Fearmongering & Football: A Look At The Ridiculous Anti-Drug PSA Airing During The Super Bowl

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Sunday February 07, 2016 · 10:20 AM PST

2016/02/07 · 10:20

Screen_Shot_2016-02-07_at_1.11.15_PM.png — This Is Your Brain On Drugs, 21st century edition

All things being considered, I’d have to say my abilities as a job interviewee aren’t stellar. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got no problem tooting my own horn, answering questions on the fly and being engaging and all that noise. My main issue is that I suffer from what I like to call Chandler Bing Syndrome, which means I have a tendency to make jokes and act overly familiar whenever I feel nervous. Sadly, I have a handful of stories wherein I do this during a job interview—with one borderline NSFW example involving almost 3 hours of questions, an empty stomach, a stone faced CFO and Susan G. Komen for the Cure—but the one that I found myself recalling recently happened when I was trying to land an internship at the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

At first everything went really well. Since I had to get all gussied up in a proper suit and festooned with all of these fancy clearance badges before being led to the interview room itself—one of those big, windowless deals with the fancy chairs and the imposing, mead hall-sized conference tables inside—I was pretty professional and businesslike for the first portion of the interview. However, the longer we talked, the more casual my demeanor got, until the very end of the interview when they asked me if I there was any particular piece of drug prevention advertising that I was fond of. In retrospect, I probably should’ve been smart enough to play a little kiss ass and praise the Above The Influence campaign they were running at the time, but for some reason I was stuck on truth mode. So I started singing: “Meth—Oooooooh Meth!”

Some of you who are reading this may already know what ad I’m talking about, but for those who don’t, there was an anti-Methamphetamine PSA that came out sometime in the early 2000s, that featured this really tweaked out girl, well, tweaking her lady balls off while this amazingly cheery, yet extremely haunting song played in the background. For example, the snippet I sang in the interview was, “I don’t sleep, I don’t eat, but I’ve got the clean-est house on the street. Meth—Ooooooh Meth!”. To this day it’s my favorite PSA, about anything, not so much because I think it’s effective, but because it’s so delightfully twisted and memorable. You could have put in as a sketch on Saturday Night Live and nobody would’ve known the difference.

Considering the fact that, as I would later find out, the PSA was produced by the Office of National Drug Control Policy during the Bush years, there’s no way they intended it to be received the way it. That being said, it’s often better to be lucky than good, and the Oooooh Meth ad is one of the few anti-drug PSAs I know of that manages to engage its target audience while not patronizing them and providing a fairly honest account of the effects of drug addiction. Compared to many of it’s forebears and contemporaries, like the infamous This is your brain on drugs egg to the stoners running over the tricycle girl at the drive thru ad, the Ooooh Meth PSA is actually pretty good, in spite of or perhaps even because of its unintentional hilarity.

I bring this up because I recently the group Families For Sensible Drug Policy recently posted something on their Facebook page that made me privy to a particularly off-putting anti-heroin advertisement that will be airing during the Super Bowl which follows in the fearmongering footsteps of the Just Say No era. The ad, which was made by a drug prevention outfit in St. Louis called the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse (NCADA), is called “All-American Girl” and I can only hope, given NCADA’s location, that it is confined to the greater St. Louis area because it is pretty awful. And, to be clear, the “All-American Girl” PSA isn’t awful in the, “it’s so bad it’s good” way, but in the, “how did anyone think this was good idea” way.

The Reader’s Digest version of NCADA’s ad is essentially: watch a pretty, upper-middle class high school girl get hooked on heroin and give up everything important in her life. However, just recounting the simple plot of PSA does not do justice to how profoundly stupid it is, so I’m going to give you an in-depth breakdown of the myriad ways this ad is and embarrassment to sound drug abuse prevention:

Screen_Shot_2016-02-07_at_1.03.25_AM.png

0:01 – The PSA starts off with a pointless shot of our beleaguered protagonist cooking heroin in a spoon, because f**k it, why not trigger any newly recovering heroin addicts who wanted to watch the Super Bowl? Also, they display a fundamental misunderstanding of how Twitter works by putting #heroin up the screen with no explanation. Who is that hashtag for? People who really like heroin? People who are trying to find treatment help for heroin abuse? Someone sharing a gif of the the toilet diving scene from Trainspotting? It makes no sense.

Screen_Shot_2016-02-07_at_1.09.47_AM.png

0:03 – Our living, breathing, female cautionary tale is now in the middle of a cheerleading practice when she drops her pom-poms and walks away. A few things: 1) Why are all of these girls in their full cheerleading uniforms during a practice? There’s clearly nothing happening on the football field behind them and no sport—not even cheerleading—practices in their uniforms. 2) This girl is in the middle of a routine and decides, apropos of nothing, to drop her pom poms and walk away. Who does this? She couldn’t have waited until the end of practice or at least told someone that she had to go because she was sick? As a teenage opiate addict, the last thing this girl wants is people suspecting that she’s using and leaving cheerleading practice without saying a word is basically the equivalent of calling your own intervention.

Screen_Shot_2016-02-07_at_1.22.49_AM.png

0:14 – For some reason, our budding heroin junkie is walking down the ramp of a circular, multistory parking garage when she just throws her computer over the railing and about 30 feet to the ground. I mean, I realize these are all metaphors for how you’ll lose everything you have if you start shooting dope, but they’re god awful ones. Seriously, you couldn’t have shot a scene where she sells her laptop at a pawn shop or tries to use it to barter with her dealer for smack?

Screen_Shot_2016-02-07_at_1.29.54_AM.png

0:24 – Now, the girl is sitting at the counter at an upscale coffee shop, fidgeting her legs, when she gets a call from her mom. Instead of answering the phone she gets up and drops her phone in the trash. What the ever-loving shit?! First off, she’s going to have answer that phone at some point to get her mom off her back because she still probably needs a place to stay and, considering the fact that she probably isn’t working, her parents are pretty much her only source of income, especially since she just flung her laptop off a damn parking garage instead of pawning it. Second, how the hell is she going to get her heroin now? Her dealer’s number was in that phone. Now she’s going to have to drive to his house every time she needs more and hope the guy’s home.

Screen_Shot_2016-02-07_at_1.38.12_AM.png

0:35 – The girl is walking her yellow lab down a side street when she takes his leash, drops it over a two-by-four in a dumpster, and walks away. Why? No, seriously. Why? She’s in high school and still lives with her parents. There’s no reason for her to give that dog away, even metaphorically. She could run away from home, do heroin every damn day for a year and then come back and the dog would still be there. Not only that, but if for some bizarre reason she did leave the dog on the side street, her neighbors would wind up finding the little guy and he’d be back at home in 6-8 hours tops.

Screen_Shot_2016-02-07_at_1.45.14_AM.png

0:48 – Saving the best for last, the girl parks her brand new 2015 Subaru Forester in the middle of the street, gets out of the car and walks away from it, dropping her button down shirt on the ground as she leaves for no apparent reason. Good god, that is a $23,000 SUV with tremendous resale value that she just left in the street. And, not only did she just abandon at least $13-14k worth of car, but she did it in the middle of the street where it’s liable to attract the most attention from neighbors and police, who will certainly try to find the car’s original owner.

That’s the end of the the ad. Where this girl is going now is anyone’s guess. She’s got no phone, no laptop and no car and she’s now just walking around suburban St. Louis aimlessly like some pretty, heroin chic zombie. I have watched this ad at least 25 times and I have yet to find one redeeming or informative quality in it. The folks at NCADA provide no solution. They provide no hope for recovery. All they do is try to scare white, middle class parents out of their shoes by showing that even their sons and daughters can get addicted to heroin. The only thing ads like “All American Girl” prevent is meaningful dialogue with teenagers about the realities of substance abuse and the possibilities for positive change inherent in abstinence-based recovery, medication assisted therapy and harm reduction.

Who’s Afraid of The Zika Virus? How We Perceive Threat With Infectious Disease

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Sunday January 31, 2016 · 3:31 PM PST

2016/01/31 · 15:31

A mother cradles the head her daughter who was recently born with Microcephaly in the Brazilian city of Recife (Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)

My fellow Americans, there is a new disease among us. It has only recently begun to make its way to our country from Latin America, but it will surely spread farther. Discovered in Sub-Saharan Africa shortly after World War II, this mosquito-borne alphavirus lay low for decades, popping up sporadically until the last few years, when it exploded on the international scene, ravaging not just Africa, but Asia and the more tropical portions of the Americas. Carried aloft in the bloodstreams of unsuspecting travelers, this virus has finally made landfall in the United States, with 44 states having reported cases. In adults who contract the virus, the predominant symptoms are fever, joint pain and rashes, although pregnant women are at greatest risk, as they can pass it on to their babies, potentially causing neonatal encephalopathy and leading to diminished neurological functioning. There is no known cure and no effective treatment has been developed. It seems like nothing can stop Chikungunya from wreaking havoc throughout the US.

If you were expecting to see the Zika virus name-dropped at the end of that paragraph, I certainly can’t fault you. In recent weeks, certain corners of the media have begun whipping the American public into a panic over Zika, a tropical disease that has been relatively active in recent years in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. In 2014, likely because of the major influx of tourists for The World Cup, the Zika virus was transferred to Brazil, where it has turned into a health crisis and spread to other portions of South and Central America.

Health workers fumigate to prevent Dengue, Chikunguya and Zika virus, at El Angel cemetery, in Lima, Peru, Wednesday, Jan 20, 2016. A U.S. warning urging pregnant women to avoid travel to Latin American countries where the mosquito-borne virus is multiplying threatens to depress tourism to the region, one of its few bright spots at a time of deep economic pain. (AP Photo/Martin Mejia) — Health workers fumigate a cemetery in Lima, Peru to prevent the spread of Dengue, Chikunguya and Zika viruses (AP Photo/Martin Mejia)

Over the past year, prevalence of Zika throughout Latin and South America has sky rocketed, leading Brazil to declare a national health emergency and for El Salvador, Ecuador and Columbia to release official government statements asking citizens to not have children for varying lengths of time due to the disease’s possible negative impact on neonatal health. For its part, the Centers for Disease Control have recently recommended that that women who are pregnant or trying to become pregnant avoid traveling to countries that have ongoing transmission of the virus. The impetus of the unprecedented severity of this particular Zika outbreak is thought to lie in climate change, specifically in the increased rains brought on by this year’s particularly strong El Nino, which has provided more breeding grounds for Zika carrying mosquitos in these tropical nations.

With that being said, none of the information provided above really explains why the Zika virus has received such a wealth of media exposure, while other mosquito-borne viruses get comparatively short shrift. As a member of the Flavivirus family, Zika bears a great resemblance to many of its virological brethren, sharing traits with viruses like Chikungunya, West Nile, Dengue and Yellow Fever. In fact, these viruses are so analogous that it’s currently impossible to know just how prevalent Zika is because the only tests we have for it have a very small window of efficacy during the virus’s infectious phase and because the virus is so similar to Dengue and Yellow Fever that past exposure or vaccination to these viruses make Zika testing a crap shoot. Based on the level of alarm that’s being raised in the US media, it would be reasonable to assume that Zika is virus on par with Ebola, but Zika has historically been considered one of the tamer Flaviviruses and is still being described by many as “Dengue Light”.

As the western world goes into a collective conniption fit over Zika, Dengue Fever has quietly infected 1.6 Brazilians in the past year, killing 863 people. Dengue, which is transmitted by the same Aedes aegypti mosquitos that transmit Zika, is also a virus that has grown at a disturbing rate, undergoing a 30-fold increase in incidence over the last 50 years with 390 million infections occurring annually. With this being the case—and with a slew of infectious diseases like Tuberculous, HIV/AIDS and Malaria that kill millions each year—why has the Zika virus ignited a media firestorm? After all, Chikungunya cases were reported in the vast majority of US states last year, West Nile has been constant presence in America throughout the 21^st Century and Hawaii is currently dealing with an outbreak of Dengue Fever so big thatRepresentative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) is urging the state’s governor to declare a state of emergency. Why isn’t Dengue Fever plastered across the front pages of newspapers and homepages throughout America?

Screen_Shot_2015-12-04_at_12.45.09_PM.0.png — The distribution of cases of microcephaly in Central and South America since 2010

To answer those questions, we have to look at the sorts of stories that capture our attention and the types of diseases that frighten us. Up until very recently, there was nothing about Zika that made it terribly exciting or newsworthy. It was an obscure virus that elicited a variety of hum-drum symptoms (mild fever, rash, joint pain, pink eye) and was confined to portions of the globe that American media largely doesn’t cover and the average American rarely thinks about. Had the Zika remained in Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania it would still be a non-story in this country. However, when the virus entered into Central & South America, everything changed.

