|
Roger Stone Made His Name as a Dirty Trickster, but the Trump-Russia Coverup May Finally Bring Him Down |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47190"><span class="small">James Risen, The Intercept</span></a>
|
|
Monday, 28 January 2019 14:50 |
|
Risen writes: "Stone, a longtime ally of Donald Trump, a frenetic character with a reputation as a Republican dirty trickster, and one of the most colorful figures in the Trump-Russia story, has finally been brought to heel."
Roger Stone, a former advisor to President Donald Trump, leaves the Fort Lauderdale Federal Courthouse on January 25, 2019. Stone was charged by the government of obstruction, giving false statements and witness tampering. (photo: Johnny Louis/Getty Images)
Roger Stone Made His Name as a Dirty Trickster, but the Trump-Russia Coverup May Finally Bring Him Down
By James Risen, The Intercept
28 January 19
 he government was shut down, but Robert Mueller kept working.
That became clear early Friday morning, when FBI agents arrested Roger Stone at his Florida home in connection with Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation. Stone later appeared in federal court to face charges that include witness tampering and making false statements to Congress.
Stone, a longtime ally of Donald Trump, a frenetic character with a reputation as a Republican dirty trickster, and one of the most colorful figures in the Trump-Russia story, has finally been brought to heel. With this latest indictment, the special counsel is drawing ever closer to Trump’s inner circle.
The indictment sheds new light on the alleged efforts by Stone and others around Trump to glean information about the trove of Democratic emails obtained by WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign. It also raises new questions about whether Stone sought to influence and direct WikiLeaks releases that were damaging to the Clinton campaign.
Since his name first surfaced in connection with the Trump-Russia inquiry, Stone has behaved in public like a clown, reveling in his cheap celebrity while also taunting Mueller and the press. He acted in the same manner after his court appearance on Friday, meeting the crowd outside the Florida courthouse with both arms raised in a Nixon-like victory salute, while vowing not to testify falsely against Trump to save himself and predicting his ultimate vindication.
But the indictment shows that Stone has some serious legal problems, and that his role as a possible link between the Trump circle and the cyberassault on the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign can’t be laughed off or easily dismissed.
The indictment alleges that Stone engaged in a concerted effort to find out what documents WikiLeaks had obtained that could harm Clinton’s campaign, and what WikiLeaks (identified in the indictment only as “Organization 1”) was going to do with them. He was scrambling to find out in advance when the documents would be released and tried to get messages to WikiLeaks to look for specific documents in its trove that he thought would be most harmful to Clinton, according to the indictment.
The indictment says that in June and July 2016, Stone told Trump campaign officials that he had information that WikiLeaks had documents that would be damaging to the Clinton campaign. The indictment notes that Stone did so after the Democratic National Committee had already made public the fact that it had been hacked by the Russian government, strongly implying that Stone should have known that the material obtained by WikiLeaks had come from the Russians. (The U.S. intelligence community has now concluded that Russian intelligence hacked the Democrats and turned over a massive archive of emails to WikiLeaks, which later released them.)
The Trump campaign evidently began to realize that Stone knew what he was talking about when WikiLeaks released some documents on July 22, 2016. It was then, according to the indictment, that the Trump campaign began to try to use Stone’s apparent inside knowledge as a weapon.
After that, a senior Trump campaign official was “directed to contact Stone” to determine what he knew about further document releases and what WikiLeaks had about the Clinton campaign, according to the indictment, which does not identify the senior Trump campaign official or say who ordered the official to contact Stone.
Subsequently, Stone told Trump campaign officials about upcoming WikiLeaks releases, according to the indictment. Stone used intermediaries to communicate with WikiLeaks, including in his efforts to influence the release of specific information that he believed would be particularly damaging to the Clinton campaign.
In September 2016, Stone asked an intermediary to contact WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (identified in the indictment as “the head of Organization 1”) to get him to find emails from August 2011 that would help prove specific allegations raised in the press against Clinton about her time as secretary of state, according to the indictment. The indictment says that on September 18, 2016, Stone sent an email to “Person 2” (widely identified in the press Friday as New York comedian Randy Credico), who Stone was then using as a go-between with Assange. The email included an article that contained allegations against Clinton related to her time as secretary of state in the Obama administration. The indictment does not say what those allegations were. “Please ask [Assange] for any State or HRC email from August 10 to August 30 – particularly on August 20, 2011, that mention [the subject of the article] or confirm this narrative.”
If the indictment is borne out, Stone’s actions come very close to making him the key missing link in the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. He allegedly worked hard to acquire advance knowledge of WikiLeaks document releases and, at the Trump campaign’s request, gave that information to Trump campaign officials. He seemingly tried to direct WikiLeaks to release certain documents in order to increase the damage to Clinton. And he did it all at a time when he should have realized that the Russians were behind the Democratic hack.
