HEF

NY TIMES

Hugh Hefner, who created Playboy magazine and spun it into a media and entertainment-industry giant — all the while, as its very public avatar, squiring attractive young women (and sometimes marrying them) well into his 80s — died at his home. He was 91.

Hefner the man and Playboy the brand were inseparable. Both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American priggishness and wider social intolerance. Both were derided over the years — as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative and finally as anachronistic. But Mr. Hefner was a stunning success from the moment he emerged in the early 1950s. His timing was perfect.

Mr. Hefner … repeatedly likened his life to a romantic movie; it starred an ageless sophisticate in silk pajamas and smoking jacket hosting a never-ending party for famous and fascinating people.

The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. Hefner was 27, a new father married to, by his account, the first woman he had slept with.

He had only recently moved out of his parents’ house and left his job at Children’s Activities magazine. But in an editorial in Playboy’s inaugural issue, the young publisher purveyed another life:

“We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

This scene projected an era’s “premium boys’ style,” Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at Columbia University and the author of “The Sixties,” said in an interview. “It’s part of an ensemble with the James Bond movies, John F. Kennedy, swinging, the guy who is young, vigorous, indifferent to the bonds of social responsibility.”

Mr. Hefner was reviled, first by guardians of the 1950s social order — J. Edgar Hoover among them — and later by feminists. But Playboy’s circulation reached one million by 1960 and peaked at about seven million in the 1970s.

Long after other publishers made the nude “Playmate” centerfold look more sugary than daring, Playboy remained the most successful men’s magazine in the world. Mr. Hefner’s company branched into movie, cable and digital production, sold its own line of clothing and jewelry, and opened clubs, resorts and casinos.

The brand faded over the years, its flagship magazine’s circulation declining to less than a million. Mr. Hefner remained editor in chief even after agreeing to the magazine’s startling (and, as it turned out, short-lived) decision in 2015 to stop publishing nude photographs.

“You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free,” he said. “And so it’s just passé at this juncture.” The magazine’s website, Playboy.com, had already been revamped as a “safe for work” site. Playboy was no longer illicit.

Mr. Hefner began excoriating American puritanism at a time when doctors refused contraceptives to single women and the Hollywood production code dictated separate beds for married couples. As the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, an early Playboy contributor, saw the 1950s, “People wore tight little gray flannel suits and went to their tight little jobs.”

“You couldn’t talk politically,” Mr. Feiffer said in the 1992 documentary “Hugh Hefner: Once Upon a Time.” “You couldn’t use obscenities. What Playboy represented was the beginning of a break from all that.”

Playboy was born more in fun than in anger. Mr. Hefner’s first publisher’s message, written at his kitchen table in Chicago, announced, “We don’t expect to solve any world problems or prove any great moral truths.”

Still, Mr. Hefner wielded fierce resentment against his era’s sexual strictures, which he said had choked off his own youth….In “The Playboy Philosophy,” a mix of libertarian and libertine arguments that Mr. Hefner wrote in 25 installments starting in 1962, his message was simple: Society was to blame. His causes — abortion rights, decriminalization of marijuana and, most important, the repeal of 19th-century sex laws — were daring at the time. Ten years later, they would be unexceptional.

“Hefner won,” Mr. Gitlin said. “The prevailing values in the country now, for all the conservative backlash, are essentially libertarian, and that basically was what the Playboy Philosophy was.

“It’s laissez-faire,” he added. “It’s anti-censorship. It’s consumerist: Let the buyer rule. It’s hedonistic. In the longer run, Hugh Hefner’s significance is as a salesman of the libertarian ideal.”

The Playboy Philosophy advocated freedom of speech in all its aspects, for which Mr. Hefner won civil liberties awards. He supported progressive social causes and lost some sponsors by inviting black guests to his televised parties at a time when much of the nation still had Jim Crow laws.

The magazine was a forum for serious interviews, the subjects including Jimmy Carter (who famously confessed, “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times”), Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Malcolm X. In the early days Mr. Hefner published fiction by Ray Bradbury (Playboy bought his “Fahrenheit 451” for $400), Herbert Gold and Budd Schulberg. It later drew, among many others, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, James Baldwin, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates.

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He married a high school classmate, Millie Williams, and began what he described as a deadening slog into 1950s adulthood: He took a job in the personnel department of a cardboard-box manufacturer. (He said he quit when asked to discriminate against black applicants.) He wrote advertising copy for a department store and then for Esquire magazine. He became circulation promotion manager of another magazine, Children’s Activities.

He was meanwhile plotting his own magazine, which was to be, among other things, a vehicle for his slightly randy cartoons. The first issue of Playboy was financed with $600 of his own money and several thousand more in borrowed funds, including $1,000 from his mother. But his biggest asset was a nude calendar photograph of Marilyn Monroe. He had bought the rights for $500.

When Playboy reached newsstands in December 1953, its press run of 51,000 sold out. The publisher, instantly famous, would soon become a millionaire; after five years, the magazine’s annual profit was $4 million, and its rabbit-head logo was recognized around the world.

Mr. Hefner ran the magazine and then the business empire largely from his bedroom, working on a round bed that revolved and vibrated. At first he was reclusive and frenetic, powered past dawn by amphetamines and Pepsi-Cola. In later years, even after giving up Dexedrine, he was still frenetic, and still fiercely attentive to his magazine.

His own public playboy persona emerged after he left his wife and children, Christie and David, in 1959. That year his new syndicated television series, “Playboy’s Penthouse,” put the wiry, intense Mr. Hefner, pipe in hand, in the nation’s living rooms. The set recreated his mansion on North State Parkway, rich in sybaritic amusements, where he greeted entertainers like Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole, and intellectuals and writers like Max Lerner, Norman Mailer and Alex Haley, while bunches of glamorous young women milled around. (A later TV show, “Playboy After Dark,” was syndicated in 1969 and 1970.)

In the Playboy offices, life imitated image. Mr. Hefner told a film interviewer that in the early days, yes, “everybody was coupling with everybody,” including him. He later estimated that he had slept with more than 1,000 women. Over and over, he would say, “I’m the boy who dreamed the dream.”

Friends described him as both charming and shy, even unassuming, and intensely loyal. “Hef was always big for the girls who got depressed or got in a jam of some sort,” the artist LeRoy Neiman, one of the magazine’s main illustrators for more than 50 years, said in an interview in 1999. “He’s a friend. He’s a good person. I couldn’t cite anything he ever did that was malicious to anybody.”

At the same time, Mr. Hefner adored celebrity, his and others’. Mr. Neiman, who sometimes lived at the Playboy Mansion, said: “It was nothing to breakfast there with comedians like Mort Sahl, professors, any kind of person who had something on his mind that was controversial or new. At the parties in the early days, Alex Haley used to hang around. Tony Curtis and Hugh O’Brian were always there. Mick Jagger stayed there.”

A party at the Playboy Mansion in 1980,

The glamour rubbed off on Mr. Hefner’s new enterprise, the Playboy Club, which was crushingly popular when it opened in Chicago in 1960. Dozens more followed. The waitresses, called bunnies, were trussed in brief satin suits with cotton fluffs fastened to their derrières.

