Master Feed : The Atlantic

The British Monarchy's Instagram Feed Will Make You Glad to Be an American
May the Force Be Nerdy: Star Wars Just Made a Contribution to Science
The Songs Otis Redding Could Have Sung
Rape Victim's Mother Wins Compensation For Unjust Labor Camp Detention
In India, Students in a Region Marred by Lunch Poisonings Remain Hopeful
Get Ready: 3D Printing Will Explode Next Year, When Key Patents Expire
Cannabis for Elders: A Precarious State
Prediction: Royal Baby Fans Will Spend $238 Million on Souvenirs
Why the Hezbollah Blacklisting Is Pointless
Meet the 'Chengguan': China's Violent, Hated Local Cops
My Father Once Tried to Take Me Away From My Mother Because She's Gay
A Graffiti Love Letter to Brooklyn
Is China now Inhospitable to the Foreign Business Community?
Obama, Race, and Justice
'A Skillful Horsewoman': A Brief History of Royal Childhoods
Study: 'Anti-Aging' Antioxidant Actually Seems to Undo Effects of Exercise
Late-Night Comedy Roundup: Snowden's Next Target—Pro Wrestling?
The Melting Arctic: Northern Sea Route Shipping Has Already Quadrupled Last Summer's Record
The Huge Threat to Capitalism That Republicans Are Ignoring
How Helen Thomas Rescued the White House Press Corps From Irrelevance
Life in the New Kabul, With Soccer, Schools, and Taliban Attacks
Romanticizing the Villains of the Civil War
The News vs. The Newsroom: Did the Show Get Occupy Wall Street Right?
President Obama: Pitch Perfect on Trayvon, Yet Silent on Abdulrahman
Did The Conjuring Really Deserve an 'R' Rating Just for Being Scary?

The British Monarchy's Instagram Feed Will Make You Glad to Be an American

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 03:34 PM PDT

No one does pomp and ceremony quite like the royals.

A new heir to the British throne was born today, and while one of course wishes nothing but the best to any new parents, the media attention and antiquated pageantry surrounding the birth of a son who does not even have a formal last name to a couple who will carry on a tradition that one's own country repudiated at its founding cannot help but occasion a moment of reflection. Namely: What the hell? We are a republic, kiddos!

Fortunately, the British Monarchy runs an Instagram feed that is so wildly at odds with the contemporary media aesthetic that carries it to us that its seems almost charmingly fusty. And it is yet also the sort of thing you can look at and be relieved to not find in your own country. Some examples:

The Queen's Press Secretary and a footman post the official announcement of the birth of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's baby on an easel in Buckingham Palace forecourt: The Queen's Swan Marker examines a swan at the annual Swan Upping: The Queen waves to waiting crowds and departs the Thistle Foundation in Edinburgh, drawing Holyrood Week 2013 to a close:

Regimental Mascot Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders L Cpl Cruachan Howe Barracks #BritishMonarchy:

May the Force Be Nerdy: Star Wars Just Made a Contribution to Science

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 03:30 PM PDT

Just northwest of Tozeur, Tunisia, lays a barren stretch of desert that's home to great swaths of sand and not much else. As the wind whips its way through that sand, it gives rise to large, crescent-shaped structures known as barchans. Barchans are something like movable mountains: they tend to migrate in the same direction as the desert winds, going, literally, where the wind takes them. Which has made them something of an enigma to scientists: How do you measure the movement of sand upon sand upon sand? How do you know how far the barchans are traveling when it's so hard to tell where the mounds end and the ground begins?

Enter George Lucas. Because the land just northwest of Tozeur, Tunisia, it turns out, is also home to the set that served as the backdrop for Mos Espa, the early home of the young Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. And the site, according to a collective of scientists who have researched the matter, "now lies between the arms of a large 'pudgy' barchan dune."

So those scientists did what any good scientists would do: they put the set to use. For, you know, scientific purposes. They used the set's buildings -- the fading architecture of Tatooine -- as fixed geographic points. From there, they were able to measure the movement of the dunes with an assist from imagery provided by Google Earth. The team, using Mos Espa as their reference, compared satellite imagery from 2002, 2004, 2008, and 2009, rounding out those images with in-person visits to the site.

And their findings, just published in a paper for the journal Geomorphology? Over the stretch of time they measured, the dunes went from being about 459 feet away from Mos Espa to being, now, only about 33 feet away from the fictional city. The dunes, in other words, seem to move about 50 feet every year -- which makes the barchans of Earth, it seems, about 10 times faster-moving than similar barchans on Mars.

And which also leads, it seems, to a paradox: the deserts of Earth could soon be swallowing the buildings of Tatooine. The place that was home to a fictional Force may soon be devoured by one that is all too real.

The Songs Otis Redding Could Have Sung

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 12:44 PM PDT

Wikimedia / Billboard

Death came too soon for too many of the 1960s' musical talents, but there's a special tragedy to Otis Redding. When Redding's Beechcraft H18 airplane crashed into Lake Monona in Madison, Wisconsin on December 10, 1967, the singer and songwriter was only 26 years old; Redding died at a younger age than Jimi Hendrix, than Janis Joplin, than Brian Jones, than Jim Morrison. That fact becomes even more remarkable when we consider how prolific Redding was. He scored his first national hit, "These Arms of Mine," in 1962, at the age of 21, and by the time of his death he had placed 20 more singles into the Billboard charts. In the two years after his passing he would place an additional 10.

All of them and more can be found on Shout! Factory's newly released Complete Stax / Volt Singles, a three-disc set that collects every Redding performance released on 45rpm by the legendary Memphis label where he spent almost the entirety of his career (Redding released two singles before arriving at Stax, "Shout Bamalama" and "Gettin' Hip," neither of which charted). The Shout! box is by no means Redding's complete recordings--many a terrific album track go uncollected here--but, as with most musicians of his era, singles were the driving medium of Redding's career. The Complete Stax / Volt Singles is testament to an artistic journey that ended too soon but was nonetheless extraordinary for its scope, ambition, and consistent brilliance.

Like all of the greatest singers, Otis Redding was utterly unique. He lacked the technical virtuosity of his idol, Sam Cooke--another '60s musician whose death came much too early--but made up for it with flawless taste and musical intellect. Despite his well-earned reputation for incendiary live performances--most famously on display in his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, six months before his death--Redding was never the frenzied pyrotechnician of later "soul man" parodies. In fact, his greatest gift may have been his command of restraint and understatement. The best singers are also masters of silence: The moments that Ray Charles doesn't sing--when he's just about to sing, just finished singing, or taking a breath (especially when he's taking a breath)--can be as electrifying as any notes coming out of his mouth. Otis Redding understood and used this power as well as anyone. Critic Dave Marsh once wrote that Redding's performance of "I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)" sounds "as though each line is coming to him only the instant before he sings it, quavering notes as if in the grip of an undeniably exquisite passion that must be consummated--now!" a description that itself dwells in pauses, anticipation, the thrill of ensuing discovery.

For all his illusions of spontaneity, Redding was an intricate and deeply cerebral singer who approached his performances with the attention of a great songwriter, which of course he was--shortly before his death he saw one of his compositions, "Respect," become one of the biggest hits in history at the hands of Aretha Franklin ("That little girl stole my song," Redding is said to have remarked, with appropriate awe). Even as a relatively callow 21-year-old on "These Arms of Mine," he delivers the song with a cool and loving precision, carefully while never cautiously. It's a studied performance in the best sense, a precociously gifted artist performing his craft with the highest seriousness.

"Dock of the Bay" is another thing entirely, a song about homesickness that Redding turns into something elemental, existential. It is personal, bold, and warming. And written and performed by a man who was only 26 years old.

The Complete Stax / Volt Singles also doubles as a pretty great repository of Booker T. and the MGs' greatest hits. The legendary Stax house band--featuring keyboardist Booker T. Jones, guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Donald "Duck" Dunn, and drummer Al Jackson, Jr.--played on nearly everything that came out of Soulsville, U.S.A. in the 1960s, but they harbored special affection for Redding and often seemed to put something extra into his sessions. "Direct Me," a posthumous b-side released in 1968, is marvelously limber, with the bass line bouncing and slithering off the drums, Cropper playing country-blues guitar fills against Jones's whispering, churchy organ. It is nearly impossible for a band to sound better than this.

Redding's most famous song and the one that would have catapulted him to superstardom, "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay," was released a month after his death and reached No. 1 on the Pop charts, his only single to achieve that position. "Dock of the Bay" is an iconic piece of music whose historical circumstances have often caused it to be misheard. With its laconically beautiful melody and themes of distance and loss it's tempting to hear the song as a prescient elegy, one of pop music's great swansongs.

But "Dock of the Bay" wasn't an ending, or shouldn't have been. Rather, it was a beginning. According to the song's co-author, Steve Cropper, Redding was obsessed with the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (which had come out weeks before Redding wrote the song), and was looking to "change his style." And "Dock of the Bay" is a remarkable turning point in Redding's catalogue: By 1967 he had mastered the barn-burning dance number and the candlelit love ballad, but "Dock of the Bay" is another thing entirely, a song about homesickness that Redding turns into something elemental, existential. It's been covered by artists ranging from Bob Dylan to Sammy Hagar--understandable considering it's one of the best songs ever written--but no rendition approaches the power and depth of Redding's original. It is personal, bold, warm and warming, completely magnificent. And written and performed by a man who was only 26 years old.

When we consider the remarkable productivity of Redding's brief career, it's easy to think that he died in his prime. But the greater likelihood is that he may have died before his prime--a staggering suggestion considering that he was already one of the best musicians of his generation. If Otis Redding hadn't gotten on that plane one night almost 46 years ago, everything since might have sounded a bit different. The Complete Stax / Volt Singles is a nice reminder that for the time that we had him, everything sounded pretty great as it was.

Rape Victim's Mother Wins Compensation For Unjust Labor Camp Detention

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 12:02 PM PDT

Tang Hui (Sina Weibo)

Almost half a year after suing local authorities for sending her to a labor camp to keep her from petitioning for justice, Tang Hui, also known as the "petitioning mother," finally won her appeal on July 15 in a case against the Yongzhou labor camp authorities in Hunan province, south-central China.

According to China's state-run media, the Hunan Provincial People's High Court in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, has ordered the Yongzhou labor camp authorities to pay Tang -- who had petitioned for justice for her 11-year-old daughter after the girl was raped by seven men -- 2,941 RMB (about US $478) for "infringing upon [Tang's] personal freedoms" and "causing mental damage" during her nine-day detention in the labor camp.

MORE FROM TLN

Earlier this year, a lower court dismissed Tang's request for compensation because it claimed she had been upsetting social stability through her petitioning.

Although the success of Tang's appeal should not have been a surprise given existing law, as one of Tang's lawyer's, Pu Zhiqiang, pointed out, it still came as a surprise to many who were following the case. Even in the eyes of a vice-chief of a local court in Hubei province, who chose to remain anonymous, Tang's chances of winning her case were slim based on public documents provided by the Yongzhou labor camp authorities. "The result of this case is due in large part to the fact that the re-education through labor system is about to be abolished, and the high court has also taken Tang's sufferings into consideration," the vice-chief noted.

The government is willing to spend 10,000 RMB on 'stability maintenance,' but not to offer an apology to a suffering mother. The 2,000 RMB was more like charity than compensation

Perhaps that is why the ruling was widely welcomed by Chinese domestic media, who commented that it meant much to both Tang herself and to everyone affected by the re-education through labor, or laojiao, system. The People's Daily, the mouthpiece of China's Communist Party, wrote on its verified Sina Weibo account, "Though Tang's demand for a written apology was not upheld, and the compensation was just symbolic, the final verdict at least offered [positive] feedback [to Tang Hui]."

However, reactions were more lukewarm among China's Internet users, as microblogger @平菇爱豆腐 said, "I just feel sad. To me, the ruling is just the way things should be, but now it is treated like a huge success. What a 'harmonious' society!"

In fact, instead of paying tribute to the Hunan High Court's decision, most Chinese Internet users have expressed disappointment that the court denied Tang's demand for a written apology. User @朱中华律师-国际工程律师 wrote, "Apologizing in court instead of publicly is inappropriate. It's not like you're doing something wrong, why would you need to cover it up? [But] in order to counteract the effect on the victim and to show sincerity, [relevant authorities] should make a public apology via the media."

Other responses went further. User @风无形QQ remarked, "As far as I am concerned, Tang Hui did not win her case, as her request for a written apology was denied. Even if it could be called a success, I would say the price she paid was too high." User @淡出江湖2950280303 wrote, "Tang's victory is no cause for happiness. The government is willing to spend 10,000 RMB on 'stability maintenance,' but not to offer an apology to a suffering mother. The 2,000 RMB was more like charity than compensation."

