How did so many smart and powerful people so quickly and thoroughly screw up such a simple and straightforward task? As Fwd.us never tires of pointing out, its founders and contributors are the A-list set of Silicon Valley luminaries: people like Bill Gates, Marissa Mayer, Sean Parker, and, before he withdrew in protest, Elon Musk. The immediate legislative objective of the organization, by the standards of the political kingdom whose castle it aimed to storm, isn’t exactly world historical. Fwd.us is committed to spending lots of tech cash to help pass bipartisan immigration reform, an issue that’s already at the very front of the President’s legislative agenda and one for which both parties are under extraordinary popular pressure to strike a compromise. What’s more, Fwd.us’ core constituency in Silicon Valley is already united in consensus behind the group’s position. After jumping into the fray at the eleventh hour, all Fwd.us had to do was to keep up the appearance of being a formidable player in negotiations for long enough for a bill to be passed, and then bow for the unearned applause. As one unimpressed tech lobbyist told The New Republic:

“They’re taking an issue where a win was already in sight, and basically they were going to try to get credit. There seemed to be almost a hubris. ‘All the people who’d been lobbying on this for years, they’re incompetent, it’s only when we, Zuckerberg’s group, gets involved in it, that we can turn the tide.’”

Now, barely a month after its first birthday, a Google News search for “fwd.us” serves up page after page of stories about the backlash the group brought upon itself from environmentalists, progressive organizations and its own erstwhile tech industry boosters for its strategy of running ads applauding regressive social and environmental positions by senators whose votes Fwd.us is trying to buy. Not a sentence in any of them speaks to any meaningful contribution the group has made to the overall reform effort. For all the press it has garnered, Fwd.us’ own “In the News” web page includes only one article dated after the group’s launch — and that article doesn’t even mention Fwd.us.

Fwd.us’ spectacular failure has much to do with the hubris of its founders, but it also has something to do with the myopically technocratic culture of the business world, and, in particular, Silicon Valley. The pervasive assumption among politically engaged business leaders that intractable social problems are merely technical puzzles to be solved by disinterested and enlightened experts is problematic enough on its own, especially when it’s a hallmark of the President’s own worldview. When those same simplistic notions are married to one’s understanding of the political process itself, the outcome is even more disastrous.

Fwd.us’ leaders seemed to believe they could run a high-profile political campaign in the same way as a product development initiative: by throwing a lot of money in the pot, hiring very smart people, giving them the space to do what they do best, and keeping a lid on what information gets out to the public. It’s a managerial approach to politics that’s practically designed to fail. As anyone who’s not paid to believe otherwise could have told them, the most successful issue advocacy efforts are not the ones run by cliques of secretive, well-compensated consultants; they’re the ones that have movements behind them.

The Obama administration learned the difference between the two during its first term, when the President was forced to match up his insular, expert-approved inside game on the stimulus bill and on healthcare reform with the spreading wildfire of the Tea Party movement. Obama got his bills in the end, but only after exhausting his limited bank of political capital in an interminable campaign of asymmetrical warfare with an opponent that got stronger the longer the struggle dragged out. Obama won his narrow legislative victories, but he lost his Congressional majorities in the process.

Later, the Tea Party movement itself learned a similar lesson. Caught in a power struggle between local grassroots activists and the seasoned Astroturf professionals at Freedomworks and Americans For Prosperity, local Tea Party leaders who chose to side with the latter found themselves branded as traitors to the founding principles of the movement. As it turned out, the fresh-faced activists who fueled the fire of the Tea Party movement cared about more than mere short term political victories for the GOP political operatives who hoisted their banner. They wanted to shape the world in their own image, and after a short-lived honeymoon with the Republican Party establishment, they found that it wasn’t Nancy Pelosi, but the professional DC co-opters who stood in their way.

Tech industry rhetoric about “crowdsourcing” and “disruptive innovation” aside, the kinds of messy, bottom-up, confrontational movements that fundamentally transform politics are alien species in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Successful business leaders excel at developing practical solutions to identifiable problems in a relatively constrained arena of entrepreneurs, investors and consumers. That is the world of the marketplace. It is not the world of political engagement.

Behind the immigration reform effort is what is arguably the most widespread, powerful and enduring movement since the Civil Rights era. It’s a movement that will prove to dwarf the Tea Party in its scope and longevity. It is this movement, and the demographic shifts that are adding to its ranks every day, that moves the needle inexorably toward passage of a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Whatever Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues add to this historical tide are but drops in the bucket, which is exactly what makes their tactics of expediency — of sacrificing critical environmental issues that truly are in precarious shape to serve their narrow organizational goals — so odious and unnecessary.

Zuckerberg’s defenders — the few that are left — will undoubtedly point to naïvety to the sausage-making ways of Washington on the part of Fwd.us’ detractors. Some already have. And in a fight on another issue, perhaps they’d be right. Sometimes, the kinds of unseemly trade-offs that are at the center of Fwd.us’ lobbying strategy are just the regrettable price to pay for representative democracy. But on this issue, Fwd.us’ tactic isn’t just cynical, it’s gratuitous. The movement behind immigration reform doesn’t need Mark Zuckerberg; at this point, he’s a peripheral and ridiculous distraction at best.

What is truly naïve is the remarkable notion that a handful of tech industry titans can step in front of a social movement, cut a few checks and change history. That’s the fantasy behind Zuckerberg’s vision of Fwd.us, just as it was the fantasy behind his faux heroism in forking $100 million over to Newark public schools while the cameras were rolling on Oprah, with questionable accountability and transparency. Washington (like Newark) may be a hopelessly corrupt place, but meaningful social change is still a harder task than that, even for the digital technocrats of the ruling class.