One bunny briefly employed in the New York club would earn Mr. Hefner’s lasting enmity. She was an impostor, a 28-year-old named Gloria Steinem who was working undercover for Show magazine. Her article, published in 1963, described exhausting hours, painfully tight uniforms (in which half-exposed breasts floated on wadded-up dry cleaner bags) and vulgar customers.

Another feminist critic, Susan Brownmiller, debating Mr. Hefner on Dick Cavett’s television talk show, asserted, “The role that you have selected for women is degrading to women because you choose to see women as sex objects, not as full human beings.” She continued: “The day you’re willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear end. …”

From left, the actor Darren McGavin, the actresses Jean Stapleton and Ruth Buzzi, Mr. Hefner, and Barbara Fisher at a casino fund-raiser in Los Angeles in 1979. CreditLennox Mclendon/Associated Press

Mr. Hefner said later that he was perplexed by feminists’ apparent rejection of the message he had set forth in the Playboy Philosophy. “We are in the process of acquiring a new moral maturity and honesty,” he wrote in one installment, “in which man’s body, mind and soul are in harmony rather than in conflict.” Of Americans’ fright over anything “unsuitable for children,” he said, “Instead of raising children in an adult world, with adult tastes, interests and opinions prevailing, we prefer to live much of our lives in a make-believe children’s world.”

Clockwise from top left, Jerry Lewis, Anthony Newley, Mr. Hefner and Sammy Davis Jr. on the set of “Playboy After Dark,” the brand’s second TV show, in 1968. CreditBruce McBroom

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The heady mood broke in 1974, when Mr. Hefner’s longtime personal assistant, Bobbie Arnstein, committed suicide. Ms. Arnstein had just been convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine, and Mr. Hefner said bitterly that investigators had hounded her to set him up.

He left Chicago for his second home in Los Angeles, an enormous mock-Tudor house with a grotto and a zoo (Mr. Hefner loved animals), where he could orchestrate the company’s move into films.

Christie Hefner, then the chairwoman and chief executive of Playboy Enterprises, with her father, Hugh, at the New York Stock Exchange in 2003.CreditRichard Drew/Associated PressMr. Hefner relied more and more on his daughter named company president in 1982 and then chief executive, a position she held until 2009. Mr. Hefner suffered a stroke in 1985, but he recovered and remained editor in chief of Playboy, choosing the centerfold models, writing captions and tending to detail with an intensity that led his staff to call him “the world’s wealthiest copy editor.”

In 1989 Mr. Hefner married again, …His second wife was Kimberley Conrad, the 1989 Playmate of the Year, 38 years his junior. They had two sons: Marston Glenn, born in 1990, and Cooper Bradford, born in 1991. [above]

The couple divorced in 2010, and Mr. Hefner plowed into his work, including the editing of “The Century of Sex,” a Playboy book….Meanwhile, to widespread snickering, he became a cheerleader for Viagra, telling a British journalist, “It is as close as anyone can imagine to the fountain of youth.”

The re-emerged Hef reveled in the new century. In 2005 he began appearing on television on the E! channel reality show “The Girls Next Door,” although his onscreen role consisted mostly of peering in while his three young, blond girlfriends planned adventures at the mansion. When the three original “Girls Next Door” went their separate ways after five seasons, he replaced them with three others, also young and blond — and shortly afterward asked one of them, Crystal Harris, to marry him.

Hugh Hefner, with his “runaway bride,” Crystal Harris

Five days before the 85-year old Mr. Hefner was to marry the 25-year-old Ms. Harris in June 2011 — the wedding was to have been filmed by the Lifetime cable channel as a reality special — the bride called it off….But Ms. Harris had another change of heart, and the two married on New Year’s Eve 2012.

In 2005, the reality show “The Girls Next Door” offered viewers a look at the lives of three of Mr. Hefner’s young companions in the Playboy Mansion: from left, Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson.CreditEuropean Pressphoto Agency

Through those years, however, the Playboy brand marched forward. In 2011 Mr. Hefner took Playboy Enterprises private again. Scott Flanders, after taking over as chief executive in 2009, focused on the licensing business, shrinking the company and raising its profits. The website, cleansed of any whiff of pornography, enjoyed huge growth, while Mr. Hefner, who retained his title and about 30 percent of the company’s stock, cheerfully tweeted news and pictures of the many festivities at the mansion, along with hundreds of photographs from his past, in the glory decades of the ’60s and ’70s.

Another of the “Girls Next Door,” Holly Madison, offered a much more depressing version of life in the mansion in a 2015 tell-all book. In the years when Mr. Hefner was calling her his “No.1 girlfriend,” she wrote in “Down the Rabbit Hole,” she endured a dysfunctional household of petty rules, allowances, quarrels and backstabbing, all directed by an emotionally manipulative old man.

NY TIMES, BROOKS BARNES

Sharan Magnuson, who arrived in Hollywood in 1980 to pursue an acting career and soon discovered a side of the Playboy Mansion that most people never discussed — certainly not if they wanted to be invited back.

“At first, it was magical,” Ms. Magnuson, who went on to become a senior executive at Warner Bros., said by phone on Thursday, a day after the death of Playboy’s founder, Hugh Hefner. “Glamorous. Fun. The mansion in perfect condition. Beautiful banquet spreads. You’d go outside and there were flamingos and monkeys. And Hef, who would come downstairs later, was always gracious and cool.”

Some of his male guests? Not so much.

In the mid-1980s, Ms. Magnuson, who was then known as Sharan Lea, and a girlfriend were invited to the mansion on a Sunday: movie night. She was not naïve, and ran with a hard-partying crowd. But she did not expect to find herself cornered outside — near the mansion’s famous grotto, with its three mammoth hot tubs and wooden shelves stocked with jumbo bottles of Johnson’s Baby Oil. A guy who had seemed nice suddenly had nine hands.“He tried to get me into the cave, and, when I refused, he really manhandled me,” Ms. Magnuson said. “I felt violated.”

She said she had managed to push away her assailant, who disappeared into the house. Within minutes, two guards approached her. “They said, ‘We’re sorry, but Mr. Hefner is asking you to leave the property,’” Ms. Magnuson recalled.

“Banned from the Playboy Mansion for refusing one of his gross friend’s sexual advances — total badge of honor,” Ms. Magnuson said. (She later added in a text message: “One of the reason ingénues accepted invitations to the mansion was to have a nice meal. Sad but true. I was the proverbial starving actress back then.”)