Still, the indictment does not charge Stone with a crime for his efforts to act as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. Instead, he is charged in connection with his efforts to cover up his role in the face of congressional inquiries that began after the election, and more broadly, to block investigators from answering underlying questions about Russian intervention in the 2016 election. “After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened or announced their respective investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which included investigating STONE’s claims of contact with [WikiLeaks],” the indictment states. “In response, STONE took steps to obstruct these investigations.”
The indictment shows that Stone used mob-like tactics to try to stop Credico from honestly telling Congress what he knew. In December 2017, Stone told Credico that he should be like “Frank Pentangeli” in his congressional testimony, the indictment says. Pentangeli is a fictional character in “The Godfather Part II,” who told Congress that he didn’t know information that he actually knew. In April 2018, Stone sent Credico an angry email. “You are a rat. A stoolie. You backstab your friends-run your mouth.” Stone also threatened Credico’s dog. In May, Credico wrote an email back to Stone saying, “you’ve opened yourself up to perjury charges like an idiot.”
While the charges against Stone don’t deal with the underlying question of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the Stone indictment still brings Mueller’s probe closer than ever to the heart of the matter.
 |
|
The US Military's Lost Wars, Overfunded, Overhyped, and Always Over There |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=13111"><span class="small">William J. Astore, TomDispatch</span></a>
|
|
Monday, 28 January 2019 14:35 |
|
Astore writes: "The question is: What's made America's leaders, civilian and military, quite so proficient when it comes to turning victories into defeats? And what does that tell us about them and their wars?"
Northern Alliance soldiers eye the crest of hill that serves as a front line December 7, 2001 in the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan. The Afghanistan War is a military conflict that began in 2001 and has cost $1.07 trillion. (photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images)
The US Military's Lost Wars, Overfunded, Overhyped, and Always Over There
By William J. Astore, TomDispatch
28 January 19
Think of it as a reverse miracle. Seventeen years of American war in this century waged by a military considered beyond compare on a planet that, back in 2001, was almost without enemies. How, then, was it possible, month after month, year after year, to turn the promise of eternal victory so repetitiously into the reality of defeat (and spreading terror movements)? As I read retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore’s latest piece on the subject, I must admit that I felt a certain sense of awe. In fact, I wondered whether, historically speaking, this might not be a one-of-a-kind situation.
Had there ever been an imperial power at the ostensible height of its glory that proved quite so incapable of effectively applying its military and political force globally to achieve its aims? At their height, the Roman Empire, China’s various imperial dynasties, and Europe’s colonial powers, however brutally, generally proved quite capable of impressing their wills and desires on those beyond their borders, even on relatively distant parts of the planet (at least for a time). In fact, in the Cold War years -- think of Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, or Chile on the first 9/11 (September 11, 1973) -- the U.S. proved no less capable, often in similarly brutal ways. And yet, from Afghanistan to Libya, Iraq to Somalia, Syria to Yemen, despite the endless application of U.S. power, the killing of tens of thousands of people (including key figures in various terror movements), the displacement of millions, the rubblization of whole cities, and the creation of a series of partially or fully failed states, nowhere, as TomDispatch regular Astore points out today, has U.S. power succeeded in successfully imposing its will, even as its wars only multiplied.
And here’s another thing I’ve come to wonder about: How did the hearts-and-minds moxie of the leftist national liberation movements of the previous century that decolonized much of the planet get transferred to the extreme Islamist groups of this one? Like the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (the “Vietcong”) and similar groups in the twentieth century, al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, and other terror outfits regularly suffer extreme casualties and yet somehow maintain their grip on the hearts and minds of significant numbers of people in riven, increasingly ruined lands. They can, it seems, even attract random Americans and Europeans into the fold. It’s a strange and unexpected phenomenon, a grim success story that hasn’t been faced in a serious way here.
I suspect that these two puzzles -- how the self-acknowledged greatest power of all time failed to deliver and the extremist resistance to it, against all odds, did -- may have to be left to future historians to fully unravel. In the meantime, check out Astore’s striking account of how the U.S. military has repeatedly turned promised victory into dismal defeat in these years. No question about it, it’s a tale for the history books.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The U.S. Military’s Lost Wars
Overfunded, Overhyped, and Always Over There
 ne of the finest military memoirs of any generation is Defeat Into Victory, British Field Marshal Sir William Slim’s perceptive account of World War II’s torturous Burma campaign, which ended in a resounding victory over Japan. When America’s generals write their memoirs about their never-ending war on terror, they’d do well to choose a different title: Victory Into Defeat. That would certainly be more appropriate than those on already published accounts like Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez’s Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story (2008), or General Stanley McChrystal’s My Share of the Task (2013).