Tang was originally sentenced to 18 months of re-education through labor at a camp in Yongzhou last year for repeatedly campaigning for harsher punishments against the seven men who kidnapped, raped, and forced her then 11-year-old daughter into prostitution. Local authorities argued that her petitioning was "causing serious disruption to the workplace and social order, and having devastating social influence." After her sentencing led to public backlash, the local authorities released Tang one week after she was sent to the labor camp .

At that time, Tang's release gave hope to many Chinese people following the case that public opinion could make a difference and that the laojiao system might indeed be facing abolition. Yet the ruling by Hunan's High Court has not inspired such hope this time around.

Some people believed that Tang's victory highlights "the imperfections within the system." As Jiang Jianxiang, the head of the Yongzhou Re-education Through Labor Committee, stated, Tang's verdict does not mean that the laojiao system or the local authorities' decision to sentence Tang to a labor camp were illegal. The case may not be any indication that the notorious laojiao system is coming to an end.

For Tang Hui herself however, the verdict was not dramatic, joyful, or regrettable, and it did not have much to do with the laojiao system or other big-picture issues. After years of petitioning and campaigning for justice for her daughter, the 40-year-old mother simply viewed it as an end to her petitioning journey and a chance to "return to life as an ordinary person," saying: "I finally won the case after years of petitioning; it was too exhausting."

Perhaps it was user @陈军___CJ who truly understood Tang:

It has never been about the money. It was just that what she needed to do as well as those who surrounded her required money. In her later pursuits, Tang had no choice. She would have chosen a normal life if she could have, so those who are following Tang's case and surrounding her please leave Tang alone, let her choose for herself and figure out what she really wants

This post also appears at Tea Leaf Nation, an Atlantic partner site.

In India, Students in a Region Marred by Lunch Poisonings Remain Hopeful

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 11:33 AM PDT

A school girl holds a container to receive her free mid-day meal, distributed by a government-run primary school, in the eastern Indian state of Bihar on July 19, 2013. (Adnan Abidi/Reuters)

On a 2011 reporting trip to visit schools in Bihar, India's poorest state, one scene in particular stuck in my mind. After a touring a slum neighborhood on the outskirts of the state's capital city, Patna, my contact there, Sunita Singh, of the Education Development Center, drove me past a small one-room schoolhouse that served the children who lived crammed in the huts and shabby apartment buildings lining a nearby railway. It was a rickety structure with a dirt floor and thatched roof and walls. It looked like it a strong breeze could knock it down.

I had been scheduled to interview the principal at the school and talk to the students there later in the week. But it was the beginning of the monsoon season and it turned out the building was as fragile as it appeared. Before I could return, a torrential rain came through and destroyed the roof. The school was shuttered until it could be fixed.

The news about the nearly two dozen children who were fatally poisoned by contaminated school lunches in Bihar on July 16 was an even more extreme and horrifying example of the monumental obstacles India faces as it tries to reform its education system.

The country's economic and political future largely depends on improving the quality of life and the productivity of kids in places like Bihar. With this in mind, in 2009 the country passed a right to education law, which, for the first time, gave children from ages 6 to 14 the right to a "free and compulsory elementary education at a neighborhood school," meaning a school within a couple of miles of their home. School buildings went up across the country, and the free lunch program became an important incentive for getting impoverished children to show up.

Bihar is one of the main target areas for the reforms. The state is one of India's poorest and also one of its most populous. Indian census numbers show Bihar's population is exploding, with a growth rate of 25 percent. There were 19 million children under the age of 6 in 2011, or 18 percent of the population, and nearly all of them live in rural areas.

In addition to free lunch, girls in rural areas of the state are also given bicycles to further boost the likelihood that they'll come to school. (The female literacy rate in Bihar was just 46 percent in 2011, according to the Indian census.)

The reforms are making a difference, local officials and education advocates say. In Bihar, "almost 50 percent of students drop out before fifth grade," said Singh. "But before, they didn't even enroll." The 2012 Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), an Indian NGO, found that just 4 percent of the state's children were out of school. In 2005, it was nearly 14 percent.

There is still a long way to go before India reaches the fairly modest goals of the new law, though. As the poisonings and the flimsy school building in Bihar show, the school system is still struggling to ensure basic safety, meaning quality often takes a back seat. ASER found that just 43 percent of rural schools were meeting the law's requirements for student-pupil ratios--two trained teachers per 60 students. Even when schools have enough teachers, those teachers are routinely absent . In Bihar, the report found that 16 percent of students in the equivalent of third grade couldn't recognize letters. A third could read their letters, but couldn't read words. Eleven percent of these students couldn't recognize the numbers one through nine, and a third couldn't recognize numbers higher than 10.

In addition to its goals for improving elementary and secondary education, India has ambitious plans for its higher education sector. Bihar is experiencing a building boom of new universities and colleges, including plans for a new international university meant to draw students and faculty from around the world .

While I was in Bihar, visiting new state-of-the-art facilities and talking to optimistic administrators, I talked to others who wondered, "Who will go to these schools?" Given the still dire situation in the elementary grades, it remains, two years later, a very good question.

Still, there are lessons to be learned from India's efforts to improve its education system. The problems of Indian schools can make America's debates over charter schools and standardized testing seem petty. The growing achievement gaps between the poor and affluent in the U.S. are dwarfed by the even wider divides between wealthy and poor Indians. But although its problems seem overwhelming--endemic corruption, high levels of debilitating poverty and vast numbers of children needing help--India has made huge investments in education and is making significant, if slow, progress toward its goals.

And despite the frustrations and disappointments, there is also a lot of hope. The appetite for education in Bihar is ravenous.

On another day during my visit to Bihar, I visited an education program for Muslim children run by a local nonprofit organization. In the state's Muslim community, which is both large and "steeped in poverty," according to a 2004 report by local researchers, girls are often discouraged from attending school. Many stay at home and do piecework to support their families. The nonprofit had set up its programs to provide them more flexibility than the regular public schools do--the girls could come during part of the day and practice their numbers and letters, and spend the rest of the day working.

At one of the nonprofit's centers, small children sat in circles on the floor hunched over workbooks in Urdu, Hindi, and English. They were receiving extra tutoring from college student volunteers while regular classes were out. But among them were two teenagers, Nazia and Tazia Hassan, who had spent their elementary school years making saris.

Their father was poor, they said, and had depended on their contribution to get food on the table. Times had changed, though, and the girls said he had begun to see the value of an education. Tazia, 14, said that her goal was to eventually become a doctor. Nazia, 16, had vaguer plans, but thought she might try college someday. "No one will value you if you're not educated," she said in Urdu through a translator. "I want to go as far as possible."

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Get Ready: 3D Printing Will Explode Next Year, When Key Patents Expire

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 11:28 AM PDT

Current 3D printers are cheap, but compared to where we're going, they're as Pong is to the iPhone. (AP)

Here's what's holding back 3D printing, the technology that's supposed to revolutionize manufacturing and countless other industries: patents. In February 2014, key patents that currently prevent competition in the market for the most advanced and functional 3D printers will expire, says Duann Scott, design evangelist at 3D-printing company Shapeways.

These patents cover a technology known as "laser sintering," the lowest-cost 3D-printing technology. Because of its high resolution in all three dimensions, laser sintering can produce goods that can be sold as finished products.

Whenever someone talks about 3D printing revolutionizing manufacturing, they're talking about the kinds of goods produced by, for example, the industrial-grade 3D printing machines used by Shapeways. The company used by countless industrial designers, artists and entrepreneurs who can't afford their own 3D laser sintering printers, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars each.

A huge drop in price and a flood of Chinese 3D printers

Older models of 3D printers are already pouring out of China. (Xinhua)

Once the key patents on 3D printing via laser sintering expire, we could see huge drop in the price of these devices, says Scott. This isn't just idle speculation; when the key patents expired on a more primitive form of 3D printing, known as fused deposition modeling, the result was an explosion of open-source FDM printers that eventually led to iconic home and hobbyist 3D printer manufacturer Makerbot. And Makerbot was recently acquired by 3D-printing giant Stratasys for about $400 million in stock, plus a potential $200 million stock bonus. That acquisition was a homecoming of sorts for Makerbot; Stratasys was founded by Charles Hull, who invented 3D printing via FDM, the very technology on which Makerbot was based.

Within just a few years of the patents on FDM expiring, the price of the cheapest FDM printers fell from many thousands of dollars to as little as $300. This led to a massive democratization of hobbyist-level 3D printers and injected a huge amount of excitement into the nascent movement of "Makers," who manufacture at home on the scale of one object at a time.

A similar sequence involving the lifting of intellectual property barriers, a rise in competition, and a huge drop in price is likely to play out again in laser deposition 3D printers, says Shapeways' Scott. "This is what happened with FDM," he says. "As soon as the patents expired, everything exploded and went open-source, and now there are hundreds of FDM machines on the market. An FDM machine was $14,000 five years ago and now it's $300."

Many of those inexpensive 3D printers are being manufactured in--where else?--China. In addition to a thriving home-grown industry in 3D printers, in 2012 China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology launched an initiative to fund 10 research centers devoted to 3D printing, at a cost of 200 million yuan ($32 million).

Disruptive implications for industry and the democratization of distributed manufacturing

Copies of famous works of art are just the beginning. (AP/Cosmo Wenman)

One thing a lot of observers don't understand about 3D printing is that not all 3D printing technologies are created equal. The revolution in manufacturing that was supposed to come with cheap, desktop 3D printers hasn't materialized because, frankly, the models they produce are basically novelties, handy for giving you a feel for what something will look like in three dimensions, but not really usable for creating prototypes that can be directly translated into molds for mass production, and certainly not usable for creating finished goods.

With the expiration of patents on laser sintering 3D printing, however, all of that is about to change. Currently, designers who want to go from idea to finished product in a matter of hours, and create finished products to sell to the public--like these accessories for Google Glass--have to order 3D prints from a company like Shapeways. The problem is, Shapeways' services are in such demand that it takes two weeks to get a finished product from the company, which is hardly the future of instant manufacturing that 3D printing was supposed to enable.

One of Shapeways' problems is that the company can't buy enough advanced 3D printers (the laser-sintering kind) to keep up with demand. This is because 3D Systems, the company that makes the models that Shapeways uses, has a 12- to 18-month waitlist for its printers. Cheap laser-sintering 3D printers of the sort made by Formlabs, which sells a desktop laser-sintering 3D printer for $3,300, could finally give people the ability to manufacture (plastic) parts of the same quality as those mass-produced through traditional means, such as injection molding. (Formlabs got around the patent issue by first getting sued by and then licensing the IP of 3D Systems, which controls the key patents that are set to expire.)

Or, if you believe Duann Scott, people will continue to use services like those of his company so that they can get even higher quality 3D prints, and in larger quantities--and, potentially, much faster than the current turnaround time of two weeks. All of this means that the release of these patents could be an important step in getting us to the future of mass customization and distributed manufacturing that we were promised.

Cannabis for Elders: A Precarious State

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 11:24 AM PDT

A collection of antique medicine bottles, come containing ingredients such as opium and cannabis that were later outlawed (Reed Saxon/AP)

Margo Bauer was desperate. Dealing with chronic nausea and frequent bouts of vomiting -- both attributed to her multiple sclerosis -- the retired nurse was constantly exhausted and in pain. That was, until she attended an informational meeting where she was introduced to medical marijuana.

Under California's Medical Marijuana Program, she received a medical marijuana card and now legally grows her own plant at a Southern California assisted living facility where she lives with her husband who suffers from Alzheimer's. She smokes a rolled joint occasionally, which she says keeps her nausea at bay, and her pain lifted to the point that she joined an all-female synchronized swimming team, the Aquadettes.

Bauer, now 75, has also become an outspoken advocate for medical marijuana use among seniors and was instrumental in starting a collective at her assisted living facility.

"I carry a little container with a rolled cigarette," she said, "and if I have nausea I know that it is because I haven't taken enough pot."

Every administrator with whom she spoke several facilities was under the impression that cannabis is illegal and they would lose their state license if they allowed it as an alternative symptom relief for clients.

While California remains at the forefront of the country's tumultuous relationship with the marijuana industry, medical marijuana usage is on the rise amongst seniors like Bauer.

Ailments ranging from chemotherapy side effects, arthritis, glaucoma, chronic pain and even malnutrition are being treated with cannabis, a promising alternative for seniors who are increasingly susceptible to the dangerous side effects and growing dependency of multiple prescription medications. The fastest growing population in the U.S. also comprises a significant portion of medical marijuana users, amounting to as much as 50 percent, according to Kris Hermes of Americans for Safe Access, the nation's largest member-based medical marijuana advocate group.

But as many of these baby boomers move into assisted living facilities, questions arise on the use of medical marijuana behind their doors. Muddied by its illegal status at the federal level, social stigma, and often hesitant attitudes of administrators who in some cases fear losing funding for allowing a controlled substance on their property, medical marijuana presents a list of challenges for seniors and the people who care for them.