Fwd.us’ political problems began the way they usually do: with a cynical, too-cute-by-half strategy adopted by his Beltway proxies. Fwd.us’ approach amounted to this: buy the votes of key lawmakers by dumping money into ads in their home states on issues that are useful to them but that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about. What that has meant in practice is running commercials supporting South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham for his bold opposition to Obamacare and his support of the Keystone XL Pipeline, and applauding Alaska Senator Mark Begich for his support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Since Fwd.us doesn’t want its own brand associated with such unsavory positions, it’s done what “special interests” always do: it has set up ad hoc shell groups to front its ad buys, in this case, “Americans for a Conservative Direction” and the “Council for American Job Growth”.

The problem with this approach, Zuckerberg is learning, is that when you pull together a coalition to fund your lobbying campaign, it’s not enough just to grease your way into political influence in the Capitol. You also have to answer to the people who cut your checks. That’s especially difficult when some of them have actual integrity.

Today, PayPal billionaire/Tesla founder Elon Musk pulled out of Fwd.us, objecting to the group’s crass exploitation of “other important causes” in its myopic pursuit of its immigration policy agenda. He was joined by another PayPal alum, David Sacks.

It’s incredible to conceive of Zuckerberg not seeing this coming. After the ANWR and Keystone Pipeline ads ran, the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, MoveOn.org and a number of other groups put out a joint statement condemning the tactic and announcing their suspension of ad buys on Facebook. Musk’s entire business persona rests on his reputation as a visionary of sustainability and green entrepreneurialism. Even if he’d wanted to, it would have been all but impossible for Musk to continue participating in Fwd.us after it had been exposed for shoveling his money into ads supporting fossil fuels and Big Oil.

Another, more subtle design flaw in Fwd.us’ cynical approach is noted by an anonymous “tech lobbyist” in an article in Forbes:

One tech lobbyist says the approach, by avoiding any mention of the immigration debate itself, sends the message that FWD.us is “afraid of its own issue. They’re saying, ‘We want you to vote for this, but we don’t want to get you in trouble.’”

Of course, it may well be that Fwd.us is afraid of its own issue. Zuckerberg, after all, isn’t interested in immigration reform as a human right; he’s interested in facilitating Facebook’s acquisition of work visas for foreign-born software engineers. Narrow as it is, that’s not necessarily an objectionable policy goal in its own right. But nor is it a font of moral conviction burning in the heart of a champion for the nation’s oppressed. This is Mark Zuckerberg we’re talking about.

Fwd.us’ lobbying approach reflects the worst of DC-style politics: it’s cynical, it’s transactional, and it’s predicated on using critically important social and ecological issues as pawns in a chess game. Worse for Zuckerberg, it’s ineffective. Filled with Silicon Valley hubris, Fwd.us boasts about its “innovative” and “disruptive” approach to politics. But so far, the crude tactics it has adopted are as old as politics itself, and clumsily handled at that. To pull off a strategy as calculated and risk-fraught as this one, at the very least you’d need an extremely dexterous hand. Instead, Fwd.us’ sneaky back room dealmaking has been exposed to the world by every major news outlet from The New York Times to TechCrunch. Zuckerberg’s hired political hands have fingers made of butter.

If Zuckerberg really wants to wield influence in the immigration debate, he needs to stop pretending he’s a guest star on House of Cards and start getting serious about the issue. Though at this point, he’s probably better off recognizing Fwd.us as the failed start-up it is, folding up shop and selling the office furniture on Craigslist.

I typically stay out of the 2nd Amendment arguments because I think both sides are talking past each other.

Progressives tend to forget that the 2nd Amendment was not passed to protect hunting rights, but to protect the ability of people to keep their government afraid of an uprising. Telling conservatives, “you don’t need this many bullets in an automatic magazine to hunt” is beside the point and a non-sequitor.  When Sen. Feinstein says, “this gun is for hunting people,” well, no joke, an assault rifle is for hunting people, and to people who oppose gun control laws from a typically conservative perspective, that’s the point.

Imagine the most vile pat-down you’ve ever gotten or seen administered from a TSA agent. Now imagine that TSA agent in control of the government in your area with police and military resources at their disposal, and imagine that they really don’t like your family but they like your property and your kiddos. In addition to the random criminal breaking into your home, that’s who that gun is for in the mind of many die-hard gun-rights advocates.

In the modern world of drones, tanks and jets, a person with a handgun or even an assault rifle is not going to overthrow the government with it (though apparently with a bunch of IEDs you can fight our military to a standstill, but i digress), but  the gun functions as a placebo to many folks worried about oppression.

The intellectual dishonesty of the folks on my side of the political spectrum on this point is so blatant that it makes me not want to politically associate with them during this argument. A typical gun control advocate will do a tap dance that makes Billy Flynn blush to avoid acknowledging that the 2nd Amendment is about threatening the government should the government overreach. The English heritage of the colonists and the place the right to have weapons as part of a natural right to self-defense in English culture, as well as the inclusion of the well-regulated militia language, makes it clear that the amendment (and the target of the weapons) is about people, not bears or deer. Progressives will often cite the “well-regulated militia” clause of the amendment in the course of their bobbing and weaving on the topic, but that only further militates against their typical talking points. The amendment says:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

This sentence was written in a time and in a place when standing armies were considered to be one of the most pernicious threats to liberty that could exist on the planet, and the solution to provide for the common defense was to have locally trained militias that could be rallied into military forces when necessary to defend the country. The militia is implicitly set against the standing army here. A militia system is necessary to the security of a free state, and the contemporary reader at the time of the writing would have understood that this was to be in place of a standing army and a sword pointed at the throat of a sovereign who got any funny ideas about making himself or herself a military-backed tyrant.

Everything about this amendment is anachronistic: we are well past the time when even the most die-hard gun-rights advocate wants to fight an invading army with the weapons a militia could muster, and we’re well past the point where the government armed to the teeth with modern technology is going to feel threatened by even the most vicious assault rifle (though apparently some AK-47s and IEDs are all you need to fight our military to a standstill, but I digress…). None of this, however, changes the fact that the amendment rises out of the experience of various disarmament attempts by the English crown both in England and in the colonies, and preserving the people’s ability to resist tyranny through armed rebellion was one of the principle purposes that drove the Founders to include the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Until progressives stop dancing around the historical record here, we are going to continue talking past the valid concerns of conservatives. 

