetic, eloquent, and morally unimpeachable, they cannot posit that anything he said was wrong, so they attack Hillary Clinton for using him for the wrong reasons.

In either case it's clear that the authors of such pieces were less interested in informing the public about current events than reassuring people of their gut feelings. The problem with this is that everyone who doesn't already agree them feels misunderstood, mocked and angry.

Imagine going into a store, where the salesperson says to you: "That dress makes you look fat. Buy this - it's more slimming." That person does not make the sale. No matter how accurate their summation of your appearance, most people will refuse to listen to a person who insults them. And thus does the country become more divided.

The reality is that we aren't helping. Ideology, and politics are salesmanship. You are trying to get someone to "buy" your opinion - be it that progress necessitates racial equality, or that racial equality is a threat to national security. Insulting the customer rarely helps.

Though I could sincerely point out that Khizr Khan was not "used" or "tricked" by the Democratic party - no Muslim has to be tricked into disliking Donald Trump, particularly not a grieving parent who feels his son's memory is insulted by the candidate - any more than anyone else who stumps at a political convention, I would rather criticize my people for taking their eyes off the ball. I can't fully grasp the ugliness that has led to Donald Trump's candidacy, but would like to. Depicting his supporters as a rash of idiots feeds their distrust of the "main stream media", such that people feel that news items which don't support their beliefs are hiding something from them. And the internet is always there to offer a comforting assurance that they were right.

See Trump never kicked a baby out of his rally! The lefties who read the articles on Huffpo or Rolling Stone or wherever else that incorrectly cited that he did probably know this. "He didn't kick the mother out, he was just a jerk to her.". "He was definitely joking when he said 'get the baby out of here', but his mocking the mother for believing he liked it was sincere'.". It doesn't show he hates babies, it shows he's an asshole.

This is eerily similar to the way Trump supporters explain some of his more incendiary proclamations as "sarcasm".  News, like a presidential candidate, is supposed to tell you what actually happened, but we no longer expect it to. On social media, at least, it is a tool for asserting our rightness, for affirming our beliefs by highlighting the multitudes who share them. Not for learning. Not for questioning.

Thus, many now claim as "news" any article supporting their already held beliefs, and are living in a completely different world from their neighbors. The problem is that you can't determine whether your beliefs are right or wrong without thoughtful debate, but who can debate when the facts themselves cannot even be agreed upon.

I'm a liberal, but if the left is more determined to be smug than useful, they are part of the problem. And both sides exist in their own bubble, obstinately refusing to recognize the other side as made up of thinking human beings . On the left I blame vanity, on the right I blame fear and insecurity. But either way, nobody's helping.

How Donald Trump became the voice of my generation:

That the internet has radically transformed society is generally accepted with a sense of bemused attachment: it used to take hours or days to send someone a message which today can be accomplished in the blink of an eye.  You had to get your news from the Godheads on TV, or the editors of a daily newspaper. Now everyone is an editor, everyone is a receiver and transmitter of the latest trends.

Where people are quick to realise that the internet has changed the way we live, fewer people acknowledge that it has actually changed us. In this day and age, there is no more news. Only editorials, delivered by average Joes who feel compelled to own current events by commenting on them, folding them into a meme which they can share, a borrowed online identity.

What really matters is I'm witty and I like dogs.

How often do you see a tweet with a simple statement of fact: "There is so much lead in Flint's water the mayor has declared a state of emergency", versus a statement of opinion: "So tragic what's happening in Flint right now."

The right or wrong opinion isn't the issue. The issue is that facts have been superseded by opinions. which have become the currency of modern life. Because you can't own a fact in the way that you can own a quip.

Remember this next time you try to diffuse a Trump supporter by explaining that forcing South Korea to pay for America's military presence there will cause the U.S.A. to lose its strategic influence in Asia. This is a language that's going extinct. Where once upon a time, people watched the news to keep informed, and discussed it around the water cooler, my generation looks to the news as an accessory to our online profiles.

The November attacks in Paris weren't an example of 20th century foreign policy disasters in the Middle East coming home to roost. Nor were they an exemplar of why terrorism is the weapon of choice for militants who don't have the resources to fight an open battle (scaring your enemies into expending their own resources to prevent small scale attacks is far more cost effective). It was a chance for us to add a red, white and blue filter to our Profile picture - as a statement of solidarity with the French people, but also a reminder that we are Very. Passionate. About. World. Events. People., #BlackLivesMatter.

Today, news only has value insofar as it can be co-opted into our online identity. We are ever on the lookout for something to enrage us, to inspire us, to promote us. The thing that media has now more than ever has before is that very thing: "us". Social Media isn't about facts. It's about identities.

Psychologists among you know what happens when "facts" and "identities" intermingle. It's called cognitive dissonance and it's a motherfucker.

The old top-down method of information had its share of problems - mainly that the person who owns the network/newspaper effectively owned the flow of information, and had it in them to misrepresent people or events in an arena where they couldn't be challenged. But the benefit was that the people doing the reporting were expected to know what they were talking about, and voters made decisions based on generally agreed upon events.