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THE BARBARA STRATTEN STORY

Playboy’ magazine founder and publisher Hugh Hefner with 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year, Canadian model and actor Dorothy Stratten.  (Frank Edwards / Getty Images) CHICAGO TRIBUNE One of his most promising Playboy Playmates, 20-year-old Dorothy Stratten, had been murdered, and Hefner was giving Village Voice writer Teresa Carpenter a glimpse at what he had otherwise kept private…. After Stratten was shot in the face by her estranged husband on Aug. 14, 1980, Hefner issued an emotionless press release and went into a media-free seclusion. In her article titled “Death of a Playmate,” which would win a Pulitzer Prize, she also addressed Stratten’s loss on a deeper level for Hefner. He had struggled to make stars of his Playmates and Stratten seemed destined to take him to the next level. The brutal killing of Stratten would remain a dark event that would follow him for years. He would later blame the cause of his stroke in 1985 on accusations flung at him by film producer Peter Bogdanovich, who had met Stratten at the Playboy Mansion and later fell in love with her. In a memoir about Stratten’s life, Bogdanovich blamed Hefner and the Playboy lifestyle for contributing to her death. He wrote that, “she could not handle the slick professional machinery of the Playboy sex factory, nor the continual efforts of its founder to bring her into his personal fold, no matter what she wanted.” “Sometimes I cried before I went to sleep,” Stratten wrote about staying at the Playboy mansion in a 16-page memoir that was publicly revealed after her death. “A lot of men were entering my life all of a sudden and a lot of them wanted me. No one was ever pushy or forceful – but talk can be very powerful – especially to a mixed-up little girl.” The man who put Stratten on Hefner’s radar, and who ultimately pulled the trigger that killed her, was Paul Snider. Stratten, born Dorothy Hoogstraten, was a teenager working at Dairy Queen when she met Snider, who was nine years older than her, drove a Corvette and was experienced at wooing young women. He bought her jewelry and cooked her dinner. He told her she was beautiful. Eventually, he convinced her to take nude photos, which were then sent to Playboy for consideration. Soon Stratten was flying in a plane for the first time in her life, heading toward Los Angeles and a place in the Playboy family. She was named Playmate of the month in August 1979 and was picked as Playmate of the Year in 1980. During that time, she was also weighing a wedding proposal from Snider. Hefner, who described himself as a “father figure” to her, said he expressed reservations when she told him about the proposal, according to Carpenter’s article. “I said to her that he had a ‘pimp-like quality’ about him,” Hefner told Carpenter. On June 1, 1979, Snider and Stratten married. Meanwhile, her career continued to take off. She was getting TV show and movie role offers. She appeared on the Johnny Carson show. One of her biggest breaks came when Bogdanovich cast her in his comedy “They All Laughed” alongside Audrey Hepburn. Filming took place in New York City and soon a relationship blossomed between the director and Stratten. She moved into his hotel suite, and later when they returned to California, she joined him at his home in Bel Air. Meanwhile, Snider, who had described her as his “rocket to the moon,” watched her grow more distant and hired a private detective. He also bought a 12-gauge shotgun. On August 14, 1980, Snider and Stratten were found nude in his West Los Angeles home, both dead from gunshot wounds to the head. Police later determined that Snider had raped her and then killed her before turning the gun on himself. In his interview with Carpenter, which appeared in November 1980, Hefner said he decided to publicly talk about it “because there is still a great tendency. . .for this thing to fall into the classic cliché of ‘smalltown girl comes to Playboy, comes to Hollywood, life in the fast lane,’ and that was somehow related to her death. And that is not what really happened. A very sick guy saw his meal ticket and his connection to power, whatever, slipping away. And it was that that made him kill her.” Bogdanovich later released a statement calling Stratten beautiful “in every way imaginable” and said they had planned to marry as soon as she was divorced. Dorothy looked at the world with love, and believed that all people were good deep down,” he wrote. “She was mistaken, but it is among the most generous and noble errors we can make.” Later when he criticized Hefner for the death, he also accused him of forcing himself on Stratten. “I am, publisher of Playboy or no, a very shy man. And I could no more force myself on a woman, psychologically or physically, than could the man on the moon,” Hefner said, according to a March 27, 1986 Rolling Stone article. Hefner, at a press conference, accused Bogdanovich of causing the stress which led to his stroke. And he did not stop there. He also threw out his own accusations, saying that Bogdanovich seduced Stratten’s little sister, Louise, who was 12 when her famous sister died, as a “pathological replacement” for the woman he could no longer have. Louise Stratten filed a slander lawsuit against Hefner that was later dropped. In 1989, at the age of 20, she and Bogdanovich were married. They divorced 12 years later. [Although neither Bogdanovich or Hefner would have admitted it, their behavior towards Stratten was not unlike Charles Foster Kane. They each objectified a beautiful woman to make her a star, whether she had the talent or not. They never considered  if she had the emotional maturity to handle the burden they put upon her. And most likely, even if they did, it would not deter them. Bogdanovich and Hefner would most likely claim that Stratten would be the main financial beneficiary of their efforts. So, in the end, her emotional trevails would be more than compensated for. Assuming, of course, that she doesn’t have a nervous breakdown or wind up doing huge, boring jigsaw puzzles.–Esco20] —————————————————————————–

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Like so many things in Hollywood, though, the reality had become quite different from the carefully crafted image. Rather than a rollicking pleasure palace, the mansion had become quite sad by 2009, when I spent time at the mansion for an article that would be headlined “The Loin in Winter.” Mr. Hefner’s struggling Playboy Enterprises was renting out the grounds nonstop for corporate events. He had lost most of his hearing but was still trying to pass off his silk-pajama shtick.

NY TIMES

The masculine ideal of the era was narrowly defined: aloof, outdoorsy, a breadwinner, “manly.” Showing too much of an interest in culture, fine food or travel was anathema. Mr. Hefner felt trapped by conformity and designed a magazine that promoted a very different idea of what made an individual a “man” through its features and advice on clothing, food, alcohol selections, art, music and literature. Though it quickly became a cliché, many male readers really did “read it for the articles,” telling surveys that they enjoyed features on the ideal bachelor pad even more than the centerfold.

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He integrated his staff and membership; he hired men and women of all races, and often provided black comedians and musicians their first chances to perform in front of white audiences. When a New Orleans and Miami club owner segregated the membership, Mr. Hefner bought those franchises back. The clubs provided female employees with tuition reimbursement and encouraged them to attend college.

Mr. Hefner also set up the Playboy Foundation, which supported First Amendment rights, often contributing to defendants in free-speech cases. The foundation went on to support other works, including research on post-traumatic stress disorder, commissions on Agent Orange and programs and organizations for veterans.

American war in Vietnam. For hundreds of thousands of young men “in country” — their average age was 19 — the magazine made them feel as if they were back home. The centerfold pages hung on tent flaps and office walls, and could be found stashed in pockets, helmets and packs. The interest went beyond the women: Young soldiers eagerly perused the glossy advertisements for the latest stereos, cars and fashion, which they could buy at one of the mall-like PXs on the military’s sprawling bases (yes, even cars, which the government would ship home). It acted as a how-to guide for consumption and consumerism for many young men who had never had disposable income before.

Articles and interviews in the magazine were some of their only sources of real news about the growing antiwar and counterculture movements stateside. They went beyond the headlines, too, discussing and critiquing strategy, the draft and the politicians who moved the chess pieces. But the magazine also remained supportive of the men fighting the war. Countless letters from servicemen to the magazine, now stored in the Playboy archives, reveal how much the magazine lifted morale, how it brought a welcome respite from the boredom, terror and chaos they endured on a daily basis.

The Silence Breakers’ Named Time’s Person of the Year for 2017

The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Edward Felsenthal, made the announcement on NBC’s Today show on Wednesday, citing “the galvanizing actions of the women on our cover.” Those women featured on the cover include actress Ashley Judd, singer Taylor Swift, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, Visa lobbyist Adama Iwu, Mexican agricultural worker Isabel Pascual, and one woman whose face cannot be seen. The anonymous woman featured on the cover … is a young hospital worker from “the middle of the country” who fears the repercussions if she comes forward with her story of sexual harassment, its editor in chief said. Dedicated to “the silence-breakers”, the magazine decided to champion the women and men who have come forward to accuse powerful figures, including former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, of sexual misconduct.   TIME

Over the course of six weeks, TIME interviewed dozens of people representing at least as many industries, all of whom had summoned extraordinary personal courage to speak out about sexual harassment at their jobs. They often had eerily similar stories to share.