Think about it. America’s Afghan War began in 2001 with what was essentially a punitive raid against the Taliban, part of which was mythologized last year in 12 Strong, a Hollywood film with a cavalry charge that echoed the best of John Wayne. That victory, however, quickly turned first into quagmire and then, despite various “surges” and a seemingly endless series of U.S. commanders (17 so far), into a growing sense of inevitable defeat. Today, a resurgent Taliban exercises increasing influence over the hearts, minds, and territory of the Afghan people. The Trump administration’s response so far has been a mini-surge of several thousand troops, an increase in air and drone strikes, and an attempt to suppress accurate reports from the Pentagon’s special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction about America’s losing effort there.
Turn now to the invasion of Iraq: in May 2003, President George W. Bush cockily announced “Mission Accomplished” from the deck of an aircraft carrier, only to see victory in Baghdad degenerate into insurgency and a quagmire conflict that established conditions for the rise of the Islamic State. Gains in stability during a surge of U.S. forces orchestrated by General David Petraeus in 2007 and hailed in Washington as a fabulous success story proved fragile and reversible. An ignominious U.S. troop withdrawal in 2011 was followed in 2014 by the collapse of that country’s American-trained and armed military in the face of modest numbers of Islamic State militants. A recommitment of U.S. troops and air power brought Stalingrad-style devastation to cities like Mosul and Ramadi, largely reduced to rubble, while up to 1.3 million children were displaced from their homes. All in all, not exactly the face of victory.
Nor, as it happened, was the Obama administration’s Libyan intervention of 2011. “We came, we saw, he died,” boasted a jubilant Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the time. The “he” was Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s autocratic ruler whose reign of terror looked less horrible after that country collapsed into a failed state, while spreading both terror groups and weaponry throughout the region. That, in turn, led to wider and more costly U.S. interventions in Africa, including the infamous loss of four Green Berets to an ISIS franchise in Niger in 2017.
“We don’t win [wars] anymore,” said candidate Donald Trump in 2016 and he wasn’t wrong about that. In fact, that remarkable record of repeatedly turning initially advertised victory into something approximating defeat would be one reason candidate Trump could boast that he knew more about military matters than America’s generals. Yet for all his talk of winning, victories (large or small) have proved no less elusive for him as commander-in-chief. Recall the botched raid in Yemen early in 2017 that resulted in the death of a Navy SEAL and many Yemeni innocents, which Trump blamed on his generals. Recall the president’s “beautiful” cruise missile attack against Syria in April of that same year, which resolved nothing. Or recall the way he recently “fired” retired general Jim Mattis (just after he resigned as secretary of defense) supposedly because he couldn’t bring the Afghan War to a victorious close.
The question is: What’s made America’s leaders, civilian and military, quite so proficient when it comes to turning victories into defeats? And what does that tell us about them and their wars?
A Sustained Record of Losing
During World War II, British civilians called the “Yanks” who would form the backbone of the Normandy invasion in June 1944 (the one that contributed to Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender less than a year later) “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” What can be said of today’s Yanks? Perhaps that they’re overfunded, overhyped, and always over there -- “there” being unpromising places like Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
Let’s start with always over there. As Nick Turse recently reported for TomDispatch, U.S. forces remain deployed on approximately 800 foreign bases across the globe. (No one knows the exact number, Turse notes, possibly not even the Pentagon.) The cost: somewhere to the north of $100 billion a year simply to sustain that global “footprint.” At the same time, U.S. forces are engaged in an open-ended war on terror in 80 countries, a sprawling commitment that has cost nearly $6 trillion since the 9/11 attacks (as documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University). This prodigious and prodigal global presence has not been lost on America’s Tweeter-in-Chief, who opined that the country’s military “cannot continue to be the policeman of the world.” Showing his usual sensitivity to others, he noted as well that “we are in countries most people haven’t even heard about. Frankly, it’s ridiculous.”
Yet Trump’s inconsistent calls to downsize Washington’s foreign commitments, including vows to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria and halve the number in Afghanistan, have encountered serious pushback from Washington’s bevy of war hawks like Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and his own national security advisor, John Bolton. Contrary to the president’s tweets, U.S. troops in Syria are now destined to remain there for at least months, if not years, according to Bolton. Meanwhile, Trump-promised troop withdrawals from Afghanistan may be delayed considerably in the (lost) cause of keeping the Taliban -- clearly winning and having nothing but time -- off-balance. What matters most, as retired General David Petraeus argued in 2017, is showing resolve, no matter how disappointing the results. For him, as for so many in the Pentagon high command, it’s perfectly acceptable for Americans to face a “generational struggle” in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) that could, he hinted, persist for as long as America’s ongoing commitment to South Korea -- that is, almost 70 years.