Conservatives, for their part, tend to ignore the fact that the 2nd Amendment is something of an anachronism, written at a time when the founders could not possibly have imagined the destructive capabilities of modern weapons–and that absolutely would have had a bearing on the text of the amendment. Conservatives (and progressives, for that matter) also need to understand that nonviolent uprisings are much more effective than violent ones (and this is an empirically verified fact), and guns are not the things that will protect your freedom. We have decades of study and a century of people’s uprisings to study in data sets not available to the American revolutionaries/founders, and that information and experience points to a more effective (and more moral) way to win: nonviolent civil resistance. If you want to overthrow an oppressive government as a subject of that government, your chances are better and the death toll will be lower if you choose nonviolent resistance.

Until gun control advocates acknowledge the concern of gun-rights advocates and the validity of their concern, and convince them that they have a more powerful tool than guns at their disposal to address those concerns, you’re going to get exactly nowhere versus the National Rifle Association’s successful and well-funded campaign to keep gun industry customers scared out of their minds about the sound of jackboots on the doorstep. Worse, the fact that you’re trying to regulate the sale and purchase of firearms provides plausibility to the unhinged mania of the NRA’s propaganda campaign. Good job!

This brings me to my final and most frustrating objection to the way progressives participate in this debate: most liberal/progressive folks who I talk to who want gun control laws are not willing to take the full step into a nonviolent worldview, and that fact is not lost on the people they are trying to convince.

When you’re a senator or member of Congress who:

• voted for the Iraq War,
• voted for the invasion of Afghanistan,
• refuses to block a president from your party from doing things like flying a drone war against dirt-poor Pakistanis and Yemenis (whom you “double tap” to kill the people who come to help the people you assert are terrorists), and
• refuses to take a stand against the serious erosion of civil liberties and the growth of the national security state under “your” president,

…but you turn around and try to sell to gun-rights advocates that nobody needs these guns and that violence isn’t the answer, they are going to politely refer you to your voting record and tell you go f*** yourself. This is exactly the vice that Dr. King referred to in his speech at Riverside Church on the Vietnam War: you can’t sell nonviolence at home when you’re blowing the hell out of people overseas.

We can’t have the world we want to live in–a free, peaceful world–as long as both sides hold on to violence as the valid way to pursue our interests in the world.

Before anyone gets upset I am not saying that women who get hair weaves have fantasies of being white. This is my story and my experience. If you see yourself in it or feel indicted after it, think about it – then forget it; or don’t, it’s up to you.

WATCH ERIKKA DISCUSS HER HAIR WEAVE ADDICTION ON HUFF POST LIVE!

I grew up going to predominately white schools and continued to do so throughout my entire educational career. From kindergarten through graduate school I was the one or one of the few black students. I am also very much a product of my family lineage; no matter how thin or heavy I am, I always have full hips and thighs – and they started to look that way when I was about thirteen. Just around the time when my white female classmates all looked like what Vogue idealizes as the perfect woman, super thin and lanky. My body image took a beating until I went to acting school (college for me) and my voice and speech teacher told me to get over myself; “some woman somewhere is spending tens of thousands of dollars to implant the lips and hips that you were born with.” I saw myself differently after that. But nothing could make me appreciate my hair.

I have always hated my hair. That is not true. I can remember a time, pre-kindergarten, when I wore afro-puffs and would go to my Aunt Georgia’s house and she would cornrow my hair for the summer. During that time I was indifferent about my hair because I was four.  I remember being little and running around with a half-slip on my head, pretending it was my long blonde (sometimes dark brown) super straight and shiny hair. I would fling it over my shoulder and whip it back and fourth, decades ahead of Willow Smith. In hindsight I’m pretty sure I imagined my eyes were blue which should have been a warning. But I was a little kid; I didn’t know to look out for these things.

My real hair did not blow in the wind or swing back and forth. It was not yellow and shiny like Karen’s, or brown and slick like Judith’s or even braid-able like the other black girl’s hair. It never got long; it was just frizzy and big. Kids would touch it and say “Eww greasy”. My mom would tell me to tell them not to touch it, which I’m sure you know was super effective in second grade. There was this one kid who loved to complain he couldn’t see over my Afro in class. Grade school seriously sucked.

When I got to high school I discovered relaxers but that was a nightmare. I had grown my hair out to my shoulders at the start of freshman year, but I damaged it so badly with curling irons and blow dryers and whipping it around, that by second semester I had to have it cut into a permanent Halle Berry hair cut until I graduated. But the year before my graduation, a film that would change everything had been released… Poetic Justice. If you haven’t seen Poetic Justice you’re crazy and there’s no hope for you and also you missed the dawn of the box braid. Janet Jackson and Regina King wore these beautiful long box braids in the film. Black women with long hair that they did not have to grow! WHAT?! I wanted them immediately.

My sister knew someone that knew someone who knew this woman that could give me the hook up. I finally convinced my mother that braids would be a good thing and she took me to this woman named Star’s house and left me there for nine hours. That’s right nine hours. That’s how long it takes to have long hair. Star braided my hair so tightly I couldn’t lay my head down to sleep. I took Advil for three days. She smoked a pack of cigarettes as she braided, cussed out her kids and a host of other things I wish I didn’t know. But when she was finished… I could put my hair in a pony tail, and wear it on top of my head.  I could whip it, and throw it over my shoulder. I was never going back to my hair again.

I left for college in Chicago two days later. While at school I tried all different types of extensions and braids. I explored the African hair braiders that were famous up and down Clark Street, I found students willing to do hair for pennies and I discovered weaves! I got so much attention for my hair. I changed it nearly every two months and everyone always thought it was really my hair, or at least I convinced myself they did. I prided myself on getting realistic styles. I didn’t even really know what my own hair looked like. I was cast in roles based on my hair – but which hair? Once I had to reshoot a scene for a movie and could not remember which hair I had for continuity. That was pretty funny.