People on either side of the debate decry the "slant" in the media's depiction of their demagogues, but fail to acknowledge that their outcry itself is an act of slant. Donald Trump surely would not have gotten the media coverage he had in the primaries if the networks weren't keenly aware of how eager viewers were to get angry. More qualified candidates like Chris Christie wouldn't have had to elbow in for airtime.

Donald Trump's signature characteristic is his narcissism, which makes him the perfect candidate for our age. To clarify: to be narcissistic is not to be conceited, though people often use those expressions as if they are interchangeable. A person who's conceited thinks they're better than you, assumes you also think this, and acts accordingly. These people are assholes.

A narcissist, on the other hand, is mentally ill. Though they can appear conceited, the main divider between narcissists and the rest of us is that they don't perceive a boundary between themselves and their surroundings.

"We are the world" is the quintessential summation of what makes narcissists different from healthy human beings, and it's also the reason they can be so charming. Narcissists may appear at first to be deeply caring, open people, willing to do anything to help their fellow man - because their fellow man is, in their mind, just an extension of themselves.

This becomes a problem when your fellow man's interests diverge with your own. And it becomes disastrous when a person with such a twisted view of reality is empowered to control situations that have confounded better minds for decades in their complexity. For the narcissist, everything is about them.  If Mexicans are coming into America, it's because they want to steal your job and rape your sister, not because they're running away from violence or deep-seated economic issues in their own country.

South Korea is benefitting from American Military presence in their country, therefore they should pay for it. Forget that American presence there protects our interests in a continent which otherwise would be ceded completely to Chinese and Russian influence. Any solution that doesn't centre around the narcissist's vision of themselves as the centre of the universe will not be considered.

That Donald Trump is utterly unfit for office is understood by a great many pundits and protestors, who continue to shake their heads in wonderment at how he got this far. But actually, he is the perfect candidate for our times. Social Media has primed the pump for a Trump presidency better than the Donald himself ever could. Ten years ago, the ascension of this man, based on his current method of campaigning, would be as unthinkable as photographing food and expecting your friends to look at it.

But here we are.

I've heard a lot of talk about how my generation is the feeling generation, since we are so interconnected and care so deeply about social causes. But what does caring really look like for a narcissist?

It looks a bit like our response to Kony 2012. You may recall a video highlighting a human rights travesty in Uganda got a hundred million views on YouTube, was shared by celebrities like Rihanna and Justin Beiber, then disseminated through a deeply concerned, justifiably outraged populace. We all hugged ourselves: see how social media is making the world a better place?

And then nothing. We all moved on. It became clear to anyone still watching that the outpouring of support was actually a pose. That "awareness" was abundant, but action nearly nonexistent. The followup video has less than three million views. The human tragedy was not a call to arms, but an accessory to be mounted on our twitter feed like a charm on a pandora bracelet: Look at me, I'm a person who cares.

This is a fundamentally narcissistic way of seeing the world. A conceited person believes others want to see every detail play out in their daily life via social media. Only a narcissist views major world events primarily as a vessel for them to express their identity.

Were the 2015 Paris attacks the result of a medieval, backward religion trying to encroach on modern values? Or was it a century of poor foreign policy decisions come home to roost? Neither. It was a red, white and blue filter to put on your profile photo, just so everyone knew how "with it" you were.

In this context, the rise of Donald Trump should not be surprising. The bragging, the over sharing, the constant quest for validation, the belief that freedom to express an opinion is more important than the facts underlying that position, is so quintessentially millennial, its no surprise that these things haven't disqualified him from the race.

Combine that with twenty years of poor decision making by those in power - from deregulating Wall Street to destabilizing the Middle East with the Iraq war, leading to mass anger and confusion, and Donald Trump makes perfect sense as a candidate in keeping with our slanted, angry, narcissistic new world order.

I do not mean this to sound reassuring.

From the pundits attempting to weigh in on how this could happen, to the liberals staring in disbelief, people, are still acting on the assumption that we live in the same world they grew up in, but that's a lie. The old rule book cannot be used to dictate a new way of life, thus its been allowed to mutate into something far beyond their control.

Most liberals acknowledge this problem's existence on the right: the rallying cry to "Make America Great Again" presupposes that it was ever great for anyone other than white males, and (more stupidly) that we can turn back the clock on globalization.

But those who fail to acknowledge how social media has affected their perception of events, their impetus to put their own personal stamp on issues that are often beyond their understanding are equally to blame. For this is the climate that Donald Trump needed to thrive, and after ten years of facebook and its ilk we've been conditioned to treat him as legitimate.

For context:

Automatic weapons gave birth to the twentieth century, surely as the internet gave birth to the 21st. Though alarmists like to draw comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler, the better analogue to Donald Trump and the many other ways the world seems to be coming apart at the seams is World War I. Though the ascendance of Donald Trump hopefully won't kill millions of people or precipitate a sequel that's even more destructive, it was predicated by major technological and social change, combined with an inability to adapt to globalization.