Turning to overfunded, the unofficial motto of the Pentagon budgetary process might be “aim high” and in this they have succeeded admirably. For example, President Trump denounced a proposed Pentagon budget of $733 billion for fiscal year 2020 as “crazy” high. Then he demonstrated his art-of-the-deal skills by suggesting a modest cut to $700 billion, only to compromise with his national security chiefs on a new figure: $750 billion. That eternal flood of money into the Pentagon’s coffers -- no matter the political party in power -- ensures one thing: that no one in that five-sided building needs to think hard about the disastrous direction of U.S. strategy or the grim results of its wars. The only hard thinking is devoted to how to spend the gigabucks pouring in (and keep more coming).
Instead of getting the most bang for the buck, the Pentagon now gets the most bucks for the least bang. To justify them, America’s defense experts are placing their bets not only on their failing generational war on terror, but also on a revived cold war (now uncapitalized) with China and Russia. Such rivals are no longer simply to be “deterred,” to use a commonplace word from the old (capitalized) Cold War; they must now be “overmatched,” a new Pentagon buzzword that translates into unquestionable military superiority (including newly “usable” nuclear weapons) that may well bring the world closer to annihilation.
Finally, there’s overhyped. Washington leaders of all stripes love to boast of a military that’s “second to none,” of a fighting force that’s the “finest” in history. Recently, Vice President Mike Pence reminded the troops that they are “the best of us.” Indeed you could argue that “support our troops” has become a new American mantra, a national motto as ubiquitous as (and synonymous with) “In God we trust.” But if America’s military truly is the finest fighting force since forever, someone should explain just why it’s failed to produce clear and enduring victories of any significance since World War II.
Despite endless deployments, bottomless funding, and breathless hype, the U.S. military loses -- it’s politely called a “stalemate” -- with remarkable consistency. America’s privates and lieutenants, the grunts at the bottom, are hardly to blame. The fish, as they say, rots from the head, which in this case means America’s most senior officers. Yet, according to them, often in testimony before Congress, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere, that military is always making progress. Victory, so they claim, is invariably around the next corner, which they’re constantly turning or getting ready to turn.
America’s post-9/11 crop of generals like Mattis, H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, and especially Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus have been much celebrated here in the mainstream media. And in their dress uniforms shimmering with colorful ribbons, badges, and medals, they certainly looked the part of victors.
Indeed, when three of them were still in Donald Trump’s administration, the pro-war mainstream media unabashedly saluted them as the “adults in the room,” allegedly curbing the worst of the president’s mad impulses. Yet consider the withering critique of veteran reporter William Arkin who recently resigned from NBC News to protest the media’s reflexive support of America’s wars and the warriors who have overseen them. “I find it disheartening,” he wrote, “that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting.” NBC News, he concluded in his letter of resignation, has been “emulating the national security state itself -- busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.”
Arkin couldn’t be more on target. Moreover, self-styled triumphalist warriors and a cheeringly complicit media are hardly the ideal tools with which to fix a tottering republic, one allegedly founded on the principle of rule by informed citizens, not the national security state.
Can America Turn Defeat Into Victory?
Like Field Marshal Slim and his coalition army in Burma, America must find a way to turn defeat into victory. Here’s the rub: Slim and his forgotten army knew that they were fighting a war of survival against a ruthless Japanese enemy. Under his results-oriented leadership, his forces proved willing to make the sacrifices necessary for victory. In the U.S. case, however, no such sacrifices would matter as there’s no way to win thoroughly misbegotten wars by finding the right general or defining a new strategy or throwing more money at the Pentagon. The only way to win such wars is by ending them and, at some gut level, candidate Trump seemed to recognize this. On occasion as president, he has indeed questioned both the high cost and disastrous results of those wars, but so far he has been more interventionist than isolationist, greatly expanding air and drone strikes across the Greater Middle East as well as committing, at the urging of “his” generals, more troops to Afghanistan and Syria.
Endless war for any purpose other than the literal preservation of the republic isn’t a measure of fortitude or toughness or foresight; however, it is the path to national suicide. And the “war on terror” has proven to be the very definition of endless war.
A quick recap: what started in 2001 as a punitive raid and blossomed into endless war against the Taliban and later other terrorist organizations in Afghanistan shows no sign of abating; a war to rid Saddam Hussein of (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction cratered in 2003 when none were found, the Iraqis did not greet their “liberators” with flowers, and no preparations had been made to stabilize an increasingly ethnically riven country after a massively destructive invasion; a shortsighted operation to overthrow a bothersome dictator in Libya in 2011 led to the spread of death, destruction, and weaponry throughout the region; efforts in Syria to train “moderate” Islamic forces to counter extremists and overthrow the country’s autocratic ruler Bashar al-Assad only aggravated a preexisting civil war. These and similar interventions are already lost causes. There is no way for better leaders, cleverer tactics, or booming defense budgets to win them today.