But even with my weaves and extensions, I still felt like an outsider.  I felt like I was not black enough for one group or white enough for another. I felt like I confused people and that they did not know what to make of me, but in reality I didn’t know what to make of myself.   Trying to “fit in” had made me feel more misshapen and gray than ever. So one day I just decided, because I only operate from two points: inaction and impulse, I walked into the salon and had them remove my weave and cut all of my hair down to its natural state. I loved it. I felt free and centered and beautiful. Then I walked onto the street and immediately felt like everyone was looking at me differently and I did not like it. They did not smile at me the same way. Men didn’t look at me the same way.  Friends did not know what to make of it. “It makes you look more severe”, “You look more ‘ethnic’ ”, and “I liked it long” were the most common responses. Twice in the grocery store a clerk called me “sir”.

I bought a wig.

Over the next fifteen years I spent ninety percent of the time in some form of weave, wig, extension or braids and ten percent of the time impulsively cutting it all off and trying to wear my hair natural. Inevitably a day or two into being natural I would go running back to the beauty supply store to buy more hair of some type. I was so confused that once after watching Chris Rock’s Good Hair, I literally had emotional breakdown in my stylist’s chair. I have done the math and from the time I was eighteen until early 2013 I have spent $25,000 getting my hair weaved, braided or extended and just over one and a half years sitting in a chair having it done. When you want to fit in you’ll do just about anything. I am not saying that people that wear extensions want to be something they aren’t anymore than someone who drinks is automatically an alcoholic. But I was still a little girl with a slip on her head, flipping her blonde hair around, imagining herself with blue eyes. I just didn’t realize I was still doing it.

To start recover from alcoholism you have to come to believe that a power greater than yourself can restore your sanity; to beat an eating disorder you have to realize that controlling your food will never give you control over the things of which you have no control and in order to recover from an acute addiction to hair weaves, you must realize that no amount of Kanekalon, Yaki or Indian Remy is ever going to make you anyone else but some woman with a bunch of store bought hair on their head. The thing is, I kind of love my hair. It has giant curls in some spots tight coils in others and some parts are just tangles of zig-zags. It is a little bit crazy, strong but fragile, coarse but soft, and completely unpredictable. We have the same personality.

I have been natural now for longer than I have ever been, which is not long. I’m not going to lie, it has been a challenge. But the more time I spend being natural, the more I like my hair and the less gray and misshapen I feel.  Sure, in the beginning, I wanted to run and hide whenever I thought someone was looking at me funny or when a shampoo commercial came on, you know the ones with all of the straight hair flowing down the screen? But a friend reminded me recently that hair is not just hair; it is intrinsically wrapped up in who we are as individuals.  It is as much a form of expression as the clothes we put on everyday. If you don’t believe that, drastically change your hair and walk around in the world a bit.

So it was with shock and awe that I saw that the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation were joining a lawsuit with American Beverage Association against the proposal to limit the size of sodas served in New York City. Why so shocked? The motive behind the lawsuit for ABA is clear: They like customers like me, the addicts that keep drinking their syrups of death and disease. But when people like Bloomberg start trying to limit people’s civil liberties, their civil right to soda and the pursuit of happiness, well that’s where they draw the line and get national civil rights organizations involved. We could argue all day that NAACP and the Hispanic Federation have become involved to fight for the civil rights of people everywhere to sell and enjoy a 32oz Root Beer, but a very simple follow-the-money Google search shows us that both companies receive funding from Coca-Cola.

Can we begrudge non-profit organizations doing good work in their communities for taking money from big corporations in order continue their services? Each organization also boasts several progressive funders as well. But when it comes to joining a lawsuit that actually harms the community for which they serve, I think it might be time to take a step back.

The Office of Minority Health reports that Hispanic Americans are 1.2 times as likely to be obese than Non-Hispanic Whites. Among Mexican American women, 78 percent are overweight or obese, as compared to only 60.3 percent of the non-Hispanic White women. In regard to African Americans, women have the highest rates of being overweight or obese compared to other groups in the U.S. In 2010, African American women were 70% more likely to be obese than Non-Hispanic White women. Now, it’s true there are other contributing factors to obesity – pizza is pretty good, so is cake and French fries…also exercising can be such a drag. We can’t just blame soda, right?

OK let’s look at diabetes. I’m not going to get into specifics of how type 2 diabetes happens (you’re born with type 1, you acquire type 2) but the amount of sugar you eat messes with how your insulin works and boom. there you are. There’s tons of sugar in soda; that’s what makes it so tasty.  African American Collaborative Obesity Network (AACORN) has a study showing that African Americans between the ages 31-50 on average consume  double the amount of sugar sweetened beverages than of white females in the same age range. African Americans are 2.2 times as likely as non-Hispanic Whites to die from diabetes and Hispanics are 1.5 times as likely as non-Hispanic Whites to die from diabetes. Sobering and kind of messed up that the NAACP and The Hispanic Federation are spending time fighting for McDonalds’ (also a funder) civil rights to continue to sell super sized Sprite.

It should be noted that Coca-Cola funding to NAACP was $100,000 for Project HELP — a program promoting healthy eating, physical activity and healthy lifestyles in African-American communities. It should also be laughed at hysterically.

It must be a challenge to be a non-profit in today’s economic climate. You want to continue to serve your community and as a result you need funding and at times that money comes from corporations and sometimes those big corporations want favors. But there has to be a time when you take a principled stance against money and against favors and say no, this is not right for us. I cannot help thinking that in a time when food deserts are rampant in under-served communities of color, immigration reform is still a thought and not a reality and we have laws that tell people they cannot marry those whom they love; these historic organizations that have fought for justice and equality could be focused on other “issues of fairness.”