By the end of World War I, survivors were scratching their heads, at a loss to explain what the hell had just happened. WWII gets more attention - mostly because it was fought by such colourful characters, and its cause is easier to understand. WWI was, technically, precipitated by the murder of an archduke in Serbia - a man whose importance in life was far out of proportion to the titanic fallout of his death. Take a step back and there were other things - arms races, nationalism,  treaty networks dictating that if one nation goes to fight, three more go with her, and the deeply first world problem that Europe really hadn't had a good war in ages. These things could converge to cause a war, but not the Great War. A World War became the Great War thanks to new technology used in the service of old ideas.

That is: wars are fought in battles where two sides agree to meet, one side does most of the dying and the other is the victor. Usually done at the whim of a monarch with little to no connection to the suffering of his people. You've seen it in a hundred movies where opposing forces meet across a battlefield like so many Sharks and Jets.

And now they had machine guns! Imagine the possibilities.  No more firing one shot, then taking five minutes to load another. Twenty rounds a second! They were certain the war would be over in a month. The reality is that when technology causes major social change, you adapt to it, not the other round.

In this case, both sides had machine guns, so the best you could do was dig holes across from one another and hide inside. At some point, a few men would go over the top. Most of them would die. And if we're lucky we gained ten metres. This is what happens when new technology is incorporated into old institutions without appreciating how fully it has altered the rules.

And as America blunders itself toward a Trump presidency, it's hard not to see the connection between this time and that. The world at large is still reeling - financially and culturally- from the effects of globalization, and the economic collapse, and while some Americans mourn their losses with a cry to Make America Great Again, we have overlooked the fact that technology, specifically, social media, has changed not only the world we live in, but us ourselves.

The Glamourous Right

This was originally written in February, then sat one for three months, hence the discussion of Trump's infomercial and Chrissy Teigan's Daily Show appearance as recent news. I still stand by 100% of it, though recent ephiphanies mean I'll be adding some thoughts about America's race to the bottom later this week:

When did the glamorous option replace the right one? This isn't a rhetorical question, for there is no denying that it has happened, and that there has always been a sense that it could happen. True democracy is at odds with the impulse to elevate beautiful people into rarefied positions, and humanity has yet to kick the habit of celebrity watching. We love shiny objects and the ones that own them, so why shouldn't a presidential candidate stage an infomercial as a victory speech?

Let's start analyzing this problem with the small, innocuous world of celebrity Twitter feeds: Chrissy Teigan appeared on The Daily Show last week, where Trevor Noah* complimented her on her political tweeting. Together they had a smug, incredulous laugh about the haters, and her adorable compulsion to speak her mind to millions of people on the internet, regardless of potential backlash.

I'm betting my political views overlap substantially more with Chrissy Teigan than with Donald Trump, but if you're wondering why Tuesday's victory speech from the Republican frontrunner looked like an infomercial, ask yourself why anyone - to be specific, 1.3 million twitter followers, cares what a supermodel thinks about politics.

I can give Chriss Teigan the benefit of a doubt and assume she's a lovely person whose political views dovetail with my own, and still say without question that she is no more qualified to dictate a political conversation than any single person I might meet on the subway. To be beautiful and well married does not make one a sociologist. But it does make you an aspirational figure. And this is the key component that analyses of Trump's popularity don't generally grasp. With the exponential rise of celebrity culture, mediated by the internet and social media, glamour has trumped reason in the eyes of a voting public who should know better.

Anyone following Chrissy Teigan, or The Daily Show on Twitter will probably agree that you're more likely to find the "right" opinion (and yes, there is such a thing) from someone like Mark Leibovitch, writer for the New York Times, whose book "This Town"  elucidates the sickly situation in Washington better than anything this author has read (In sum: Democracy isn't dead in America, but the infection is starting to smell), than from her. But those same people won't be following him on Twitter. The need to make an educated decision has been hijacked by the need to feel a connection to the people who live the lives of our dreams.

Did you ever wonder why Beyonce did ads for L'Oreal hair color? How many people ever believed Beyonce did her own roots in the kitchen sink like a mere mortal? Probably about as many people believe Chrissy Teigan is a viable political commentator. But humanity is an easy mark: we know we're not going to be movie stars, pop singers or supermodels, but if we can see ourselves as alike in small ways - be it by wearing Beats headphones, drinking Pepsi or sharing their politics, it connects us to the divine.

The chief draw of a man like Donald Trump is that he is someone who people want to be. Undereducated people, maybe, predominately white people, true. People who believes they have an easy solution to all the country's problems, incredulous that the suits in Washington haven't figured out what they've known for years: A wall will keep out Mexicans; Banning Muslims will stop terror; Anyone who doesn't agree with you is a loser; When they try to stop you, sue, sue, sue. Each tenet of his ideology is as reductive as it is easy to pitch.