In a state that enacted the first medical marijuana voter initiative in the U.S., the group that stands to perhaps benefit the most from medical marijuana has the hardest time gaining access to it.

For the marijuana advocates working to change perceptions of a substance classified as a Schedule 1 Drug, reaching the seniors in assisted living facilities has been an ongoing, lengthy struggle.

Sue Taylor, the senior outreach coordinator for Harborside Health Center in Oakland, Calif., the largest marijuana dispensary in the country and subject of several federal lawsuits, had difficulties with assisted living facilities and nursing homes for years.

"They wouldn't let me in, because they were afraid of losing funding and getting put out of the building for even smoking," she said.

After several failed attempts, she changed her approach and teamed up with local organizations while meeting seniors at health fairs. She now arranges tours of Harborside for seniors and administrators, giving them a firsthand glimpse of the dispensary to answer questions and quell misconceptions.

She's starting to see a change in administrator's willingness to discuss medical marijuana for their residents, albeit slowly. The mother of three and former educator thinks a major part of why her message has been effective has to do with her approach.

"I'm harmless. I don't walk around with weed leaves on my shirt and weed earrings," she said. "I want cannabis to take its rightful place as a spiritual component and medicine."

Taylor's initial experience with administrators is echoed by other medical marijuana advocates.

According to a Los Angeles-based marijuana advocate who wished to remain anonymous, every administrator with whom she spoke several facilities was under the impression that cannabis is illegal and they would lose their state license if they allowed it as an alternative symptom relief for clients.

Most simply refused to discuss medical cannabis past this initial misconception, she said.

California's Compassionate Use Act, passed by voters in 1996 and its 2004 amendment, Senate Bill 420 was written in part specifically about seniors and their caretakers operating within the confines of the law, however.

The initiative included health care facilities, residential care facilities for elders, hospices or home health agencies on a list of primary caregivers allowed to administer medical marijuana without legal ramifications.

But the procedures on marijuana's medical usage in California care facilities still remain vague and vary from agency to agency -- assisted living facilities fall under state jurisdiction, at the Department of Social Services (DSS) Community Care Licensing Division. Specific guidelines on medical marijuana do not yet exist.

"There are no specific regulations to medical marijuana but there are specific regulations related to the use of prescription medicine and how medicine is distributed," said Michael Weston, spokesperson for the DSS.

"I think you're just beginning to see a realization in the senior community about how valuable cannabis is to seniors."

Nursing homes and hospices on the other hand, are regulated at a federal level by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, leaving them at a precarious legal crossroad as many receive federal funding through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The vague and often nonexistent guidelines, as well as the perceived legal implications of a patient's desire to use medical marijuana have caused problems.

Molly Davies, the vice president of the Elder Abuse Prevention and Ombudsman Services Wise & Healthy Aging in Los Angeles says that as cases in L.A. involving medical marijuana in skilled nursing and assisted living facilities have increased, many residents who use it are subject to eviction, despite having medical marijuana cards.

This issue has been an evolving one, Davies said. Lack of regulatory oversight has left those interested in implementing medical marijuana in a trial by error phase, where figuring out dosage and potential harmful side effects is largely done without any established guidelines.

Administrators are also facing myriad questions: Where will it be stored? How do patients know how much to take, and who is going to administer it if they can't do it themselves? Since smoking isn't allowed in most assisted living facilities, how can medical marijuana be used, especially if it infringes on another patient's rights? Who will be able to get it for residents?

"We can't ask a facility staff member to go in and purchase on behalf of a resident, so what we recommend is finding a collective that will deliver if the individual is unable to purchase it on their own," Davies said. Stuck between maintaining the rights of residents and following regulatory guidelines, the non-profit agency faces a conflict and, Davies added, cannot instruct facilities to violate federal law.

Joel S. Goldman is an attorney who exclusively represents assisted living facilities in California. On average for the past 2 to 3 years, he has received a call a month from a client with a medical marijuana question. Goldman says that when it comes down to it, the facility is owned by his clients, which gives them the final say on what they allow on their premises.

There's also the fact that the unregulated nature of marijuana circumvents established protocol for handling medications in assisted living facilities.

"The rules for storing medication, with respect to labeling, dosage, destruction of expired meds -- none of these normal rules really work very well when the medication is marijuana," Goldman said.

He suggests that facilities looking to accommodate their residents can request exceptions from DSS and ultimately implement more individual care plans. According to Weston, DSS does consider any requests for regulatory exception, including those involving medical marijuana on a case by case basis, "if the intent can be met by a proposed alternative," he said.

Despite these workarounds, the topic is still a fearful one to broach. Even when facilities incorporate medical marijuana in their programs, they're often staying as low key as possible to not attract extra attention and minimize the possibility of facing criminal sanctions.

Several administrators running California facilities who had allowed residents to use medical marijuana, or at least considered it, declined being interviewed for this article, stating that they didn't want to draw attention from the federal government which could lead to possible charges.

But Liz McDuffie, founder of the Medical Cannabis Caregivers Directory in Pasadena, is ambitiously facilitating an educational endeavor familiarizing facility administrators with the benefits of medical marijuana, all within state law.

McDuffie, who has been a marijuana educator and advocate for decades, received approval from DSS in 2011 to teach a class under the department's continuing education program for Adult Residential Facility Administrator Licensing and Re-Certification.

The class, titled "California's Medical Marijuana Program As It Relates to Adult Residential Care Facility Access" provides four hours of credit toward the Continuing Education requirement for facility administrators and covers how Title 22 Regulations, which govern State Licensed Residential Care Facilities, support the ARF Client's participation in California's Medical Marijuana Program.

The class teaches administrators delivery, ingestion and storage options as well as how to recognize legal marijuana collectives and cooperatives within compliance of state and local law.

Though it is aimed at ARFs, whose residents range from 18 to 55 years of age, it's a first step towards progressing to reach seniors in assisted living facilities, nursing homes and hospice care.

But, according to McDuffie there's something bigger at play than just unwillingness of administrators: medical marijuana cannot reach seniors living in assisted living facilities until it's fully regulated.

"You got to give them something clean and safe," she said. "That's why we put in place agencies to protect the consumer. We don't have anything in our industry to address what we're giving to use as medicine. If no one is interested in how to regulate the product, it's not going in healthcare facilities."

Harborside's founder and marijuana trailblazer Steve DeAngelo, whose focus has been connecting medical marijuana with seniors for the last few years fielded refusals from every single laboratory he approached in the Bay Area to test cannabis. With two partners, he developed his own analytical lab, where every bud now passes through before being made available to patients to ensure quality.

Despite the limitations that the unfettered nature of marijuana presents, such as communicating its medicinal benefits with resistant administrators, DeAngelo remains positive about seniors taking the helm to address the challenges between them and medical marijuana. He's right. The Silver Tour, a first of its kind non-profit was founded by Robert Platshorn, one of the biggest marijuana smugglers of the 1970s who spent 30 years in federal prison. The cross-country platform is working to specifically educate seniors in the U.S. about the medicinal values of cannabis and has gained significant ground over the last three years.

"I think you're just beginning to see a realization in the senior community about how valuable cannabis is to seniors - they themselves over the course of the next few years will be vocal and effective advocates for changing cannabis laws," DeAngelo said.

This story was made possible through the Metlife Journalists in Aging Fellows program, a collaboration of New America Media and the Gerontological Society of America.

Prediction: Royal Baby Fans Will Spend $238 Million on Souvenirs

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 10:41 AM PDT

The circus surrounding the coming child of the U.K's Prince William and Kate Middleton isn't just a global womb-watch. It's also estimated to bring $380 million into the U.K.'s economy. And even though the country's economic growth has ticked up a bit of late, Britain could still use the help.

Where's this stimulus to come from, exactly? First, there are the parties. Joshua Bamfield, director of the Center for Retail Research, told Reuters that he estimates 4.8 million people will spend 62 million pounds on booze and 25 million pounds on food at parties to celebrate the royal infant. Bamfield also expects tourism to kick up in the months surrounding the birth, as it did by 13 percent in April. And some of that money will, as Bamfield told CNN, be spent on Keeping Up With the Windsors, as he expects more people to spend more on their own personal babies, as "they will want their baby in the local area to be up-market as well."

But most of all? The commemorative kitsch. So, so much kitsch.

Bamfield estimates that 156 million pounds will be spent on royal baby souvenirs. That's about $238 million. And who wouldn't want to spend his or her hard-earned money on the troves of commemorative ephemera? Especially when you can get stuff like this at least mildly demonic baby doll:

Or these morning sickness bags from Lydia Leith:

And don't forget, some of that seemingly ridiculous royal baby china may one day gain significant value as a collector's item.

There is some skepticism here, however. Mothercare, a U.K. baby-goods retailer, has said it doesn't expect to see much of a boost from the royal birth. The chief U.K. economist at IHS Global Insight said the birth would have a limited but "overwhelmingly positive" economic impact. But none of this really holds much of a comparison to another recent stimulative event in England: the 2012 Olympics. Last week, the U.K. government heralded a report showing that the London Games gave the economy a 9.9 billion pound trade and investment boost.

There's one other stimulative aspect that isn't purely economic. When Prince William was born in 1982, there was speculation from the Family Planning Association that the royal birth would help kick up Britain's declining birth rate. That rate has shot up lately, to its highest level since 1972. But there is some speculation that the royal birth could bump it up just a little higher. And why is that? Maybe there's nothing like watching a 24/7 broadcast of a patriotic pregnancy to get Britons in the mood.

Why the Hezbollah Blacklisting Is Pointless

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 10:37 AM PDT

A Hezbollah supporter burns tires on a main road near a government building in Beirut. (Jamal Saidi/Reuters)

Today, the European Union designated Hezbollah's "military wing" a terrorist group.

Aside from the fact that the very notion of a separate military wing is an absurd fiction, and that the designation has almost no chance of influencing Hezbollah's behavior, is there any reason to care?

I would argue that yes, there is; terror designations carry real consequences -- if not the ones their authors intend. On balance, I believe that when Western countries blacklist groups they define as terrorist, it harms their own policy aims much more than it does the targeted group. Talking to "terrorists" is political unpopular, but also necessary. It's one of many tools required to deal with violent non-state actors, along with intelligence work, policing, force, and economic levers.

In a reality where Hezbollah is a key central player, it makes little to no sense to erect a cone of silence around them.

In the case of Hezbollah, the European Union will now join the U.S. and member governments like Britain in making it all the more difficult to find political solutions to the imbroglios of the Levant. Hezbollah is a major combatant in Syria, while at home in Lebanon it's the largest and most influential elected political movement.

Hezbollah's behavior is often frustrating (to its Lebanese rivals as well as to Western governments), and it has been credibly linked to violent plots, political assassinations, and pedestrian organized crime like drug dealing and money laundering.

Naturally, the European Union would like to find ways to curtail Hezbollah's reach, especially after the group was found responsible for a deadly bombing in Bulgaria and a foiled attack in Cyprus.

But what does a terrorist designation achieve, and at what cost?

First, it eliminates communication with Hezbollah, putting even further out of reach meaningful diplomacy on the Syrian conflict and on Lebanon. It also necessitates foolish gymnastics for states that continue their relationship with the Lebanese government as if Hezbollah weren't the primary power within that government. Effectively, it amounts to a blanket ban on dealings with Hezbollah, since the Party of God does not make any distinction between its military, political and social work; the organization is seamlessly unified, its fighters as distinct from the supreme leadership as America's Pentagon is from the White House.

Second, it ties the EU's hands in acting as a regional broker. How can the EU leverage its power across the Levant's many conflicts if it won't talk to one major player, and in fact has taken the step of branding it a terrorist group while leaving alone other factions who engage in similar violence?

In a reality where Hezbollah is a key central player, it makes little to no sense to erect a cone of silence around them (already some governments, like Britain, don't talk to Hezbollah officials, following the U.S. lead). Any significant political accord in Lebanon must include Hezbollah, just as any political resolution of the Syrian conflict will have to include Iran and Hezbollah, along with the other states that sponsor the rebels and the government. Any other approach is simply a denial of reality and doomed to fail.

Third, the designation will hardly dent Hezbollah. Already Hezbollah operatives linked to violence or terror plots in the West are subject to prosecution in Western courts. Already, Hezbollah's operations in the West are underground. If agents of Hezbollah are raising money for the group by trafficking narcotics in South America, or are training sleeper cells in Germany, how will the designation stop them? These already are secret, illicit operations; law enforcement and intelligence work might thwart them, but not blacklists.

Logic and experience both teach us that politics requires buy-in from the major stakeholders; that's even more true in conflict resolution. You don't make peace with your friends. You can't influence a war -- or an unstable polity like Lebanon -- without points of entry to all the major players. It simply doesn't work.