In the future, the surest way to turn defeat into victory would be to avoid such needless wars. On the other hand, a surefire way to defeat is to persist in them out of fear, greed, opportunism, careerism, or similar motives. These are lessons America’s gung-ho defense experts have little incentive to absorb, let alone act upon -- and because they won’t, we must.
A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and professor of history, William Astore is a TomDispatch regular. His personal blog is Bracing Views.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
|
|
|
In #MeToo Age, Can We Love the Art but Deplore the Artist? |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=40147"><span class="small">Harry Bruinius, The Christian Science Monitor</span></a>
|
|
Monday, 28 January 2019 14:30 |
|
Bruinius writes: "And be they rock stars, writers, or painters, such artists, most all of them men, have often been given an implicit moral pass."
R. Kelly. (photo: Reuters)
In #MeToo Age, Can We Love the Art but Deplore the Artist?
By Harry Bruinius, The Christian Science Monitor
28 January 19
What happens to the artist as “enfant terrible” in an age of morality clauses and #MeToo? Does socially condemned behavior discredit a person’s artistic vision?
 effrey McCune has never hesitated to speak out against what he calls the predatory energy and aggressive, toxic masculinity in R. Kelly’s music.
As an artist and social thinker, Dr. McCune has probed what he and others see as long-embedded patterns of patriarchy in American culture, “a culture that continues to produce moments of sickness and violence, which we see in R. Kelly and Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby and Kevin Spacey and so many others.”
But the moral reckonings of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have also posed vexing questions for him and a host of people around the country: How should we feel now about the art produced by these men, each considered masters, if not “geniuses,” of their crafts?
It’s a question, too, being asked within the halls of the high arts, as major painters and classical musicians accused of sexual harassment have also seen their contracts severed, their exhibitions cancelled, and their public reputations disgraced. Indeed, “Can I love the art but deplore the artist?” has become a moral question with both civic and deeply personal implications.
Especially for McCune, a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He came of age in Chicago deeply influenced by the music of R. Kelly, who attended the same high school he did a few years before.
“When I was a young Chicagoan, R. Kelly represented a hope in us all to surpass the constraints of the South Side or of the idea of limited blackness,” says McCune, an actor and playwright in St. Louis. “His voice was a representation of the audacity to speak beyond the moral boundaries in our black Christian communities.” The trajectory of his own life as a scholar and performer, in fact, “was really made possible through my engagement with Kelly’s music,” he says.
Yet as member of his high school’s choir, he sat next to one of the women who later accused the Grammy Award-winning R&B artist of sexual assault, and he witnessed firsthand the life-altering consequences of Kelly’s alleged crimes and how the singer used his music as a lure for underage girls.
“That gave his music for me a much different type of meaning, of course, but that didn’t necessarily negate the importance and centrality that R. Kelly had to my own personal liberation,” McCune says.
“And that’s what I think the real tension here is: that art forges itself, that music generates within a space that can be liberating for some and yet really troubling for others,” he continues. “And still again, at the same time it can be both for some people.”
Such vexing personal conundrums, however, are just part of a long tradition of questions about the purpose of art in human culture and whether or not there are certain moral dangers posed by powerful works of art and the powerful, charismatic artists behind them.
And be they rock stars, writers, or painters, such artists, most all of them men, have often been given an implicit moral pass. Especially during the 19th century through the present era, a mythology developed of the artist as “enfant terrible,” or a Bohemian eccentric who believes, like the Romantic poet William Blake, that the “road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
Male artists, especially, are often expected to be mercurial rebels, “geniuses” with an original and often countercultural vision of the world.
“They were permitted to be drunken or intolerably diva-esque, or people would actually wink at their abuse of the people around them,” says Crispin Sartwell, professor of art and art history at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. “You might even expect that from a genius.”
“And while I think that that figure was always a bit of a fiction, on the other hand, I do think artists often have a problematic or outsider relationship to the culture they’re in,” continues Professor Sartwell. “Sometimes that’s true, sometimes it’s not, but it’s an extremely valuable thing, and we’re going to have to tolerate some transgressions from within the arts, especially when artists continue to press upon our assumptions or values. That's a central function of the arts,” he says.
But in the Judeo-Christian West, there has also been a tradition of deep suspicion toward the arts, as well as deep ambivalence about the emotional power of music and visual images and the charismatic performances behind them. Art has the particular moral power to lead people astray, corrupt a person’s soul, and thus endanger the wider society.
The Greek philosopher Plato, too, believed individual souls should set their minds on eternal ideals and perfect “forms.” In his ideal Republic, the arts would be banned, since they represented imperfect imitations of the imperfect shadows of the physical world and thus a mental space dangerously removed from eternal truth.
Aristotle, on the other hand, thought artistic works could embody the eternal ideals already woven into the physical world. In his influential “Poetics,” he observed that viewers of the tragic and grotesque could experience a “catharsis,” or an emotional cleansing.