Listing the ways Mr. Trump is wrong, misguided or flat out lying is missing the point. What's important to his followers is that he is saying what they think, what they believe, and in so doing connecting them with a  life they've only dreamed of. We all wish we could be like him, and if you share his beliefs, then maybe you are like him, a little. His power lies not in being able to change peoples' minds, but in validating the beliefs they already have. It's not politics, its celebrity.

This is why Beyonce got paid fifty million dollars to hawk Pepsi, though scientists have yet to link sugary cola to beauty, fitness or a lovely singing voice. It's why a supermodel's thoughts on the world are more valued than a journalist for the New York Times.

There is in fact a strong correlation between celebrity culture and poor social mobility. That is - in a country where being born poor means you'll probably die poor, with the slashing of welfare programs, a political system which favours the wealthy, and college tuitions so high you'll graduate with crushing debt if you graduate at all - people will sooner attach their aspirations to fantasies rather than practical solutions, thus creating a feedback loop where people are less engaged in politics, and politics is less engaged with the people. 

It's no longer about choosing the right or wrong president. It's about finding someone who can repeat your own thoughts back to you in a sexier voice, and the ego trip that comes from knowing you have something in common with the power class. The left is no more immune to this than the right: the Clinton's dynastic politics are also a sign voters would sooner settle for a name brand than do some digging of their own.

Ultimately, the supermodel who shares your beliefs might be as toxic as the billionaire who doesn't.

You might also like: This is Your Brain on Beyonce (Though Lemonade has made it completely obsolete)

*Sidenote, Trevor Noah's interviews with beautiful women are all strangely endearing. Remember when he told Brea Larson he knew "lots of hungry people?" Adorable.

The Perfect Guy

 

So sick of the objectification of men in the media. Its almost like they don't even exist if they aren't jacked and eternally sexually available. Think of the young boys who will measure themselves against the "perfect guys" displayed on this poster like a peace of meat. Jackpot for the ladies, though, amirite?

This is your brain on Beyonce

Note: Lemonade has made this article obsolete. Perhaps it should be renamed, This Was Your Brain on Beyonce...until Formation.

Bey's surprise album was big news last year, and my main point of familiarity with the album was the ubiquitous, "I woke up like this" hashtags and tee shirts that followed in its wake, which I actually thought was a brilliant slice of irony, since no one in history has ever woke up looking like this:

Not even her.

So imagine my surprise when I found that the song it came from was actually a badly misjudged attempt at female empowerment, and my bewilderment that the world at large fell for it.

I'm gonna break the Beygency's gag order and lay this on the line: Beyonce is a mediocre feminist. Let's break down the song in question point by point:

I know when you were little girls
You dreamt of being in my world
Don't forget it, don't forget it
Respect that, bow down bitches (Crown!)
I took some time to live my life
But don't think I'm just his little wife
Don't get it twisted, get it twisted
This my shit, bow down bitches

An excellent point, Bey.  When we were little girls, we aspired to be as beautiful as the woman who sang Crazy in Love, Baby Boy and Deja Vu, videos that were always in heavy rotation on Much Music. She was as pretty as Britney or JLo, but with an actual voice. Apart from Gwen Stefani, the only pop singer who seemed like an actual talent and not a marketing gimmick. Bow down, indeed.

Flawless quotes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

We teach girls to shrink themselves
To make themselves smaller
We say to girls,
"You can have ambition
But not too much
You should aim to be successful
But not too successful
Otherwise you will threaten the man."
Because I am female
I am expected to aspire to marriage
I am expected to make my life choices
Always keeping in mind that
Marriage is the most important
Now marriage can be a source of
Joy and love and mutual support
But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage
And we don't teach boys the same?
We raise girls to see each other as competitors
Not for jobs or for accomplishments
Which I think can be a good thing
But for the attention of men
We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings
In the way that boys are
Feminist: the person who believes in the social
Political, and economic equality of the sexes

I agree with all of that, and good for Bey for putting it out there. Then she sings:

You wake up, flawless
Post up, flawless
Ridin' round in it, flawless
Flossin' on that, flawless
This diamond, flawless
My diamond, flawless
This rock, flawless
My rock, flawless
I woke up like this
I woke up like this
We flawless, ladies tell 'em
I woke up like this
I woke up like this
We flawless, ladies tell 'em
Say I look so good tonight
God damn, God damn
Say I look so good tonight
God damn, God damn, God damn

How did a song about female empowerment become a song about beauty? And why is this woman considered any kind of beacon for critical thinking? The biggest barrier to gender equality is the still persistent belief that a woman's worth is equated with her physical appearance - moreover, that a woman will never have an opportunity to prove her worth unless she is physically attractive.

And all that talk about how we make women compete against each other for men? How we should raise girls to compete for jobs and accomplishments? Could we have got another verse about that, Beyoncé?

Momma taught me good home training
My Daddy taught me how to love my haters
My sister told me I should speak my mind
My man made me feel so God damn fine, I'm flawless!

Physical beauty is the most important thing, repeated like an incantation against evil: Flawless, damn I look good tonight.