Zero Dark Thirty opens with audio clips of emergency calls from September 11^th, 2001. The screen is black. The calls are harrowing. The movie then jumps ahead several years and puts us in a CIA “black site,” where a prisoner is being tortured. An agent named Dan is doing most of the torturing, and a novice agent named Maya is watching.

It’s all very matter-of-fact. Dan says, repeatedly, “You lie to me, I hurt you.” And he does. Maya is unnerved at first, and clearly uncomfortable, but she gets over it. When she is finally – briefly – left alone with the prisoner, he tells her, “Your friend is an animal. Please help me.” She just stares blankly and tells him to help himself by telling the truth. After that she shows no compunction about torture in her obsessive hunt for Osama bin Laden. No one in this film does, really. Nor do they justify their participation in torture with long-winded speeches about fighting for democracy, or breaking a few eggs, or ends and means, or truths that you can’t handle. This is not an Aaron Sorkin movie.

Apparently, though, many of Zero Dark Thirty’s critics would prefer an Aaron Sorkin movie. Dan Froomkin wants to know why “nobody in the movie even once expresses any doubt about torture or its efficacy,” and notes the “missed opportunity to discuss the other disturbing elements of the movie,” such as the raid on Bin Laden’s compound in which the SEALs are shown killing unarmed civilians. Jane Mayer, at the New Yorker, similarly laments the lack of “a single scene in which torture is questioned.”

I understand the basic complaint here: difficult subjects call for some sort of commentary. I think it’s odd, for instance, to make a movie set against the backdrop of hydraulic fracturing without making any real comment on the continuing controversy. But “fracking” is little more than a plot device in Promised Land, whereas torture is central to Zero Dark Thirty. I would agree with the film’s critics if Zero Dark Thirty included only a brief, sterilized torture scene that yielded information but no sense of gravity. But that’s not the case. Zero Dark Thirtyspends roughly a fifth of its screentime depicting torture. And it’s rough: the tortured prisoner is strung up for hours; is deprived of sleep for days; is stuffed inside a small box; is stripped nearly naked and led along the floor in a dog collar; and is waterboarded. And this extended sequence, the film makes clear, is just one example of many; Maya searches for clues through stacks of discs on her desk, many of them recording tortured confessions. Torture is not simply an element of the story that goes unaddressed; it is a pivot on which the movie rotates.

The criticism of the film comes from several angles. One is the complaint that the film plays fast and loose with the facts, most consequentially in showing evidence gained from torture playing a key role in locating Osama Bin Laden. Not only journalists but United States Senators have made this point. This is an important debate. On the one hand, the film depicts torture as failing in several instances and shows agents themselves questioning torture’s utility (although not its morality). And the CIA (the real CIA) has essentially admitted that torture did play a small role in the search for bin Laden. On the other hand, as Zero Dark Thirty’s critics have repeatedly pointed out, the movie shows key information arising from torture sessions – if not directly then indirectly – and implies at several points that torture leads to revelation. It’s difficult – but important – to weigh the movie’s depiction of torture as instrumental in finding Osama bin Laden against its focus on torture as central to American operations, a focus that should make audiences very uncomfortable.

Another angle of criticism – more strident, and less justified – is that the film’s style and tone legitimize torture. Presumably, that claim is what led several members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, including Martin Sheen, to call for a boycott. Leading the charge against Zero Dark Thirty from this particular angle is Glenn Greenwald who calls it a “torture-glorifying film.” Greenwald’s argument  comes down to what he claims is a simple equation: “There is zero doubt…that the standard viewer will get the message loud and clear: we found and killed bin Laden because we tortured The Terrorists,” he writes. Because the killing of bin Laden is considered a fundamentally good moment in U.S. foreign policy, anything that produced that moment will be considered fundamentally good as well. “For that reason, to depict X as valuable in enabling the killing of bin Laden is – by definition – to glorify X.”

That’s a pretty mechanistic understanding of movies, not to mention popular opinion, an understanding which leaves no room for interpretation or subjectivity. It’s worth noting, then, that the New York Times’s Frank Bruni disapproves of the film’s opening because torture “immediately follows a bone-chilling, audio-only prologue of the voices of terrified Americans trapped in the towering inferno of the World Trade Center. It’s set up as payback.” For Bruni, the audio clips are played to legitimize the torture that follows. Alex Gibney, on the other hand, writes: “For me, along with the very ending, this was one of the best moments in the film. The juxtaposition of the agony of 9/11 with the payback that followed…perfectly captured a bitter poetic truth about how members of the Bush Administration responded to tragedy.”

Both of these writers criticize Zero Dark Thirty for many of the same reasons that Greenwald does, but they have divergent understandings of what the film’s first five minutes mean. Despite Greenwald’s mathematical claims about the film’s unambiguous meaning, ambiguity is what makes this film work.

Greenwald’s imposition of his own black-and-white view onto a movie that is mostly grey becomes clearest when he describes the CIA agents that are at the center of the story. He calls Maya – played by Jessica Chastain – a “pure, saintly heroine,” and all of the other American characters “heroic, noble, self-sacrificing crusaders devoted to stopping The Terrorists.” The film overall is “the ultimate hagiography” of the CIA. David Clennon, one of the Academy members calling for a boycott, similarly says that the film “makes heroes of Americans who commit the crime of torture.”

It’s hard to imagine a greater misreading of Zero Dark Thirty. Maya is not pure and saintly in any sense. Her character is a cipher; we learn nothing about her backstory, about her family, about her relationships beyond one agency friendship, about her motivation for what she is doing. We don’t even know her last name. She is a nearly robotic agent, fixated on killing bin Laden and apparently interested in nothing else. The other agents and personnel are, if anything, less likable. Maya’s station chief seems to be concerned most of all with his career. One of his supervisors operates largely according to political pressure, and at one point comes into a room full of agents, bangs his fist on the table, and yells, “Find me somebody to kill!” Other than Navy SEAL Team Six (more on them later), there are almost no characters who demonstrate genuine personality, let alone heroism. There is no flag-waving, no trumpet-playing, no fireworks display in Zero Dark Thirty. The final raid is carried out with no soundtrack. When bin Laden is finally killed, it happens so fast that you don’t realize it for several seconds. And the final scene is of Maya alone in an airplane, with no pomp and circumstance and little sense of wrongs having been righted.