Yet both believed what many believe today: Art can have some kind of connection to the transcendent, whether a real or merely psychological state, and the individual “genius,” regardless of his behavior, may have an intimation of a reality beyond the rational.
“Can we separate the artist from their work? Certainly we can, and must, if we hope to have robust literary, visual, and performing arts in our future,” says Jeff Deist, a conservative social critic and the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Ala. The idiosyncrasies of artists are often part and parcel of their talent, he says, and in many ways their expression of truth is separate from their moral behavior.
“We should resist the trend of boycotting art due to the acts or identity of the artist,” Mr. Deist continues. “Would we tear down a bridge designed by a bigot, or refuse heart surgery from a talented doctor whose political views oppose our own?”
But the trend has been wide-ranging. The Academy Awards this year is again a focus of the #MeToo movement. Bryan Singer, the listed director of the film “Bohemian Rhapsody,” nominated for best picture, is accused of abusing or raping teenage boys. Mr. Singer called the latest allegations, detailed in the Atlantic, a “homophobic smear piece.” The comedian Kevin Hart, slated to be this year’s host, dropped out after past homophobic tweets resurfaced.
In the rarified worlds of high art, too, the National Gallery of Art in Washington cancelled solo exhibitions last year scheduled for the renowned painter Chuck Close and accomplished photographer Thomas Roma, both of whom were accused of sexual misconduct. And last year the Metropolitan Opera in New York fired its long-time conductor, James Levine, for what the Met called credible evidence of allegations of sexual harassment or abuse of seven men.
“There is, of course, a long history of tension between public morality and artistic visions,” says Paddy Johnson, a writer and art critic who helps run PARADE, a nonprofit arts organization in Queens. “Often this tension reflects ideological power struggles,” and traditions of free speech in the modern era recognized the dangers of censorship and the value of self-expression and unorthodox ideas.
“But the fight to be heard plays out a little differently now because there actually is a crisis of moral values,” says Ms. Johnson. In the context of the #MeToo movement and the exposure of sexual misconduct at the highest levels of society, the words and actions of provocateurs like a Louis C.K. or even the countercultural flamboyance of a Milo Yiannopoulos can quickly lose their resonance and thus their power.
“We don’t need art to transgress norms as a means of challenging the status quo anymore,” she says. “Those norms are gone. We can, however, look to art to help us see the world a little differently. But you can’t really understand art unless you understand the context.”
Return of the morality clause
And there is a difference between the moral choices of individuals and those of businesses and public institutions, many observers say.
The charges against Kelly go back decades, with the singer having been acquitted of child pornography charges in 2008. After the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” aired this month, both his label and publisher dropped Kelly. The music streaming business Spotify this week created a feature that allows users to mute him and others after a “hate content and hateful conduct” policy was launched and then repealed last year.
And some media companies have returned to the early 20th-century tradition of adding the “morality clause” in their contracts. A part of the film industry in the 1920s through the 1960s, morality clauses tried to ensure, as Diest points out, “a Hollywood mystique, where actors literally had contractual obligations never to appear publicly in casual dress” or to engage in anything that could be considered scandalous behavior.
In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of artists and screenwriters saw their contracts invalidated by their morality clauses during the McCarthy era. And federal courts dismissed their lawsuits against studios and publishers, ruling that “a large segment of the public did look down upon Communism and Communists as things of evil,” so they violated their agreement to refrain from any behavior that could “bring him into public hatred, contempt, or ridicule.”
“Morality clauses are designed by lawyers for various business and legal risk management safeguards, but they can badly harm the artist’s creativity,” says Jeffrey Leving, a Chicago-based attorney and painter who negotiates the contracts of a number of artists and writers. “Such clauses can be harmful to freedom of speech and the creative expression which defines artists.”
“As both an artist and as a lawyer representing artists, I understand the purpose behind morality clauses but find many are created out of paranoia and have no real value,” Mr. Leving says.
“I would not have signed a contract with my publisher if it contained a morality clause for this book or any of the others.... There is no art without creativity.”
When the ‘price of genius’ is paid by others
Many women, however, emphasize that the issues raised in the #MeToo era have challenged many of the long-held assumptions about the nature of creativity and the role of artists in society.
And instead of an idea of art that sees a “genius” able to connect to deeper insights about the world or a transcendent realm, many see a much more complex process of human values and artistic production embedded in a wider social matrix.
“We can no longer worship at the altar of creative genius while ignoring the price all too often paid for that genius,” wrote the social thinker and writer Roxane Gay, reflecting on the enormous role “The Cosby Show” played in her life in her essay Can I Enjoy the Art but Denounce the Artist? “In truth, we should have learned this lesson long ago, but we have a cultural fascination with creative and powerful men who are also ‘mercurial’ or ‘volatile.’ ”
No matter the impact the comedian had on her identity, “it is not difficult to dismiss the work of predators and angry men because agonizing over a predator’s legacy would mean there is some price I am willing to let victims pay for the sake of good art, when the truth is no half hour of television is so excellent that anyone’s suffering is recompense.”