One would think that the major cause for the sudden interest in Zika by the American public would be the virus’s closer proximity to the United States, but that is only half the story. After all, there’s an outbreak of Dengue Fever going on in a US state as I write this and it’s not grabbing headlines, while Zika—a less severe disease that has yet to make significant landfall in America—is. The reason for this, I propose, lies predominantly in the ways we perceive and internalize the harm and risk surrounding microcephaly, a birth defect that has been associated, but not linked, to the spread of Zika in Latin America.

Since the Zika virus began to spread throughout Brazil in earnest last spring, physicians and nurses began noticing an abnormally large number of newborns with a condition known as microcephaly, wherein an infant is born with a significantly underdeveloped brain and skull. Brazil has seen 4,000 babies born with this irreversible condition in the past year—a twenty-fold increase over the usual rate—at the same time the Zika epidemic has broken out. No causal link has been established yet between Zika and microcephaly, with the virus’s genetic material being found in only 6 of the 4,000 cases of infants born with the birth defect, but it is strongly suspected that the link is there.

The substantial increase in babies being born with microcephaly in Latin America is certainly tragic, but I would argue that our collective response to Zika in America is based more on the macabre and horrifying nature of the way the virus is manifesting itself than the actual danger it poses to us. Dengue Fever, which is prevalent wherever Zika is, already kills roughly 25,000 people each year, has been shown to lead to miscarriage, fetal death and maternal death, and is currently running roughshod through Hawaii, hasn’t made much of a splash in American media while Zika has because it occupies the realms of the known and the mundane.

If we as a nation really cared about infectious disease and the totality of the unacceptably large portion of humanity that is still ravaged by it, we’d be freaking out in even greater measure about the growing Tuberculosis pandemic that caused 1.5 million people to die TB-related deaths in 2014 as multi-drug resistant strains of the virus become more and more prevalent. If the average American was worried about the state of infectious disease in their country and the world, we wouldn’t have a news media that largely ignores the 50,000 Americans who contract HIV each year and that never mentions the over half a million people who die from Malaria each year.

The argument could be made that the Zika virus has generated such headlines because it seems to have had its effect primarily on newborns and young children, but that hardly makes it novel. Malaria, Pneumonia and Infectious Diarrhea all have their most damaging effect on children under 5, with anestimated annual death toll between the 3 of them of roughly 2.5 million kids, the vast majority of whom live in Sub-Saharan Africa. We aren’t fascinated with the Zika virus here in America because of the small, yet legitimate threat it poses to pregnant women and their newborns who travel to Central and South America. We are fascinated because it would appear that Zika silently sabotages the miracle of birth, turning a moment of unparalleled joy into a nightmare and delivering in the place of a healthy baby boy or girl, a wailing, underdeveloped infant that will likely never know a normal life.

The distribution of cases of microcephaly in Central and South America since 2010

The term microcephaly may not have registered in most American households prior to the appearance of the Zika virus, but show those same households a photo or a video of an adult suffering from microcephaly and odds are that their first association would be the same: the circus. Ever since the advent of the circus sideshow in the mid 19th-century, microcephalics—or “pinheads” as they were known at the time—were frequently featured. From the introduction of “Zip the Pinhead”, played by a black microcephalic from New Jersey named William Henry Johnson, into P.T. Barnum’s circus in the 1860s, to the use of Schlitzie in the cult 1930’s film Freaks and the microcephalic character Pepper in American Horror Story (played by an actress without microcephaly), the neurological condition has always been rooted in freak show culture.

While it is an unequivocally good thing that WHO, the international community and the US media are taking note of the outbreak of Zika virus in Central and South America and taking what appears to be swifter action against it that it did with Ebola in 2014, I feel that it’s still important to take a long hard look at why this particular virus has so captured our attention when similar viruses that are arguably more severe and pose bigger threats to public health in America have not. If we truly ask ourselves what it is about the Zika virus that so scares and intrigues us, we cannot help but notice that we are drawn to it more by the bizarre, aberrant way in which the virus seems to be effecting those who contract it than by any empirically validated threat. Much like the man who’s terrified of losing his life in a plane crash, but winds up dying while texting on the freeway, we cannot allow the fear of Zika to occupy too much space in our minds while there are other, more deadly infectious diseases already flourishing both in United States and abroad.

Sentiment Over Substance: How Presidential Candidates Talk About Addiction Without Saying Anything

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Monday January 25, 2016 · 1:36 PM PST

2016/01/25 · 13:36

In frame: Carly Fiorina giving a speech on addiction at the New Hampshire Forum on Addiction and the Heroin Epidemic. Out of frame: Me feeling nauseous.

It happened at the beginning of the New Hampshire Forum on Addiction and the Heroin Epidemic, well before the 5 mid-card presidential candidates who participated in the event showed up to speak. About halfway through the morning portion of the forum, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) stepped up to the podium and began her speech with a little audience participation. After doling out the requisite amount of praise to those in attendance, Senator Shaheen decided to take an informal poll of who exactly it was that she was speaking to:

“How many of you in the audience have a family member or a friend who is an addict?” Senator Shaheen asked. The majority of those in the room raised their hand.

“How many of you are treatment professionals of some kind?” she asked next. A smaller, but still substantial group of people raised their hand.

“How many of you are involved in drug policy work?” she said to the crowd, prompting a smattering of hands to go up in the air.

“How many of you are working for a presidential campaign?” Shaheen asked, this time eliciting one hand raise from a member of Governor John Kasich’s staff who had gotten to the event early.

And then, happy with the response she had gotten, Senator Shaheen ended that portion of her appearance and got on with her speech. I looked around the room and pretty much everyone looked satisfied—or at the very least uninterested—and ready to hear the Congresswoman’s remarks. No one outside of myself, it seemed, found it odd or insulting that Senator Shaheen had asked about the backgrounds of attendees at a forum on addiction and neglected to ask if there were any recovering addicts in the room, an omission that is far too common in the corridors of power in America to blame squarely on Senator Shaheen or any of the political actors in the room that day. Nonetheless, it was still disconcerting that a forum on heroin addiction would seem to go out of it’s way to avoid communicating directly with those in recovery and active addiction while spending a significant amount of time painting addicts as passive actors in the fight against their own addiction.

Jeb Bush speaks about his daughter’s struggles with addiction at the New Hampshire Forum on Addiction and the Heroin Epidemic (Cheryl Senter/New York Times)

Having worked in The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) for the better part of a year some time ago, this open neglect of those in both active addiction and recovery at a forum ostensibly for their benefit shouldn’t have surprised me. Yet, owing to the vagaries of human memory and my desire to place rose tinted gels over the lights shining on my past, I had managed to block much of that portion of it from my mind. But, the fact of the matter is there are very few politicians and policy makers out there shaping drug policy who are in recovery themselves. At the current moment, we are lucky enough to have Michael Botticelli as our nation’s “drug czar”, the first person to hold this position who is himself in recovery from drug addiction/alcoholism or to have a background rooted in public health as opposed to law enforcement.

I had the good fortune to work in ONDCP’s Office of Demand Reduction when Mr. Botticelli was brought in as the office’s Deputy Director and can say that work he has done while I was there and after—along with that of ONDCP’s Recovery Branch Chief Peter Gaumond, who is himself in long-term recovery—has done a great deal to bridge the gap of trust and understanding among many advocates and treatment professionals in the recovery community who have long seen government outfits like ONDCP as being punitive in nature and only interested in paying lip service to the importance of substance abuse prevention, treatment and recovery services in our nation’s approach to drug addiction.

This is not to suggest that those who occupy leadership positions within the government organizations that inform our nation’s drug policy have to be in recovery. There are many people within ONDCP, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and the federal government who are not addicts or alcoholics and who do phenomenal work, but it is vital that any comprehensive federal drug strategy be firmly rooted in the experience and needs of those who have gone through the crucible of active drug addiction and come out the other side. At the present, folks like ONDCP Director Botticelli are the exception to the rule, rather than the rule itself and, while I can’t speak for everyone else in recovery and active addiction, it would be greatly reassuring to see the next President of the United States nominate someone for Drug Czar who is in recovery from drug addiction or, at the very least, has an extensive background in public health and not law enforcement.

A man who had just been revived by paramedics after overdosing on heroin is loaded into an ambulance in Manchester, New Hampshire. (Shawne K. Wickham/Sunday News)

Now, while it is encouraging that pretty much all the candidates have publicly acknowledged that drug addiction is a disease and not a moral failing, it would seem as if many presidential hopefuls still aren’t addressing it through a public health framework. This was evident at the New Hampshire Forum on Addiction and the Heroin Epidemic, when all of the candidates on stage said that they would be against allocating any funding to drug abuse prevention programs, with some candidates openly mocking the idea of formal drug abuse prevention altogether.

Normally, if a candidate is talking about their opposition to funding drug prevention programs, they would cite cost as their primary rationale. However, the prevailing sentiment among the 5 GOP candidates that day seemed to be: Why would I want to waste money on something that anyone could do for free?Governor Kasich seemed to think it was ludicrous that government fund prevention efforts based on comprehensive education and best practices, instead arguing that teachers should be tasked with the job of keeping the kids off drugs—because, you know, all teachers are trained in drug prevention and clearly don’t have anything else occupying their time and energy, like teaching. For many of the other candidates, the onus of prevention was placed less on schools and more on parents, a plan which is absurd for many reasons, particularly because the only way to expect better outcomes in parental prevention of drug abuse is to fund educational and outreach programs to provide them with the resources to do so and because a large percentage of potential youth addicts have parents who are addicted to drugs as well.

And beyond the effectiveness of these programs, it would seem to me that for a group of people who claim to love to save money, the Republican presidential candidates (and to a certain degree the Democratic ones as well) have a very poor grasp on how to effectively reduce healthcare costs. You see, the funny thing about disease is, if you prevent it from happening, you don’t have to pay for its eventual treatment. For example, it’s remarkably expensive, both in cost and loss of life, to treat those suffering from an addiction to opioid painkillers. It is much, much cheaper to invest money in comprehensive drug education programs for both children and parents and to provide families with free or discounted pill safes to keep teens and newly recovering addicts from abusing medications not prescribed to them.

Ending the opioid epidemic, and doing so in a cost-effective manner, requires the organization of frequent Rx pill buy-back days with local law enforcement to keep opioids and benzodiazepines and the like from just hanging around the house, the widespread enforcement of Prescription Monitoring Programs, and, perhaps most importantly, it is essential that the pharmaceutical companies be held accountable for profiting on the misery of the American people and that physicians be encouraged to prescribe opioid painkillers judiciously and in smaller numbers, with larger numbers of refills, so that those in pain have access to medications, but rarely have extras when they recover.

All of this is much easier said than done, especially with regards to the reining in of Big Pharma, which is easily one of the most universally reviled industries in the country, but is also a top contributor to many presidential candidates. Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Hillary Clinton all currently count the pharmaceutical and health product industries as one of the 20 biggest contributors to their campaigns, with both Bush & Clinton taking in over $1 million from them. This fact, by itself, does not mean that Secretary Clinton or Governors Bush & Christie can’t propose a number of substantive measures towards increasing access to drug treatment and creating a national drug control strategy that is based firmly in public health and recovery instead of law enforcement and incarceration, but it does mean that I have very little faith that they will attempt to enact policies that will significantly cut into Big Pharma’s bottom line.

At the end of the day, all but one of these candidates will be moving into The White House this time next year, which means that the vast majority of the drug reform rhetoric that’s being thrown around on the campaign trail will wind up being just that—rhetoric. However, just because a candidate doesn’t win the general election or their party’s nomination doesn’t mean that they can’t use their soap box to shape the national discourse on drug addiction, for better and for worse. After listening to the 5 GOP candidates in New Hampshire and, to a lesser extent, the Democrats during their debates, it seems pretty evident that most of those running for president have opted for heartstring-pulling anecdotes and political preening rather than substantive policy solutions.

Carly Fiorina waits off stage before giving a speech primarily about her step-daughter’s struggles with addiction (Brian Snyder/Reuters)

In Alcoholics Anonymous, there’s a particular type of lead or share during a meeting that is known as a drunkalogue (I would imagine there’s a similar term in Narcotics Anonymous, but I spend less time in that fellowship and have not heard it). A drunkalogue is, in essence, when an alcoholic tells his/her story and focuses almost exclusively on instances of drinking and using, without talking much about the recovery process or how he/she is coping with life in sobriety. In terms of it’s utility in helping an alcoholic stay clean and sober, the drunkalogue is of virtually useless as it mainly serves to glorify past use—a phenomenon known as “war storying”.

The tendency of politicians to spend the bulk of their time talking about the suffering of addicts that they have known personally throughout the course of their life is in many ways an offshoot of the drunkalogue. In a place like New Hampshire, which currently has the 3^rd highest drug overdose rate in the nation, residents hardly need to be educated as to the severity of heroin epidemic, so the only purpose these stories serve are to make the candidate seem relatable and sympathetic to the voting public. Some of the politicians that spoke at the forum were so desperate for a personal addict story that they resorted to talking about their hairdresser’s children. However, it’s not simply the proximity of the addict to speaker that characterizes this form of pandering, but the way they talk about the addict.

