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Maureen Ryan, Burn It Down: Lots of horrible stories of abusive cultures and detailed explanations of why they are particularly abusive for people who aren’t straight white men. White men essentially band together to increase their collective power, while encouraging members of other groups to see demographically similar people as the competition. Hollywood both accepts and promotes the myth that genius allows and sometimes requires abusiveness to others, while not looking at whose untapped genius gets destroyed by that. The fact that not all the white men who want to succeed can do so preserves the system: “Even if you were born on third base, in order to get to home plate, you still have to run, right? There was still an effort required to get there,’ said Hannah, a writer/producer. “Once you’re on home plate, you want to believe that the run was the only part that was important ….’”
But everyone suffers except the people collecting the big payouts at the top. Why is that particularly bad for entertainment? “If abusers, clinical narcissists, and other awful or monstrous people control the stories that are told, that comes out in the work,” as when the show 24 glorified torture and NBC celebrated Donald Trump as a successful rulebreaker. Suggests that the working conditions, combined with the hope of creating something good, make people vulnerable to other abuses, including cults, which also promise benefits from suffering. Hollywood trains working people to accept abuse, so they can be creative geniuses and also deeply unable to recognize exploitation. Also tells a story about the rise of shorter seasons and piecework and how that has made working conditions even worse, except for executives who get paid year-round.
The chapter on Sleepy Hollow exemplifies everything else, including the double standard applied to the two leads, both of whom suffered from Fox’s schedule (or lack of planning for same). It was also depressing to read about the practice of hiring someone who wasn’t a white guy as second-in-command to try to deal with a problematic white guy, meaning he still got the credit and she got the blame. Many decisionmakers think they’re limiting risk/betting on success when they continue to promote awful white guys, but that also limits their actual experimentation with new perspectives.
She ends with notes of hope, though better workplaces are sometimes tied up with the rise of “IP,” which is to say, franchises where there is no individual author and so the studio owns everything and can keep rebooting it, which has its own costs in creative freedom and artistic risk-taking. But there are successes, she argues, that recognize that abusive behavior travels in packs, so investigating sexual harassment can also deter, for example, other forms of abuse and financial mismanagement. She also argues that the ability to manage people needs to be supported and not subordinated to the perception of creative genius: putting unqualified people into managerial roles is a pathway to all kinds of bad behavior, creating employees who believe they’re supposed to abuse underlings if they get power. This is also about the perception of white guy competence: how hard could it be for this smart guy to run a show, they think?
Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present: Provocative rumination on anti-Semitism’s modern forms, including treating Jews as only worth knowing about in relation to and as victims of the Holocaust; anything else, including other acts of anti-Semitism, are too trivial to count. Best line goes to her son, who reportedly said—after hearing the idea that Shylock is humanized by his soliloquy explaining why he insists on his pound of flesh—that every supervillain in every superhero movie gets the same speech, so he was unconvinced.
Bartow J. Elmore, Seed Money: Monsanto’s history of petrochemical destruction shifting to biotech and being only slightly less destructive (more profiteering/false promises that pesticide use could go down if farmers adopted Roundup Ready seed technology, which was true for the few years it took for weeds to become Roundup-resistant).
Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them: Spoiler alert/rape: She stopped them by being brutally assaulted by their leader, taking poison, and surviving long enough to narrate her abuse, leading to a shocking murder trial that actually ended in a prison term. So she stopped them by being a perfect victim, despite his lawyers’ attempts to portray her as a loose woman. That required a huge amount of bravery and suffering, but the activists here are the men (she actually tried to befriend the bad guy, not because she was particularly racist or anti-Catholic, but because he could help her career because of how powerful he was, which shows how this all worked). Anyway, this is the story of how the Klan rose in the Midwest in the early 1920s, due in part to the charisma and brutality of one man, D.C. Stephenson, who seized leadership from the previous, less aggressive leader. He managed to control Indiana politically and had reasonable hopes of controlling the federal government (Klan adherents also won other governorships and a number of seats in Congress, including Senators). Railing against liquor and immorality, he doled booze and naked women out at parties for the politicians he controlled. Hating people was fun and Klan members had fun doing it, at picnics and parades, like Trump supporters today. Although this shifted Black voters towards Democrats, voting restrictions managed to lead to the lowest percentage turnout ever in 1924’s presidential election; it all seemed to be working.
Stephenson’s downfall was undoubtedly good for democracy, but Egan warns in the strongest terms against seeing the overall problem as Stephenson’s doing: “The Grand Dragon was a symptom, not a cause, of an age that has been mischaracterized as one of Gatsby frivolity and the mayhem of modernism. It’s entirely possible that the Klan fell apart not just because of scandals and high-level hypocrisy, but also because it had achieved all of its major goals—Prohibition, disenfranchisement of African Americans, slamming the door on immigrants ….” Hard not to see Trump as an echo, with much less public reaction to his impunity.