The most off-base statement that Greenwald makes, however, is the following:

Other than the last scene in which the bin Laden house is raided, all of the hard-core, bloody violence is carried out by Muslims, with Americans as the victims.

Yes, except for the thirty minutes of torture that open the film, torture carried out by Americans against a Muslim prisoner. In fact, the movie is bookended by scenes of American violence: the opening torture sequence and the final raid by the Navy SEALs. Those SEALs are at times a little too casual and gung ho for me, in a way that would fit better in a Schwarzenegger flick, but when the final raid is conducted it is done seriously, and with considerable collateral damage. The SEALs shoot and kill several unarmed civilians, and show only fleeting concern that they have done so.

Greenwald’s omission of CIA torture from his description of who perpetrates the violence in Zero Dark Thirty is telling, because it is that fact – American responsibility for many of the most troubling actions depicted in the film – that makes Zero Dark Thirty far more complicated than Greenwald allows.

The fact that Zero Dark Thirty puts the implements of torture firmly in American hands points to a larger, more important aspect of the debate this film inspires. Far more important than the question of whether torture works or not is the question of whether, regardless of torture’s utility, the United States should use brutal interrogation methods. The strong argument against torture is that it is immoral in any situation, independent of the results. I think this is probably the position of most critics who rely on the weaker argument – that torture never works. Presumably if it were shown that a program of torture, widespread enough to identify patterns and trends in coerced information, actually did produce reliable results, most critics would not simply say, “Well, in that case….” They would remain morally opposed to torture, because it is immoral on any terms.

If the fundamental immorality of torture is at the center of the discussion, then Zero Dark Thirty becomes a movie that asks whether the rewards of hunting and killing bin Laden were worth the costs. It doesn’t ask this question explicitly at any point, but I think it does implicitly. The ending of the movie, which even Alex Gibney likes so much, is as ambivalent as the ending of The Graduate. (Watch the movie before you dismiss that comparison). In both films, it’s not at all clear what the protagonist is thinking and whether the realization of a long-sought goal is satisfying or empty.

That is the sort of moral terrain that Zero Dark Thirty maps. It is far more uneven than the flat topography that Greenwald describes. There are plenty of reasonable criticisms to make of this movie, but simply calling it “pro-torture” sidelines the difficult question that Zero Dark Thirty suggests: how far are we willing to go in prosecuting the “war on terror,” and at what cost?

R.I.P. Nora Ephron
Brodesser-Akner cites failing box office numbers and diminishing audiences for the reason why romantic comedies are in peril. The studio executives spend quite a bit of time blaming you, the audience, as well as unwilling actresses. But to get to the heart of what is really wrong with the modern day romantic comedy, we need to go to the late 1980s/early 1990s — The Golden Age of Rom-Com — and look at the Queen of the genre, the late Nora Ephron.

Nora Ephron is to the romantic comedy as John Hughes is to coming-of-age movies. Invariably, when you think of romantic comedies, you’re thinking of one of Ephron’s most famous films: Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally or You’ve Got Mail. Ephron had a knack for writing about the magic of falling in love, the fear that comes with being vulnerable and the clumsiness of the beginning of relationships. Instead of being slick and sexy, her characters often said the wrong things and tripped on their words: they were human. She captured all of the nuances that modern day rom-coms miss. Now characters meet and sleep with each other within twenty minutes of the opening credits and fall instantly in love. Before the first act has concluded they have all this investment, these impossibly high stakes. Then like clockwork, forty minutes before the film ends it all falls apart, but comes back around just in time for boy to chase girl through the streets of Big City A and fix everything. It rings false, yet studio execs keep shoving that same formula at us with different packaging. That is why Ephron’s films and one or two of Gary Marshall’s remain the most beloved of romantic comedies — and why there hasn’t been a truly great romantic comedy since 1998, the year You’ve Got Mail was released.

Indie Is Doing It Right
Though I remain the genre’s biggest fan, it’s a sad fact that the romantic comedy has lost imagination. Two people meeting several times in their lives before they realize they’re meant to be together — that’s creative. A recently widowed father set up by his son on a radio show to meet his soul mate in the style of An Affair to Remember — that’s genius! What isn’t genius is the plot device of two men fighting over the same woman. That same premise has been repackaged in many ways. We loved it most as Bridget Jones’ Diary but really have to draw the line at when it comes to spy vs. spy in This Means War. Studio romantic comedies have started playing to the lowest common denominator. They’ve shamefully bought into the premise that the genre is little more than a date movie and they do not need to try very hard to entertain. They could stand to take a cue from independent filmmakers who are making beautiful forays into the romantic comedy world. (In indie film, they’re called “relationship films.”) Indie filmmakers have the imagination to make a story about a divorce romantic, funny and heartbreaking (Celeste and Jesse Forever). They have the creativity to create a world where a novelist accidentally writes his dream girlfriend “to life” and then must deal with the consequences (Ruby Sparks). I don’t want to say that indie filmmakers are better than studio executives at making solid stories to which people can relate, but they are.