On the positive side of the spectrum, I will say that Jeb Bush’s remarks about his daughter’s struggles with addiction were done tastefully and without over-dramatization. He spoke less about what he personally had done during his daughter’s struggles and didn’t provide some woebegone accounting of her addiction, choosing instead to talk more about the work his wife Columba did to combat drug addiction when she was First Lady of Florida. I certainly didn’t agree with everything Governor Bush had to say during his speech, but he did do a good job at avoiding using his daughter’s struggles with addiction as a political prop.

The same can certainly not be said about Carly Fiorina, whose speech about the death of her step-daughter after a prolonged battle with prescription pill addiction and alcoholism filled me with a sort of muffled anger. As she spoke about her step-daughter’s retrospectively inexorable descent into addiction, the words coming out of mouth were so overwrought and maudlin I felt ill. “As Lori grew progressively sicker, the potential disappeared from behind her eyes”, Fiorina told her audience. “The light, the sparkle she once had, left her. What remained was a dull, flat void. It was the look of hopelessness. And that look is what haunts me most.” In a vacuum, those words might seem genuine and touching, but just looking at her I knew it was an act. I knew it before I went back to my hotel room that night and Googled her remarks and found they had already been written in an op-ed published the day before, which was taken almost verbatim from the book she published back in May. And I most certainly knew it before it came out that she had ushered a bunch of unwitting preschoolers onto a stage where she was giving an anti-abortion speech in front of a giant picture of a fetus.

It is unfortunate when those in the political realm refuse to include those of us who are in recovery or active addiction in the formulation of drug policy. It is unacceptable when they use our suffering as a stepping stone to elected office.

Off His Meds & Away From Reality: Charlie Sheen’s Struggles With HIV & Mental Health

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Thursday January 14, 2016 · 10:20 AM PST

2016/01/14 · 10:20

Dr. Oz and Charlie Sheen have a prolonged and awkward in-studio chat about the actor's HIV treatment

Acceptance is the answer. As someone who has been through his fair share of rehabs and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, that is an axiom that I am sure Charlie Sheen is well acquainted with and, based on his history of addiction denialism and his recent behavior in the wake of his public announcement of HIV status, it is one he steadfastly refuses to acknowledge. On a very special two-part episode of The Dr. Oz Show earlier this week, Sheen invited the (not so) good doctor to his home and showed up for an taped interview in studio to demonstrate the ways in which he had turned over a new leaf and begun to tackle his HIV with a newfound, sober resolve. What ended up happening, as one might reasonably expect, is that Sheen’s appearance did the exact opposite of what the actor desired, painting him as an unstable, delusional individual who was risking his life chasing curative windmills instead of following his antiretroviral treatment regimen.

It is impossible to have a discussion about Charlie Sheen’s management of his HIV without first discussing his issues around substance abuse and, more importantly, mental health. Sheen’s travails around his myriad addictions, which run from alcohol and cocaine to gambling and sex, are one of the worst kept secrets in Hollywood and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the actor told Dr. Oz that he was once again newly clean and sober. Sheen reports that he hasn’t used drugs since in about 5 months and that he quit drinking the day after going on the Today Show and revealing his HIV diagnosis in an interview with Matt Lauer, which, if true, would mean he has a little under 2 months of simultaneous sobriety and clean time. Given his history of chronic relapse and his lack of a sober support system or recovery program, it’s hard to be too confident in Sheen’s continued sobriety, but it is encouraging nonetheless and, regardless, it isn’t necessarily an impediment to him suppressing the HIV in his body. Studies have shown that, as HIV medications have gotten more readily available and easier to take with fewer side effects, the number of people in active addiction who were able to take their meds regularly has skyrocketed, going from 19.3% in 1996 to 65.9% in 2009 according to one study.

Screen_Shot_2016-01-14_at_12.37.26_PM.png — *Charlie Sheen and Dr. Oz in the midst of a totally organic morning jog/heart-to-heart about the actor’s struggles with addiction, mental illness and HIV*

However, Sheen’s mental health status is a different story. In the special, he admits to Dr. Oz that he as been labeled and diagnosed as being bipolar before by several people (he won’t say specifically by who, but it’s safe to assume psychiatric professionals were among them), but that he refuses to identify himself as such or to take any medications for it, saying he doesn’t want to, “turn into some Seroqueled zombie.” For those who are unfamiliar with it Seroquel is a anti-psychotic medication that is FDA approved to treat schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder. It is a pretty heavy duty medication with a host of pretty dreadful side effects, the most common of which are increased fatigue, sedation, dizziness, cotton mouth and an increased appetite. It’s certainly understandable why Mr. Sheen wouldn’t want to take Seroquel or any drug that has those sorts of side effects, but his failure to treat his bipolar disorder has, in all likelihood, led him to make decisions regarding his HIV treatment that are potentially fatal.

The big “bombshell” of Dr. Oz’s special came when Sheen admits to the film crew following him around that he had stopped taking his HIV medications. “I feel like there’s this mantra, ‘Stay on your meds, stay on your meds, stay on your meds’” Sheen says to the camera in an SUV after receiving some acupuncture therapy. “As I was leaving, Michelle (Sheen’s acupuncturist) said ‘you look very healthy…you look very present, very clear.’ And I told her, ‘well, I’m not on my meds.’ I’ve been off my meds for about a week now and I always feel great. And yeah, am I risking my life? Sure. So what…I told my mom on day one that the disease picked the wrong guy if it wanted to stay alive.”

Later on in the episode, Sheen reveals that he had begun seeing a Dr. Samir Chachoa in Mexico, who was using alternative therapies to not only treat his HIV, but cure him from having it using treatments that were patented over 2 decades ago and which have been either discredited or ignored by the international medical community. When Dr. Oz managed to reach him via telephone, Dr. Chachoa told him rather matter-of-factly that, in order to convince Charlie of the efficacy of his treatments, he, “drew some blood from him (Sheen) and I injected myself with it and I said, ‘Charlie if I don’t know what I’m doing, then we’re both in trouble right now, aren’t we?’” After recounting the story to his studio audience, Dr. Oz called Dr. Chachoa’s behavior, “pretty inappropriate”, a statement that might be the early frontrunner for the largest understatement of 2016.

While Sheen was in the studio, Dr. Oz also had the actor read an excerpt from something he had sent him that was half poem, half program pitch and which outlined an idea for a TV show he had called Chasing The Cure. In it, Sheen wrote that in this show, “We’ll go through the medical front lines, the alternative back rooms, and at times, the radically unsafe and uncharted catacombs and warrens that have been labeled or deemed as ‘godless voodoo’ or ‘unapproved junk science’.” Essentially, Sheen is saying that he wants to put his life on the line to find HIV treatment’s Holy Grail when perfectly good antiretroviral treatments already exist. He truly believes that, because of his fame, because of his brilliance and because of his intrepid nature, he can find a cure to HIV where all of humanity and science has failed previously.

This sort of detachment from reality and sense of exceptionality are some of the hallmarks of both someone who is in denial and someone experiencing a manic episode. To a sane individual, the idea that any one person could either, through biologic superiority or unbridled tenacity, be better equipped to combat HIV and/or find a cure is ridiculous, especially when there are already scientifically proven treatments on the market that can render the virus suppressed within the body. But to someone who is in denial or actively manic, that idea can sound perfectly reasonable.

It may sound like I’m harping on the mental health aspect of this—and to a certain extent I am—but it’s only because I feel as if it’s one of the more overlooked parts of medication adherence and because I have personal experience with it as well. While I am not HIV positive myself, I am in recovery from addiction and alcoholism, I have been on medication for bipolar disorder for almost my entire adult life and I have done case management work with numerous clients who had been diagnosed with various mental illnesses. I know what it’s like to have side effects from the medication you take have negative impacts your life and I also know that those side effects are the price I must be willing to take if I want to live a productive, satisfying life. I can’t say with any certainty what Charlie Sheen’s medication adherence and sobriety will look like if he continues to leave his mental health untreated, but I know from experience, both lived and observed, that his odds are not great.

Shoot First, Apologize Later: The Police Killings of Bettie Jones & Quintonio Jones

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Tuesday December 29, 2015 · 1:51 PM PST

2015/12/29 · 13:51

CHICAGO, IL - DECEMBER 27: Janet Cooksey listens to speakers talk about the deaths of her son Quintonio LeGrier, and Bettie Jones before the start of a vigil on December 27, 2015 in Chicago, Illinois. LeGrier, a 19-year-old college student who was home f — Janet Cooksey, whose son was shot to death on Saturday by a Chicago Police officer, wipes a tear from her eye

For most Americans, December 26^th isn’t a date that holds a great deal of significance outside of its relation to the day that comes before it. If you’re lucky, the 26^th of December will be spent in the comforts of your own home, watching some obscure college football bowl game, nursing a prime rib and egg nog hangover and trying to regain some of the sanity you shuffled off after being around your extended family for much of the day before. Others will be out braving the consumerist frenzy of after-Christmas sales or trying to recover from the side effects of the season at work, but, regardless, few will think of the day itself as being anything special. However, in the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, Australia and a host of other nations which were once British colonies, December 26^th is celebrated as a holiday known as Boxing Day.

In modern times, Boxing Day has become about as divorced from its origins as Christmas has here in America and is celebrated as something akin to a federally recognized Black Friday, where shopping and a full slate of sporting events are the main orders of the day. However, the roots of Boxing Day, which are about as Dickensian and quintessentially British as you could imagine, center around an old tradition wherein members of the working and/or servant class in the British empire were given small boxes filled with gifts and bonuses on the day after Christmas as a reward for their service throughout the year. Going back even farther, others say that the origins of Boxing Day are related to the story of the 10^th century Bohemian duke Wenceslas, whose alleged charity was immortalized in the Christmas carol, “Good King Wenceslas” and is set during during the feast of Saint Stephen, which takes place on December 26^th. No matter which origin story you choose to believe, the thread that runs through all of them is that it is a holiday centered around charity with a noblesse oblige chaser.

Americans generally do not celebrate Boxing Day, but if we were to start, it might be appropriate to start our own derivation of the holiday using Saint Stephen and the killings of Bettie Jones and Quintonio Legrier as inspiration. For those who are unaware or might need a refresher, Bettie Jones and Quintonio Legrier were two black Chicagoans who were killed by members of the city’s police department in the early morning hours of December 26^th, after officers responded to a domestic disturbance call. According to police reports and radio dispatch transcripts, a pair of officers were sent to an apartment complex in West Garfield Park on the city’s West Side after Antonio LeGrier called to report that his 19 year old son Quintonio was carrying a baseball bat and making threats towards him. Antonio also called his downstairs neighbor, 55 year old Bettie Jones, to let her know that his son was acting hostile and to not open her door until after the police had arrived.

2FA4001F00000578-3375629-LaTonya_Jones_the_daughter_of_Bettie_Jones_gets_comfort_from_her-m-10_1451265797524.jpg — *Bettie Jones’s daughter LaTonya, seen here holding a picture of her mother and being comforted by her father, Garry Mullen*

The details of what happened next are sparse, but from what little we know, two police officers arrived at the multi-family residence in which Jones and the LeGriers lived at 4:20 on Saturday morning to respond to the call. Once there, the police asked Jones to open the door to her home and, shortly thereafter, both she and Quintonio LeGrier were shot by one of the officers on the scene. Antonio LeGrier reported looking out after the shots were fired and seeing a white or hispanic officer standing on the lawn about 30 feet from Jones’s front door in a state of shock. “Fuck, no, no, no. I thought he was lunging at me with the [baseball] bat” the officer reportedly yelled.

In Antonio LeGrier’s mind, there was little doubt that the officer knew he’d done a big thing badly. “In my opinion, he knew he messed up.” LeGrier told the Chicago Sun-Times. “It was senseless. He knew had shot blindly, recklessly into the doorway and now two people are dead because of it.” According to the autopsy report released by the Cook County medical examiners office, Quintonio LeGrier died as the result of several gunshot wounds and Bettie Jones was killed from one bullet to the chest, although when her daughter found her lying on the floor of her apartment she was bleeding from a gunshot wound to the neck, so it would seem the officer shot her at least two times.

In a statement released shortly after the killings, the Chicago Police Department said that once they arrived at the scene, “officers were confronted by a combative subject resulting in the discharging of the officer’s weapon which fatally wounded two individuals.” What makes someone a “combative subject” in the Chicago PD’s eyes is anyone’s guess, but given the fact that LeGrier didn’t lay a hand on either officer and was armed with a 30-some-odd ounce piece of wood or metal, it would appear that all that was needed to make a subject combative is the perception of the officer in question. With regards to Ms. Jones, the department acknowledged that she was, “accidentally struck and tragically killed”, adding that they extended their “deepest condolences” to Jones’s family, which includes 5 children and 10 grandchildren.