Historically, blacklists have never worked. Studies have shown that in a small proportion of "terrorist" groups are eliminated by force, but in the vast majority of cases when they give up violence, it is because of a political settlement.

In the case of Hezbollah (like Hamas and a plethora of Iranian institution before it), the blacklisting Western governments are setting themselves up at best for embarrassment and hypocrisy, and at worst for failure.

Ultimately, they will either let conflicts simmer on and do nothing about them (as they largely have in Syria), in which case blacklisting is just one element of a general diplomatic withdrawal. Or else they will get involved with political negotiations, talks, and maybe an agreement that will require them to make deals with the very groups that they earlier designated as beyond-the-pale terrorists with whom any parley whatsoever is unacceptable. When reality prevails, the Western governments end up in tortuous talks through intermediaries, or else they simply ignore their entire directive.

There is almost nothing gained from a terror designation other than the public relations bounce and perhaps some domestic political credit with the tough-on-terror crowd.

But only politics and long-term strategy stand a chance at limiting Hezbollah violence and shifting Hezbollah's political priorities. It's unlikely that a smart Western policy would result in a behavior change from Hezbollah, but it's guaranteed that a terror designation won't do the trick -- and in fact, will only further limit the West's poor options.

Meet the 'Chengguan': China's Violent, Hated Local Cops

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 10:22 AM PDT

The son (C) of 56-year-old farmer Deng Zhengjia cries during a funeral in Linwu county, Hunan province July 19, 2013. (Reuters)

Last week, a 56 year-old farmer named Deng Zhengjie and his wife arrived in the town of Linwu, Hunan Province, in order to sell watermelon they had grown on their farm. Within a few hours, the municipal police approached them and asked them to move to a designated vendor area. The couple complied. But later, according to eyewitnesses, a scuffle broke out between Deng, his wife, and the police. Multiple policemen began beating the couple, eventually leaving them for dead. Deng's wife survived the attack. Deng did not.

The incident, which sparked outrage throughout the country, was merely the latest violent act attributed to the chengguan, who are China's widely loathed municipal police. Separate from conventional police forces, the chengguan are responsible for managing more quotidian aspects of urban life, such as regulating street vendors and unlicensed construction sites. The chengguan system was established recently, in 1997, and appear to operate with little oversight. As a result, stories of chengguan brutality are common -- According to Human Rights Watch, Chinese media reported more than 150 incidences of violence involving the chengguan between 2010 and 2012.

Police brutality exists in every society, but the case of the chengguan is a particularly Chinese phenomenon -- a byproduct of the country's seismic economic changes over the past three decades. The influx of hundreds of millions of rural Chinese into the country's towns and cities, attracted by the multiplying opportunities, greatly expanded China's informal economy and created a legal gray zone that the chengguan, among others, now occupy. While China's prosperity has minted millions of winners, many more continue to struggle along the margins: people typified by rural pushcart vendors, workers on illegal construction sites, and apartment dwellers whose homes are slated for demolition. In other words, the sort of people who can least afford sudden misfortune -- and exactly the sort who have the most to fear from the prying chengguan.

Problems with China's municipal police are not new, but technology -- in particular the spread of social media -- has brought the chengguan issue into the open. People frequently post video evidence of chengguan brutality on social media sites like Sina Weibo, fomenting a nationwide sense of outrage that had, until recently, been strictly localized. Li Chengpeng, one of China's most outspoken public intellectuals, wrote a poignant essay (translated by occasional Atlantic contributor Helen Gao in the Telegraph) identifying Deng Zhenjie as a symbol of the "Chinese dream": precisely the sort of man who epitomizes the Horatio Alger-ism of President Xi Jinping's signature slogan. How ironic, then, that Deng's death, officially (and absurdly) explained away by him "unexpectedly falling to the ground and dying," came at the hands of the government who seeks to nurture the ambitions of people just like him.

Small-scale investigations of chengguan violence does occur in China, but as of yet there have been little effort to reform the system as a whole. In the days following the Deng Zhenjie incident, the Chinese media published articles in praise of the system, with the People's Daily even going so far as to reminding the public that being a chengguan remains an "alluring job."

Will the Chinese public buy the Party line? Time will tell, but the early indications aren't good. When this weekend a wheelchair-bound man blew himself up at the Beijing Airport, apparently in protest of police brutality, he attracted much sympathy (alongside criticism) throughout the country. In a widely circulated article on the bombing in Caixin, one of China's leading business journals, reporter Luo Jieqi wrote that peasants who once formed the backbone of Communist China -- the life force of Mao Zedong's great revolution -- now live lives of increasing desperation. Quite naturally, unable to find legal justice for their grievances, some decide they have nothing left to live for -- an idea that, for a government obsessed with harmony and stability, cannot be easily dismissed.

My Father Once Tried to Take Me Away From My Mother Because She's Gay

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 10:11 AM PDT

On a hot summer morning in 1974, a few months after my parents' separation, my father came to visit my mother and me. He offered to take me for a walk. I was 10 months old.

"In retrospect, I should have thought it odd that he wanted me to give you a bath before the walk," my mother recalled. "I understood later that he wanted you clean for the journey."

I can imagine the scene outside Mom's rented, white clapboard house in Athens, Georgia: She handed me over to him. He looked down at me, recognizing himself in the shape of my chin and telling himself that what he was about to do was the right thing, the best thing for me. He lowered me into the stroller and headed for the sidewalk.

Hours went by. We didn't return. Apart from terror, my mother doesn't remember specifics from that part of the day. I assume this is a sign of panic and trauma. Did she tearfully wander the neighborhood, calling out for us?

***

My mother does remember looking in the mirror at age five and trying to comb her hair to look like her father's. She remembers the powerful crush she had on Miss Gunderson, her biology teacher in high school. And she remembers the frightening yearnings she felt for a college friend I'll refer to as Amy, though their relationship, while deep and emotional, was never physical. "We were in love but we couldn't call it that," she told me. "We didn't know what to call it. We had no vocabulary for it."

In 1968, fearing what was brewing inside her, and without a language for being gay, she decided to leave the country, and leave Amy. "I wanted to spend time with her more than anyone else, but I was overcome with shame and fear, fear of who I really was," she said. "The emotions I felt were overwhelming. I joined the Peace Corps to get away from those feelings, to stay frozen in time. It broke both of our hearts."

The Peace Corps took her to Malaysia, a place she still recalls fondly. In one of her stories, a headhunter from Borneo fell in love with her and requested a lock of her hair so he could concoct a love potion designed to win her affection. There's another one about being stalked by a tiger.

Also in pursuit -- for her hand in marriage -- were a captain from the English army, as well as an Indonesian police chief, whom she remembers having the kindest heart of all. But she couldn't see herself living in Malaysia for the rest of her life.

And there was my father, an American who worked in the Peace Corps office in the city of Penang. They had a brief chat there one afternoon. It was the first time Mom ever felt even the slightest twinge of attraction to a man. At 22, she was fully a product of her background: southern and conservative. "The feeling I felt for your father in that one moment felt right in a socially prescribed way, so I pursued it. It was a kind of relief, actually, to feel attracted to a man, even if just fleetingly. I knew my mother would approve."

They were married in Kuala Lumpur, assisted by a family of Australian tin miners.

I've seen a few pictures of my parents from that era. Brash and tan, my father smiles wide in one of them. He has a subtle under-bite and deep-set, drooping eyes -- features I inherited. He's standing shirtless in the jungle. My mother is beautiful and slim, with high cheekbones. She smiles a feminine smile straight out of the '60s, the one in countless advertisements from the era that seem to say, "This is my man and he will guide me into the future."

But that was not to be. Somewhere along the way, the woman in this picture, the daughter of a Lieutenant Colonel fighting in Vietnam, realized she would have to step out of the frame.

***

My mother and father returned to Athens in 1970. He began graduate school and she worked to support him. According to Mom, my father was devoted to his scientific research, a devotion that shaded into obsession.

Meanwhile, my mother found a community of women who helped her find a language for who she was. She was also influenced by the emerging gay rights movement, which was breaking into mainstream culture. In 1971, the National Organization for Women passed a resolution stating that lesbian concerns were a "legitimate cause for feminism." Meanwhile, in nearby Atlanta an underground newspaper called Great Speckled Bird was championing gay rights and announcing some of the city's, and the nation's, first gay pride marches.

Even so, Mom never directly came out to my father. According to her, much of it was unspoken and tacitly understood, as they lived in a time and place where homosexuality was unspeakable. After completing his first doctorate, my father accepted a job in his home state of Maryland. My mother refused to go, saying only that something was wrong with the marriage and she and I needed to stay in Athens.

Mom told me that while their relationship was strained for many reasons, her decision not to move with him to Maryland came down to the fact that she was gay. "Had I not been gay," she said, "I would have gone with him. I'd been taught that women suppressed their own needs for the wellbeing of their husbands and that in return, they'd be taken care of. But being gay pushed me beyond the limits of what I had been taught to do. It was nature. I couldn't ignore it."

***

The evening of the abduction, my father called from the airport in Greenville, South Carolina. He'd taken me across the state line, out of the jurisdiction of Georgia law enforcement. "His voice was calm, measured," Mom said. "He told me he was taking you to Maryland. Then, he hung up."

Of course, I have no recollection of the journey. I try to imagine myself sitting on his lap on the plane, doing what babies do. Did I give him much trouble? Did I need a diaper change mid-flight? How and what did he feed me?

Mom found out later that his mother had joined him on the trip to help with these and other logistics. The idea to take me had been hers and she'd persuaded my father to go along. She met him at the airport in Greenville and they traveled together to my father's boyhood home in Silver Spring, Maryland.

A friend in Athens put Mom in touch with a civil rights lawyer, whose advice to threaten my father's career was critical. "I called your father and told him I would make it known what he'd done, that I'd embarrass him professionally," she said. "That's what he cared about more than anything, his reputation."

***

For gay and lesbian fathers and mothers of that era, the threat of losing a child was very real. The loss came suddenly for my mother, but well into the 1980s it frequently happened via the courts. And while they're less common now, discriminatory rulings persist to this day in some states.

Christina Cash, the founder of the LGBT newspaper Southern Voice, recounted her partner's battle to win custody of her son in a Clayton County, Georgia courtroom in 1987. The case was widely publicized on TV and in local papers. "We proved that the child's father was an alcoholic -- he's an alcoholic to this day -- but that wasn't enough. We lost custody because we were gay. It superseded everything."

In Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States since World War II, Daniel Winunwe Rivers catalogs a litany of judicial arguments from the era for denial of custody. They read like an official handbook of homophobia: Gays are child molesters. Gays are felons afoul of sodomy laws. Children of gays will not learn proper gender roles and will end up gay themselves. Children of gays will endure undue shame and stigmatization.

Rivers adds that when custody or visitation was granted it was often predicated on the denial of fundamental rights:

In case after case, gay and lesbian parents were ordered to sign affidavits agreeing never to have their partners and children in their homes at the same time, to undergo regular psychiatric examinations testifying to their repudiation of their sexual orientation, and to halt all pro-gay rights activist work in order to maintain parental rights.

***

Mom's threat worked, apparently. My father quickly agreed to turn me over, and within days, she was on a plane to Maryland. Before she left, she met with her parents, who advised her not only to retrieve me but also to reconcile with my father. My grandmother had long suspected Mom was gay, but she exhorted her to save the marriage.

Now in her 80s and suffering from dementia, my grandmother still reminisces about my father. My guess is that her memories of him are indelible despite her flagging mind because they're bonded to powerful emotions. For her, the marriage of my mother and father represented the familiar and familial, an ideal of perfection, social conformity, and domestic bliss. These prototypes are her religion. She still stands by my alcoholic and deeply troubled grandfather, who died years ago.

When I phoned my grandmother recently, she could barely recall my name. But nearly 40 years on, she remembered my father's tall frame and handsomeness: "Your father was such a good man. He loved you," she added. Then, she asked, "Where do you live?"

***

My father picked up Mom at the airport in Maryland and drove her to his mother's house. "I walked in, looked her in the eyes, and said 'Where is my son?'," Mom told me. "Those were the only words spoken. They'd prepared a full nursery for you. I plucked you from the crib and walked out."

When I told her how courageous she'd been, Mom replied that she was only scared. "I guess courage is what fear looks like from afar," she said. "On the plane ride home, I cried the whole time with you on my lap. Even then, part of me wanted to give your father what he wanted, which was you, and me. He wanted both of us."

Back in Athens, Mom began to live in fuller recognition of who she was. But it would take years for her to come out completely.

As for me, just like any childhood, some of it was good (I was the batboy for her lesbian softball team) and some of it was bad (a teacher of mine caught wind of my family situation and isolated me from the other students for a time).