It's a bit out of balance, is what I'm saying, especially for a song that's meant to be at the vanguard of a social movement. To which you will respond: You're reading too much into it! It's just one song! To which I say:

(1) If you have a spoken passage by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, you're asking people to read into it. You can't claim to have something important to say, and then ask that no one listen to closely to it.

(2) It's not just one song.

You will never see Beyonce looking less than a 10, even in the video for "Pretty Hurts," the ugly, "no makeup" Beyonce is a knockout in a way that deflates the song somewhat. I'm not saying its a bad song, and can't hold it against her that she's beautiful. Though if this was the video, she would at least be putting her money where her mouth is, and that is something which Bey has for a decade, been categorically unwilling to do.

Recall one of Adichie's (and feminism)'s biggest grievances with patriarchy:

"We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are." This culture encourages women to fantasize about being what men want, rather than having an inner world of their own. It is acceptable to express your sexuality as long as it falls into the narrowly defined category of "attractive" and "not threatening".

And my oh my, how Beyonce's sexuality looks like a male record exec's wet dream.

Remember the video for Baby Boy, where Bey is greased up and dancing on a beach, while Sean Paul (business casual) sings on a bed of naked women?

Remember how that song was supposed to be about a sexy man?

Baby boy you stay on my mind
Fulfill my fantasies
I think about you all the time
I see you in my dreams

This woman's fantasy looks suspiciously like something a straight male record exec would dream up,

Like Where's Waldo for dirty old men

Deja Vu, same thing: She sings "Your sexiness is so appealing I can't let it go," but Beyonce is the only one working her ass off while Jay Z just hangs out like, "Yeah, I tapped that." (Full credit where credit is due, though, she was a way better dancer than Britney or Justin and I don't know why this didn't get more attention at the time)

All their collaborations in a nutshell.

More than ten years later, the videos for Partition and Drunk in Love - both meant to be about desire with the former explicitly setting itself up as a woman's fantasy - is the same old thing. Beyonce looks fabulous, works her ass off, and Jay sits around like Jabba the Hutt (at least in Drunk In Love she kind of looks likes she's having a good time). That's not equality. And it says something about the insidious power of patriarchy when women are taught to fantasize from a man's POV.

If Beyoncé's videos do represent a straight woman's desire, that desire is: "I want to be so beautiful that a famous man wants to fuck me." This is the exact opposite of empowering. It's downright regressive, a slap in the face to all those once-little girls that Beyonce compels to bow down before her, for the supposed gifts she gave to their self esteem.

When "Anacanda" came out, Nicki Minaj made this argument, to V magazine:

If a man did the same video with sexy women in it, no one would care. You’re talking about newspeople who don’t even know anything about hip-hop culture. It’s so disrespectful for them to even comment on something they have no idea about. They don’t say anything when they’re watching the Victoria’s Secret show and seeing boobs and thongs all day. Why? Shame on them. Shame on them for commenting on “Anaconda” and not commenting on the rest of the oversexualized business we’re a part of. 

 A male music video for Anaconda would feature Drake in a thong dancing with a bunch of nearly nude men, and, sorry Nicki, but people would lose their shit. Which is why we'll never see Jay Z dancing scantily clad on a beach while his wife sings about his sex appeal.

Because that would be threatening. That would actually spit in the face of gender inequality, and Beyoncé is not prepared to do that. If she did, the video for Run the World Girls would look like this*:

Yes, that's Madonna. And yes, Beyoncé's gender politics are musty and out of date compared to an act from twenty years ago.

You can't be universally beloved and a revolutionary. Really taking a stand means kissing half your fans goodbye in the hopes that twenty years from now you'll be remembered as a visionary (or, in the case of the lady above, be labelled a slut until you hit fifty and are rechristened "Slutty Granny" - because that's how much people hate women who actually challenge gender roles), and Beyoncé clearly is not ready to make that sacrifice.

Which brings me back to the first lines of "Flawless":

I know when you were little girls
You dreamt of being in my world
Don't forget it, don't forget it
Respect that, bow down bitches

When I was 13 I didn't realize how lopsided the depictions of women in the media were. It never struck me as strange that Naughty Girl and Baby Boy both starred an objectified woman and a fully clothed man. But I did feel small, and ugly, like I didn't deserve to have a voice until I was clear skinned and sexy as the women on TV, because in this culture beauty is still the qualifying step to personhood. Those without it need not apply. So imagine my disgust that a childhood has actually been playing for the other side all along, propagating and profit from the same inequality that causes young girls self esteem to plummet at adolescence, then asks me to bow down and be grateful for it. 

She's part of the problem. And the fans that see in her a beacon of hope: a shining example of how they too can have it all if they Just. Try. Harder, are kidding themselves.

On the upside, though, it's never too late to see why Madonna got excommunicated: 

*And the song would be called "Run the World (Women)" and would not have been written by a group of men.

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The Century Trend

The Public Life of a Private Doll

The Century Trend

The first thing I have to say is everything is going to be all right. It just might take a history lesson to convince you.