At this point, it would certainly be fair to ask what, aside from their happening on December 26^th, the murders of two African-Americans by police on Chicago’s west side have to do with Boxing Day and Saint Stephen. Well, in order to adequately explain that, it might help if I fleshed out who Saint Stephen was a bit, as hagiography may not be everyone’s favorite past time. Stephen was one of the first deacons of the early Christian church who was appointed by the Apostles to spread the word of Christ and to help widows and the poor in Jerusalem. According to the Bible, Stephen worked wonders amongst the Hellenistic Jews he was sent to minister to, but was falsely accused of blasphemy by those who disagreed with him and was eventually stoned to death, making him the first martyr in the history of Christianity.

Before he was executed in one of the most barbarous ways imaginable, Stephen gave a speech to the Sanhedrin, an assembly that was the main governing body among the Jewish people at the time. In the first half of the speech, Stephen essentially gives an accounting of history of Israel, starting with a depiction of Abraham’s covenant with God. It ultimately amounts to little more than a retelling of certain portions of the Book of Genesis, but when I looked on it in the wake of the murders of Bettie Jones and Quintonio LeGrier, one passage in particular caught my eye:

“‘For four hundred years your descendents will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, God said, ‘and afterward they will come out of that country and worship me in this place.’”

It was 396 years ago, in 1619, that the first Africans were sold into slavery in Jamestown, Virginia, strangers in a country not their own—a country that, as far as the justice system is concerned, is not their descendents’ own. Is it coincidence, this symmetry between the Israelites in Egypt and blacks here in America? Probably, but that doesn’t make the parallels between them any less prescient.

One of the biggest problems with living in the age of social media and a never ending news cycle is that we have a tendency to follow the proverbial bouncing ball and pay attention to whatever’s newest at the expense of past events which still require our attention. With the frequency of police murders of blacks in America and the overwhelming tendency for their perpetrators to go without so much as a trial, it is easy to get discouraged and numb to it all. Just as I was in the process of writing this article, it was made public that a Cleveland grand jury had declined to indict any of the officers involved in the killing of 12 year old Tamir Rice last year. Naturally, much of the attention that was being paid nationally to the deaths of Bettie Jones and Quintonio LeGrier will switch over to the results of the Tamir Rice grand jury, before pivoting to wherever a police murder of black men, women and children happens next.

Therefore, I would like propose a new Boxing Day tradition here in America. Every December 26^th, in cities and towns all across America, we could have people from communities of color, black lives matter activists, victims of police violence, white allies and anyone who wants to stop the incessant killing of African Americans by police come down to their local courthouse with boxes. But, unlike the creators of the original boxing day traditions, the focus of our gift to local law enforcement and the judicial system will not so much be what’s in the boxes as much as the boxes themselves. That is because the boxes that we will lay at their feet will not be ordinary boxes. They will be coffins.

Exit Jail, Do Not Collect Ballot: Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin Revokes Voting Rights For Ex-Felons

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Thursday December 24, 2015 · 7:04 PM PST

2015/12/24 · 19:04

Gov. Matt Bevin addresses a crowd at his public inauguration at the Capitol. — Matt Bevin smiling, probably because he's thinking about slashing people's wages

At it’s most basic level, incarceration is exchange between an individual and the society in which he or she lives. Before the advent of the carceral punishment, this exchange was pretty direct and tangible. Steal a loaf of bread and you’d have your hand chopped off so others would know you were a thief. Make a cuckold of your spouse and you’d be branded with hot irons to let everyone know of your adulterous ways. This sort of punishment was quite literally an eye-for-an-eye and, even though it is a rather barbaric way of going about things, it was also a pretty straightforward transaction. In recent times, as the prison cell has largely replaced the stocks and the gallows as society’s preferred mode of punishment, this exchange has gotten more nebulous in nature and tenacious in its grasp on those who break the law. Ostensibly, after serving their time in the correctional system, those who have committed crimes are released as free men and women. Their time served, these ex-felons will have—to use the preferred parlance of much of the political class—paid back their debt to society. And yet, for millions of Americans, the debt that they owed to society will have generated so much interest, that they will be forced to go on paying it well after they have been released from prison and often, for the rest of their lives.

On November 24^th, outgoing Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear issued an executive order that mandated the immediate restoration of voting rights for all Kentuckians convicted of a nonviolent felony upon their release from prison. At the time of Beshear’s order, Kentucky was one of only three states in America—along with Iowa and Florida—that did not automatically restore suffrage to residents who had committed a felony and served out their sentence. With a few strokes of a pen, Governor Beshear restored the the right to vote for roughly 140,000 formerly incarcerated Kentuckians. But that was a month ago. In the 31 days that have passed since that executive order was issued, the political landscape of the Bluegrass State has shifted dramatically to the right and Kentuckians are quickly discovering that some of their civil liberties have been lost in the shuffle.

*Within 2 weeks of taking office, Matt Bevin had disenfranchised 140,000 Kentuckians*

In what a amounts to his first major actions as the newly elected Governor of Kentucky, Tea Party darling Matt Bevin has taken it upon himself to embody the spirit of Ebeneezer Scrooge by issuing executive orders cutting the minimum wage for state employees by almost 3 dollars an hour, removing the names of county clerks (like Kim Davis) from state marriage licenses, and revoking the just recently granted voting rights of ex-felons in the state of Kentucky. Put another way, within a little over a fortnight of his inauguration, Bevin had pilfered almost $6,000 from the annual salaries of the many employees of the state of Kentucky who are making minimum wage, allowed state employees to refuse to sign marriage licenses because they think homosexuality is the devil’s work, and had taken away the right to vote for over 4% of the state’s population.

Now, it’s easy enough to understand why a callous wretch of human being like Matt Bevin would slash the minimum wage for state employees, but why would he be so keen on taking away the vote from Kentuckians who had paid their supposed debt to society through the hellish social construction that is prison-industrial complex? The answer, like the answers to most questions surrounding disenfranchisement in the United States, lies with voters of color. In Kentucky, as is the case in many US states, blacks and latinos are disproportionately represented in the state’s prisons and jails, which means that taking the vote away from ex-felons will have a much bigger impact on those populations. As it stands right now, more than 1 in 5 black Kentuckians are barred from voting due to prior felony convictions, a rate which gives it the 2^nd highest black disenfranchisement rate in the nation behind Florida.

In answering questions about his decision to strip the vote from 140,000 of his constituents, Bevin tried to frame his motivation as being purely procedural. “I have been a vocal supporter of the restoration of rights”, Bevin recently remarked, adding that suffrage for ex-felons, “is an issue that must be addressed through the legislature and by the will of the people.” It’s a lovely sentiment, except for the the fact that it’s complete and utter garbage. As was evidenced by his executive order to allow county clerks an avenue through which to refuse to sign same-sex marriage certificates, Bevin clearly doesn’t feel as if the legislature and the voters need to address all issues—just the ones he doesn’t much care for. And, as he acknowledged during his campaign, bills around felon voting rights get routinely blocked by Republicans in the state senate. Given how much he’s disliked among the rank-and-file of his party and how adept he is at pissing people off, Bevin probably couldn’t even get a felon enfranchisement bill passed if he wanted to…which he doesn’t.

At the end of the day, these executive orders are only a sign of much, much worse things that are coming down the pike for most Kentuckians. There is no reason to believe that Matt Bevin won’t do everything in his power to destroy the healthcare infrastructure that has been built up by the Affordable Care Act and cast hundreds of thousands of his constituents off of the rolls of the insured by dismantling Kynect—the state’s healthcare exchange—and rejecting Medicaid expansion. However, the onus for all the pain and suffering that will be visited upon the state of Kentucky doesn’t just lie with Matt Bevin and his supporters, but also with the hundreds of thousands of progressive & centrist Kentuckians who stayed home on election day and with Democratic Party leaders in the state who ran an uninspired, lackadaisical campaign. Kentucky liberals didn’t use their vote in 2015 and, as a result, 140,000 Kentuckians won’t be allowed to vote in 2016.

High Nope: Adam Sandler’s New Film May Offend Native Americans & Anyone With A Sense of Humor

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Sunday December 20, 2015 · 4:46 PM PST

2015/12/20 · 16:46

During it’s brief stint as an original content creator, Netflix has proven itself to be a magnificent judge of character, providing audiences with shows that are exquisitely made as they are bingeably watchable. Whether it’s their beloved older fare, like House of Cards or Orange is the New Black, or their newer hits likeDaredevil and Master of None, Netflix has been able to churn out critically acclaimed, hit programming at a rate surpassing most of their cable TV rivals and equalling that of HBO. With that being said, even the most savvy network executives and adjudicators of talent put their money on a lame horse every once in a while. In Netflix’s case, that lame horse was Adam Sandler and, after limping through the opening straightaway with the star’s first film, a “comic” western called The Ridiculous Six, it’s a safe bet that the top brass at Netflix are wishing they could cut their losses and put their horse out to pasture.

The Ridiculous Six is a wretched movie for a variety of reasons, with the most notable one being the abundance of pointlessly offensive content that is spread throughout the film. If you’re familiar with the film, it might be because The Ridiculous Six made headlines back in April when a group of about a dozen Native American extras—most of them from the Navajo nation—walked off of the set during filming due to the film’s use of material that was deemed grossly inappropriate and disrespectful to Natives. One of the actors, Allie Young, a Navajo artist and filmmaker who started an online petition in protest of the filmwhich has garnered over 108,000 signatures, points to a litany of obscenely racist issues within the movie’s production, ranging from bronzing the skin of Native actors to make them look darker and having white actors play Native characters to a surfeit of jokes around alcoholism, sexual assault and violence against women, all of which are deadly serious problems within Native communities.

With this as prologue, I came into The Ridiculous Six expecting it to be a bad film, but I don’t think I was adequately prepared for just how bad it would be. Within the first 5 minutes of the movie’s start, there were signs outside a trading post reading “no injuns allowed” and “maize munchers shot on sight”, a dead-eyed Adam Sandler co-opting some Native dress that looked so generic and half-assed I thought they may have stolen it from a local high school’s costume department, Steve Zahn talking about how “killing an injun” would make his day and Will Forte calling a young Native woman a “sweet piece of red prairie meat” and “Poca-hot-tits”. At this point, it might be useful to mention that Netflix signed Sandler to a $320 million, 4 film deal that gives the SNL alum full creative control and that The Ridiculous Six is the first of those 4 films. Oh, and in case you were wondering, that sound you’re hearing is Netflix chief content officer Ted Sandaros flagellating himself with old film stock in front of the company’s board of directors to atone for his sins.

*Adam Sandler is many things. Culturally competent is not one of them*

In case you had any doubts, the vast majority of the final 115 minutes of The Ridiculous Six are just as atrocious as the initial 5. As the film goes on, those who haven’t turned it off and started watching Jessica Jones will find out that the reason Sandler is dressed in Native garb is the screenwriters decided to use a variation of the tried and true great white warrior trope—wherein a lone white man is raised or captured and trained by a foreign civilization, only to become the greatest fighter they’ve ever seen—and make Happy Gilmore the “bravest of all braves” (I’m serious) after being raised by Apache Indians. Naturally, Sandler—whose character’s name is Tommy “White Knife” Stockburn, on account of him being white…and having a lot of knives—is set to marry the most attractive woman in the tribe, because what gorgeous Native woman could resist the charms of a flabby, 49-year old white guy with the personality of a plank of balsa wood?

While Sandler’s character name is painfully unfunny and literal, his Native paramour—played by Julia Jones (Twilight, Longmire)—was given the sophomoric name “Smoking Fox” because…she’s hot, I guess. Not content at making one cheesy, off-putting and racist name, the writers of The Ridiculous Six created two other minor Native female characters, giving them the names “Never Wears Bra” and “Beaver Breath”. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, both of the actresses playing those characters were non-Natives in red-face, with Sandler’s wife playing the role of Never Wears Bra. As for Native men, they were all but nonexistent in the film, with the only real speaking Native male role going to Sandler’s character’s surrogate father, who only appears now and again for vaguely mystical and sage advice and the odd one-liner.