Eventually, my parents officially divorced and Mom changed our last names back to her maiden name. The judge asked my father to pay $150 a month in child support, which he paid only once. My mother didn't report it, suspecting that he would retaliate by attempting to take me back through legal or other means. Real or imagined, this is the fear she lived with.

Neither my father nor his mother made any more attempts to take me back. I can only assume my father turned to his work and tried to put us behind him. Perhaps his mother sensed who could care for me best. I can say from experience that my mom's love is powerful enough to melt a hole through any ideology.

Where is my father now? Somewhere. And everywhere in my imagination. I have no contact with him, nor do I know if he remembers our last days together. I suspect that he doesn't allow himself to remember, so I'll do it for him:

A man and woman stand in the driveway of a suburban brick home. The man asks to hold me one last time, and she hands me to him. A glance of recognition passes between the man and woman. It seems to say, we will live with this moment forever. Then, the woman extends her arms towards the man, and as all fathers must one day do, he lets me go.

A Graffiti Love Letter to Brooklyn

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 09:44 AM PDT

At the corner of Livingston and Hoyt, artist Steve Powers found his canvas — a 5,000-square-foot concrete parking garage. "Really one of the ugliest pieces of architecture I've ever had the privilege of decorating," Powers says. "It's just built for vandalism." Powers's art is inscribed (this time with the city's permission) on the multi-level structure with block letters intended to empower the community. "It's just paint no big deal," Powers says. "My paint can bring a community up, and there's no way anyone else's paint can push a community down." In this short documentary, the folks from the New Yorkers series take us to the Brooklyn street corner where Powers and his self-described team of "professional hangout artists" are painting their message.

This documentary is part of an ongoing series called New Yorkers that records the many faces of the city. The filmmakers have explored individuals from a fellow graffiti artist named Guess to a Shaolin monk, and more.

For more work by Moonshot Productions, visit http://moonshot-productions.com/.

Is China now Inhospitable to the Foreign Business Community?

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 08:48 AM PDT

A Chinese employee walks into GlaxoSmithKline's office in Beijing. (Jason Lee/Reuters)

Before he was detained by police in Shanghai on July 10 in connection with the GlaxoSmithKline bribery investigation, Peter Humphrey warned of the treacherous business environment for foreign firms trying to navigate China's opaque business climate.

"There is one industry that is booming in China like everything else but doesn't often get written about -- it's called fraud," wrote Humphrey, a British consultant, former journalist and past president of the Rotary Club of Beijing, in a 2008 magazine published by the British Chamber of Commerce.

Read more from Government Executive.

The Melting Arctic: Northern Sea Route Shipping Has Already Quadrupled Last Summer's Record

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 07:26 AM PDT

Quartz

The Suez Canal has new competition. Captains watching the creation of a rare new ocean passage -- the Northern Sea Route through the melting Arctic -- say that shipping has quadrupled (paywall) over just the last year. The route's governing body -- known as the Northern Sea Route Administration -- has so far granted permission for 213 shipping trips through the passage this year. As this chart shows, that is up from 46 in 2012, 34 in 2011 and four in 2010.

It's actually a slow buildup -- over the next couple of decades, traffic could be up 30-fold and ships could be moving a full quarter of the Asia-Europe trade through the Arctic, experts estimate. One of the main goods will be liquefied natural gas from northern Europe and Russia.

The time ships save by traversing the new ocean passage is significant. A ship traveling from Rotterdam takes 33 days via the Suez Canal to reach South Korea, 10 days more than the 23 days via the Northern Sea Route.

But the Suez need not feel threatened -- not yet anyway. The 2012 Arctic traffic was 1.25 metric tons compared with 740 metric tons through the Suez. Before the Northern Sea Route truly gets busy, ports must be built for safety and relief purposes, and insurers will need to get more comfortable with the Arctic passage to lower their higher premiums for that route.

The Huge Threat to Capitalism That Republicans Are Ignoring

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 06:30 AM PDT

goldman sachs full reuters.jpg

Reuters

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a jaw-dropping story about how Wall Street investment banks are slyly manipulating commodities markets to make billions at the expense of consumers.

Is that description too abstract? Here's the lead example:

Hundreds of millions of times a day, thirsty Americans open a can of soda, beer or juice. And every time they do it, they pay a fraction of a penny more because of a shrewd maneuver by Goldman Sachs and other financial players that ultimately costs consumers billions of dollars.

The story of how this works begins in 27 industrial warehouses in the Detroit area where a Goldman subsidiary stores customers' aluminum. Each day, a fleet of trucks shuffles 1,500-pound bars of the metal among the warehouses. Two or three times a day, sometimes more, the drivers make the same circuits. They load in one warehouse. They unload in another. And then they do it again.This industrial dance has been choreographed by Goldman to exploit pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange, an investigation by The New York Times has found. The back-and-forth lengthens the storage time. And that adds many millions a year to the coffers of Goldman, which owns the warehouses and charges rent to store the metal. It also increases prices paid by manufacturers and consumers across the country. Tyler Clay, a forklift driver who worked at the Goldman warehouses until early this year, called the process "a merry-go-round of metal."

Only a tenth of a cent or so of an aluminum can's purchase price can be traced back to the strategy. But multiply that amount by the 90 billion aluminum cans consumed in the United States each year -- and add the tons of aluminum used in things like cars, electronics and house siding -- and the efforts by Goldman and other financial players has cost American consumers more than $5 billion over the last three years, say former industry executives, analysts and consultants.

Kevin Drum writes:

Did you follow that?

Some genius at Goldman apparently had a brainstorm after reading the detailed rules that determine the spot price of aluminum. They figured that if storage times could be artificially lengthened, prices would go up and Goldman could make a killing. So they bought an aluminum storage business with the explicit goal of making customers wait a longer time for their aluminum. And they made a killing. The Times hastens to add that Goldman has done nothing illegal. Of course not. Why bother when "special exemptions" granted by the Federal Reserve and "relaxed regulations" approved by Congress allow you to make billions legally?

Preventing this sort of thing ought to be a high priority for anyone who wants to see free-market capitalism succeed in America. So long as our economic system resembles what Adam Smith described -- the profit motive benefiting everyone, as if by an invisible hand -- much of the American public can be counted on to support politicians who campaign as unapologetic capitalists, even if people are rewarded unequally, based on the value their labor is producing.

But if "capitalism" starts to be associated in the public mind with Wall Street profiting by deliberately slowing down industrial productivity (or with Mitt Romney making millions by buying companies and gaming the tax implications of shuttering them), Americans are not going to support capitalism. They're going to regard it as a rigged system that only profits wealthy insiders.

In the short term, Republicans and Democrats alike benefit by allying themselves with the wealthy insiders. Like the GOP, President Obama has benefited from Wall Street money. But in the longer term, enough stories like this New York Times scoop will destroy Republicans, because rhetorically, they're the ones insisting that the market is beneficial and more or less fair, even as a transparently corrupt financial sector consumes a larger percentage of the overall economy.

I'm emphatically for free markets. I have the highlighted copy of The Constitution of Liberty to prove it. But the party of free markets has a self-interested obligation to attack crony capitalism. The party has been failing for years. Democrats have too, but they have less to lose.

"Many of us already view the financial industry as little more than a gigantic shakedown of the American public," Drum writes. "But even so, there are still days when we can be dumbfounded by the sheer scale and gall of their machinations." It isn't enough for the right to point to faulty government regulations and bailouts that have abetted financial-industry shakedowns.

Republicans need to wean themselves from certain donors and make fixing American capitalism a priority, and to go on the offensive against Democrats for their part in Wall Street dysfunction, if they're going to persuade voters that the party of free market capitalism is worth supporting.

A good place to start: rules of the road that make increasing productivity more profitable than decreasing it.

I prefer a theoretical Republican solution to a theoretical Democratic solution, but if Democrats have an actual desire to regulate Wall Street, and Republicans have nothing, that's no choice at all. The GOP has to start attacking Wall Street misbehavior even when it doesn't take the most obvious form: a direct, explicit bailout check from taxpayers to the most well-connected banks.

Earlier this year, George Will wrote, "By breaking up the biggest banks, conservatives will not be putting asunder what the free market has joined together. Government nurtured these behemoths by weaving an improvident safety net and by practicing crony capitalism. Dismantling them would be a blow against government that has become too big not to fail. Aux barricades!"

Co-sign.

How Helen Thomas Rescued the White House Press Corps From Irrelevance

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 06:30 AM PDT

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Yes, Helen Thomas was ornery, at times curmudgeonly and not the most subtle of White House correspondents. Yes, she was a much-admired gender trailblazer in an overwhelmingly white-guys profession a half-century ago. And yes, she had a blind spot for the Palestinians and an antipathy towards Israel that ultimately proved her career undoing three years ago.

But make no mistake: More than any other White House journalist of her era, Helen is responsible for turning the daily White House briefing into an appropriately adversarial institution. That will be her enduring legacy -- emboldening reporters to challenge more aggressively the self-serving spin every administration peddles.

At my maiden White House briefing in the summer of 1968, I was introduced to a mandarin of the presidential press corps. He offered me a little friendly advice: "Son, here's how it works -- they tell us what's happening and we write it down and put it in the paper."

Fortunately, that benign, unchallenging view towards power died with Watergate -- and Helen was the primary executioner.

She was furious that a couple of whippersnappers named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had scooped the White House press corps on the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon. But she was even more enraged that Nixon's courtiers had repeatedly lied to her and her colleagues -- and that the press had all-too-willingly swallowed their baloney.

Helen felt she and the other briefing room regulars had been way too trusting - and lazy -- and vowed that any White House she covered would forfeit the benefit of the doubt henceforth.

"Never again," she swore to me one day on an Air Force One pool. "We looked like fools and let our readers down."

As a result, every press secretary since Ron Ziegler felt the sting of Helen's skeptical interrogatories. Critics who consider the White House press corps lapdogs to their sources have no clue how tame briefings once were. Presidents still get a few passes too many, but Helen permanently stiffened our collective backbones.

There was another less-noticed side to Helen Thomas -- a kindness towards less established and accomplished colleagues that many reporters will never forget.

She had a habit of befriending rookies to the White House beat -- introducing them to sources, offering common-sense advice that eased their learning curves and generally being a self-appointed godmother.

More than one former rookie on the White House beat today is no doubt remembering weekend trips with vacationing presidents where Helen would invite them to dinner with the big guns of the day -- Rather, Brokaw, Cormier, Lisagor and other legends of the business. She made us feel like we belonged when we didn't, and inspired us to dream.

Her passion for the underdog got her into trouble at the end when she suspended journalistic judgment and told the Israelis to get out of the Palestinian homeland. But many of us she inspired to be better reporters recall that zeal in a fonder personal context today.

Life in the New Kabul, With Soccer, Schools, and Taliban Attacks

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 06:11 AM PDT

Reuters

The first thing I do when I arrive in Kabul is to try to get up on a roof. I am in most ways a respectful guest, but this is a city that places a premium on privacy that I routinely disregard. It is a place where people have long prized discretion, so homes were built behind walls, those walls now have walls built on top of them, and the whole thing is often garnished with concertina wire and corrugated tin sniper shields, the idea being that people may shoot at you, but they'll be shooting blind. This is a city that's always enclosed its people and does so now more than ever, so my first inclination is to get above, to climb up and see and hear and smell the things I'm not supposed to. I'm a voyeur here, I guess.

From up here, the city feels denser than ever before. Kabul is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, but there's something more. There are more voices screaming at a volleyball game in the distance, more whistles, more bicycle-mounted ice cream vendors playing their groaning, god-awful jingles that sound like children's toys whose batteries are dying. There are more muezzins at prayer time, it seems; more voices that mix and swirl and echo around the valley so that it feels as though the mountains themselves were telling us to pray. ISAF surveillance blimps hang tethered to the ground and unmoving. Afghans believe these blimps are miraculous things that can see everyone in the city, all at the same time, and who knows, maybe they can.

Today in Kabul there are more and taller buildings, a new mall where I buy a cell phone the vendor swears is both not a Chinese knock-off ("Real from Germany!" he says, though the manufacturer is Canadian), and brand-new. "Not a refresh!" The mall has a tiny movie theater that shows horror films, a little bumper car track, and a Taliban warning or two. The city's trees are more plentiful and healthier looking. There is still far too much evidence of draught here, but I'm struck by parks which look sort of like parks, by a main thoroughfare which has been under construction the last four or five times I've been here, but which now has a planter running down the median with little trees defying climate. This road has traffic lights, a couple of pedestrian bridges, no potholes, and a new petrol station. There are solar-powered street lamps.