Feminists have worked themselves into a lather over the Era of the Asses - From Miley to Minaj to Kim "breaking the internet", all the way to the absolute nadir of modern pop music, Jason Derulo's rancid "Wiggle." Kim Kardashian was modelling everything but clothing in her cover story for Love Magazine's February 2015 issue. Prada sunglasses and a Miu Miu bag couldn't compete with the tits and slit in that stairwell photo, but I'm not worried.

I am, after all, a scholar of fashion, so I know that whenever women's rights take a step forward in the real world, fashion and pop culture icons tend to swing the other way, if only for a while. It's a trend that began in the 1920s after women got the right to vote. No, really. To us in the 21st century, the iconic "flapper" of the twenties looks like a glimpse of joyful rebellion - alongside the ramping up of first wave feminism, the skirts and hair for rebellious young women got shorter, who traded in their corsets for shapeless dresses that were easy to dance in.

But flappers were not vanguards of the suffrage movement. They were notoriously oblivious to social causes and mostly in it for the attention (sound familiar?). To people from that place and time, what they most resembled were little boys. To reiterate, once women were allowed to vote, fashion started dressing them as children. I'm not saying this so that we can get angry at people who lived ninety years ago, but to point out a trend that's still going on. As much as we like to think of fashion and pop culture as being cutting edge, it more often represents a refuge for old ways of thinking to act like everything is normal - are women getting uppity and demanding a vote? Don't worry, they're just rambunctious little children.

Are they demanding equal pay for equal work? Nonsense, they just want to be your little baby doll.

Do I exaggerate?

Every major social achievement for women in the last hundred years has been marked by a regression in fashion. That's twiggy up there, premiere model of the nineteen sixties, a time when Gloria Steinem and the pill gave women a freedom they'd never enjoyed before. There were feminist sit ins at Newsweek and the Ladies Home Journal. Radicals threw maxipads into a trash can at the America pageant beneath a banner proclaiming "Women's Liberation". Mad Men fans know the fights they went through in the workplace, and anyone into fashion also remembers how short the skirts got toward the end of the decade, once they started winning.

High fashion and pop culture have never been a marker for the world we live in, but the world we wished we lived in - or rather, the world that specific tastemakers wished we lived in. While second wave feminism was scaring men and women alike, grown women were once again infantilized by clothing fit for a child. We have twiggy to thank for models who today are so thin they're practically invisible, because when some women started demanding equal work opportunities, the old guard no doubt wished they would disappear altogether.

But women bought those clothes! you might exclaim. That's because feminism scared women too. Having a voice, standing up to men you had always been taught to respect - even today most of us would rather crawl back into our daddy's arms than accuse our boss of sexual harassment, even if deep inside we knew it's our right. I never saw Gloria Steinem in a miniskirt, and in the end it was women like her who made the difference.

So maybe the age of the ass isn't as bad as we think.

Kim Kardashian, Nicki Minaj, and the vastly out of her league Miley Cyrus are delivering a crass form of sexualisation, mistakenly labelled as feminist by people who don't know any better ("It's my body, I should be able to show it off how I like - and if 'how I like' is just a manifestation of ingrained patriarchy,--then screw you for using such big words!"), but in the real world where (most) people live and breathe, things are getting better.

Women still make less than 80 cents on the dollar compared to men, but it's something we're talking about more openly than ever before. The internet may have given a voice to both the best and worst in society, but cyber bullying and sexual abuse of young girls are now less likely to be swept under the rug, largely because of online activism. When Emma Watson made an empowering speech to the United Nations last year, some hackers may have threatened to release nude photos of the actress in retaliation, but the internet as a whole was overwhelmingly on her side. Last year, when Cee Lo Green tweeted, "women who have really been raped REMEMBER" it was met with the proper level of disgust and him being dropped from festival appearances. Twenty years ago, that would never have happened, and not just because there was no twitter - if you want proof of that, consider the decades it took the allegations against Bill Cosby to be taken seriously.

What this all means is that, by and large, women are growing their voices in the digital age, and the haters are becoming more and more of a minority. Knowing that, it was about time that our cultural icons regressed to reassure the masses who aren't quite sure about all this female empowerment going on. The popularity of the Kim Kardashian model of "fashion" - that is, less clothes more attention - is hopefully the last gasp of something ugly, rather than a marker for where society is headed. To the remaining men who live in fear of being called on their leering sexism (and the women who have yet to realize that such leering sexism is a problem), Kim's giant greased up ass, offered forth like a baboon who's presenting, is a symbol of a simpler time, of a femininity that doesn't think, doesn't demand answers, and might as well be made of porcelain, just like Twiggy and the flappers before her.

What, did you think she was a rebel?

Ali LIstens: Back to the Future



When I was younger, a hundred self important VH1 specials told me that music represented our culture in ways that no other artistic medium could. They lied.