Not content to stop at just denigrating Native Americans, Sandler & company brought their obnoxious brand of juvenile humor to bear on other racial and ethnic groups as well. Perennial Sandler co-star and former Deuce Bigelow star Rob Schneider took on the role of playing White Knife’s Mexican-American half-brother, Ramon. Schenider, who is very clearly not Latino, spends most of the movie astride the crossroads of simple racist stereotyping and scatological humor. In the film, Ramon has a borderline inappropriate relationship with his “burro”, which vacillates between the vaguely sexual and the familial, all while the burro has explosive diarrhea on a regular basis, most notably pummeling Chris Parnell with a pressure-washer speed spraying of shit. The other 4 of White Knife’s titular half-brothers run the gamut from actually amusing (Luke Wilson as an alcoholic who turns to drink after going to the bathroom at Ford’s Theater when he was supposed to be guarding President Lincoln) to downright stupid (Twilight‘s Taylor Lautner as Lil’ Pete, a developmentally disabled character who gets a blow job from a horse).

I would call The Ridiculous Six an offensive film, but that would be doing a disservice to offensive films everywhere, since there are plenty of offensive films in the world that also hold some sort of artistic merit or entertainment value. No, The Ridiculous Six belongs to that special class of offensive films wherein the repugnance of the film’s material is equal to both the laziness inherent in its production and the overall contempt in which its creators hold the audience. Somehow, likely through a combination of connections, cash and sheer star power, Sandler was able to get a truly phenomenal cast together for this movie, but there aren’t enough great actors in this world to turn this festering turd of a film into anything that could be considered enjoyable.

Brain Surgery Would Have Been Easier: Ben Carson’s Struggles With Foreign Policy

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Monday December 14, 2015 · 1:08 PM PST

2015/12/14 · 13:08

WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 09: Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson addresses the National Press Club Newsmakers Luncheon October 9, 2015 in Washington, DC. Carson was at the press club to promote his new book, "A More Perfect Union: What We th — Dr. Ben Carson is currently in the midst of a crash course on international affairs...and so far he appears to be failing.

On the morning of September 5^th, 1987, a brilliant young neurosurgeon named Ben Carson stood over the motionless, butterflied bodies of the 7-month old Binder boys at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Surrounded by an extensive team comprised of some of the brightest medical minds in America, the 35-year old Carson would soon be entrusted with making the most delicate incisions throughout what would wind up being a22-hour surgery to separate these conjoined twins who had the gross misfortune to have been born with their skulls fused together. At the time, there were only a handful of neurosurgeons with the requisite dexterity, knowledge and skill to slice through the complex web of blood vessels shared by the twins and Carson was maybe the most gifted of them all.

While some of these gifts were certainly of the natural or “god-given” variety, much of Dr. Carson’s prodigious ability came from a relentless work ethic and years upon years of intensive study. By the time that September morning rolled around, Carson had completed 4 years of undergraduate study at Yale, another 4 years of study at the University of Michigan Medical School, 6 years as a neurosurgical resident at Johns Hopkins and a year abroad as a senior registrar in neurosurgery at Sir Charles Gardner Medical Hospital in Perth, Australia before returning to Hopkins and spending 3 years as the university’s Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery. In the months leading up to the surgery, Carson and his team went over the strategy for the surgery again and again, practicing on baby dolls attached at the head by velcro to try and simulate what the surgery would be like. And, even with all this experience at his disposal and all of their practice, Carson and his team were ultimately only partially successful.

*Ben Carson’s campaign bus parked outside one of the candidate’s rallies in Fort Wayne, Indiana*

Initially, the surgery seemed to be remarkable triumph. Overcoming great odds, the young twins had been successfully separated from one another, but neither of them would go on to lead anything approaching a normal life. When they were eventually discharged from the hospital and sent back to their home in Germany, one twin had undergone enough neurological damage during the surgery to result in developmental delays while the other twin was unresponsive and in a vegetative state. By the age of 7, both children were still in diapers, unable to sit up straight, make words, lift their limbs or imbibe food and drink without aide. Soon thereafter, with her now ex-husband an alcoholic wreck and unable to deal with the emotional and physical toll of taking care of two severely disabled children, their mother gave them up to be taken care of as wards of the state. From what little can be gathered about them today, one of the twins has died, while the other continues to live in an asylum. In an interview given several years after the surgery, the mother of twins told a German paper that she wished she never authorized the surgery, saying that she flew to Baltimore with, “a healthy, happily babbling baby bundle and came back to [Germany] with two lifeless, soundless, mentally and physically…damaged human bundles.”

My purpose in outlining the story of the Binder twins for you is not to impugn Dr. Carson’s prodigious abilities as a neurosurgeon so much as to demonstrate that, even with a lifetime of practice and what might appear to be initial success, complex operations such as this one can turn into disasters over time. Given what he has written about the Binder surgery in his memoirs and the remarks he has made concerning it in interviews, it would seem that Carson doesn’t see, or doesn’t care to see, how this nominally successful surgery led to the disintegration of a family and two severely damaged lives.

In his most recent book, My Life, Carson again recounts the tense moments before, during and after the incredibly complex surgery to separate these craniopagus twins. In the book, he describes the moment the drugs began to wear off and the boys first started to come to consciousness. “I couldn’t believe what was happening.” Carson wrote. “I hadn’t expected them to survive twenty-four hours, yet here they were progressing beyond my wildest dreams.” In My Life, Carson stops talking about the boys when they turned two years old, claiming that he is unable to go any further into the story because of a contract signed by the twins’ parents and the German magazine Bunte for exclusive rights, but given the fact that that contract ended when the boys turned 18 in 2005, it’s far more likely that Carson ended the narrative then because, at that point, it still makes for a heartwarming story. After all, it would have been a bit crass for Carson to talk about a distraught mother being forced to hand her permanently disabled children over to an asylum and then end by proclaiming, “Thank you, God. Thank you! I know you had your hand in this.”

Carson’s real or feigned short-sightedness when it comes to the long term consequences of his actions as a neurosurgeon are not immaterial when it comes to determining the sort of president he might be. At a campaign rally in Ft. Wayne, Indiana on Thursday, Carson spent a good portion of his speech trying to shutdown some of his naysayers who claimed that his knowledge of foreign affairs was abysmal and not befitting a man with presidential aspirations. While not nearly as stilted as his recent address to the Republican Jewish Coalition, which was described by some in the media as sounding more like a book report than a speech on middle eastern policy, Carson’s remarks to a crowd of around 2,000 supporters in the heart of Indiana’s rust belt came off as over-simplistic and absurd.

When talking about the Syrian refugee crisis, Carson played up his recent visit to the middle east and to a refugee camp in Jordan and argued that the Obama administration had constructed a false narrative for the American people regarding the crisis:

“What we’ve been told, is that we only have two options. Either we bring in thousands of Syrian refugees…or we turn our backs in cold hearted indifference and forget about them. But there is a third option, which is better than that, which is to take care of them over there, where they already have the capacity to take care of them.” [Italics mine]

The line drew a large swell of applause from the assembled crowd, not because it was a viable alternative to the resettlement of Syrian refugees in nations like America, but because it was exactly what the audience wanted to hear. It is true that the Jordan needs financial aide to deal with the influx of refugees from Syria—the annual budget for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Jordan has increased more than six-fold since the start of the conflict, clocking in at over $400 million in 2015—but it’s also true that only about 15% of the Syrian refugees currently in Jordan are living in refugee camps and that the 650,000 Syrian refugees currently in Jordan only make up about 14% of the registered Syrian refugees in the region—a population in which, it should be noted, more than 80% of its members are living below the local poverty line of a little more than $3 a day. The Jordanians very clearly don’t have the capacity to take care of that many refugees for an indefinite period of time and neither do the Turks or the Lebanese or any other middle eastern nation currently bearing the brunt of this crisis.

*Dr. Carson & his wife Candy on a recent trip to Syrian refugee camps in Jordan* *(Photo Courtesy Dr. Ben Carson Facebook Page)*

Later on his speech, after excoriating the Obama administration for not adequately disrupting the distribution of oil that allows ISIS to be so well funded (his sage advice: “you need to do it better.”), Carson put on his Patton boots and started playing general for the Fort Wayne crowd. Citing the recent success of Kurdish forces, when backed by US air support, in retaking the Iraqi city of Sinjar from ISIS control and shutting down a major supply line for the terrorist group, Carson advocated replicating this strategy in Mosul and other major ISIS-controlled cities before going after Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital in Syria.

“There are 4 routes in an out of Raqqa.” Carson told the crowd. “We can shut those routes off, soften that city, make it vulnerable, and when they flee from there, we’ll find out where they’re going to set up their command center and we’ll do the same thing there and the same thing there, and we chase them wherever they go.”

It’s a lovely militaristic sentiment, to be sure, but Carson’s drawn-on-a-paper-napkin grade plan is, at best, an exercise in futility. What the good doctor failed to mention was the fact that, within days of the military victory in Sinjar and the closing of an important supply route between Mosul and Raqqa, ISIS had simply created an alternate route, trucking in loads of gravel and dirt to a create stable, albeit unpaved road around the blockaded area. Beyond that, any semi-permanent or permanent closure of supply routes between Mosul and Raqqa would have devastating effects not only on ISIS, but on the large civilian populations who still live in those cities, driving up the cost of food and basic supplies and providing ISIS with an avenue to create enmity between that population and the US-led coalition responsible for the blockade.

As for duplicating the relative success of the retaking of Sinjar in Raqqa, it’s not a safe bet that the Kurds would be able do the job on the ground, even with coalition air support and the help of smaller groups of Sunni Arab fighters and other Arab auxiliaries. However, even if they were able to topple ISIS in Raqqa, there’s very little chance they would be able to establish anything approaching sustainable local governance, particularly if the Kurdish-majority Syrian Defense Forces were to play terrorist whack-a-mole and chase ISIS around from de facto capital to de facto capital until, I suppose, the group would cease to pose a threat.

It’s all well and good for politicians like Carson to refer to the Kurds as singular force in the region and, although they are a definable ethnic group, they are separated by a number of political party and tribal allegiances that would take another article to even begin to explain properly. With that being said, the Kurdish people are the world’s largest ethnic group without their own nation, something that all segments of the Kurdish population would like to rectify. However, the creation of Kurdish state is hardly a universally popular proposition among many other players in the region, particularly Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been carrying out air strikes against the members of the Kurdistan Workers Party, which is actively involved in the fight against ISIS, and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who has the backing of both Russians and the Iranians, with Russia bombing all groups in Syria that oppose the Assad regime, including the Syrian opposition forces that the West has been supporting. And, on top of all that, even the success of US-led coalition forces in eliminating ISIS wouldn’t necessarily do much to help the nearly 4.4 million Syrian refugees spread across the Middle East, since it was the Syrian Civil War and Bashar al-Assad’s Baath Party that drove most of them into exile, not ISIS.

There is no simple solution to the Syrian refugee problem and any presidential candidate that tells you he or she has one is either delusional or in the business of selling snake oil. Regardless of which camp Ben Carson falls in, the fact remains that he is patently unqualified to be the Commander in Chief of the United States of America. Before he was allowed to slice through the thin blue vein connecting the bodies of the Binder twins, he had to undergo tens of thousands of hours of schooling and practical experience, proving his worth at every step until his colleagues and patients had the requisite faith to allow him to take another human being’s life in his hands.

As president, Dr. Carson would have the lives of millions upon millions of people placed in his care and he would be accepting that responsibility with zero hours of formal education and real-life experience at his disposal. As a neurosurgeon, if he makes a misstep or takes an ill-calculated risk and fails, he may lose the life of a patient or lessen their quality of life. As president, those same sorts of failures result not in the loss of one life, but in the potential loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.

When people joke about how being the President of the United States isn’t exactly brain surgery, they’re right. It’s not. It’s much, much harder.

We Have Nothing To Fear But Trump Himself

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Saturday December 05, 2015 · 3:00 PM PST

2015/12/05 · 15:00

Trump giving the thumbs up to the estimated crowd of around 6,000 people in The Macon Coliseum

Middle of Nowhere, North Georgia ain’t a bad place to be on a Monday night for an itinerant traveler. Provided you’re near a highway, there’s nothing you’re going to want for that you couldn’t stand to go a night without. Gas station’ll be open, so you can get your fuel and sundries and such. There’s bound to be a motel or two that’ll come with rooms cheap as red Georgia clay, some of which you can smoke in because that whole public health thing hasn’t caught on down there yet despite the fact that the CDC’s set up shop a couple counties away. And, because this is Georgia, there’s going to be one, if not two or three Waffle Houses within a quarter-mile radius of wherever you’re standing, which is bound to be a good thing as there are few things that taste considerably better after midnight and away from home than one of their over-sized Eggo waffles and a mess of greasy hash browns.

It might’ve been the time of day or the stretch of highway it sat off of, but the Waffle House I walked into Monday night was all but dead. Aside from a trucker who had just paid for his meal and was on his way out, I was the only customer there. Three waitstaff, one patron. I ordered my food and made pleasantries and the like with one woman while the other two slapped my hash browns on the griddle and poured my coffee. They were all women, all three of them. Two black, one white—the white woman getting the coffee as the two black women manned the griddle and cleaned up the bit of mess the trucker left behind him.