Harvey Levenstein, Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry About What We Eat: Covers various food fads and fears, generally promoted by some financial interest and usually distracting from more fundamental food issues, like poverty (the greatest risk factor for heart disease). We’re quicker to abandon nutritious stuff than tasty stuff—when spinach was linked to an illness outbreak, “consumption of fresh spinach plummeted by over 60 percent and subsequently recovered very, very slowly…. Meanwhile, beef easily weathered an onslaught of equally frightening news.”
Jay Timothy Dolmage, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education: The core thesis: “physical inaccessibility is always linked—not just metaphorically—to mental, intellectual, social, and other forms of inaccessibility.” The steep steps up to the library of iconic college campuses are both very real barriers and powerful metaphors. In particular, “so-called invisible disabilities are particularly fraught in an educational setting in which students with disabilities are already routinely and systematically constructed as faking it, jumping a queue, or asking for an advantage. The stigma of disability is something that drifts all over—it can be used to insinuate inferiority, revoke privilege, and step society very freely. But the legal rights that come with disability do not drift very easily at all. Ableism drifts. Therefore, so must accommodations and access.”
He makes interesting points about the link between academia as a place where eugenics was promoted and legitimated and academia as a place for “positive” eugenics, that is, a place where the “right” kinds of people could be brought together to mate and learn eugenic ideals.
As a result, accommodations are temporary, retrofitted, because the model is “not to empower students to achieve with disability, but to achieve around disability or against it, or in spite of it.
The disablism built into that overarching desire for able-bodiedness and able-mindedness comes from the belief that disability should not and cannot be something that is positively claimed and lived-within.” No lasting changes are required.
What is to be done? He recommends constant anonymous feedback opportunities; this seems not likely to work well to me but I have worked on content moderation. As for Universal Design, he suggests understanding it as an inevitable failure in capitalist society, likely to be diverted towards flexibility only that serves the powerful and heightens surveillance. Given the distance from true universal design, administrative apparatus for accommodation can be dangerous even if it’s using language of universal design, which might just mean disinvesting in everyone or telling teachers (probably untenured) to do it themselves.
Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War: Culled from “lessons learned” interviews with military and diplomatic folks, this is a catalog of repeated bad decisions, with billions of dollars and thousands of lives lost for essentially no purpose but to strengthen corruption in Afghanistan. It’s hard to be hopeful that things could have been much better even if we hadn’t jumped into a distracting war with Iraq, but maybe the waste would have been a little bit less.
But everyone suffers except the people collecting the big payouts at the top. Why is that particularly bad for entertainment? “If abusers, clinical narcissists, and other awful or monstrous people control the stories that are told, that comes out in the work,” as when the show 24 glorified torture and NBC celebrated Donald Trump as a successful rulebreaker. Suggests that the working conditions, combined with the hope of creating something good, make people vulnerable to other abuses, including cults, which also promise benefits from suffering. Hollywood trains working people to accept abuse, so they can be creative geniuses and also deeply unable to recognize exploitation. Also tells a story about the rise of shorter seasons and piecework and how that has made working conditions even worse, except for executives who get paid year-round.
The chapter on Sleepy Hollow exemplifies everything else, including the double standard applied to the two leads, both of whom suffered from Fox’s schedule (or lack of planning for same). It was also depressing to read about the practice of hiring someone who wasn’t a white guy as second-in-command to try to deal with a problematic white guy, meaning he still got the credit and she got the blame. Many decisionmakers think they’re limiting risk/betting on success when they continue to promote awful white guys, but that also limits their actual experimentation with new perspectives.
She ends with notes of hope, though better workplaces are sometimes tied up with the rise of “IP,” which is to say, franchises where there is no individual author and so the studio owns everything and can keep rebooting it, which has its own costs in creative freedom and artistic risk-taking. But there are successes, she argues, that recognize that abusive behavior travels in packs, so investigating sexual harassment can also deter, for example, other forms of abuse and financial mismanagement. She also argues that the ability to manage people needs to be supported and not subordinated to the perception of creative genius: putting unqualified people into managerial roles is a pathway to all kinds of bad behavior, creating employees who believe they’re supposed to abuse underlings if they get power. This is also about the perception of white guy competence: how hard could it be for this smart guy to run a show, they think?
Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present: Provocative rumination on anti-Semitism’s modern forms, including treating Jews as only worth knowing about in relation to and as victims of the Holocaust; anything else, including other acts of anti-Semitism, are too trivial to count. Best line goes to her son, who reportedly said—after hearing the idea that Shylock is humanized by his soliloquy explaining why he insists on his pound of flesh—that every supervillain in every superhero movie gets the same speech, so he was unconvinced.