In Living Color
One thing can go the furthest to save The Romantic Comedy from a fate worse than The American Western: Studio executives, producers and casting directors must to begin to acknowledge that people of color have relationships and fall in love. I understand that this is a novel concept as Tyler Perry’s on-going string of misogynistic portrayals of African American women in films like Why Did I Get Married portrays them as nagging, cold, career focused bitches. And we’re hard pressed to find evidence in any film that Latinos or Asians ever fall in love except for maybe Jennifer Lopez, but she’s somehow always cast as an Italian woman. But consider this: The most successful romantic comedy last year was Think Like a Man, which brought in $33 million its first weekend. The film has a predominately African American cast but is technically multi-ethnic. An unnamed studio executive in Brodesser-Akner’s piece dismisses the numbers out of hand because it “never truly broke out beyond its predominantly African-American target audience.” This is grossly inaccurate.  Think Like a Man only opened in 2000 theaters its opening weekend. The film brought in $91 million dollars at the box office domestically and the audience breakdown was 37% males and 63% females; 38% were under 30; and 62% were 30 and over, according to market research firm CinemaScore.  By these numbers, only black audiences saw Think in the same way that only black people voted for Obama.

Only in Hollywood is segregation still legal. Studio executives would be wise to start diversifying their casts when it comes to romantic comedies, and I don’t mean token characters. I mean real people with real roles. Look what it’s done for television. Bonus points if you have an interracial couple. Double bonus if you stop calling films with predominantly African American casts “urban.”

Save the romantic comedy by making smart films about real people in real relationships with a couple of laughs in between. Until you can figure it out, I’ll still be watching — but I’m probably the only one.

There are two main criticisms of Lincoln, one more widely discussed than the other. The primary criticism, articulated by Kate Masur in The New York Times, Aaron Bady at Jacobin, and Cory Robin on his own blog, is that Lincoln pays little or no attention to black agency – or black people, really – in depicting the passage of the 13th Amendment. All three writers point to the missing story of how African Americans were pivotal in putting slavery at the center of the Civil War and in putting the end of slavery at the center of Washington politics, a story that scholars have been piecing together and relating for decades. This critique is not just an important one; it is the important one in terms of the distance between Lincoln and the scholarly interpretation of the events the movie depicts. Spielberg’s film makes almost no effort to show African American participation in the long struggle to end slavery, despite the centrality of that fact in recent historiography on the Civil War period.

The critique is not without its own critics, though, summarized nicely in a roundtable discussion at The Atlantic organized by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The debate here is one of expectations rather than facts; Coates and New York Times film critic A.O. Scott don’t disagree with Masur but question whether she’s asking for too much from Hollywood. Given the constraints of big-budget movie making and history-as-entertainment, they suggest, the little ways in which Lincoln improves on earlier films about the Civil War era are worth celebrating. We’re moving slowly, but in the right direction, and we ought to appreciate that.

“Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good,” in other words. And that aphorism-for-our-times not only applies to the critical reception of Lincoln, but to the story that Lincoln tries to tell. Lincoln writer Tony Kushner has, in fact, made the explicit comparison of the story of the thirteenth amendment’s passage to the first Barack Obama administration. The film shows Lincoln as the great compromiser of Civil War and Reconstruction period, steering a course between the rock of House Democrats and the hard place of radical Republicans. The amendment runs the gauntlet of the House of Representatives only because the most staunch advocates of racial equality sacrifice principle to pragmatism. Radicalism is avoided; moderation is rewarded.

This is the second criticism of Lincoln: that it is an unapologetic argument for the prudence of middle-of-the-road politics over the recklessness of radical change, for seeking compromise over sticking to principle, for the supposedly “serious” politics of the people in power over the naïve demands of the people out of it. Aaron Bady lays the case out better than anyone, and it’s hard to argue with, given – as Bady points out – Kushner’s antiquated and reactionary views about Reconstruction.

I think Bady’s right, and that his criticisms are crucial. But I also think that his take is not the only way to view Lincoln, and that he overstates his critique. Movies are not made by one person, and regardless of what Kushner’s or Spielberg’s particular intentions were it’s not only possible to read the movie in a different way but hard not to. Some of the things Bady writes off as incidental are what make Lincoln more nuanced than he allows. Thaddeus Stevens, for instance, the radical foil to Lincoln’s fence-sitting, is for Bady saved from being a complete caricature “only because [Tommy] Lee Jones brings too much gravitas to the part.” This was not likely an accident; no filmmaker makes casting decisions lightly, much less with someone like Jones, the only actor in the film other than Sally Field with the star power and charisma to match Day-Lewis’s (Hal Holbrook barely gets any screen time). But it would be hard to call Stevens a caricature even if he were played by some frumpy unknown from central casting, given that the movie pays him more close attention and allows him more depth than any other character not named “Lincoln.”

Bady accuses the film of reproducing “the usual hagiography of Lincoln.” That also seems like an odd charge. Yes, Lincoln is larger-than-life and in the spotlight the entire time, and given the usual Spielberg treatment. But Lincoln is also a president who admits to stretching the law beyond its limits in order to get what he wants; who seriously considers prolonging the war and letting thousands more die in order to give his legislation a better chance of passing; who has his secretary of state twist arms and dangle political favors in exchange for votes; and who at one point, fed up with the debate among his cabinet members, stands up imperiously and yells “I am clothed in immense power,” and so shut up and do what I say. This is all to say nothing of the way the president treats his family, which is far from flattering.

Bady is especially concerned, I think, with pulling back the curtain to show what the Great Oz is up to. But the intent of the filmmakers does not always determine the meaning of a film, and that is especially true here. If Spielberg’s and Kushner’s intention was to make a film that champions moderation and compromise over principle, Lincoln becomes all the more interesting as a movie that demonstrates just how difficult it is to make that argument convincingly. There are probably few movies more at odds with their own score; anybody paying attention will find it jarring to listen to John Williams’s triumphal crescendo at the moment that Stevens declares that he does not, in fact, believe all people are equal. If Spielberg honestly intended the moment to be a heroic one, he failed to make it so, and that failure leaves the audience with conflicted sentiments about the democratic process.

That’s Stevens’s most cynical moment, but not his only one. My personal favorite is the private conversation between the congressman and Lincoln, in which the president makes the standard “But what the people want…” argument, and Stevens replies that he doesn’t actually give a shit about “the people.” Lincoln does not object. He can’t – he has already tried to bargain for the support of several constituents and hired political operatives to buy off House votes. The exchange is actually sort of quaint; one assumes that congresspeople today never actually bring up “the people” in serious conversation unless the cameras are rolling.