Culture has changed a lot in my lifetime. Music has not. As I write the most popular song in the country is "Uptown Funk", a lovely little ditty cobbled together from thirty year old classics like "Jungle Love" and "Give it to me Baby" (Say Whaaaaat?), like the wet dream of an A&R guy from 1985: "Like Prince, but safer." The last few years also gave us "All About That Base", "Blurred Lines" and "Get Lucky", and a bunch more Bruno Mars to help us live in the past.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of pop history or mass culture should know something's askew right now. Pop music as we know it has a pretty short history. It's new enough that some of our grandparents remember its infancy, from Fred Astaire to Elvis Presley to the Beatles and Beyond. Through the decades pop has had two key tenets: It's youth oriented, and its all about novelty.

Those rules apply to almost all mass-consumed products in the 20th century. Novelty is the reason the iPad 2 was offered in different colours, with little else to distinguish it from the previous model. Novelty is the cornerstone of consumerism. And young people are almost always on the receiving end of the these gimmicks, because they have disposable income and no better way to spend their time.

This is the way its supposed to be, the way it has been for most of my life, and my parents' too. Young people feel like they own pop culture, like their parents are squares and their tunes are the music of revolution. Then you hit your mid twenties and realize Barbra Streisand can sing like a motherfucker and maybe mom had okay taste after all.

The wheel goes round and round: Elvis scandalized parents with his fabulous hips, the Beatles made them uncomfortable with their long hair, Zeppelin and the Stones scared them to death with sex, drugs and Satanism. Madonna was a hussy, Rappers were cop killers and the wheels on the bus went round and round. "Parents just don't understand" has been the unwritten rule of popular music for ages.

And yet...

When was the last time anything was truly shocking? The Wrecking Ball video? Anaconda? They're all pretty tame compared to what Prince and Madonna were doing decades ago (okay, fine I'll link to a sexy video if you promise to come right back) , to say nothing of the truly revolutionary spirit of acts like Neil Young or Public Enemy.

Kids these days may loathe the idea of "old" singers staying too long in the spotlight, but they're hypocritical in a way their parents were not:

Elvis sounded nothing like Fred Astaire.
Zeppelin sounded nothing like Frank Sinatra
N.W.A sounded nothing like Marvin Gaye

But

Lady Gaga looks and sounds an awful lot like Madonna, but tamer
Bruno Mars sounds a lot like Prince / Michael / Morris / Rick / insert-funk-legend-here, but more accessible.
Pharell Williams is paying seven million dollars because "Blurred Lines" - the song of the summer of 2013 - sounds virtually indistinguishable from Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give it Up"

But the hate lobbed in the direction of legacy acts (one legacy act in particular) is shockingly wrong footed. Madonna is told to leave the playground she built, because of her age, but to make room for who? Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Miley...all acts that owe her a huge debt and have no interest in building on her legacy, merely reducing it to its simplest moving parts (Sex! Shock! Girlpower!). I'm a millennial with a middle-aged soul, so forgive me for saying anyone who was shocked by Miley's twerking, three decades after Prince sang that he wants to "fuck the taste out of your mouth"  is damn soft.

But its not just music where we see this trend, which points to something much bigger. The rush to reappropriate old properties--from comic books, to movies to television and back again--is running rampant through this culture. Plenty of people complain about how Hollywood isn't offering anything new, but the truth is, these movies, these shows, this music, all of it gets made because the masses are buying them.

You'll hear theorists say that "People like what's familiar". Since when? Wasn't novelty the order of the day for the last five decades? The short answer is to that question is "yes". The long answer involves explaining the rise and fall of the Ford Motor company in the early 20th century, and since you don't really care about that stuff, you just have to trust me.

Speaking of films, what's the first hint that a movie is set in a particular decade? The clothing.
Now can you name any two years separated by two decades whose clothing was so utterly indistinguishable as 2015 and 1995? Bet you a nickel that you can't. 1960s fashion looks nothing like the 1940s or the 1980s. The 1950s are similarly indistinguishable from the 1970s, as the 70's are from the 90's, but that's when it stops. Chunky heels may be out, but I guarantee someone looking through Vogue twenty years from now wouldn't be able to guess for certain what decade we're in.  What has changed, fashion wise, are all throwbacks. "That's so Mad Men" you might say about a new dress, or "So eighties!"

This is a culture curiously divorced from our own moment in time, like none has been in recent memory.

Why?

Because we are afraid.

I may have lied at the top of this article. I said that music didn't reflect culture anymore, what I meant was that music never reflects culture, but cultural fixations. Why are we so obsessed with the past?

Because the present is a goddamn mystery. I'm not talking about dirty politics or poverty or racial divides or environmental destruction. You can find great, popular songs about those things from our parents' era a lot easier than you can from Beyoncé or her contemporaries.

I'm talking about how the internet, and all the technology that lives off it has completely changed the world so quickly we haven't quite adapted to it yet. Social media drives people farther apart, while online pornography is there at the click of a button (fine, here's another sexy video to reward the focus it took to read this far). Everything you ever wanted to see, and some things that you don't but will click on anyway are barking at you from the sidelines of every page you go to. Meanwhile, the things we were taught to hold dear to - friendships, a sense of belonging, even our own identity, has been untethered from reality. These tenets of humanity are strangely intangible in the age of the internet, floating in a digital realm we haven't got a grip on.