Bartow J. Elmore, Seed Money: Monsanto’s history of petrochemical destruction shifting to biotech and being only slightly less destructive (more profiteering/false promises that pesticide use could go down if farmers adopted Roundup Ready seed technology, which was true for the few years it took for weeds to become Roundup-resistant).
Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them: Spoiler alert/rape: She stopped them by being brutally assaulted by their leader, taking poison, and surviving long enough to narrate her abuse, leading to a shocking murder trial that actually ended in a prison term. So she stopped them by being a perfect victim, despite his lawyers’ attempts to portray her as a loose woman. That required a huge amount of bravery and suffering, but the activists here are the men (she actually tried to befriend the bad guy, not because she was particularly racist or anti-Catholic, but because he could help her career because of how powerful he was, which shows how this all worked). Anyway, this is the story of how the Klan rose in the Midwest in the early 1920s, due in part to the charisma and brutality of one man, D.C. Stephenson, who seized leadership from the previous, less aggressive leader. He managed to control Indiana politically and had reasonable hopes of controlling the federal government (Klan adherents also won other governorships and a number of seats in Congress, including Senators). Railing against liquor and immorality, he doled booze and naked women out at parties for the politicians he controlled. Hating people was fun and Klan members had fun doing it, at picnics and parades, like Trump supporters today. Although this shifted Black voters towards Democrats, voting restrictions managed to lead to the lowest percentage turnout ever in 1924’s presidential election; it all seemed to be working.
Stephenson’s downfall was undoubtedly good for democracy, but Egan warns in the strongest terms against seeing the overall problem as Stephenson’s doing: “The Grand Dragon was a symptom, not a cause, of an age that has been mischaracterized as one of Gatsby frivolity and the mayhem of modernism. It’s entirely possible that the Klan fell apart not just because of scandals and high-level hypocrisy, but also because it had achieved all of its major goals—Prohibition, disenfranchisement of African Americans, slamming the door on immigrants ….” Hard not to see Trump as an echo, with much less public reaction to his impunity.
Harvey Levenstein, Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry About What We Eat: Covers various food fads and fears, generally promoted by some financial interest and usually distracting from more fundamental food issues, like poverty (the greatest risk factor for heart disease). We’re quicker to abandon nutritious stuff than tasty stuff—when spinach was linked to an illness outbreak, “consumption of fresh spinach plummeted by over 60 percent and subsequently recovered very, very slowly…. Meanwhile, beef easily weathered an onslaught of equally frightening news.”
Jay Timothy Dolmage, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education: The core thesis: “physical inaccessibility is always linked—not just metaphorically—to mental, intellectual, social, and other forms of inaccessibility.” The steep steps up to the library of iconic college campuses are both very real barriers and powerful metaphors. In particular, “so-called invisible disabilities are particularly fraught in an educational setting in which students with disabilities are already routinely and systematically constructed as faking it, jumping a queue, or asking for an advantage. The stigma of disability is something that drifts all over—it can be used to insinuate inferiority, revoke privilege, and step society very freely. But the legal rights that come with disability do not drift very easily at all. Ableism drifts. Therefore, so must accommodations and access.”
He makes interesting points about the link between academia as a place where eugenics was promoted and legitimated and academia as a place for “positive” eugenics, that is, a place where the “right” kinds of people could be brought together to mate and learn eugenic ideals.
As a result, accommodations are temporary, retrofitted, because the model is “not to empower students to achieve with disability, but to achieve around disability or against it, or in spite of it.
The disablism built into that overarching desire for able-bodiedness and able-mindedness comes from the belief that disability should not and cannot be something that is positively claimed and lived-within.” No lasting changes are required.
What is to be done? He recommends constant anonymous feedback opportunities; this seems not likely to work well to me but I have worked on content moderation. As for Universal Design, he suggests understanding it as an inevitable failure in capitalist society, likely to be diverted towards flexibility only that serves the powerful and heightens surveillance. Given the distance from true universal design, administrative apparatus for accommodation can be dangerous even if it’s using language of universal design, which might just mean disinvesting in everyone or telling teachers (probably untenured) to do it themselves.
Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War: Culled from “lessons learned” interviews with military and diplomatic folks, this is a catalog of repeated bad decisions, with billions of dollars and thousands of lives lost for essentially no purpose but to strengthen corruption in Afghanistan. It’s hard to be hopeful that things could have been much better even if we hadn’t jumped into a distracting war with Iraq, but maybe the waste would have been a little bit less.
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Goodness. That certainly wasn't an understatement.
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