In almost every case, they described not only the vulgarity of the harassment itself—years of lewd comments, forced kisses, opportunistic gropes—but also the emotional and psychological fallout from those advances. Almost everybody described wrestling with a palpable sense of shame. Had she somehow asked for it? Could she have deflected it? Was she making a big deal out of nothing?

 

“I thought, What just happened? Why didn’t I react?” says the anonymous hospital worker who fears for her family’s livelihood should her story come out in her small community. “I kept thinking, Did I do something, did I say something, did I look a certain way to make him think that was O.K.?” It’s a poisonous, useless thought, she adds, but how do you avoid it? She remembers the shirt she was wearing that day. She can still feel the heat of her harasser’s hands on her body.

 

Nearly all of the people TIME interviewed about their experiences expressed a crushing fear of what would happen to them personally, to their families or to their jobs if they spoke up.

 

For some, the fear was born of a threat of physical violence. Pascual felt trapped and terrified when her harasser began to stalk her at home, but felt she was powerless to stop him. If she told anyone, the abuser warned her, he would come after her or her children.

 

Those who are often most vulnerable in society—immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income workers and LGBTQ people—described many types of dread. If they raised their voices, would they be fired? Would their communities turn against them? Would they be killed? According to a 2015 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 47% of transgender people report being sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, both in and out of the workplace.

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Other women, like the actor Selma Blair, weathered excruciating threats. Blair says she arrived at a hotel restaurant for a meeting with the independent film director James Toback in 1999 only to be told that he would like to see her in his room. There, she says, Toback told her that she had to learn to be more vulnerable in her craft and asked her to strip down. She took her top off. She says he then propositioned her for sex, and when she refused, he blocked the door and forced her to watch him masturbate against her leg. Afterward, she recalls him telling her that if she said anything, he would stab her eyes out with a Bic pen and throw her in the Hudson River.

 

Blair says Toback lorded the encounter over her for decades. “I had heard from others that he was slandering me, saying these sexual things about me, and it just made me even more afraid of him,” Blair says in an interview with TIME. “I genuinely thought for almost 20 years, He’s going to kill me.” ( Toback has denied the allegations, saying he never met his accusers or doesn’t remember them.)

 

Many of the people who have come forward also mentioned a different fear, one less visceral but no less real, as a reason for not speaking out: if you do, your complaint becomes your identity. “‘Susan Fowler, the famous victim of sexual harassment,'” says the woman whose blog post ultimately led Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to resign and the multibillion-dollar startup to oust at least 20 other employees. “Nobody wants to be the buzzkill,” adds Lindsey Reynolds, one of the women who blew the whistle on a culture of harassment at the restaurant group run by the celebrity chef John Besh. (The Besh Group says it is implementing new policies to create a culture of respect. Besh apologized for “unacceptable behavior” and “moral failings,” and resigned from the company. )

Iwu, the lobbyist, says she considered the same risks after she was groped in front of several colleagues at an event. She was shocked when none of her male co-workers stepped in to stop the assault. The next week, she organized 147 women to sign an open letter exposing harassment in California government. When she told people about the campaign, she says they were wary. “Are you sure you want to do this?” they warned her. “Remember Anita Hill.”

 

Taylor Swift says she was made to feel bad about the consequences that her harasser faced. After she complained about a Denver radio DJ named David Mueller, who reached under her skirt and grabbed her rear end, Mueller was fired. He sued Swift for millions in damages. She countersued for a symbolic $1 and then testified about the incident in August. Mueller’s lawyer asked her, on the witness stand, whether she felt bad that she’d gotten him fired.

 

“I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault,” she told the lawyer. “I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are a product of his decisions. Not mine.” (Mueller said he would appeal.)

 

In an interview with TIME, Swift says that moment on the stand fueled her indignation. “I figured that if he would be brazen enough to assault me under these risky circumstances,” she says, “imagine what he might do to a vulnerable, young artist if given the chance.” Like the five women gathered at that echoing soundstage in San Francisco, and like all of the dozens, then hundreds, then millions of women who came forward with their own stories of harassment, she was done feeling intimidated. Actors and writers and journalists and dishwashers and fruit pickers alike: they’d had enough. What had manifested as shame exploded into outrage. Fear became fury.

 

Read more at TIME

 

Tarana Burke, the woman who realized the power of the simple words “Me Too,” marched with others in Los Angeles in November. CreditLucy Nicholson/Reuters

NY TIMES

First it was a story. Then a moment. Now, two months after women began to come forward in droves to accuse powerful men of sexual harassment and assault, it is a movement.

 

Time magazine has named “the silence breakers” its person of the year for 2017, referring to those women, and the global conversation they have started.

The magazine’s editor in chief, Edward Felsenthal, said in an interview on the “Today” show on Wednesday that the #MeToo movement represented the “fastest-moving social change we’ve seen in decades, and it began with individual acts of courage by women and some men too.”

 

Investigations published in October by The New York Times and The New Yorker, [detailed] multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault against the movie producer Harvey Weinstein.

 

It is a testament to the size of the movement that the set of “Today” itself, where the announcement was made, had recently been the site of such a reckoning. Matt Lauer, one of NBC’s most well-known personalities for decades, was fired only last week after an allegation of sexual harassment from a subordinate. Other complaints soon followed.

And of course, Time’s 2017 runner-up for person of the year, Donald J. Trump, was accused during his presidential campaign by more than 10 women of sexual misconduct, from unwanted touching to sexual assault.

 

Those accusations did not stop Mr. Trump from being named person of the year in 2016. And Mr. Trump inadvertently promoted this year’s announcement, tweeting that he had been told he would “probably” be chosen again and claiming to have turned down the honor. Time quickly released a statement saying that the president was incorrect.

The Opioid epidemic and the truth about deaths of despair.

WASHINGTON POST

Medicaid isn’t the problem (and isn’t the solution). Critics of Medicaid argue that the program enables the epidemic by paying for prescription opioids. In fact, Princeton University researchers Janet Currie and Molly Schnell calculate that only 8 percent of all opioid prescriptions from January 2006 to March 2015 were paid for by Medicaid, based on data from QuintilesIMS, a leading health-care information company.

 

Medicaid can help addicts by providing a range of evidence-based therapies. This is correct and, like many others, we think treatment is a good idea. As such, we are also concerned about the effects that reductions in Medicaid could have on the epidemic. But Medicaid proponents often greatly overstate what can be expected from treatment in general, and Medicaid in particular. Many addicts deny their addiction and either do not seek or do not adhere to treatment once started. “Evidence-based” typically means there has been a randomized, controlled trial that has demonstrated effectiveness. But trials include only those who seek treatment — and say nothing about those who avoid it. A trial is deemed successful when the treatment is proved better than nothing (or at least a placebo) — even if only a few people end up benefiting from it.