We need a sense of control, of belonging, of identity, which this new world order so insidiously inhibits. As a culture, we've gone back into the womb, like a groundhog who saw its own shadow and settled in for very long winter.

"What about the millenials?" you may ask. Most of the kids who love Uptown Funk and Born This Way are too young to be nostalgic for a time before the internet. How does this apply to them?

I'll tell you. It's a simple answer that bodes well for the future of humanity: because those are great songs. Specifically - "Jungle Love" and "Express Yourself" are great songs. And their enduring popularity shows that even as the world around us has exploded, we haven't lost that most basic human emotion that connects us to a great beat.

The Power of Love: or, How I Learned to stop worrying and listen to Springsteen

 

 

My parents owned Born in the USA when I was a kid, but it was on Vinyl so I never heard it played. Our turntable was long since broken by the time I was born. When the music of Bruce Springsteen filled our halls, but it was the sound of Born to Run, Tunnel of Love and the Essential on compact disc (Born to Run had the distinction of being owned on both formats, Darkness, sadly, only vinyl).

Since then, I've been building my Springsteen library, and it wasn't until today that I heard the eighth track on Springsteen's most popular record for the first time.

And lo, came the tears from a dormant part of my brain that I had nearly forgotten existed. A vault of adolescent loneliness and abandonment was breached by a thirty year old song. Such is the power of Springsteen.

Growing up, I had three best friends: The first, was my neighbour, who didn't go to the same school as I did, didn't really have any of the same interests as I did, and whose friendship was based almost entirely on geography. The second, was my best friend from school -- Laura -- who was funny and energetic and strange in all the ways that I was. The third, and most important was my cousin, Victoria. She had a single mother, and no idea who her father was. It seems like she spent other week at my Grandma's house around the block, and consequently we were nearly sisters. There were sleepovers almost every weekend during the school year, and in summers by the lake we took joint responsibility for looking after our unruly younger boy cousins. Thick as thieves.

In high school things changed, and until yesterday I understood these changes solely in terms of how they made me feel about my friends. Best Friend #1 and I drifted apart, starting a little before high school. We never had much in common, so it wasn't really surprising, and I didn't give it much thought.

Friend #2 went to the same high school as I did, but decided early on that I was not cool enough to be her friend, which is baffling still because she was not cool. She was never cool. Our joint un-coolness was what drew us together in elementary school. But, when high school began and it was apparent that I did not represent valuable social real estate she moved on. I remember with striking clarity the day I found myself sitting alone in the cafeteria. It was the first day of a new semester, and  the handful of friends I usually sat with now had a different lunch than I. Laura approached and I, breathing a sigh of relief, waved to her. I wouldn't have to sit alone after all, thank goodness. She saw me, then pretended she didn't. I was hurt, angry and I never tried to engage her socially after that, except perhaps a little bit some mornings, when my mom drove her to school! I had all kinds of opinions about her after that.

Friend #3 --the best friend, the family, the close-in-age sister I never had, topped them all for cruelty. She'd had a difficult life, in case you didn't pick up on that in her introduction as the bastard child who spent every other week at her grandmothers. Her mother was sick a lot, and depressed. Her family moved out of the city when she was just about to hit adolescence, finding herself in a brand spanking new subdivision where every house looks alike and she had to make new friends. When she did find out who her biological father was, it was a major disappointment. Any one of those factors would be enough to make a teen act out. Together, they were an H-bomb on her self esteem, and she acted out in ways we never would have thought possible - Stealing, lying, running away - the most egregious act of betrayal was falsely accusing her loving step-father of beating her, and taking that accusation to the authorities.

I can trace the trajectory of my feelings for her, like lines on a map: from concern, to anger, to pity, to relief, and finally to forgiveness (this is over a ten year period - and I'm happy to report that all's well that ends well and I'm going to be her maid of honour next year). I can do that for friends #1 and 2 also.

But until yesterday I never gave a thought to how all of this made me feel about myself. Which is where Springsteen comes in. Bobby Jean tells the story of a boy learning his best and only friend has left town without saying goodbye. "I wish I could have called. I wish I could have talked to you, not to change your mind, just to say good bye, Bobby Jean." Listening to it was like meeting my younger self, for the first time.

I spent a lot of time thinking about other people - how they were selfish, or stupid, or whatever - but I never had the perspective to see myself for what they had made me - alone. As far as I could tell, I was still the same person. It was them who had changed - who had sold out or betrayed me, who were selfish or superficial, but I never appreciated just what it did to me, how important it was to have one close friend, how empty we become when they're gone, and we're listening to the radio alone.

Something about this song took me back - A place, a time, a fully realized moment that I thought was lost to me, but got the chance to revisit. I listened to Bruce Springsteen and met myself.

This is why love music. This is why I pay money for music, and rant about how the industry has taken over the art. This is why I'm a true believer. If you're not, I feel sorry for you.