On a recent Friday, I took this road to attend a meeting of Afghan technocrats, ostensibly to help one prepare for a lecture series, but probably to help him prepare for a presidential run. Influential people arrived with fancy sunglasses in fancy cars and well-fed guards carrying big guns, all to spend their days off passing around flow charts with titles like "Optics;" "Legitimacy;" "Group Identity and Subnational Issues." And I think: either all of these people, cherry-picked from the finest minds in the country, are irretrievably naïve, or they know there's enough progress here that it's worth their time to stay and fix the broken things.

And as I look around from the rooftop, there are more signs of normalcy than I've ever recognized before. My neighbor has a couple of unfriendly pet mutts, a trampoline, and an inflatable pool. I have never seen any of these things in Kabul before, and I've been back and forth to this place in various capacities since 2007.

There are tall red blinking radio antennas multiplying a few miles out, like I remember from growing up in Philadelphia, when winter stripped the trees and I would notice things in the distance I'd forgotten since last season. And where once ethnic and religious schisms felt to me like wounds so wide and deep they'd never close, I now wonder, cautiously, whether time may indeed be able to salve them. Kabul is still a segregated city, but it is also a city squeezed together by mountains, and even as squatter houses creep higher and higher up the hillsides like they're trying to escape, it's harder for people to isolate themselves. A leader of one ethnic group once told me I should not write too much about ethnic conflict here, because his country wasn't ready, those wounds had to heal before they could be examined. "It took ten years, didn't it," he said, "for people to begin calling what the Nazis did the Holocaust?" I found that troubling, but coded in his admonishment was the notion that someday his country would be ready, and that that day was in the imaginable future. There are signs now that unevenly, haltingly, the day may be approaching.

There are still darker moments, when people I admire will say revolting things about other races, and it will make me believe that these resentments will never end. I spent a peaceful early Ramazan day at a park with a big-hearted young man I've been close to for five years and watched him become alternately animated and emotional talking about his two small daughters. Afterwards, he insisted I drive his old sedan home, because to him, entrusting me with his finest piece of property was the most selfless gesture he could think of. But as I drove, we passed through a neighborhood inhabited mostly by members of an ethnic group that is not his own. I heard him tut-tutting, and when I asked, he didn't hesitate. "I hate these people," he said, and then he pointed to one of the portraits of the martyred commander they've deified, mounted on storefronts and Toyotas all over the neighborhood. He began recounting all of the animalistic things he'd heard this commander had done. He said he'd never forgive the commander, nor would he the people who had sanctified him.

But here, as time passes and one generation gives way to the next, another change is happening that may--just may--be starting to heal these resentments. To hate someone now because they're the wrong race means you have to hate the way your grandparents do, and while it's hard for 20-somethings anywhere to listen to their elders, it's harder still when your generation is, by every objective measure, better-educated than the last.

***

On the day in late June I'd climbed up to the roof, the Taliban launched a highly coordinated attack in Kabul, an assault whose purpose seemed as much to show what they're capable of as it was to eliminate any target in particular--indeed, the Taliban seems increasingly strategic in its violence. They used counterfeit security passes to breech the fortified diplomatic zone and killed three people before the attack was neutralized, but they got within shooting distance of the Presidential Palace, a CIA station, a handful of embassies, and other high value and supposedly impregnable targets. And there are some parts of the country, I'm told by the security community, that the Taliban will take within days of bases closing; hours even. There are some parts of the country, including provinces enveloping Kabul, which they won't even need to "take," because they already effectively have them. They're active enough there now that Taliban control wouldn't look a hell of a lot different from whatever you'd call what's happening now. In the provinces just over the mountains from Kabul, Talibs come out in the afternoon and control roads, as if the real government and the shadow one held the same job, just in different shifts.

And yet up here on the roof in Kabul, just hours after the boldest kind of attack, the city seems unfazed. I hear people playing and singing; I see a woman with her burkha flung over her shoulder, pumping water. I can smell kabobs being grilled and trash being burned. I see a boy skipping home with a stack of fresh naan. Perhaps I'm seeing validation of all the commentary that's issued forth over the past twelve years on the resilience of the Afghan spirit, but I've always found that explanation to be insulting and dumb. As if people here are more primitive and therefore better equipped to deal with savagery. Or else that they have become immune to violence by witnessing so much of it. They aren't; they don't. They come up with ways to mask their suffering--gallows humor, for example--but they don't suffer less than the rest of us would. Probably more.

So rather, the feeling I have is that the Taliban is facing a simple numbers problem. There are just too many people who've built houses here, too many people opening restaurants, too many people playing soccer, too many people learning new languages, too many people, for the Taliban to do more than insert slivers of violence info city life, to serve as a disruptive criminal syndicate settling scores, capable of terrific violence and trauma, but not of every really coming back. Not of taking the country; not of any kind of writ beyond the places in the provinces where they have it now.

This is not to minimize the threat they pose, a threat which they are making good on with so much frequency that when a few days pass without an attack there's a palpable feeling in the air that's not altogether different from abandonment; suspense at least. And yet, on this night, Afghanistan is still out playing soccer and volleyball, getting stuck in rush hour, praying along to the soundtrack of the competing muezzin. So I allow myself this thought: maybe this is what winning will have to look like.

This article was produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Romanticizing the Villains of the Civil War

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 05:34 AM PDT

copperheads banner.jpg — This political cartoon appeared in *Harper's Weekly* in 1863. (Library of Congress)

When Gone with the Wind had its premiere in Atlanta in 1939, the governor of Georgia declared a state holiday. One million people turned out to watch the arrival of Clark Gable, Olivia DeHaviland and Vivien Leigh. The night before, a costume ball of leading citizens dressed in the finery of the Old South was serenaded by a "negro boys' choir" dressed as slaves standing against the newly constructed backdrop of a plantation mansion. One of its singers was six year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. Hattie McDaniel, who acted as Mammy, was prohibited from joining the other stars inside the theater. It was segregated just as movie houses and other public facilities were throughout the South. Angry about McDaniel's exclusion, Gable threatened to boycott, but she persuaded him to attend. She would go on to win an Academy Award.

Copperhead, the newly released Civil War movie directed by Ron Maxwell, lacks the scope, star power and drama of the all-time blockbuster. But it's in a tributary of the tradition -- stretching from Gone with the Wind through Maxwell's ponderous Gods and Generals -- of Lost Cause mythology. The story takes a few liberties with an obscure late-19^th-century novella based on a completely fabricated and otherwise unlikely incident in upstate New York in order to offer an alternative interpretation of the Civil War: that Abraham Lincoln was a bloodthirsty tyrant trampling the Constitution, that those who opposed the war in the North were not Southern sympathizers but true patriots, and that those truly loyal to the Constitution were the persecuted victims of an oppressive regime and virtual dictator who used emancipation as an instrument of his drive for power. Though Copperhead is a sad little morality play that has swiftly flickered away, it represents an increasingly fashionable pseudo-history among ideological re-enactors who wear Revolutionary War costumes but never the Union blue. "Do I think Lincoln was wrong in taking away the freedom of the press and the right of habeas corpus? Yeah," said Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky recently.

The hero of the film is an upstate New York farmer, Abner Beech: a man of profound character, diligent, well-read and religious, a believer in civil liberties but not in slavery, not sympathetic to the South but attached above all to the Constitution, and therefore glorified as the prototypical Copperhead. The crux of the film comes in a conversation between Abner Beech and Avery, a Lincoln Republican, played by of all people Peter Fonda -- a riff resonating with his father Henry's famous portrayal in Young Mr. Lincoln (released in 1939, the same year as Gone with the Wind). Abner argues that Lincoln has divided the country: "It's Abraham Lincoln, and he's a Republican...Closing down newspapers, putting critics in prison, enlisting your boys to fight in his unconstitutional war." He goes on: "He should have let the South go, as they would not have harmed us." Abner's political views make him an old-fashioned American dissenter, who is nearly martyred at the hands of the fanatical town abolitionist "Jee" Hagadorn and his mob. In the happy ending, the abolitionist recognizes the errors of his ways and he is reconciled with the good Copperhead.

maxwell on set.jpg — Ron Maxwell, right, on the set of his film *Copperhead* (Swordspoint Productions, LLC)

But the distortions of Copperhead, the film, as a parable for our time, cannot be understood apart from the Copperheads, the movement, and The Copperhead, the novel, and the tradition into which they all fit.

The Copperheads were the northern antiwar faction of the Democratic Party that demanded an immediate peace with the Confederacy. The Democratic Party had splintered after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 that opened the territories to a contest over whether they would be free or slave. It was now a party thoroughly dominated by the South and in which the only northern men that thrived within it were famously "Northern men with Southern sympathies." Antislavery northern Democrats defected to the new Republican Party. Then, in 1860, southerners and their northern allies deprived Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois of nomination, splitting the party yet again. In effect, the pro-slavery Southern Democrats seceded and created their own Democratic Party with its own nominee. When the South itself seceded after Lincoln's election, with its state ordinances of secession declaring protection of slavery as the cause -- their Northern allies were left like a severed arm trying to reattach its nerve endings. One wing of the Democrats was the War Democrats, who had misgivings about Lincoln but supported the Union effort. Another wing was the Peace Democrats, which included the Copperheads, who were the more radical in their virulent racist rhetoric, hatred and demonization of Lincoln, and sympathy for the Confederacy. The vileness of the Copperhead rhetoric, especially in print, with its obsessive inflection of the n-word, is too offensive to quote in the post-Paula Deen era.

The Copperheads opposed the draft, emancipation, and suspension of habeas corpus. They were not pacifists; none of them were Quakers (who were deeply antislavery and had supported the Underground Railroad). Rather, they were an organized political movement, with political aims, chiefly to undermine the Union effort. Nobody really knows how big it was. They belonged to groups such as the Knights of the Golden Circle, which claimed a half million members, and its successor organization the Sons of Liberty, but it's hard to determine what the exact figures might have been. Historians today, such as Jennifer Weber of the University of Kansas, and others who have done recent state studies, have documented the broad character of the movement and dismiss the notion that the Copperheads were just dissident individuals. The movement fed off defeatism, growing with each Confederate victory and Union defeat. Some Copperhead leaders coordinated their operations with the Confederate government to create havoc on the Union home front. There is evidence of Copperhead agitation behind the New York City draft riots of late July 1863, the largest incident of mob action during the war, with at least 120 people killed, including 11 black men lynched. Fernando Wood, the congressman and former mayor of New York, had called for the city to secede at the war's beginning and was a notorious Copperhead, presenting himself as a Peace Democrat.

Knights_of_the_Golden_Circle_History_of_Seccession_book,_1862.jpg — Wikimedia Commons

In the election year of 1864, the Confederate government heavily subsidized a number of Copperhead leaders in order to try to overthrow Lincoln. Ohio Democratic leader Clement Vallandigham, a former congressman, perhaps the country's number one Copperhead, who had been arrested, released, exiled, and returned, received Confederate secret service funds. Vallandigham had declared the Union struggle "a war for the freedom of the blacks and the enslavement of the whites," proclaimed his "duty to stay at home and fight the Abolition rebels," and declared that anyone who was loyal to Lincoln was "fit only to be a slave." Fernando Wood and his brother Benjamin Wood, publisher of the New York Daily News, also received Confederate secret service money. Copperhead leaders plotted, among other schemes, to stage the secession of the Midwest. This was not a completely lunatic fantasy on their part: Both the Indiana and Illinois legislatures were essentially in Copperhead hands--the Republican governors in those states would not convene them for fear they would withdraw volunteer units from the Union army. Coles County, in southern Illinois, was in effect in rebellion: Copperheads organized the killing of Union soldiers and a vicious little civil war was waged, as it was in many places.

The Copperhead myth holds Lincoln's chief crime among his exercise of presidential war powers (including the Emancipation Proclamation) to be the suspension of habeas corpus. It is true that briefly, Lincoln invoked suspension to thwart an insurrection and secession in Maryland, something explicitly permitted by the Constitution in the case of rebellion. Though Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, also author of the notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision, ruled that only Congress had this power, Lincoln invoked the measure on his own because the Congress was recessed, and the Congress, in 1863, voted for the suspension. The historian Mark Neely, of Penn State, and the leading authority on civil liberties during the war, demonstrates that the vast majority of arrests were for insurrectionary acts like blockade running, gun running and desertion. They were not aimed at political opponents, according to Neely, but to protect enlistment and conscription. Without question, there were abuses, mostly by military commanders in the field. Newspapers were suppressed. But the few big papers that were closed were reinstated within a short time by order of the President acting through the War Department, which had been overly zealous. The Copperhead press remained more or less intact throughout the entire war -- even Copperhead publications that advocated Lincoln's assassination were left alone. On the basis of a handful of cases, the Copperhead myth purported that the Lincoln administration sought to crush all criticism and opposition, which in fact remained so vigorous that Lincoln thought he might lose his reelection.