 

It is not all about opioids. Policymakers often speak as if the epidemic will be over as soon as we tackle both legal and illegal opioids. Better control of opioids is essential, but, even without opioid deaths, there would still be as many or more deaths from suicide and liver diseases. Opioids are like guns handed out in a suicide ward; they have certainly made the total epidemic much worse, but they are not the cause of the underlying depression. We suspect that deaths of despair among those without a university degree are primarily the result of a 40-year stagnation of median real wages and a long-term decline in the number of well-paying jobs for those without a bachelor’s degree. Falling labor force participation, sluggish wage growth, and associated dysfunctional marriage and child-rearing patterns have undermined the meaning of working people’s lives as well.

 

The crisis has hit men and women about equally. There are competing myths that women (or men) have faced the greater brunt of the epidemic. In fact, the increase in deaths of despair has been similar for men and women. It is true that women are less likely to kill themselves than men, and they have lower death rates throughout life. As a result, the same increase in deaths among both sexes translates into a larger percentage increase for women. But the numbers of additional deaths remain similar. A focus on men appears to reflect a prejudice that the social pathologies connected to the epidemic — drinking and drugging — are primarily seen in men. That has led some to believe that men are more prone to deaths of despair, but again, the data do not support that claim.

 

Rural Americans are not alone in this crisis. While mortality rates are somewhat lower in the suburbs of large cities than elsewhere, deaths of despair have risen in parallel in all levels of urbanization defined by the Census Bureau, from inner cities to rural areas. They have increased for middle-aged whites — not blacks or Hispanics — in every state between 1999 and 2015, with deaths concentrated among those who do not have a four-year college degree. This is a statement of fact, not a claim that more education would bring the deaths under control.

There is no simple policy solution to this epidemic. In the short run, we need to develop less tolerance for the use of opioids — both legal painkillers and illegal forms of the drug, such as heroin and black-market fentanyl. Perhaps local communities have the best chance of doing so.

 

But the long-run solution is much harder to attain. We need higher wages and better jobs for working people. The past 40 years suggest that is a far more difficult goal to attain.

Diana Nyad: My Life After Sexual Assault

Diana Nyad at 61, during training for a swim from Key West, Fla., to Cuba. CreditJeffery Salter/Redux

NY TIMES

Here I was, a strong-willed young athlete. There he was, a charismatic pillar of the community. But I’m the one who, all these many years later, at the age of 68, no matter how happy and together I may be, continues to deal with the rage and the shame that comes with being silenced.

 

My particular case mirrors countless others. I was 14. A naïve 14, in 1964. I don’t think I could have given you a definition of intercourse.

 

My swimming coach was in many ways the father I had always yearned for. I met him when I was 10, and those first four years were marked by a strong mentor-student bond. He repeatedly told me I had all the talents to one day rock the world. I worshiped my coach. His word was The Word. I built a pedestal for him and gazed up at the center of my universe.

 

That summer, our school hosted the state championships. It was a big deal, and I was a star in the middle of it all. In between the afternoon preliminaries and the night finals, bursting with confidence, I went over to Coach’s house for a nap. This was normal: Coach’s house, his family, his kids were all part of the swim team’s daily milieu.

 

I was dead asleep in the master bedroom when it happened. Out of nowhere, he was on top of me. He yanked my suit down. He grabbed at and drooled onto my breasts. He hyperventilated and moaned. I didn’t breathe for perhaps two full minutes, my body locked in an impenetrable flex. My arms trembled, pinned to my sides. He pleaded with me to open my legs, but they were pressed hard together. If breath gives us force, that day I could feel the strength in my body from the polar opposite — from not breathing. He ejaculated on my stomach, my athletic torso I was so proud of now suddenly violated with this strange and foul stuff.

 

As he slinked out of the room, I gasped for air, as if I had just been held underwater for those two minutes. I vomited onto the floor.

 

That night I was not of this world. Teammates had to prompt me to get onto the blocks. I hadn’t heard the announcer’s voice. In the end, we won the team title, but while the team was cheering and laughing, I plunged down to the floor of the diving well. My young world had just been capsized and I was very much alone in my confusion and fear. And I screamed into the abyss of dark water: “This is not going to ruin my life!”

 

I might have defied ruin, but my young life changed dramatically that day. That first savage episode signaled the beginning of years of covert molestation. Throughout the rest of high school I was a loner, not a natural role for me. No longer did I hold the unofficial title of “most disciplined” on the team, the first to practice each dawn. I couldn’t chance being alone with Coach again. I sat through classes, distracted by an image of hacking my breasts off with a razor blade. Overnight, I began going through life a solitary soldier. I didn’t need anybody, for anything.

 

Mine is an age-old scenario. Coaches and priests and doctors and scout leaders and stepfathers and, yes, movie producers, have been preying on those they are supposedly mentoring for far too long. And this isn’t the first time I’ve told my story. I first gave voice to the details of the years of humiliation when I was 21; the sense of power it gave me was immediate.

 

For me, being silenced was a punishment equal to the molestation. Legal prosecution proved time and time again to be futile, but I could at least regain my own dignity each time I uttered my truth. I’ve been speaking out, loud and strong, for nearly five decades now. It has been crucial to my own health. It has energized others to speak out, too. And I will continue to tell my story until all girls and women find their own voice.

 

I didn’t suffer the Holocaust. I’ve never been through the horrors of war. I don’t paint my youth as tragic, yet I spent every day of my high school years terrified that it would be yet another day that he would summon me after practice, for a humiliating ride in his car or a disgusting hour in the motel down the street. I wasn’t studying with my friends. I wasn’t home with my family. I was clenching my teeth, squeezing my legs tightly together, waiting to breathe again. And I was silent. Always silent. He assured me that what we shared was something special, that my life would collapse if anybody else knew, that this was magic between us. Our special secret.

 

One spring day, the elite of our team had a light practice, preparing to leave the next day for the nationals in Oklahoma. We were scheduled to spend a few minutes each in private consultation with Coach in his office, to talk over strategies for our races.

When I headed in for my session, I had zero fear of a molestation episode. We were on campus. The other swimmers were chatting right outside.

 

No sooner had I begun expressing my worry about not having tapered enough, when he flew from behind his desk to behind my chair. He ripped my suit down and grabbed my breasts. He swiftly dragged me into a little bathroom in his office and pushed me up against a single mattress that was propped up in the shower stall. My body knew its response; I went rigid. He pleaded with me to open up, but my survival system was gripped with fear. His eyes glazed with pleasure as he called me his “little bitch.” I recoil at the word to this day. He bucked, panted, drooled and, once again, ejaculated onto my stomach. My breath was short, in my throat, as he bounced back into the office and called out for the next swimmer to come in. Mortified as I exited past that kid, I aimlessly walked out to nowhere. The self-hatred, the welling shame, was all-consuming. I wasn’t an elite athlete of my school, heading off to the United States Nationals the next day. I was inconsequential. Utterly inconsequential.

 

These molestations were the cornerstone of my teenage life. I studied. I had friends. I won awards. On the outside, I was a bold, overly confident, swaggering success. But the veneer was thin. On the inside, I lived the perpetual trauma of being held down, called misogynist names and ordered to be quiet. I wanted to be anywhere but here, anybody but me.

 

I was 21 when I told someone the whole horrid saga for the first time. I took a weekend trip to Michigan to celebrate the birthday of my best friend from high school, and every heinous detail, every recounted word, came spewing forth. The relief was palpable. I wept. My friend cried with me, hugged me, took a long pause and said, “Well, Diana, hold on to your hat because the same thing happened to me.” The same coach. The precise same words. The mattress in the office shower stall. The same covert manipulation. The same special secret. And we soon learned that it wasn’t just the two of us. It never is.