“The value of art is decided by human beings, and the value of human beings is decided by human beings,” says Irina Aristarkhova, a professor of art history and women’s studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “When one of those value judgments is in conflict with another, forcing us to take sides, our discussions reveal how moral decisions are being made and on whose terms and under which circumstances.
“I welcome an acknowledgment that we should discuss the value of human beings and not just art, and seeing it from that perspective is useful,” Professor Aristarkhova says.
It’s a perspective that McCune has long embraced as a performance theorist and social critic. But even amid his own ambivalence about the role R. Kelly’s music has played in his life and continues to play in his thinking about sexuality and black culture, he also sees in art a deep and perhaps ironic truth.
“Some of the stuff that we don’t like about art and artists is what actually creates the gumbo, so to speak,” McCune says. “I think that it’s hard for us to manage the fact that what actually produces art is not just the good and pleasant things that happen; it’s also what we might consider the darker things.”
“I think that’s the conundrum, because part of it is that the beauty of the thing we love, and the complexity of the art that moves us so – it’s just precisely because of its relationship to that which we might think is immoral,” he says. “We enjoy thinking about the presence of the good as producing light, and we want to reproduce that.”
“But oftentimes artists create their work from a place of pain and sorrow as well as joy,” McCune says. “It’s made in troubled spaces as it is in triumphant spaces. And so we have to wrestle with that.”
|
|
RSN: Swing Vote for Bigotry, Chief Justice Roberts Strikes Again |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Monday, 28 January 2019 12:57 |
|
Boardman writes: "The swing vote putting the court on record supporting baseless discrimination was Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts could as easily have voted on the side of tolerance and the rule of law. His decision looks cowardly. It is unexplained."
Chief Justice John Roberts stands with U.S. Supreme Court Justices in the House chamber prior to the 2016 State of the Union address. (photo: Reuters)
Swing Vote for Bigotry, Chief Justice Roberts Strikes Again
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
28 January 19
Openly transgender persons have been serving in the military for two and a half years and leaders from each branch have testified that their service has not harmed the military. Although the government cries that the sky is falling, it has offered no evidence to support its dire claims.
 ere’s another level of madness: The Supreme Court ruled on January 22 that the Trump administration could force the Pentagon to adopt bigoted transgender policies, even though a lower court had already held the policies likely to be unconstitutional. The swing vote putting the court on record supporting baseless discrimination was Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts could as easily have voted on the side of tolerance and the rule of law. His decision looks cowardly. It is unexplained. The court offers no argument – none – to support its decision. The court offers no supporting evidence to justify its arbitrary and capricious reinstatement of gender bias as a lawful policy under the Constitution. And the body politic, never mind the general public, hardly responds at all to an action that replaces due process of law with government by decree to which there is no avenue of appeal. Governance by tweet has brought us to a place of judicial anarchy.
In the ordinary course of events, a plaintiff – here, several transgender soldiers affected by the Trump administration’s ban – will file a case seeking to block (or overturn) an action in federal district court. Typically cases will be decided first at the district court level, then appealed to a higher court where it is affirmed or reversed (or some of both). Only after this careful process builds a solid record of evidence and argument will the Supreme Court even consider hearing a further appeal. Out of some 7,000 appeals to the Supreme Court each year, it decides maybe 130 (holding hearings on about 80). It is extremely rare for the court to deviate from this orderly process. The Supreme Court’s rules allow such deviation “only upon a showing that the case is of such imperative public importance as to justify deviation from normal appellate practice and to require immediate determination in this court.” [Rule 11] The court identified no such “imperative public importance,” but for some reason allowed these transgender bias cases to jump the line.
On January 22, the Supreme Court threw out regular procedure, without explanation. The court issued orders in two cases – Trump v. Karnoski, et al. (18A625) and Trump v. Stockman, et al. (18A627). The cases are similar but come from different jurisdictions in California and Washington. The initial plaintiffs (Karnoski, Stockman, et al.) won their case at the district level, where the court not only ruled in their favor voiding the transgender ban, but also issued an injunction preventing the government from implementing the ban before the litigation was completed. The government appealed the decision but did not appeal the injunction issued December 11 (or the one issued December 22). That is an indication that there was no arguable emergency in December 2018.
In issuing the injunctions, the district courts also found, on the record, that the government’s forcing the military to adopt a transgender ban was likely to be found unconstitutional by higher courts.
As defendants in a companion case, Trump v. Jane Doe 2 (December 2018), argued:
The district court correctly concluded that the government’s ban on military service by transgender individuals is likely to be found unconstitutional and that a preliminary injunction is necessary to prevent irreparable harm to respondents while the parties work toward final resolution of respondents’ claims on the merits.
