New York Times Pieces on Two Major National Sexual Assault Stories

There's another piece in the Havey Weinstein saga of sexual harassment and assault over many decades--Uma Thurman's much-anticipated story.  Her comments at the end are especially interesting.  So is her story about Quentin Tarantino forcing her to drive in a car crash in Kill Bill.  It might seem that she was relatively unscathed by Weinstein (and Tarantino), given her very successful career. This column makes clear that this is not the case.

The NY Times has also investigated the FBI inquiry into Dr. Larry Nasser's assaults under cover of medical treatment of teenaged and pre-teen female athletes. Notice the way the key "clue" appears here--not to mention the apparent problems with how the FBI handled the cases.   There are lots of overlaps with the course discussion of Cause 2 of noir culture that we started on Thursday.

IRL Examples for Noir this Week

These articles talk about two sides of the same noir coin. One discusses why the U.S. hasn't been able to move from military engagement to diplomacy in Afghanistan.  The other argues that, back home, political rivalry is turning into war with an enemy.

We'll be using "noir" in a way that is expansive, in order to describe a set of cultural forces. We'll also try to be concrete and precise.

One interesting passage from the Afghanistan piece:

Mr. Trump is not the first president to struggle over how to align goals with reality. In 2009, as President Obama escalated combat troop levels in Afghanistan, his advisers identified only two vital American interests in the war, according to participants, the kinds of interests that might justify sending soldiers into battle. 

One was the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. The second was the terrorist threat posed by Al Qaeda “and its affiliates.” Neither problem really existed in Afghanistan; they resided over the border, in Pakistan. After 2002, Al Qaeda’s most lethal operators largely fled to Pakistan. Mr. Obama’s strategists nonetheless rationalized their escalation on the grounds that if Afghanistan fell into chaos, Al Qaeda would return — a plausible fear but an indirect and even speculative reason to send American men and women to war.

Our course's first of six causes of noir culture is "the generalization of war."  Was the Obama Administration's strategy an example of this?

From the same article:

In effect, Pakistan’s strategy of nuclear deterrence, conceived to keep India’s military at bay, has also deterred the United States. The United States has so feared the risks of violent disarray in Pakistan that it has tolerated interference by Inter-Services Intelligence in Afghanistan since 2001 that it otherwise would most likely not have accepted.

Does this suggest that the credible threat of force works to protect a weaker power where negotiations would not?  Could Pakistan have done something less noir in dealing with the U.S?  Does U.S. foreign policy only (or mostly) respect threats of force? Lots of questions!

The other piece is called "Is Our Democracy Wobbly?" (the online title is different).  It claims that democracy depends on "two basic norms," "mutual toleration and "forbearance."  It says that "democratic norms are vulnerable to polarization," and when that happens,

Parties come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe. When that happens, politicians are tempted to abandon forbearance and win at any cost. If we believe our opponents are dangerous, should we not use any means necessary to stop them?

This is how democracy died in Chile. Before the 1973 coup, Chile was Latin America’s oldest democracy, buttressed by vibrant democratic norms, including a well-established “culture of compromise.” Chileans liked to say that there was no political disagreement that could not be settled over a bottle of Chilean cabernet. But beginning in the 1960s, Chile’s culture of compromise was shattered by Cold War polarization. 

We'll talk about Afghanistan later in the course (as a thought experiment on whether detection can replace invasion), so think a bit about what is going on there (two major mass slaughters of civilians in the past week) and why.  And bear in mind the question of US democracy as we get into Chandler's The Long Goodbye, which doesn't think too much of it.

 

Noir Interpretation with Example of UC Funding Cuts

Can This Course Help Explain Why Police Killings of Black Men Keep Happening?

As the course was getting started, two more police killings sparked national attention and protest.  On September 16, Terence Crutcher was killed after his car broke down outside Tulsa, Oklahoma.  The officer responsible, Betty Shelby, has been charged with first degree manslaughter. Four days later, Keith Scott was killed in Charlotte, NC, as he got out of his SUV in an apartment parking lot (a mourner is pictured at left).  As of today, no one has been charged.

Scott's wife released a harrowing video she made as the incident occurred.  After coming under quite a bit of pressure, the Charlotte police department released some of their video footage.  Today, the London Daily Mail tabloid ran a story claiming that Scott was a gun-carrying former convict whose wife had filed a temporary restraining order against him last year.  And so it goes.  Terence Crutcher was clearly unarmed, and Keith Scott appears to be unarmed, at least to me, though the video released so far has not settled the issue.  The New York Times ran a piece collecting some of the videos of the shootings that have put the issue of police killings on the national agenda.  Rakeyia Scott's video is like the one made by Philandro Castile's girlfriend outside St. Paul, Minnesota last July as he lay dying.

The "causes of noir" that I mentioned on Thursday refer to historical, cultural and social factors that create conditions in which actions like the killing of black males becomes more rather than less likely.  While discussion of individual cases often focuses on direct causality (whodunit and why), the course analyzes indirect causality as well.  This is when background or contextual forces shape events, often invisibly and beneath the surface.  We'll see whether by mid-way through the course we can shed light on the indirect causes of the killings that are increasingly being called an "American epidemic."

Crash Procedure English 193 Fall 2016

More on the Criminalization of Drug Use

Decriminalization of all drug use (our solution to Noir Cause 3) makes even more sense when we understand the politicial goals behind the strategic criminalization in the 1970s.  Richard Nixon's (r) domestic policy advisor, John Erlichmann (l) laid it out in a 1994 interview to Legalize it All author Dan Baum:

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

A Tale of Two Shootings: In the Hospital, In the Park

We've discussed how Easy Rawlins, Black Betty, and much of their Los Angeles came to California as part of the 2nd Great Migration. (That's one of Jacob Lawrence's series The Great Migration, one of the high points of 20th century American art.)  This past Sunday's New York Times had a piece by the journalist and historian Isabel Wilkerson that compares the end of two Great Migration stories--the killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 when his family sent him back to the South for a summer vacation, and the killing of 12-year-old Tamar Rice in 2014 in a Cleveland park across the street from his home.
Another reason the article is interesting is its narrative structure: it's a good example of non-fiction writing that uses characters to tell a story with a large historical arc, in under 1800 words (or about two blog posts).  Take a look at the skillful way the two family stories are told.   Another major issue gets us to the second story:  

As in the majority of the 21st-century cases of police shootings in the North, no one was prosecuted in the death of Tamir Rice. Late last December, a grand jury declined to indict the officer who killed him. Decades ago, in the Jim Crow South, Emmett Till’s killers were acquitted by an all-white jury, but at least they had gone to trial.

The Times also ran a major investigative story about why a Black college student in Houston sought help for a manic episode that was producing delusions and wound up with a bullet in his chest--administered in his hospital room.  He survived, and the story was produced in tandem with an episode of This American Life, "My Damn Mind," in which the victim, Alan Pean, tells much of the story himself.  Both are really good, and ponder issues we've raised about the underlying cultural forces that shape Black freedom and justice (and their absence) in the U.S., fifty years after the formal end of Jim Crow.