When we confronted Coach, in front of our high school principal and the school’s lawyer, he knelt at my feet and whimpered. He said he couldn’t understand why I would falsely malign him this way. The next day he was fired. The principal told me that he had had suspicions, even reports from witnesses over the years, but that he had never caught him in the act.

 

At the end of all the proceedings, the principal asked me and my friend point blank whether Coach’s being fired from the school would be enough punishment for us. I took a minute to think — and said it would. Little did we know that he would jump right down to the next town and quickly be installed as head coach of a major university. Had I known this man would continue to harm more girls, had I had an inkling as to how deep the imprint of this man’s actions would run through the course of my life, I would have immediately pursued a criminal case.

 

Up until his death in 2014, Coach was celebrated by the coaching community, his town, his church. He made it into halls of fame and to the top of the coaching pyramid, the Olympic Games. And so is woven the fabric of the epidemic. These often charming individuals are lauded, presented with trophies for their leadership, from the piggish Weinsteins of Hollywood to the unscrupulous parental figures scattered throughout our suburbs. Statistics bear out the astonishing number of sexual abusers among us.

 

And therein lies the call for our speaking up. We need to construct an accurate archive of these abuses. And we need to prepare coming generations to speak up in the moment, rather than be coerced into years of mute helplessness.

 

Those who have found a platform to speak, and to be heard, within recent weeks have most likely forged unexpected connections as a result. Whenever I mention my case in front of a live audience, invariably women come up to me afterward and let me know that they too are survivors. They immediately command my full attention with a particularly steady gaze and they say, “The same thing happened to me — my stepfather.” Or “I’m a survivor, too.” Then we hug, long and hard. And we often find tears for each other. We connect. It’s our version of #MeToo.

 

One afternoon, after an appearance I made in Hilton Head, S.C., an elderly woman came toward me. Gingerly, she took both of my hands into hers, looked at me knowingly and, without saying a word, gave me a folded note. I slid it into my pocket, to read it later in private. Back in my hotel room, I read the note and called the number she had left me. She came to my room a couple of hours later.

 

This woman told me a story that I’ve heard many times before. Her father began molesting her when she was 3. Three. How can we begin to wrap our minds around that? He continued throughout her teenage years, using the familiar threat of shaming her and even hurting her if she told anybody. This was their special secret, he told her. Those words chilled me to the bone: their special secret.

 

Our conversation in my hotel room was the first time that she ever told anyone what had happened to her. She shed bitter tears, and I held her frail body, crying also for all these long years she had lived with the burden of these unspeakable events. There’s the irony. These events we have suffered are at once unspeakable and yet need to be spoken.

 

An interviewer once asked me, as many do, “Where did your confidence, your iron will come from?” That person didn’t know that just hours earlier the same day, I’d flown into an uncontrollable self-rage. Approaching my door, clutching several bags of groceries, I’d fumbled with the keys, lost hold of the bags and started a self-destructive rant as apples rolled down the driveway. The same words the coach had used while molesting me came screaming out at me, from my own mouth. “You little bitch!” “You worthless little ….” That wounded young person inside believes, on some cellular level, that these words sum up exactly who I am at the core.

 

These self-loathing rages aren’t frequent anymore. Each year, as the events of my youth recede further and further, my current life carries more emotional significance than that long-ago era. I bounce out of bed every day, thrilled to greet the sunrise. I live my life with great gusto. I tell people that I can look back at each stage of my life with no regrets because, win or lose, I throw my best self at everything I try. I walk down the street as though I own it. All the while, the trauma has lodged in an obscure corner of my soul. I refuse to believe it’s a lifelong imprint, yet, with age 70 in clear view, I admit to wondering whether I will ever entirely heal that young girl who was pinned down.

Tell your story. Let us never again be silenced.

SAM SHEPARD

DAVID HUDSON, THE DAILY

One of the most important and influential early writers in the Off Broadway movement, Mr. Shepard captured and chronicled the darker sides of American family life in plays like Buried Child, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979, and Curse of the Starving Class, and A Lie of the Mind,” writes Sopan Deb for the New York Times. “He was widely regarded as one of the most original voices of his generation, winning praise from critics for his searing portraits of spouses, siblings and lovers struggling with issues of identity, failure and the fleeting nature of the American dream. He was nominated for two other Pulitzers, for True West and Fool for Love, which both received Broadway productions.”

Mr. Shepard brought a singular dramatic voice to the creation of a world that literary critic Walter Kirn once described as “Grass-Roots Gothic, infused . . . with a sense of folksy madness and populist brutality.’’

Michiko Kakutani’s 1984 interview with Shepard, in which she noted that he’d “created a fictional world populated by cowboys and gunslingers, ranchers and desperadoes, but these characters all find that the myths they were raised on somehow no longer apply. Eddie the wrangler-hero of Fool for Love . . . finds that he has nothing better to lasso than the bedposts in a squalid motel room. The Hollywood hustlers in Angel City look out their window and see not the fertile valleys of the Promised Land, but a smoggy city of used-car lots and shopping centers—a city waiting for apocalypse. And the old-time outlaws, who pay a visit to the present in The Unseen Hand, discover that there are no more trains to rob, that there is no place for heroics, that it is no longer even possible to tell the good guys from the bad.”

 

Born Samuel Shepard Rogers III on Nov. 5, 1943, he came naturally by his Strindbergian view of love, marriage and family. The father for whom he was named was an alcoholic, nomadic man, and he haunts Mr. Shepard’s work.

He worked on a ranch as a teen and discovered Samuel Beckett—as well as jazz and abstract expressionism—at Mt. San Antonio College before he dropped out to join a touring theater repertory troupe.

When Shepard arrived in New York at the age of nineteen, “he looked up a high school friend, Charles Mingus Jr., son of the jazz great, who got him a job at the Village Gate nightclub, ‘cleaning up dishes and bringing Nina Simone ice,’ as Mr. Shepard once described it.” John Leland for the New York Times: “The two friends shared a cold-water apartment on Avenue C and Ninth Street, paying $60 a month in rent. . . . Even then, Mr. Mingus said in an interview this week, ‘He could walk into a room with a typewriter and not leave until he finished a play. No revisions, just typing.’ When Ralph Cook, a waiter at the Village Gate, started the Theater Genesis at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in 1964, he gave Mr. Shepard his first break — a pair of experimental one-acts that used disjointed dialogue to ‘change the audience’s cognition,’ Mr. Mingus said. The Village Voice loved it, and Mr. Shepard was off.”

 

Sam Shepard, second from left, at his wedding to the actress O-Lan Jones at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery in 1969. Credit Michael Evans/The New York Times

“He was blessed with good fortune, always in the right place at the right time,” said Peter Stampfel, who met Mr. Shepard in a pawnshop in the East Village where Mr. Stampfel was retrieving a violin he had pawned to buy amphetamines.

Off Off Broadway in the mid-1960s was wide open. An actor in one theater might be designing costumes in a second, then rushing to see a new play in a third.