I reached down into my pocket to pull out my phone and a Trump For President sticker came out with it, fluttering to the floor and falling face down on the linoleum. Bending down from my swivel chair, I picked the sticker up, crumpling it into a little ball on its way to the nearest trash can. I didn’t want the sticker, but I had to take it. Trump volunteers had strategically positioned themselves around every entrance to the Macon Coliseum a few hours earlier and I couldn’t say no—not in public. With my longish hair and half-frame glasses I already looked the part of a carpetbagging liberal, so I couldn’t afford to turn a Trump sticker down in broad dusklight.

*A Trump supporter hands out signs at a rally in Macon, GA*

“Let me ask you something” the one woman closest to me said, smiling a barely stifled smile that showed the teeth she had and the one space where a front tooth was supposed to be, before pointing over to her co-worker by the grill. “Me and her’s sisters, right? So, let me ask you. Which one you think’s older and which is younger?”

“Come on now”, I said. “I’m not answering that.”

“Why not?”

“What do you mean ‘why not?’ There’s no good answer to that question. If I guess wrong, than the younger one’s gonna be pissed I said she was older and if I guess right, the older one’s gonna be pissed I said she looked old. Nope.”

“It’s an easy question. Which one of us is older?”

Which one was older and which was younger…the woman who asked me looked older, for sure. She was thin, but not a healthy kind of thin—a sickly thin or, at best, a gangly thin. With a gauzey black doo-rag on her head and clusters of little tattoos on her arms and neck, she would have come off as hard if she wasn’t grinning all the time. The other one was thicker…softer in both appearance and manner than her sister. She’d look back every now again with a wan smile, but for the most part she just set about cleaning her prep station with the detached bemusement of vaudevillean straight man setting up the same jokes for her 30^th different audience in as many days.

“Alright, well if I had to give you an answer,” I told the thin woman, “I’d say you’re the younger one and she’s the older on account of the fact that no woman I’ve ever met would ask such a question if the answer wasn’t a flattering one.”

“Hah! I told you!” the thin waitress said to her thicker counterpart, before turning back around to me. “And we ain’t even sisters. I just like reminding Dee how old she is.”

“Well, I’m older than the both of you, so I don’t want to hear it”, the white woman said as she brought me my coffee. “You see all them little white whispers floating around in my hair? That’s what age looks like, darling. You all set now?”

I told her I was and before I could say boo, my waffle and hash browns were in front me. As I started to eat, the older non-sister threw a burger patty on the griddle and two of the biggest pieces of white bread I’d ever seen shortly thereafter. Then, with the care reserved for something being made for one’s self (as opposed to a patron), she placed a couple pieces of American cheese on top of the bread and started dicing up onions and tomatoes and green peppers to sprinkle over it all. As she was working, the younger one walked up by her side and started picking at the peppers while she got to talking.

“I forgot to ask you earlier. Your brother have that baby yet?”

“He sure did.”

“You an auntie now?”

“Ain’t the first time”, the thick one said, shaking her head softly.

“So, what’d he name him?”

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt _________ the third.”

“That’s one long ass name.” said the thin one.

It was a long ass name. And, while I didn’t know if it meant anything to them, I knew for damn sure it meant something to their great-grandparents, even though there’s barely a snowball’s chance in hell they would’ve been able to cast a vote in rural Georgia for the man who first wore it. I was also pretty certain that the great-grandparents of the white waitress at the Waffle House would’ve felt a similar kind of way about FDR, and that they would’ve voted for him way back when. During the four Presidential elections he ran, Roosevelt garnered between 82 and 92 percent of the almost exclusively white vote in Georgia, while turning the tides against his Republican rivals and getting the support of roughly 7 in 10 blacks.

But that was ages ago. It was before Brown vs. The Board of Education and the bus boycotts—before Selma and the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing. That was a generation removed from Goldwater and from George Wallace. A time without a Southern Strategy where poor whites could always go to sleep with the knowledge that no matter how broke they were and how hard times was, that they’d always be better than a n*****. Nowadays, no candidate for any office, whether it’s President of the United States or the local dog catcher, is going to get overwhelming support from both blacks and whites. In the race for ideological purity, the Republican Party has shed all semblance of compromise and empathy. Over the years the moderation and prudence that was once the hallmark of the GOP has been whittled down—distilled into nothing more than the dread fear that lies at the heart of conservatism. The fear that someone else is getting what is rightfully yours and that that someone else doesn’t look or think like you at all.

This fear—fear which had largely metastasized into self-righteousness and indignant rage—hovered over the floor of the Macon Coliseum earlier that night as I joined several thousand southerners who were gathered together to worship at Donald Trump’s profane altar of self. It was a fear that was stoked from the moment you entered in the building and were confronted with a cadre of TSA agents and Secret Service members serving as gatekeepers to a handful of metal detectors that had been set up in the coliseum’s foyer.

Place all your belongings on the conveyor belt.

Even coins?

Even coins. Now, step forward sir. Lift up your arms horizontally and stand still. Open your legs a bit. Now turn around. Okay, you can stand to the side and wait to collect your things.

But, before you do, you stand there, surrounded by flak jacketed secret service agents and gun-toting officers of the peace as some government employee goes through all your personal effects with a fine-toothed comb, not content to simply open up your wallet, but determined to rifle through every pocket and check between every business card for some miniscule piece of contraband. Out of the corner of one eye you see a K9 unit and out of the corner of the other you see flashes of metallic yellow on the uniforms of agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. By the time you’ve finally gotten your possessions back, your perspective has been purposefully altered. This is no longer just a rally for a presidential candidate. It is an event of supreme national import—big enough to necessitate the presence of all of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men to protect it from the evil that is sure to come from the outside.

After I had been wanded and searched and found to be a good egg, I went over to a concession stand to get a coffee before making my way out to find a seat. I eyed an open seat in the lower level’s back row, but had to pause before navigating the waves of knee caps and shins that stood between me and it. I was shaking, or at least my hands were. It could’ve been because I was nervous or cold or because I’d barely eaten all day. Maybe it was just the natural tremor my hands have on account of the Lithium I’ve taken day in and day out for 12 years—trading steady hands for a steady mind. Either way, the slight trembling in my hands made it so that little splashes of coffee were jumping over the styrofoam sides of the cup I was holding and I had to focus to make sure I didn’t spill scalding hot liquid on the scrubs of the off-duty nurse in the aisle seat.

Once safely in my seat, I looked out and saw some campaign staffer ambling over to the microphone in the center of the stage. It was still almost 90 minutes before Trump was scheduled to speak, but the staffer was already set on getting everyone riled up.

“How many of y’all are ready to see the next President of the United States, Donald Trump?” He yelled out, eliciting a chorus of Woooooo‘s and Trump! Trump! Trump‘s from the crowd. One of the loudestWoooooo’s came from a young man sitting two seats down from me with a group of his friends. He was sporting one of those godforsaken Make America Great Again hats and had been covered in nacho cheese and chip crumbles until he leapt up to to lead chant of Donald! Donald! Donald! and scattered them into the empty row of seats in front of him.

“If you don’t mind my asking, why are you supporting Trump?” I asked him after he had taken a seat again.

“Because!” he said, still shouting, “he’s the only one of them guys that’s got the balls to do what’s gotta be done!”

“What do you think has to be done?”

“What we need to do is blow up the whole Middle Eastern part of this planet.”

“And you think Trump’s going to do that?”

“I don’t know, but I sure as shit hope he does. What I do know is that Trump’s the only one of these guys that ain’t too much of a pussy to try.”

“Why do you think we need to blow up the Middle East?” I asked him.

“We got to.” the young man said, as if it was so obvious I should’ve already known better. “It says so right there in The Bible. It’s in Revelations. They’re over there in Israel killing thousands and thousands of Jews just like The Bible said and we’ve got to protect the children of Israel.”

“By blowing the region up?”

“Damn straight. And Trump’s the only one of these guys that’ll do it, I’m telling you. That’s why I’m voting for him.”

And with that, the conversation was over. He didn’t say anything more after his little second coming/end of days spiel and for that I was truly grateful. Shortly thereafter I hopped over the railing behind our seats and made my way down to the coliseum floor where maybe a couple hundred Trump supporters and curious lookers-on had congregated around the thrust stage that had been set up where hockey goals and basketball hoops normally stood. In the shadow of the far side of the stage, perhaps the least soulful cover band ever assembled butchered hits by the likes of Smokey Robinson and Sam & Dave as Trump volunteers handed out pre-made “homemade” signs to people in the audience.

Before the great orange one was to grace us with his presence, we were made to endure a number of depressing opening acts, ranging from the angriest invocation I’d ever heard from a man who was apparently not aware of the separation of Church and State to a guest appearance by Georgia’s own Herman Cain, who had not lost his gift of nonsensical gab since the last election. But, after what felt like several hours, the man of the hour finally made it out onto the stage. When he emerged, most of the audience erupted in applause and hoots of Trump! Trump! Trump! and U-S-A!, but there were a surprising number people around me who just sort of stood there, looking at the man like he was some sort of exotic bird, the infamous combover on his head nothing more than an unfortunate and unavoidable bit of natural plumage.

Almost as soon as Trump began speaking, it became readily apparent to anyone not under his egomaniacal spell that he nothing to say. I could go over the particulars of his speech, but there wouldn’t be much point as less than half of remarks touched on topics pertinent to a presidential election and none of it included a shred of policy. Over the course of his speech, all of which was extemporaneous and rambling, Trump shifted back and forth from various personas as he worked the room and extolled his seemingly limitless brilliance.

At first, it was Trump the deranged carnival barker…Trump the political pastor. Having figured out that promising to give money to veterans or lauding the service of our armed forces was a surefire way to get applause and knowing full well that his audience loathes the mainstream media, Trump declared that he would boycott CNN’s upcoming GOP presidential debate unless they paid him $5 million, which he would in turn give to the Wounded Warrior Project. It was a stunt Trump had pulled once before and he clearly had no issue with going back to the well. During his speech, Trump would mock-vacillate about whether or not he was going to demand CNN give him the money in order to milk every last ounce of adulation out of the gimmick. “Should I do it or shouldn’t I?” Trump would say, prompting the audience to scream out “do it!” in return.

Then there was Trump the victim, beset on all sides by a mainstream media that does nothing but defame his good reputation and take things out of context. “They take these two second snippets”, Trump whined, claiming that his words are consistently misconstrued by journalists who are out to get him—journalists whom he went so far as to partially call out in the press area and launch ad hominem attacks against to the apparent glee of his adoring fans. Now, having transitioned from Trump the victim to Trump the bully, the real estate tycoon would proceed to launch into attack mode against all of his GOP presidential rivals and a litany of perceived enemies. I lost track of the number of times Trump called someone a “loser” or some analogous term and, on multiple occasions, Trump accused Hillary Clinton of not having the “strength and stamina” to be president, remarks that should probably have been accompanied by an Andrew Dice Clay-style grab of the nuts.

But, by far, Trump’s preferred persona was that of the braggadocious blunderbuss. It’s the role that made him famous and the one this sociopathic caricature was born to play, namely because I believe he suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, a mental disorder that, for reasons that would take a dissertation-length tract to fully explain, makes him a model capitalist and the ideal presidential candidate for the American far-right. It may sound like I’m being overly harsh on The Donald, but a number of prominent mental health professionals have been so taken aback by the adulation being heaped on Trump for his pathological behavior that they’ve come out publicly as saying they believe he has narcissistic personality disorder.

According to The Mayo Clinic, those suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, “may come across as conceited, boastful or pretentious…often monopolize conversations…may belittle or look down on people [they] perceive as inferior…may feel a sense of entitlement — and when [they] don’t receive special treatment…may become impatient or angry.” People with narcissistic personality disorder might also, “insist on having ‘the best’ of everything — for instance, the best car, athletic club or medical care,” and may, “have trouble handling anything that may be perceived as criticism.” Based on such a description, a layperson would be forgiven if he or she came away convinced that the disorder was designed specifically to describe Donald Trump.

The part of Trump’s speech that was most indicative of his disordered mind came well into its first hour, when the reality-show star spent a healthy 10 to 15 minutes regaling the slowing thinning audience about how he played the executives over at NBC for fools during contract negotiations for The Apprentice. Objectively, it was a story about a contract dispute between a major television network and the star of one of its shows. The network has a hit show…the talent asks for a significant pay raise…the network initially says no, but acquiesces to the talent’s request because they think they’ll take a bath if they let the talent go. However, to Trump this story served as nothing short of a validation of his greatness. In his rhetorical care, a simple contract negotiation morphs into this epic struggle between the smart and the strong (Trump) and the stupid and weak (everyone else). And it is this ability to reduce even the most complicated of geopolitical and economic issues to a form that is both easily digestible and immediately satisfying to his target audience, that may be the biggest source of Donald Trump’s appeal.