The film Copperhead is based on the novel The Copperhead, by Harold Frederic, born and raised in Utica, New York. The turning point comes in a chapter called "The Election." In the book, after Abner Beech casts his ballot, he declares, "The war must now surely be abandoned, and the seceding States invited to return to the Union on terms honorable to both sides." His celebration of his candidate's victory, in both the novel and film, precipitates the attack of the abolitionist mob.

A political cartoon, by Henry Louis Stephens, of Horatio Seymour delivering his famous "My Friends" speech from the steps of New York's City Hall during the draft riots. (Wikimedia Commons)

The winner of that election in New York State for governor in 1862 was the Democrat Horatio Seymour, a friend of the author Harold Frederic, who dedicated an earlier novel to him. Seymour campaigned against the Emancipation Proclamation, which was unpopular and the Democrats' main issue. This is what Seymour stated at a campaign rally: "The scheme for an immediate emancipation and general arming of the slaves throughout the South is a proposal for the butchery of women and children, for scenes of lust and rapine, of arson and murder, unparalleled in the history of the world." During the New York City draft riots of 1863, Seymour addressed a crowd of rioters as "my friends" and refused to cooperate with federal authorities for days in suppressing the violence. (Martin Scorsese's 2002 Gangs of New York climaxes with the fury of the draft riots. As he shows, the gangs served as the muscle for local political bosses such as Fernando Wood, whose "Mozart Hall" political machine relied on gangs like the Dead Rabbits, involved in inciting the riots. Wood was notably and accurately portrayed in Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln as a Copperhead congressman opposed to the 13^th Amendment abolishing slavery.)

Before and during the Civil War, waves of mobbing crested across the country. Not a single one of those recorded involved abolitionists attacking individuals of opposing opinions. Not one. That did not occur. That is not how abolitionists behaved. There were also not any attacks on Copperheads in upstate New York. There were, however, infamous examples of the mobbing of abolitionists. Before the war, in the north, in free states, there were 73 mob attacks on abolitionists, according to the historian David Grimsted of the University of Maryland. There were 19 mob attacks in the South -- fewer, of course, because there were not many abolitionists present in the South. Fifteen of these took place in the border state of Kentucky. Thirteen mob attacks were aimed at abolitionist presses. There were numerous beatings, of Frederick Douglass, for one, and tar-and-featherings of abolitionists. The most momentous mob attack was the murder of the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois, while defending his press, an event that Lincoln addressed in his first major speech, in 1837, at the Springfield Lyceum.

New York State had a particular history of the mobbing of abolitionists. After mobs had broken up antislavery meetings in New York City, a convention was called for October 21, 1835 to found the New York State Antislavery Society in Utica, the home of The Copperhead's author. About 600 delegates gathered in a church where they were besieged by a mob. The leader of the mob was Samuel Beardsley, the congressman from the district and a close friend of Vice President Martin Van Buren, engaging in an act that he thought would help Van Buren secure Southern support for the Democratic nomination for president, which it did. Beardsley declared, "It would be better to have Utica razed to its foundations, to have it destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah, than to have the convention meet here." And the mob broke up the meeting. The delegates reconvened in a nearby town. That is the history of mobbing in and around Utica.

In The Copperhead, Harold Frederic turned the history of mobbing on its head. He made the abolitionists the violent mob and the anti-abolitionist into the innocent victim. His novel was published in 1893, after Reconstruction was crushed by white terrorist organizations led by former Confederate officers throughout the South. The year before, a black man in New Orleans named Homer Plessy was denied the right to sit in the front of a public streetcar and sued. The Supreme Court would rule in 1896 that segregation was legal, indeed nothing less than "separate but equal." On the ruins of Reconstruction the dominant themes pervading politics and literature about the Civil War, now more than 30 years concluded, were of the North and the South truly reconciled, one nation at last, with discussion of the causes of the conflict removed. The theme of reconciliation was the veneer for Jim Crow. (For those interested, the historian David Blight has written an excellent book on this subject, Race and Reunion.) The Copperhead falls into a stream of both Lost Cause and reunion literature.

Ron Maxwell, the director of Gettysburg and God and Generals, told an interviewer for The New American, the magazine of the John Birch Society, that he had discovered in Frederic's novel a vehicle for a story on "why good and honorable, ethical, moral men choose not to go to war." Asked by the interviewer about the constitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation, Maxwell replied, "It was not just a violation of the Constitution, but the usurpation of power." (Of course, Lincoln believed that the Proclamation was constitutional under his presidential war powers.) To write the screenplay of Copperhead, Maxwell secured the services of Bill Kauffman, the author of a laudatory history of the pre-World War II isolationist movement called America First!.

And so we are back to the insidious mythmaking of Gone with the Wind, although without the talents of Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh and Hattie McDaniel. "You'd thought I'd won a second Civil War for the South," Clark Gable remarked about ecstatic audience reaction to the film debut in Atlanta. The Lost Cause myth was the political correctness of the postwar South, and a political correctness that dominated American history writing and culture for decades after Reconstruction. In the year of the 150^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Copperhead presents us with a false depiction of the Copperheads as principled men of peace instead of what they were -- often violent and always racist defenders of slavery, secession, and the Confederacy. Copperhead is propaganda for an old variation of the neo-Confederate Lost Cause myth, that the root of the Civil War was not slavery and the slave power, but an aggressive, power-mad North seeking to tyrannize, by unconstitutional means, a benign and chivalrous South. The Lost Cause myth was at its heart not a matter of a differing interpretation, but of the falsification and suppression of history in order to vindicate the Confederacy and later to justify Jim Crow. Frankly, my dear, we should give a damn.

The News vs. The Newsroom: Did the Show Get Occupy Wall Street Right?

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 05:21 AM PDT

newsroom ep 2 banner.jpg

HBO

The Newsroom takes place roughly two years in the past, where the ACN News Night team strives to virtuously and judiciously report the news as it happens. By reenacting headline-making happenings, Aaron Sorkin's HBO series comments both on those happenings and the way they were handled by journalists. So it's worth asking: How does The Newsroom's version of events fit in with the way these events really unfolded in the media?

Not always perfectly--but not always incorrectly, either. Here's how the second episode of The Newsroom's second season compares to the real-life news coverage and media narratives of the time period it portrays.

occupy wall street.jpg

The Newsroom: At a September 19 editorial meeting, staffers laugh off Neal's pitch on the emergence of a leaderless resistance movement known as Occupy Wall Street. On September 21, he is arrested at an Occupy Wall Street rally in Zuccotti Park.

The news: On September 19, much of the media perhaps was laughing at the notion of Occupy Wall Street being newsworthy. Keith Olbermann, though, was a step ahead. On that night's edition of Countdown With Keith Olbermann, he asked why major American news outlets had thus far ignored the protests in Zuccotti Park. "If this [were] a Tea Party rally in front of Wall Street about Ben Bernanke putting stimulus funds into it, that [would be] the lead story on every network newscast. How is that disconnect possible in this country today, with so many different outlets and so many different ways of transmitting news?"

"It's just kind of uncool for journalists to take these people who want to change the world seriously," said Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News, a guest on Olbermann's show.

On Sept. 21, though, camera-phone footage--much like Neal's--of Occupy arrests surfaced on YouTube.

Within a few days, other news outlets had begun covering Occupy Wall Street.

peter jennings.jpg

The Newsroom: Two control-room operators watch decade-old footage of Will McAvoy's unexpected 16-hour first anchor shift at ACN on September 11, 2001, after the World Trade Center was attacked.

The news: Will's 16 hours behind the anchor desk covering the September 11 attacks may be inspired in part by Peter Jennings, the ABC anchor who spent roughly 17 hours straight on air that day and then continued in similar marathon stretches for the days after. According to The New York Observer's 2005 play-by-play of Jennings's 9/11 coverage,

Jennings arrived in his anchor chair just after 9 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. For 60 hours, he carried on an epic dialogue with correspondents, experts, eyewitnesses and emergency personnel, taking breaks to collect his thoughts. "It's not the rest issue here, quite frankly," he told Elizabeth Vargas as he ceded her the anchor chair at 2 a.m., for his first break, on Sept. 12. "It's important to get away and appraise what is happening in the country from a broader perspective than just sitting here."

By 10 a.m., he was back.

Like Will McAvoy, Jennings vowed to the public that the news would stay with the viewers until morning came: On the night of September 11, Jennings promised, "We're going to go on all day, and we'll continue throughout the night trying to get some grasp of this." According to the Observer,

It was just after 9 p.m. on Sept. 11, and he had been in the anchor chair for 12 hours. And he became highly emotional here, uncharacteristically choking his words, much as Walter Cronkite did when he announced President John F. Kennedy's death.

It would be another five hours before he took his first real break.

Here's Peter Jennings's signoff, in the early hours of Sept. 12, 2001, just at the end of his first shift on air that day.

troy davis.jpg

The Newsroom: On August 25, Don urges Will to retrace the steps of the legal process that led to Georgia resident Troy Davis's death sentence in connection to the murder of an off-duty cop in 1989. He declines, saying it would be unfair to "relitigate" a case that's already been given due process of law. It isn't clear whether ACN provides more coverage of the situation, but on September 21, ACN reports as breaking news that Troy Davis has been executed after being denied clemency by the Supreme Court.

The news: Some outlets gave considerably compassionate coverage to Davis's lawyers' last-minute appeal. For example, NBC's Brian Williams and Thanh Truong reported on the protests at the Supreme Court just before Davis's 7 p.m. scheduled execution. According to Truong, "Barring a legal miracle, Troy Davis has just minutes left to live."

CNN's coverage just before his execution even included footage of protesters celebrating at 7:04 p.m. that the time of Davis's scheduled execution had passed without an execution taking place. "Certainly in the period leading up to 7 o'clock, he was strapped to the gurney and the IV quite likely placed into his arm. But they couldn't begin the procedure until they received word from the Supreme Court," explained CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

"I don't know how you feel about this case, I don't know how you feel about the death penalty. But this is just an awful, excruciating scene."

al awlaki 570.jpg

The Newsroom: The ACN producers agonize over how to ethically report on American-born al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki's death by a drone strike on Sept. 21. Will initially refuses to appear to sympathize with al-Awlaki, but later, while listing off unfair legal decisions to an officer at a police station, he laments that "Anwar al-Awlaki was killed today. It wasn't an accident. There was no warrant, no arrest, no arraignment, no judge, no jury, and no appeal."

Ultimately, ACN's coverage remains neutral (as far as we can tell), as Elliott reports only what al-Awlaki was accused of and some details on the way he died. Will, though, reveals plans to publicly demand to see the memorandum that authorizes drone strikes against Americans accused of, but never tried for, involvement with terrorism.

The news: Not all news outlets arrived at the same conclusion as ACN the day al-Awlaki died. Some, like CNN and ABC, hailed his death as a victory in the war on terror. "In terms of immediate threat," said ABC investigative correspondent Brian Ross, "it could prove to be more significant than the death of Osama Bin Laden."

Will, Charlie, and Mackenzie's hesitance to welcome al-Awlaki's death as good news, though, echoes some voices who decried the killing of an American without due process of law--among them, notably, Glenn Greenwald and Ron Paul.

President Obama: Pitch Perfect on Trayvon, Yet Silent on Abdulrahman

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 05:01 AM PDT

Reuters

Few things divide us as quickly and powerfully as criminal trials that contain or spark racial controversy. Think of the police officers who beat Rodney King; the murder case against O.J. Simpson; the rape charges filed against members of Duke's lacrosse team; and the recently concluded trial of George Zimmerman, who was acquitted after killing Trayvon Martin on the streets of a Florida subdivision. In many ways, the cases could hardly be more different. But all stand out as polarizing cultural moments, when trials came to stand for more than the incident under review, and divisions in the way different Americans experience their country were exposed.

President Obama took a risk last week by speaking about Trayvon and race in America, even as a polarized debate raged about racial profiling, Stand Your Ground, and whether any of it mattered in the death of the 17-year-old. Obama spoke when emotions were at their most raw and people were in the streets protesting. It's easy to see how he could have made matters worse, for himself or the country. Yet he delivered remarks so pitch perfect that, for 15 minutes, I wasn't just glad he was president; I wished America could've benefited from his calming, unifying rhetoric during bygone controversies. Labeling him the "Defuser-in-Chief," Andrew Sullivan wrote, "He tried to explain -- in a simple, uncondescending way -- one shared communal experience to another," adding that "in a polarized America, this mixed-race president is doing what he can to foster mutual understanding and respect -- by lowering the temperature." That captures the tone and substance of Obama's remarks. Do read them if you haven't already.

***

Many observers thought that Obama's remarks were at their most powerful when he said:

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away.
There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me -- at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often. And I don't want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it's inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.