The merits are what should matter in any legal proceeding that purports to be a search for truth. The district court issued its injunction after concluding the government’s transgender ban was likely unconstitutional, a substantive judgment on the merits. The Supreme Court, without considering the merits, lifted the injunction without explanation. How does this not corrupt the process below? How is this not a signal that five justices are ready to find transgender prejudice constitutional? How is this not a rather genteel but blatant obstruction of justice?
How did we get to this particular place of radical cruelty from an unaccountable, authoritarian court without raising a ruckus among those who still pretend the Constitution means something? The court has a solid bloc of reactionary justices in the quartet of Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch, all of whom voted for the transgender ban. Roberts chose to join them, just as he chose to join the reactionaries in 2013 in gutting the Voting Rights Act when he preposterously argued that racial bias was a thing of the American past. Since that case, Shelby County v. Holder, almost 1000 polling places have been closed, mostly in minority districts, one of the more obvious tools of racist voter suppression enabled by the Supreme Court.
The justices voting to defend voting rights included Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote a dissent joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. These same four justices voted this year to maintain the injunction against the military transgender ban.
So what is it with Roberts that, faced with a clear opportunity to vote for democratic process, for inclusion, for tolerance, he opts for repression and bigotry? In gutting the Voting Rights Act, Roberts voted against allowing despised minorities to participate as political equals in a society he pretends is colorblind. He voted in denial of reality and in disregard of Congressional findings. With the transgender cases, he again chooses bigotry over decency and he again votes to undermine constitutional processes, this time of the US judicial system. What kind of legacy is he building?
There are maybe 15,000 transgender military personnel on active or reserve duty now, no one knows for sure. There are maybe 134,000 transgender military veterans. The Supreme Court has unsettled their futures, with no guideline for how anyone should proceed. All the court did was lift injunctions, and that may not take effect before the end of February. After that, no one is required to do anything. The Defense Department, facing no immediate crisis it can see, does not have to reinstate the transgender ban in its previous or any other form. There is concern that any significant change from the status quo would create a crisis of its own. A Pentagon spokesman said with careful fuzziness:
It is critical [that the Defense Department] be permitted to implement personnel policies that it determines are necessary to ensure the most lethal and combat effective fighting force in the world.
Transgender personnel have served in the military since the American Revolution. For most of that time, the military treated the issue with a blind eye. More recently, as more and more minority groups struggled for rights and self-respect, openly bigoted resistance came out of other closets. At the urging of evangelical Christians, Trump placated them with his July 26, 2017, tweet: “that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military…” This caught the Pentagon by surprise, setting off the policy chaos the Supreme Court just added to.
The transgender community has reacted with predictable fierceness, since the administration seems bent on their metaphorical if not literal extinction. In a powerful New York Times op-ed, 1997 Annapolis graduate and transgender Navy Air Force pilot Brynn Tannehill describes the recent evolution of humane policy, a process in which she participated. She also describes her effort to return to active duty, apparently sabotaged by the Supreme Court, and adds:
All of this makes the administration’s dogged attempt to undo everything achieved over the last few years even more baffling. The ban was developed in secret, without the sort of careful study that went into the policy it reversed. It does not reflect any current medical understanding of transgender people, and it has been denounced by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association.
No one, including the lawyers for the Trump administration, has been able to show that inclusion of transgender service members or providing care to them has had any measurable negative impact on morale, readiness or unit cohesion.
The bigotry of the Trump administration and now the Supreme Court is so palpable as to seem perhaps a distraction from something else, but what? US Solicitor General Noel Francisco offers a possible higher stake in his filing on the transgender cases. In a single passing sentence without further amplification, the solicitor general complains:
The accelerating trend of lower courts’ enjoining enforcement of federal policies nationwide, including as to nonparties, reflects an abandonment of settled principles and underscores the need for this Court’s review.
This is not your average throwaway line. It is a sweeping attack on the court system in general for its efforts to protect the American people – those annoying “nonparties” – from unconstitutional power grabs by this administration. The shibboleth of “activist” judges has long been a staple of right-wing propaganda, but now it’s shape-shifted into an attack on courts who defend the nation against “enforcement of federal policies” when those federal policies fail to meet constitutional or legislative standards. (As one judge wrote: “Whatever the scope of the President’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden.”) Who better to rid the president of these troublesome judges than a Supreme Court well-stocked with ideologues who believe in the expansion of executive power? With this ugly decision in favor of transgender bigotry, the court also sends a message to lower courts: if you go too far checking the president’s power then we’ll have to disempower you – human decency, justice, those are a chump’s game.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
|
|
e are living in a truly unprecedented moment in history and the actions we take now, together, will determine not only the future of our country but the entire world. If there has ever been a time in American history when our people must stand together in the fight for economic, social, racial and environmental justice - now is that time.