Take the immigration debate for example. It doesn’t matter to Trump’s supporters that it is logistically impossible to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, nor does it matter that over 5% of the American workforce is made up of undocumented workers who are vastly overrepresented in service occupations (housekeeping, cooks/dishwashers, landscaping), construction and farming. Trump supporters also either don’t know or don’t care that roughly 40% of all undocumented immigrants arrived in America through legal means and then simply stayed in the country after their visas had expired. All they want is for someone to validate the scapegoat they and the media they consume have created to explain their present economic hardships and to make sweeping, vitriolic statements about how to they will slaughter that scapegoat.

Donald Trump will remain a frontrunner in the GOP field of presidential candidates only so long as he is able to buoy his campaign with the fear of his supporters. Trump is well aware of this, recently stating that, “whenever there’s a tragedy, everything goes up, my numbers go way up.” Whether it’s stoking conservative white America’s fears of black men by tweeting out blatantly false crime statistics orerroneously claiming that he saw thousands of muslims celebrating on the streets of New Jersey after the attacks on 9/11, Trump has proven that he is, at his core, little more than a smarmy fear peddler—a parasite that feeds and bloats on the insecurities of his conservative base.

It was over 82 years ago when, upon being elected by a resounding majority of the American people, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the nation in his inaugural address that, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Here’s to hoping the great-grandchildren of those New Dealers in Georgia and all across the country find the strength to heed those words again.

Your “Tradition” Is My Pain: How Race-Based Mascots Inflict Real Harm On Native Americans

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Tuesday November 24, 2015 · 2:05 PM PST

2015/11/24 · 14:05

A pair of R**skins fans ignore Native American protestors speaking out against race-based mascots in Phoenix last year

Let me ask you a question. When was the last time you saw a thoroughly modern Native American in a film or a TV show? Now, I’m not asking the last time you saw a contemporary film or TV show that has Native American character based in the 18^th or 19^th centuries. I’m asking when you last saw a Native American character firmly grounded in the present—an investment banker clad in a tailored suit or as a blue vested Wal-Mart greeter—anything that acknowledges the continued existence of 5.2 million Native Americans in the United States with something beyond harmful stereotypes. Put away all of the feathered heads plastered in profile on the sides of helmets and the men in warpaint charging onto a football field at halftime. Cast aside all the old Westerns and the revisionist histories filled with ultra-spiritual shamanic characters and brave, buckskin-clad warriors. Can you remember the last time you saw a Native American who wasn’t hidden in history or reduced to a two-dimensional stereotype?

I’ll give you time to think, but don’t feel too bad if you come up with nothing. Even with the aid of Google, I could only come up of 3 instances in the past 15 years of popular media that featured non-stereotypical modern depictions of Native folks: John Redcorn and Joseph on King Of The Hill, Kicking Wing in Joe Dirt,and Ken Hotate on Parks and Recreation. That’s it. Now, I’m sure there are some other recent examples that I’m not familiar with—particularly with regards to non-recurring characters on TV shows—but my broader point is that Native Americans are all but invisible in popular culture.

Even when you include historical representations, content analyses show that Native Americans are only featured in anywhere from 0% to 0.4% of popular films and television shows, less than 1% of children’s cartoons and 0.09% of video game characters. For the vast majority of Americans, the modern Native American simply isn’t there. As a result of this, the primary exposure many non-Native folks get to Native Americans is through the deeply flawed and Eurocentric reading of US history that is taught in our schools and depicted in popular media, and the whitewashed narratives promoted through national holidays like Columbus Day and Thanksgiving, and Native mascots.

*For many in the United States, this type of representation of Native Americans is the only one they ever encounter*

Over the past 50 years, there has been no shortage of rationales and ad hoc justifications for the continued existence of American Indian mascots by supporters of the schools and sports teams who use them—and they’re all wrong. The very fact that we have made it to the year 2015 with a professional football franchise that uses a dictionary defined racial slur as its team name does not speak so much to the validity of its continued existence, but to the degree with which Native Americans have been marginalized and deemed second-class citizens by broad swaths of our society.

Hail To The [Expletive Deleted]s

Contrary to what Washington team owner Daniel Snyder might say, there is nothing honorable in using hate speech to brand a professional sports team. It takes a deluded mind to honestly believe that naming a professional, college, or high school sports team after an entire race of people, festooning all manner of equipment and merchandise with a stereotypical representation of them and singing fight songs and performing gestures that make a mockery of their culture constitutes an honorable gesture. Evidence of such delusion was on full display in a letter Snyder wrote to season ticket holders in 2013, where he said, “when I consider the Washington R**skins name, I think of what it stands for. I think of the Washington R**skins traditions and pride I want to share with my three children, just as my father shared with me.” Not everyone would not second Snyder’s sentiments.

“I understand what tradition is, but you took a tradition that wasn’t yours”, Sarah LittleRedfeather Kalmanson told me when asked about supporters of teams with race-based mascots. Kalmanson, a Native American of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) descent who splits her time doing graphic design work and marketing between her own independent business and the Native-focused environmental group Honor The Earth, has been integral in building the Not Your Mascots movement that is on the front lines of eliminating the perpetuation of harmful Native American stereotypes. Like all of her Native colleagues in the movement, Kalmanson’s fight is not solely academic or theoretical, but is also rooted in years of stigmatization and hard won experience.

Kalmanson, whose father was in the Air Force, spent most of her childhood bouncing around from base to base, even spending a couple years in England where she received no reprieve from racial discrimination, but the most painful memories she has were accrued here in the States. “I was on the pom-pom squad when I was in high school here in Wisconsin and I remember being mortified at students doing the ‘woo-woo’ face and the tomahawk chop”, Kalmanson said. “I had a long and difficult journey to find myself. I can recall seeing myself and it would hurt. It really would…and then, when I was in my twenties, I just started self-searching and remembering.”

Mark Denning, an educator and lecturer in American Indian history and culture and member of the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin, had similar experiences, although from the other side of the gender line. In the late 1970s, while a student at Marquette University, Denning was approached by the school to portray their new mascot, “The Warrior”, which was being introduced to replace the absurdly insulting “Willie Wampum”, a mascot that consisted of a student dressed up in stereotypical Native American garb, with a tomahawk and a massive papier-mâché head that looked like a cross between Chief Wahoo and one of the California Raisins. At first, Denning was supportive of the product—after all, a human likeness surely seems preferable to a gross caricature—but over time he began to feel denigrated and disrespected by the whole thing.

“After a while, I realized that they we’re using us for fun.” Denning told me when I sat down with him at the headquarters for Southeastern Oneida Tribal Services in Milwaukee. “Students at the basketball games were like, ‘We’re here to be entertained. We aren’t here for reality.’ Ultimately, Sports is about pretend. It’s about being entertained. And we need to look at what we find entertaining.” This whole ordeal led Denning to become a one of the nation’s leading advocates against race-based mascots and likely served as a catalyst in spurring him on to seek a greater connection with his cultural and communal roots. As with Sarah LittleRedfeather Kalmanson, this didn’t happen overnight and, through the process of introspection and self-discovery, Denning became much more attuned to the ways in which broader cultural conceptions of Native Americans affected his life. One instance that he shared with me happened when Denning was 15:

“When I was a freshman in high school, I decided to go out for the football team. When I got to practice, my coach looked at me and said, ‘Indians are really tough’ and threw me onto the varsity team.” Denning said. “I was in 9^th grade & I didn’t have any business playing with those guys, but he put me out there because he had this preconceived notion of what an Indian was supposed to be and I just remember getting crushed. His idea of who American Indians were could get me hurt.”

By their very nature, mascots are 2-dimensional conceptions. They are designed to be caricatures, not representations of an entire race of people, and the effects from the consistent use of Native mascots as, for many people, the primary way in which they view Native Americans themselves are very real and profound. In Mark Denning’s case when he tried out for football team in high school, the hyper-masculinity and “Warrior-Indian” persona that is so often projected by sports team mascots and popular media, led this adult, white coach to implicitly assume that a 15-year old Denning could play with boys that were much older and stronger than he was because “Indians are really tough.”

This Isn’t About Opinion—It’s About Fact

The debate over race-based mascots is not about political correctness or offensiveness—it is about the psychological effects produced by the continued portrayal of 1.6% of our society as something less than human. I say this not as conjecture or opinion, but as scientifically validated fact. In recent years, the work of researchers like Dr. Stephanie Fryberg have shown time and again that when it comes to negative effects of race-based mascots, “[the] harm is real and substantive, with the significance rising far beyond the conventional argument related to ‘offensiveness’”. Study after study has demonstrated that Native American mascots have a tangible, deleterious impact on Native youth and adults, lowering their self-esteem and reducing their belief in both the abilities of their communities to effect change and their chances for achievement later in life. At the same time, these studies have illustrated that white students actually receive a self-esteem boost from the use of Native mascot imagery and that the stereotyping of Native Americans carries over into white students willingness to internalize stereotypes of other races.

Even more damning for proponents of race-based mascots is that the research has shown that the psychological damage to Native Americans is the same regardless of whether the mascot is a gross caricature like the Chief Wahoo of the Cleveland Indians or a more “respectful” mascot, like Chief Osceola of the Florida State Seminoles and that the amount of harm done to Native Americans who say they agreed with the use of Native mascots is actually greater than those who oppose them. This means that, whenever a team owner like Daniel Snyder presents a few examples of Native Americans who aren’t opposed to the R**skins name and likeness, those are actually the people most negatively impacted by its usage.

With much of this research in mind, the American Psychological Association passed a resolution in 2005calling for the immediate retirement of all Native American mascots as they have demonstrably harmful effects on Native children and, “teach non-Indian children that it’s acceptable to participate in culturally abusive behavior and perpetuate inaccurate misconceptions about American Indian culture.” And the APA aren’t alone. In the past 20 years or so, there have been hundreds of professional associations, human rights groups, Native American organizations, media outlets, religious leaders and politicians who have come out against the use of the term r**skin in specific and the continued existence of Native American mascots in general. It would take entirely too much ink to list all of the individuals and organizations who have publicly opposed race-based mascots, but a representative sampling might include President Obama, all 3 Democratic candidates for president, over 45 US Senators, the ACLU, the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the United Church of Christ, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post.

*The front page of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune the day after a massive protest against the Washington R**skins last year*

And yet, despite the recent victory for American Indian activists in getting the University of North Dakota to remove its moniker of “The Fighting Sioux” and Adidas’s recent offer to help any high school with a Native American mascot redesign their image and equipment, progress has been maddeningly slow. Mark Denning believes a lot of the staying power of these race-based mascots lies in the ways in which the debate itself is framed, saying that conservatives have turned the issue of Native mascots into a “siren song” for free speech and less government presence, with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on lead vocals.

A Conservative Backlash in Wisconsin’s Capital

In 2010, then-Governor Jerry Doyle (D) signed into law Senate Bill 250, a landmark piece of legislation that made Wisconsin the first state in the nation to allow individuals to petition the state for removal of race-based mascots and placed the burden of proof on the state to provide clear and convincing evidence that the school’s race-based mascot does not promote discrimination, pupil harassment or stereotyping. When Walker inherited the bill upon his election, he quickly set about using it as a political prop to bolster his conservative credentials.

“SB 250 wound up being on the front lines in the ideological battle against minorities” Denning said. “It had all of the trappings of great political theater and it allowed conservatives to ring the bell of individualism loud and clear. The irony of it all is that while, on the larger scale, it’s all about individualism and less government, on the small scale it’s hurting individual people.”

Carol and Harvey Gunderson were two Wisconsinites who had spent much of their lives fighting against race-based mascots and had used the opportunities provided by SB 250 within their school district in the western portion of the state. In 2010, the Osseo-Fairchild school district became the first in the state to have the Department of Public Instruction order them to remove their race-based mascot, The Chieftains, and replace it with something that didn’t discriminate, stereotype or promote the public harassment of a racial subset of students. SB 250 may have made the removal of the mascot possible, but it certainly didn’t make it easy.

A member of the Oneida Nation, Carol knew the kind of backlash that would come at them if they tried to change the Osseo-Fairchild mascot and gave her husband a a verbal disclaimer of sorts when they set out. “Before this all started, Carol told me, ‘Harv, you know if we get involved in this we’re going to be the most hated people in the county’” said Harvey, who as his surname might suggest, is of Norwegian heritage. “’But, if you’re ready to have a cross burned on your lawn, then alright’…and I said alright, so here we are.” Since the couple didn’t have any kids, they volunteered to be on the front lines as the de facto faces of the campaign, but that didn’t stop collateral damage from happening to others, like fellow Native American activist Gary Montana.

“We had to pull Gary’s girls out of school and home school them the last couple weeks of school because things got so bad.” Carol told me. “We made sure not to put his name on the official complaint, to try and protect the kids, but it didn’t work. These families become the lightening rod.”