It was an incredibly exciting time,” said Tony Barsha, a playwright and director who worked with Mr. Shepard at Theater Genesis. “We thumbed our noses at Broadway and Off Broadway because they were so slick and commercial, and what we were doing was just off the wall stuff,’’ he added. “Nobody was thinking of art for the ages. Sam was just dashing this stuff off. His early work was just what came out of his head. It had nothing to do with dramatic construction or form or history. I think he was using a lot of drugs at the time, speed mainly. I did the same thing.”

 

The front cover of “Indian War Whoop,” an LP by The Holy Modal Rounders. The band featured Sam Shepard on drums. CreditJ.P. Roth Collection

 

Mr. Stampfel invited him to play drums in his band, the Holy Modal Rounders, a psychedelic folk group that went on to open for the Velvet Underground, Ike and Tina Turner, Pink Floyd and others. The two shared a taste for drugs and a preference for energy over musical finesse, Mr. Stampfel said this week.

“When we started, he never mentioned writing plays or that he got a grant,’’ Mr. Stampfel said. “We’d mention his name to other people and they’d say, you mean the guy who writes plays?”

With the war raging in Vietnam, and F.B.I. agents storming the apartment on Avenue C looking for subversives, Mr. Shepard avoided the draft by feigning a heroin habit.

When Mr. Shepard married O-Lan Jones, an actress who appeared in some of his plays, in 1969, Mr. Stampfel and the other Rounders performed and handed purple hits of LSD to guests as they entered.

A year later, shortly after the couple had their first child, Mr. Shepard was playing drums with the band on Bleecker Street, when a journalist came backstage to interview them. The journalist was Patti Smith. “She went straight to Sam, and they went straight to the Chelsea,” Mr. Stampfel said.

Their public affair, loosely echoed in a play they wrote together, “Cowboy Mouth,” lasted until Mr. Shepard and his wife reconciled and before long left New York for London and Nova Scotia.

Michael Feingold in the Village Voice, “…my longtime acquaintance, Sam Shepard, the playwright, that quirky constructor of hypnotically fascinating plays, who had really wanted to be a rock drummer and had somehow settled for being a world-class movie star instead, while continuing to turn out quirky, fascinating plays.”

 

His name and image earned widespread recognition via film, including his Oscar-nominated turn as U.S. Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager, pictured together, in 1983’s The Right Stuff.

[The movie]“extended the idea of the end of the West into the mid-20th century and showed it playing out through the space program, the media, and the characters’ personalities,” writes B. J. Bethel at RogerEbert.com. “Shepard’s Yeager was the heart of it all. The character didn’t change, but the world around him did.”

 

The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, “the film role most emblematic of this taciturn neo-Gary Cooper was his first major screen appearance, as the wealthy Texas Panhandle farmer drawn into a deadly romantic triangle in Terrence Malick’s haunting 1978 evocation of early 20th-century American life, Days of Heaven. . . . While the celebrated visuals of that film evoke the painters Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, its magic-hour shots of Shepard amid sprawling wheat fields—a solitary figure with an unforgiving gaze—could just as well be lifted from the playwright’s own singular body of work.”

“The effectiveness of Shepard’s performance is doubly impressive considering his near-total lack of dialogue,” writes Adam Nayman at the Ringer. “Although he was only six years older than Gere, Shepard evinces the fatigue and sadness of a man several decades his senior.

---

 

Joe Leydon reminds us that Shepard “couldn’t claim actual Western roots. But the minor detail of his being born (on November 5, 1943) in Sheridan, Illinois, mattered very little to his many fans and admirers. . . . Whether it was a frontier lawman who needs a shot at redemption in Purgatory (1999), a former Texas Ranger who reluctantly joins a manhunt in Streets of Laredo (1995), or a burnt-out western movie star who wants to repair frayed family ties in Wim Wenders’s Don’t Come Knocking (2005), Shepard effortlessly conveyed the authority and authenticity that audiences traditionally associate with the strong-and-silent icons who gallop through our collective pop culture consciousness. In recent years Shepard appeared in the Netflix series, Bloodline.”

 
For Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, the “supreme, and crowning, irony” is “that Shepard had found stardom and glory by portraying, in effect, the living incarnation of the core American values that his stage plays . . . said, in one way or another, had all gone up in smoke. He was playing the soul of an America that no longer existed. Yet he played it so slyly, with such stirring conviction and understatement, that it’s as if he marked the moment when the longing for those values—the ones shredded by the counterculture—began to make a comeback.”

 
In 2014, writing for Esquire, Nick Schager wrote that Shepard was “something like an archetypal personification of manliness: tall, rugged, handsome, and possessed with a mixture of take-no-shit candor, volatile tempestuousness, and disarming sincerity and compassion.

 

Sam Shepard adjusts his sunglasses as he arrives for the screening of the movie The Assasination of Jessie James by the coward Robert Ford during the 64th Venice International Film Festival in September 2007.

“Simply by showing up and inhabiting the frame for a few minutes, Shepard could inject a picture with some essential quality that it needed—gravitas, world-weary intelligence, the weight of lived experience.” Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times: “If a picture needed to assure you of its down-home roots or its western bonafides, there was no better resource than Shepard—even when he barely seemed to last beyond the opening credits, as when he played Jesse James’s older brother in the early train-robbery scenes of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007).
—-
“Shepard wrote the screenplays for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, and Robert Altman’s Fool For Love, a film version of his play of the same title,” writes Elbert Wyche for Screen. “As a writer-director, he filmed Far North and Silent Tongue in 1988 and 1992, respectively.

Later in life, he had a nearly 30 year relationship with Jessica Lange, whom he met when he collaborated with her on 1982 movie Frances. They separated in 2009.

Black Hawk Down (2004)
His almond-shaped blue eyes looked out at the world with wry detachment; they imposed on his passionate nature a mask of cool. . . . Years of living with invasive family aggression—‘The male influences around me were primarily alcoholics and extremely violent,’ he said—had taught Shepard to play things close to his chest: to look and to listen… Shepard was a man of few words, many of them mumbled. Compelling to look at but hard to read—at once intellectually savvy and emotionally guarded—he exuded the solitude and the vagueness of the American West.”

 In Michiko Kakutani’s 1984 interview with Shepard, she noted that he’d “created a fictional world populated by cowboys and gunslingers, ranchers and desperadoes, but these characters all find that the myths they were raised on somehow no longer apply. Eddie the wrangler-hero of Fool for Love . . . finds that he has nothing better to lasso than the bedposts in a squalid motel room. The Hollywood hustlers in Angel City look out their window and see not the fertile valleys of the Promised Land, but a smoggy city of used-car lots and shopping centers—a city waiting for apocalypse. And the old-time outlaws, who pay a visit to the present in The Unseen Hand, discover that there are no more trains to rob, that there is no place for heroics, that it is no longer even possible to tell the good guys from the bad.”                                         

WHITE WORKING CLASS: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

A yard sign near Pine Grove, W.Va., touts the belief that President Trump is supportive of the coal industry. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

WHITE WORKING CLASS: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

By Joan C. Williams

Harvard Business Review Press. 180 pp. $22.99

 

“White Working Class” by law professor Joan C. Williams is more an effort to puncture the foibles and misperceptions of upper-class liberals than an attempt to get to know the people her book title comprises…..Why don’t they push their kids harder to succeed and go to college? Shouldn’t they move for better jobs? Why do they resent government benefits? Aren’t they just racist? Sexist? And why do they dislike us so much, even while admiring gauche plutocrats such as President Trump?