I felt the power of those words. But as I re-read that part of the speech, as well as the passage where the president said, "I want to make sure that, once again, I send my thoughts and prayers, as well as Michelle's, to the family of Trayvon Martin, and to remark on the incredible grace and dignity with which they've dealt with the entire situation," I can't help but harbor complicated feelings about Obama and the American people generally. You see, right around the same time that Obama gave his speech, the grandfather of a 16-year-old American, killed in an apparent incident of profiling, wrote in the New York Times, "They showed me the grave where they buried his remains. I stood over it, asking why my grandchild was dead. Nearly two years later, I still have no answers." As he put it, "the United States government has refused to explain."

The 16-year-old "lived in America until he was 7, then came to live with me in Yemen. He was a typical teenager -- he watched 'The Simpsons,' listened to Snoop Dogg, read 'Harry Potter' and had a Facebook page with many friends. He had a mop of curly hair, glasses like me and a wide, goofy smile." In the autumn of 2011, Abdulrahman set out from his grandfather's home in search of his father, who he hadn't seen in years. He was still hundreds of miles away when the U.S. government killed his father, Anwar al-Awlaki, in a drone strike due to his affiliation with al-Qaeda. "Abdulrahman called us and said he was going to return home," his grandfather wrote. "That was the last time I heard his voice. He was killed just two weeks after his father."

The U.S. government was behind the killing. "The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians on Oct. 14, 2011, while the boys were eating dinner at an open-air restaurant in southern Yemen." I've written about the boy's case before, though I hadn't thought about it for awhile.

But Obama's speech brought it to mind. There are, of course, many differences between the killing of Trayvon Martin and the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. But they were just a year apart in age when killed. When I heard Obama muse about how 35 years ago, he could've been Trayvon Martin, I started to think about a young Barack Hussein Obama, having not seen his father in years; and it didn't seem so far-fetched to think that he could've been Abdulrahman too -- not someone whose father was an international terrorist, necessarily, but a young American citizen venturing off to a volatile foreign country in search of an absent father, and getting killed in the course of his search, despite not having done anything wrong himself. If a mixed race 16-year-old named Barack Hussein Obama had been killed overseas circa 1978, how many Americans would have cared? Would the U.S. government have investigated? Had a George W. Bush or a Bill Clinton been killed abroad at that age would it have been different? Experience would lead African Americans and Muslim Americans to think so.

I'd never fault Obama for failing to identify with Abdulrahman in the personal way that he has with Trayvon. But comparing and contrasting the two deaths, as I've been doing in my head all weekend, ought to make anyone deeply uncomfortable. The Florida case sparked a nationwide protest movement because of the widespread belief that local police hadn't properly investigated a 17-year-old's death. Millions of Americans felt that absent an independent investigation of the facts, an arrest and a trial, justice wouldn't even have a chance of being served. Obama even addressed the case himself and consoled the boy's grieving family.

Abdulrahman's death still hasn't been investigated.

The Obama Administration took many months just to acknowledge that it was responsible for firing the missile that killed Abdulrahman, but still gave no explanation, saying only that the 16-year-old wasn't targeted intentionally. There was no popular outcry for the facts to be established and possible wrongdoing to be adjudicated, even after reports surfaced that John Brennan suspected that Abdulrahman was killed intentionally. Obama hasn't addressed the 16-year-old's death.

He hasn't consoled the boy's family.

But Robert Gibbs, his former press secretary, did say, asked in his capacity as an Obama 2012 staffer how Obama justified the 16-year-old's death, "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don't think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business." Imagine how that statement made Abdulrahman's surviving relatives -- none of them al-Qaeda members -- feel. Imagine how it feels for them to still not know why the boy was killed.

***

Is it sufficient to say, as Obama Administration defenders do, that Abdulrahman's killing happened in war, and national security requires that the details be kept secret? Is it unfair to compare this case with a domestic incident in Florida where state secrets were not implicated at all?

Certainly the incidents are different.

But I don't think all comparisons are unfair. It should be said that the U.S. isn't, in fact, at war with Yemen, and wasn't at war with any group to which the 16-year-old belonged. But set that aside.

When an American citizen is wrongfully killed by the government, "we didn't mean to do it but we can't explain why we did" doesn't cut it. Is there no other information that can be released without jeopardizing national security? Even if it was a terrible accident that everyone in the national-security establishment regrets, isn't the next of kin owed an explanation and an apology?

Shouldn't what went wrong be established?

Don't the press and the public have a responsibility to see if anyone erred in a way for which they should be held accountable, and that safeguards are in place to make sure other innocents don't die in this terrible way? That's how we reacted when Pat Tillman died on the battlefield. As in that case, the notion that the government is obviously telling us the truth, and has additionally told us all that it possibly can without jeopardizing national security, seems farcical.

One needn't suspect murder to demand answers.

And when I think about the contrasts in the ways that the government and the public have treated Trayvon and Abdulrahman, I must say that I discern uncomfortable truths that are bigger than the facts of the individual cases, as perilous as extrapolating in these circumstances can be. In a nod to the inevitable uncertainty involved in these judgments, I'll conclude by talking not about what I know or can prove, but about what I fear and want desperately to prevent.

***

Whatever the truth is about the killing of Abdulrahman, the way that it's been handled -- by the president and the public -- makes me fear that it would be easy for the United States government to wrongfully kill an innocent American teenager, so long as he is a Muslim American traveling in a Muslim country. I fear that having a name like Abdulrahman is itself enough to make the American public more comfortable with your unexplained death than if you have a name like Trayvon or John. I fear that no public figure with the cultural resonance of a Barack Obama, or even Jessie Jackson or Al Sharpton, reliably speaks up on behalf of wronged Muslim Americans, because there is no constituency to make a figure of that sort popular. I fear that this makes Muslim Americans the most vulnerable minority group in America today.

I fear that a healthy majority of Americans, including Americans who would be outraged were it proved that Trayvon Martin was racially profiled, are perfectly comfortable with killing young men of unknown identity in Yemen, so long as drone pilots conclude that they fit the profile of terrorists. (Few object to the fact that the Obama Administration has treated all dead males of military age as "militants" when it calculates how many innocent civilians are being killed by its ongoing drone war). I fear that the logic of the drone war -- that terrorists are determined to kill us, and that very real threat justifies drone strikes in Yemen, even though some innocents will be killed -- is uncomfortably similar, though not equivalent, to the logic of Zimmerman, who noted that his fearful neighbors were targeted by real criminals to justify his aggressive pursuit of Trayvon.

I fear that the thousands of family members of innocent civilians killed in drone strikes feel toward the United States something like what Trayvon Martin's family feels toward George Zimmerman, and that when Muslim Americans hear Obama talk about understanding what it's like to be part of a minority group subject to profiling, they nevertheless feel vulnerable to being profiled. Indeed, they know that Obama has recently praised a man who ethnically profiled them.

When it came to Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, Americans on all sides of the controversy, however wrongheaded their understanding of the facts or their arguments, generally wanted what they saw as justice to be done. I fear that, in the case of Abdulrahman, my fellow citizens don't particularly care whether justice is done, because deep down they know we're doing some unjust things in the War on Terrorism, but they have a hazy idea that those things make us safer, so they don't want to look into them too deeply, lest we have to stop, or even to fully confront what's being done in our names. I want to believe that being an American citizen at least means that when you're killed, the facts around your death will be investigated and wrongdoing will be punished, even if you have a Muslim name and a radical for a father.

I fear I'll never be able to believe it again.

Did The Conjuring Really Deserve an 'R' Rating Just for Being Scary?

Posted: 22 Jul 2013 04:31 AM PDT

Warner Bros.

"Rated R for sequences of disturbing violence and terror."

That's the decree that came from the MPAA earlier this year for James Wan's hit new horror flick, The Conjuring, a '70s-set, based-on-a-true-story tale about a family besieged by the supernatural in their Rhode Island farmhouse. Though Wan claimed to have shot it with the intention of garnering a more box office-friendly PG-13, the ratings board had other ideas. R ratings can limit the potential audience for a film, so moviemakers often appeal the MPAA's decision or recut their work to try to change the judgment. But Wan and the film's producers saw the harsher rating as an opportunity instead of an obstacle.

Speaking to an audience at the WonderCon in Anaheim in March, The Conjuring's executive producer, Walter Hamada, said that the MPAA told them, "'It's just so scary. [There are] no specific scenes or tone you could take out to get it PG-13.'"

No sex, no nudity, no profanity—just too scary. In one tidy sound bite, Hamada turned The Conjuring into the sort of movie that horror-loving teens essentially have to find a way to see. The film took the top spot at the box office this past weekend, earning an impressive $41.5 million—the best debut for an R-rated horror flick ever. One can only guess how many tickets to Pacific Rim, The Lone Ranger, or World War Z were be sold this weekend were actually be for 16-year-olds sneaking into the screen next door to see just how scary too scary is.

But how terrifying is the film, really? Anyone who pays attention to ratings controversies, or who has seen Kirby Dick's excellent 2006 documentary on the MPAA, This Film is Not Yet Rated, knows that the ratings board is notoriously arbitrary and not prone to explaining their actions publicly. When Hamada says the association told the producers there was nothing that could be altered in the film to get it a PG-13, we have to take his word for it—or go see for ourselves, which is certainly what The Conjuring's producers were banking on.

But despite the narrative that has sprung out of all this, which is the sort of publicity that horror impresario William Castle would have killed for back in the '50s and '60s—"The filmed deemed too scary for teens!"—it's not like this is the first time a film has been rated R largely for the ambiguous "terror." Nor would it be the first time such a rating might be questionable.

In 1996, just before he was tapped to make the Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson filmed his first sizably budgeted work for a major studio, the Michael J. Fox-starring horror comedy The Frighteners. Despite its light tone, a minimum of any significant scares, and the fairly cartoonish nature of the violence, it got saddled with an R rating for the same elements as The Conjuring: violence and terror. The Frighteners isn't nearly as frightening as, say, James Wan's last film, Insidious —which is cited for violence and terror in the MPAA's explanation, but also for language and disturbing images. Insidious, however, was only a PG-13.

Then there's Sam Raimi's goofy, slapstick Army of Darkness, which the MPAA seemed to really have it out for—it initially received not an R, but an NC-17, for nothing more disturbing than a zombie getting beheaded. Who knows what would happen if AMC's The Walking Dead was subject to weekly review by the board.

All of this raises a question: Just how can terror be measured? Short of hooking audience members up to an EEG and EKG and analyzing brain function and heart rate, or trying to monitor adrenaline production over the course of a movie's running time, how do you quantify the subjective quality of fear?

Short of hooking audience members up to an EEG and EKG and analyzing brain function and heart rate, how do you quantify the subjective quality of fear?

Here's one measure. Let me preface by saying that advance screenings of horror films are usually terrible, often having little to do with the quality of the movie itself. These promotional screenings, set up for the media to attend with a band of lucky moviegoers who've been given free passes to the early showing, highlight almost all the reasons many people hate seeing movies in the cinema. Even more than for any other genre, advance screenings of horror seem to give people license to try to prove to the world that they're not scared by yelling at the screen, laughing at wildly inappropriate times, and loudly attempting to predict to their neighbor what's going to happen next.

But here's what took place at the screening I attended last week for The Conjuring. Things started out with the usual chatter, but then something curious started to develop, gradually, as the movie went on. People largely kept quiet. There were startled screams, collective jumps and armrest-grabbing, and laughter at the needed comic relief that Wan provides throughout the film. But as the director slowly wound up the tension in preparation for the film's chaotic climax, there were moments where it seemed the entire theater was holding its breath. We were united in one feeling: terror.

Is it too scary for a 16-year-old to see without Mom or Dad? Probably depends on the teen, and I don't feel qualified to make that decree—I was watching R-rated films alone in my parents' basement on HBO and VHS before I was even technically allowed to go to a PG-13 film myself, and I don't consider myself any worse off for it.

But does The Conjuring deserve to be singled out as more intense than its peers purely on the basis of terror? (I realize the rating mentions violence too, but I doubt its violence would break the PG-13 threshold.) Others may disagree, but I'd argue the answer has to be yes.

Wan's approach to horror is resolutely old-fashioned, but finely tuned to maximize techniques we've already seen a million times before. When a character is locked goes into a darkened basement with only matches for light, we KNOW something is going to spring out of the darkness. When Wan leaves obvious room in the frame for something to pop up, or telegraphs the appearance of a ghoul by having a character look in terror before the camera actually shows it, it shouldn't be a surprise when he gives us what we expect.

Yet his ability to deliver thoroughly disturbing images without resorting to ostentatious gore or violence is something to marvel at. I'm fairly desensitized to this sort of thing—maybe that's the fallout of my teenage horror viewing—but my guts were wrapped up in knots and every follicle on my head sizzled with fear on multiple occasions. If the MPAA is looking for an objective standard for R-rated terror going forward, they might as well just add to the rating, "as scary as The Conjuring."

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