Part of what made SB 250 such an effective piece of legislation was that it allowed for a single person—in theory anonymously—to file a complaint with state about a race-based mascot. When Scott Walker and the Republican Party in Wisconsin set about to amend the legislation, it was this aspect of it that they focused on. Senate Bill 317, which was eventually signed into law by Governor Walker in December of 2013, did a number of things that made the removal of race-based mascots more difficult, namely placing the burden of proof on the petitioner rather than on the state and requiring that the petitioners collect the equivalent of at least 10% of that school district’s student population in a 120 day period if they wanted the complaint to be filed.

This new stipulation is problematic for a number of reasons, the primary one being that only 1.1% of Wisconsin’s population is Native American. Thus, even if every single Native person signed the petition to file the complaint, the filers would still need to get the remaining 90% of the signatures from non-Native residents, which in the vast majority of Wisconsin counties means getting signatures from whites who are likely to be emotionally invested in the team name. In 2010, the combined populations of Osseo and Fairchild added up to a total of 2,044. Of that 2,044 a mere 18 were of American Indian origin and 1,977 were non-hispanic whites. Under the current rules for filing a complaint against schools with race-based mascots, nothing would have happened.

Of Headdresses & Feathers

Barb Munson, a member of the Oneida Nation who is the chairperson of the Wisconsin Indian Education Association “Indian” Mascot and Logo Task Force has been fighting this fight for the bulk of her adult life and over time, she’s come to an understanding of the underlying issues behind the mascot issue.

“At the very beginning of all this we kept on thinking, ‘why don’t they get it?’” Munson said when she spoke with me from her home in the town of Mosinee in central Wisconsin. “But, eventually, we just came to the realization that what this is all about is systemic racism…How is it good educational policy to teach children to wear headdresses and feathers? That’s teaching children hands-on racism in school. Would you have your kids do a blackface minstrel show? Of course not.”

When I asked Munson if she saw a viable way to reconcile the differences between those who support and oppose the mascots, she was circumspect, but hopeful.

“It is my responsibility to get up, say my morning and evening prayers in my native language and be thankful.” Munson told me. “I know that people really are good and if people are acting badly there’s something wrong, but it’s going to take more than research and education to resolve this…it’s going to take a desire to create a better society.”

Sarah LittleRedfeather Kalmanson echoed Munson’s sentiments, but she seemed to place more faith in the power of the anti-race-based mascot movement and groups like Not Your Mascots than the inherent goodness of her detractors. As we were talking, the subject of conversation switched from the use of race-based mascots in general to the ways in which those mascots hijack items of deep spiritual importance to Native American tribes, such as the headdress and use of eagle feathers. Kalmanson spoke at length and with great passion about how it had taken her decades to do enough within her community to earn the right have even one or two feathers bestowed upon her and tried to explain to me—and to other non-Native folks—the significance they held for her:

“You know how deeply honored the Purple Heart is? Think about how sacred and revered an object that is and ask yourself if there is anyone manufacturing Purple Hearts for monetary gain? Probably not. That’s how I feel about the misappropriation of the headdress.”

Will that argument sway the opinions of many supporters of teams with race-based mascot names? Probably not. But, ultimately, their opinions will be of little consequence because the fight against the continued existence of these mascots and monikers is not about public opinion, nor is about political correctness or “offensiveness” or free speech. This fight is about treating the 5.2 million Native Americans that live in the United States as human beings rather than tomahawk-toting caricatures. It is about acknowledging that the scientifically proven damage that these mascots do to the self-esteem and self-worth of Native Americans is linked to the fact that Native youth have the highest rate of suicide of any racial or ethnic group in America. And it is about realizing that the race-based mascot debate isn’t about hurt feelings so much as it is hurt people.

———-

If you would like to learn more about the fight to stop the misappropriation of Native American identities and imagery in American culture in general and among high school, college and professional sports teams in particular, I encourage you to go to the Not Your Mascots website and to follow them on Twitter and on Facebook.

Big Man On Campus: How Bernie Sanders Is Trying To Lock Down The College Vote in Iowa

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Tuesday November 17, 2015 · 3:08 PM PST

2015/11/17 · 15:08

Bernie gesticulating, as Bernie is wont to do, while Hillary listens during the Democratic Debate in Iowa this past weekend

If you're looking for an American city that embodies the myriad successes and shortcomings of Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign, you could do worse than Cedar Falls, Iowa. Located in the northeastern quadrant of the state, the demographics of Cedar Falls suggest that it is a city where the Sanders campaign should flourish. Like Sanders supporters in relation their Clintonian counterparts, Cedar Falls is quite white and very young, demographic details owing equally to the city's location—Iowa is the 6^th least diverse state in nation—and the fact that it is home to the University of Northern Iowa (UNI). Known for much of the 20^th century as the Iowa State Teachers College, UNI's identity is still very much formed through its education program and, as a result, a good chunk of the college's student body projects the sort of staid midwestern progressivism that would make Tom Harkin proud. However, with a racial and ethnic makeup that mirrors the region in which it's situated, it shouldn't come as a surprise that UNI finds itself in the bottom decile of all US universities when it comes to diversity, although one would be forgiven for being mildly shocked that Cedar Falls is actually less diverse than the state of Iowa itself.

This past weekend, I stopped in Cedar Falls for to attend a Democratic Debate watch party that was being put on by UNI Students for Bernie Sanders 2016, the school's home for those who are Feeling The Bern. When I walked through the unlocked front door of the barely off-campus house where the party was taking place, I was greeted by a crowd of about a dozen or so students. Sitting on a sea of beanbag chairs and a couple second hand sofas, the students were watching the debate and offering up snide commentary while Martin O' Malley was trying to give his opening statement, questioning why the former Maryland governor was still in the race and saying he looked like a “Presidential Ken Doll”.

Soon thereafter, I was greeted by Martin Wise, the 23 year old President of UNI Students for Bernie Sanders 2016, who pulled me aside into the dining room so that we could discuss the political climate on campus and how he thought his organization was faring.

“We really haven't had too much opposition”, Wise told me when we started talking. “It's actually been a pretty straightforward and mellow campaign on campus. I really couldn't have asked for shallower, nicer waters.”

According to Wise, his group got a jumpstart on organizing over the summer and garnered a lot of early support from students. Despite the fact Clinton—unlike Sanders—has actually spoken at the University of Northern Iowa, it is Sanders who is getting the bulk of the buzz around campus, both through the group, which Wise says has signed up at least 700 members in a school with just over 13,000 students, and through the university's student paper, The Northern Iowan. There is a pro-Hillary student group at UNI—Panthers For Hillary—but I was unable to find any events sponsored by them or letters to the editor in the paper in support of the former Secretary of State. It is probable that there are potential Hillary voters on campus, but if they're there, they're not being too vocal about it.

As far as Republican candidate support at UNI is concerned, it looks like it's Rand or Bust. “I feel like on campus it's begun to turn into a Progressive Democrat sect and a Libertarian sect, rather than Democrats versus Republicans.” Wise said when I asked him about it. “It just seems like college students in general believe in the advancement of social options...I would say that on the business side of things, you would find a lot of students who believe in capitalism, who believe in trickle-down, but they're still kind of on the fence about the social options because they grew up watching gay rights advance. They don't identify with the Republican Party wholeheartedly on issues like that.”

After talking for a little while, a young woman named Shelby sat down at the table and started describing the reasons why she had chosen to support Sanders. Shelby, who was both the Vice President of UNI Students for Bernie Sanders 2016 and, not so coincidentally, Martin Wise's girlfriend, said that it was growing up under rough economic circumstances that drew her to Bernie. “One of the biggest reasons I'm for Bernie is the minimum wage and family values, because my mom was a single mother with 3 kids and she was making maybe 10,000...12,000 dollars a year and I have no clue how she raised us...it's insane when I think about it. No woman should be put through that.” Shelby said, adding that she also supported Sanders because she's a Spanish major who is passionate about immigration reform, but neglecting to go into specifics regarding policy or Bernie's somewhat checkered voting record on the issue.

Pretty shortly after that, the discussion switched to Sanders's recent support for ending the federal ban on marijuana and Truman, a Cedar Falls native who was back in town getting a respite from his more conservative environs at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, decided to chime in. “Why do I like Bernie?” Truman asked himself. “He tells the truth. My sister's going to start college soon, so free tuition would be nice. Uh, I believe in medicinal marijuana...my grandpa uses it.” Truman isn't alone in Cedar Falls in viewing college affordability and marijuana legalization as key issues. According to Wise, Sanders's proposal for universal free college is often what he has his volunteers lead with when talking to prospective voters, although he would much rather focus on Citizens United and getting corporate interests out of politics.

*A flyer for a punk show in Cedar Falls raising money and awareness for Bernie's campaign. I mean, what could be more college than a band called "Joe Meteorite & The Space Peanuts"?*

As for foreign affairs and the growth of the surveillance state, they seem to be more or less irrelevant to the student body. “It doesn't come up.” Wise told me when queried as to whether or not students ask about Sanders's positions on issues like military involvement in the Middle East, drone strikes or NSA wiretaps. “I don't have students come up and talk to me about these issues—about foreign policy—they don't really bring it up at all...I'll have a couple of my tablers and I'll usually try to prep them, like, try and give them cheat sheets and stuff like that, and I don't really equip them that well for that because we just don't get those questions, ever.” By the same token, Wise said it has been hard to get the predominantly white student body to care about the Black Lives Matter movement. “We are very much in a bubble here,” Wise told me, “so that side of things gets brought up very rarely and it's hard to get students fired up about that because they don't see it.”

The University of Northern Iowa may well be a bubble, but it's a bubble with a wildly disproportionate influence on who becomes the Democratic and Republican nominees for President. For some, like President Obama back in 2008, a victory in Iowa can prove a springboard to The White House. For others, like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum in 2008 and 2012, it winds up being the high water mark in a political career that leads them to the kiddie table debate in this year's election. As Hillary knows all too well, it's a tough row to hoe to win the Democratic nomination after losing Iowa. She knows it can be done, as her husband was the last Democrat to do so 24 years ago, but it's a pretty safe bet to say she doesn't want to have to find out. Whether or not she is forced to will depend in large measure upon how many college age Iowans like the ones met get behind Bernie and how many of them come out to caucus.

Say It Ain't So Joe: The Unfortunate Prospect of a Biden Presidential Campaign

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Monday October 19, 2015 · 8:50 PM PDT

2015/10/19 · 20:50

Up until today, the Republican and Democratic presidential primary fields were a study in contrasts. On the right, you had a raucous melange of hyper-conservative ideologues, religious extremists and political would-be-kings vociferously bickering on national TV, all of whom seemed far more interested in scoring points off of their belligerent opposition than actually outlining their policy positions. On the left, you had, with the exception of three harmless also-rans, a pair of central figures—Hillary and Bernie—who had a debate about the comparative merits of capitalism and the ways in which their respective administrations would address the myriad economic and social issues facing this country.

For anyone interested in the long term health and wellness of the Democratic Party, the initial three debates of this primary season couldn't have gone any better. Republicans showed that they had not learned their lesson from the disastrous primary slugfest in 2012 that left Mitt Romney bruised and battered for the general election, with the toupeed tornado currently leading the polls ensuring that civility would be anathema from the debate proceedings. Democrats, on the other hand, seemed to have found a productive, if not slightly uncomfortable, balance between their powerhouse establishment frontrunner and the impassioned outsider nipping at her heels. And, while their supporters don't seem to be too fond of one another, Clinton and Sanders seem to have a good rapport with one another—or at least, enough mutual respect to prevent the sort of petulant name-calling that's become common fare across the aisle. All bickering around the truncated debate schedule aside, it appeared that we'd have another 5 installments of more or less mano-a-mano primetime primary encounters that, while they certainly wouldn't have been Lincoln—Douglas Redux, would have made for compelling and informative television.

At least, that was the plan until it was reported on Monday by Fox News's White House Correspondent Ed Henry that Vice President Joe Biden had made up his mind to run for president. The three sources Henry used for his report were anonymous but, combined with other reports that said he planned announce his candidacy in the next 48 hours and that claim his associates have started interviewing campaign staff, it would seem as if Biden's run is more likely than not at the moment. For Democrats—at least the majority of them that currently don't plan on voting for Biden in the primaries—and many left-leaning independent voters, this is a unwelcome development. If you're a Hillary supporter, you have to be worried about the prospect that Biden will be able to eat into your candidate's huge lead in support among non-white voters, while those who back Sanders will be confronted with the distinct possibility that the mainstream media will, in pursuit of ratings, focus on the inevitable Clinton v. Biden dustups to the detriment of their candidate.

If you're looking for a sign Joe, the people have spoken and most of them say stop.

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