 

Those questions are of recent vintage, Williams notes, because for a long time left-leaning elites were concerned with just about everyone except the white working class. “During an era when wealthy white Americans have learned to sympathetically imagine the lives of the poor, people of color, and LGBTQ people,” she writes, “the white working class has been insulted or ignored.” She accuses her tribe of “class cluelessness — and in some cases, even class callousness.”

 

One of the strengths of Williams’s book is the author’s willingness to call out such callousness and hypocrisy among her fellow travelers. One of its weaknesses is her reluctance to call out Trump voters for much of anything.

 

Williams’s working-class America excludes the poor. In fact, the white working class often begrudges government efforts to help the poor. Williams writes, “when such programs are limited to those below a certain income level [and] . . .  exclude those just a notch above, [we have] a recipe for class conflict…because the white working class resents programs for the poor, to the extent that benefit cuts target the poor, that’s attractive. To the extent that tax cuts for the rich hold the promise of jobs, that’s attractive, too.”

 

The working class’s simultaneous fascination with the ultra-wealthy and disdain for the professional class is not only about trickle-down fantasies — it’s about proximity. “Most working-class people have little contact with the truly rich,” Williams explains, “but they suffer class affronts from professionals every day: the doctor who unthinkingly patronizes the medical technician, the harried office worker who treats the security guard as invisible, the overbooked business traveler who snaps at the TSA agent.”

Williams chastises the professional-managerial elite, or PME, for the sort of thoughtless and condescending behavior that breeds animosity among the white working class, or WWC, as she dubbed it in the post-election Harvard Business Review essay that inspired this book . The president, for one, knows better. “Brashly wealthy celebrities epitomize the fantasy of being wildly rich while losing none of your working-class cred,” Williams writes. “Trump epitomizes this.”

 

Williams argues. Working-class families may not choose to relocate for a job because they care more about their community ties. They may worry about tuition debt and see college as a risky investment. They may prioritize stability and dependability over “disruption” because in working-class jobs, disruption “just gets you fired,” Williams writes. And they may cling to religion because “for many in the working class, churches provide the kind of mental exercise, stability, hopefulness, future orientation, impulse control, and social safety net many in the professional elite get from their families, their career potential, their therapists, and their bank accounts.”

 

“Gender does not necessarily bind women together across social class,” Williams writes, noting that for many working-class women, there is little to be gained by “giving privileged women access to the high-level jobs now held almost exclusively by privileged men.” Constantly invoking that highest and hardest glass ceiling was, Williams concludes, a “class-clueless metaphor.”

 

When discussing racial attitudes, Williams is quick to stress that those lofty liberals are as bad as anyone else. “Among the professional elite, where the coin of the realm is merit, people of color are constructed as lacking in merit,” she writes. “Among the white working class, where the coin of the realm is morality, people of color are constructed as lacking in that quality.”

 

Williams chastises white elites for always seeking out “structural factors” to explain the conditions of the poor while denying the working class similar generosity. “When it comes to working-class whites,” she complains, “social structure evaporates.” This is a compelling point.

 

Williams’s book is a quick read and a good-faith effort at cultural and class introspection. I wish it ranged more widely beyond the themes the author raised…. In particular, I’d want to know how zealously we need to focus on that first “W” in the WWC.  At times, the author cites the experiences of working-class Latino families to buttress her points, and she notes that working-class black Americans hold many attitudes in common with blue-collar white Americans regarding work, personal responsibility and integrity. Class, more than race, is Williams’s crucial divide.

In Trump Country, Russia Just Isn’t Big News. But the Opening of a New Dollar General Is. Here’s Why.

[Not everyone who voted for Trump is a racist. Some Americans in the middle of the country may have just wanted a little respect from those Eastern elites and those college graduates in the big cities. Trump, of course, doesn’t have a clue about how they live and cares even less. But he never talked down to them, and that can go a long way. Are you listening, Democrats?–Esco]

As of August 2017, Dollar General operated over 13,000 stores in all U.S. states except: Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Wyoming.Since 1993 Dollar General has provided funding of literacy and education programs through its subsidiary Dollar General Literacy Foundation. It has awarded over $135 million in grants to nonprofit organizations as of July 2017. [ Wikipedia ]

WASHINGTON POST

Gary Abernathy July 21

Gary Abernathy is publisher and editor of the (Hillsboro, Ohio) Times-Gazette.

 HILLSBORO, Ohio

…maybe I can explain a little more about small-town newspapers — which I have often said are the last newspapers practicing old-school, non-sensationalized journalism — and in so doing perhaps help the head-scratchers better understand Trump country.

 

One particular response to my op-ed, summarizing probably hundreds of others, surmised that for newspapers like ours, the “biggest news is a new Dollar Store opening and the most column-inches are taken up by the crime report and obituaries. So sad.”

I laughed, in part because the comment hit close to home. In fact, we have done stories on dollar-store openings. In some tiny communities in southern Ohio, the opening of a dollar store is real news because it means that local residents no longer have to drive 30 minutes or more to buy some important household and grocery items. [Italics and bold print by Esco]

The reality of life in rural flyover country is lost on those who mock us. These are the places where Donald Trump won the presidency, where people know they are ridiculed by East and West Coast elitists who have little understanding of the meaningful issues — the real news — that affect their lives. Trump identified a common enemy when he took on the media elite, and rural America flocked to his side.

A recent Reuters article on the lack of concern across southern Ohio about the Trump-Russia controversy identified three people at a restaurant in Jackson, Ohio — an hour from Hillsboro — who, when asked about the brouhaha, “stared back blankly.” One of them replied, “I have never heard anything about it.”

How could this be? One reason might be that they have more important things to do than sit glued to cable news. But in addition to the scarcity of grocery choices in some areas, broadband Internet has yet to reach many parts of southern Ohio. One government initiative with wide public support in Trump country is an effort to expand broadband access to more rural residents.

To this day, rural America continues to be portrayed in major media, both news and entertainment, as backward and uneducated. The media often reports that Trump won a majority of voters without college degrees, which is taken by Trump supporters as just a nicer way of being called stupid.

Many people in rural America ply their trades quite successfully without a framed degree in sight. Considered uneducated by the mainstream media, many make more money through farming and various trade skills than most college graduates, [By Esco again] and the news that matters to them most is the weather forecast.

Small-town newspapers report hard news and local political controversies. They do investigative reporting and in-depth analysis. They win awards from the Associated Press and other media organizations for their efforts.

But, yes, small-town papers also do stories on dollar-store openings, because sometimes their presence as the only store in town is real news that will affect lives. They do stories on a new doctor coming to town because it often means that specialized treatment will be offered for the first time, which is real news for patients who no longer have to travel to faraway cities.

They feature stories on school bus route changes, real news to parents who might have to get up an hour earlier or make new child-care arrangements. [Italics and bold print by Esco] They do features on World War II veterans to honor past generations, and they do features on the achievements of youngsters in 4-H to encourage future generations.

This is the America that Trump embraced. The media’s Russia fixation may not be fake news in the way that Trump uses the phrase. But for millions of Americans, Trump’s claim strikes a chord because the Russia hysteria is not real news, either, not compared with the issues that impact their daily lives.

And when someone tells them they should care more deeply about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer, yes, sometimes they will just shake their heads and stare back blankly.