If this is all a justification for moderation and for the Obama Administration, it’s one that Barack Obama would probably not be thrilled about. The movie portrays Washington , D.C. as largely divorced from the electorate, let alone the non-voting public; as a place that subordinates principle to cold, political calculations; and as a world where rules exist only for those without the power to break them. What’s so odd about the debate over Lincoln is that, in at least one sense, its critics want a more triumphal tale than the movie is willing to give: Masur, Robin, and Bady would like to hear more about how Washington, D.C. responded to the influence of the most marginalized Americans. That is a profoundly important story, but it’s not the one that Lincoln – whether by design or by accident – set out to tell.

On December 22, 1997, close to four years after the armed insurrection by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) against the government of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), militants allied with the PRI crept into a poor Indian village in Chiapas State whose residents were known to be sympathetic to the Zapatista movement. There, they gunned down 45 defenseless civilians while they prayed for peace in a chapel, among them 21 women — five of them pregnant — and 15 children.

Last year, relatives of victims of the massacre, under anonymity, filed suit in U.S. court against then-president Ernesto Zedillo for crimes against humanity (Zedillo currently lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale, serving as director of the Center for the Study of Globalization). The suit contends that Zedillo’s administration walked away from peace accords signed in 1996 and resorted to a military crackdown after a report from Chase Manhattan Bank counseled the Mexican government “to eliminate the Zapatistas.” Zedillo, the complaint alleges, had knowledge of and promoted the formation of the paramilitary group that carried out the slaughter, then covered up his involvement after the massacre. (Some allege that the case is part of a political vendetta against Zedillo, speculating the involvement of his predecessor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari.)

The U.S. State Department has recommended immunity for Zedillo in the case.

After 12 years out of power, this month marked the return of the PRI to the National Palace in Mexico City, in the person of newly elected President Enrique Peña Nieto. His inauguration two and a half weeks ago was received with massive street protests by thousands of people all over the city, including violent confrontations between hundreds of protesters and police immediately outside the barricades erected around the Legislative Palace to protect the new regime from an anticipated civil uprising and to prevent disruption of the ceremonies.

Yesterday, thousands of Zapatistas donned the movement’s trademark black ski masks and converged on the centers of cities, towns and villages all over Chiapas to memorialize the massacre and demonstrate opposition to the PRI’s return to power.

Lorenzo Tlacaelel Lambertino, a blogger originally from Oaxaca, writes:

EZLN groups in this action have gathered by foot and by bus into the municipal centers of Ocosingo, San Cristobal de Las Casas, Las Margaritas, and Palenque among others. Preliminary estimates project a total possible mobilization of 30 to 50 thousand people from the Los Altos and Jungle regions of Chiapas. The action was nonviolent and extremely orderly. Men, women, and children wore black hoods covering their face, with a red bandana around their necks and green, white, and red ribbons, well known as the three colors of Mexico’s flag. ‘Subcommandante’ Marcos, the famous and outspoken public relations officer for the EZLN, did not make a presence.

Yesterday marked the end of the Mayan calendar and the beginning of a new cycle. It may also have marked the beginning of a new cycle of resistance in Chiapas to the resurrected hegemony of the PRI.

Photo: Trailofdead1, Creative Commons

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Some of the kids were totally out of control. One kid said he was going to draw his gingerbread man getting shot. “Why?” I asked. “Because I saw on the news about those kids who got killed,” he said. Another kid (who told me on another day that his father was killed by gun violence) sat in the corner and cried the whole morning. Another kid broke pencils and kicked chairs. I assume these other two kids were also exposed to news about the killings.

Perhaps they have older siblings and the news was impossible to contain, or perhaps their parents are not in the habit of protecting their children from the harsh adult world, or perhaps, in the case of the child who lost his father to gun violence, the harsh adult world has come to meet them head on and now they are left to pick up the pieces. Whatever the case may be, it is our job as parents and adults who care for children to hold them and protect them and help them work out their pain. But what if the parents are the ones inflicting the pain?

How can they comprehend? How can they keep going and feel safe? How can they possibly thrive when they know things they can’t possibly deal with?

See, the thing is, I can’t even bring myself to read about this story. I know the basic facts but have only read one article about it when it first came out and have watched no TV news. I do this to protect myself, because even though I am not a child I don’t want this fear indelibly imprinted upon my psyche like so many other things that pass into my frame of conciousness without my permission. I don’t feel the need to know every fact about the story or the shooter. I’d like to leave all that aside.

Terrible things happen every day in this world and we here in the U.S. are very sheltered from most of them. We do not live in a war torn country with drones dropping bombs on our children. We (speaking as middle and upper middle class citizens) have it very lucky. So when something like this hits our community it makes us feel very vulnerable.

So although I know we have it lucky, it is still scary to be reminded that everything you hold dear in your life could be taken away from you at the drop of a dime. This fact is disquieting to us all. Especially children. They should be protected from things that will harm them. Isn’t that our job as parents: to protect them from harm? And have we not yet learned as a society that mental harm is just as real as physical harm?

I think the Newtown shooter is a plain example of that if we care to see it. If we don’t care for our children, if we don’t care for our society, if we don’t protect ourselves and each other from harm, then we end up with an uncaring group of individuals, which, frankly, is not the world I want to live in. Would-be shooters are bred in that type of society — and terrorists, too.

So how do we best care for our children? We are all going to choose to do that differently. We will make different choices, hopefully with their best interests at heart, but the most importantly thing is that we do it consciously – we make choices. Instead of having the news on in front of our kids and letting them be exposed to horrific acts of violence unknowingly, we can make decisions to carefully bring up issues that we want our kids to be aware of in ways that they can deal with the information. We can choose to keep certain information from our kids until we think they are ready. And we can hope that their world allows them to keep their innocence for as long as possible.

Photo: Al-Jazeera