Search Results for: NPR

How the Shock Jock Became the Outrage Jock

Ben Hider / Invision / AP, Jeff Chiu / AP, Charles Dharapak / AP

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,111 words)

In the past, the bow tie seemed to hold him together, kind of. Tucker Carlson had always been as red-faced and obstreperous as so many other conservative pundits, but he had never been known to be “cunty” or “faggot”-level offensive. Still, it wasn’t much of a shock earlier this week when progressive watchdog Media Matters unearthed him spouting slurs like that — a couple of racist remarks rounded out the misogyny and homophobia — during a series of appearances on Bubba the Love Sponge Clem’s radio show between 2006 and 2011. From Monday to Tuesday, after the first recordings surfaced, Tucker Carlson Tonight hemorrhaged almost half its advertisers.

That bow tie had been a flourish of propriety: a strip of cloth separating him from a loudmouth like Howard Stern, the “shock jock” who looks and acts like a dollar store rock star, grabbing his crotch for whoever will listen. But he dropped it the year he appeared on that radio show. It was Stern who hired Bubba the Love Sponge Clem (yes, that’s his legal name) in the mid-2000s to host a show on his second satellite radio channel, and it was on that show that Carlson crossed the line. That was where the shock jock and the political commentator proved that they were one and the same — the former played off conservatism, the latter played it up, but both relied on its foundation. “Well, you’re talking about God and illegals,” Carlson told Clem. “I thought we were just going to be talking about blow jobs.”

But what’s the difference, really? Blow jobs were once used for shock value. Now it’s “illegals.” The punch line being that neither one of them is transgressive in the end.

* * *

No one used the words shock jock for Joe Pyne, the host of It’s Your Nickel (that’s a reference to pay phones, kids, and I’m including myself here) who pioneered in-your-face talk radio in the ’50s and went on to create TV’s The Joe Pyne Show, which sometimes devolved into actual physical altercations between him and guest. No one really knew what to make of him. His unconventional style — dressed-up to dress down “pinkos” and “women’s libbers” and riff on, rather than read, reports — was neither news nor entertainment. It seemed to be best described (well, The New York Times and Time both did anyway) as an “electronic peepshow.” The personality-free press of the time considered Walter Cronkite the most trusted man in America and Johnny Carson the funniest, but Pyne, with his syndicated show on more than 200 radio outlets, was the most Machiavellian. “When it comes to manipulating media,” Icons of Talk author Donna Halper told Smithsonian Magazine, “he was the father of them all.”

Pyne briefly descended from his soapbox in the mid-’60s — for a week’s “vacation” — after bringing a gun to his show during the Watts riots, suggesting the world wasn’t quite yet ready for his kind of conservative appeal. It took until the mid-’80s, when the FCC was no longer so hard-assed and political correctness was all the rage, for Howard Stern to turn the shock jock into a thing. The idea was that PC America was muting real America, and personalities like his were there to liberate our ids … usually on the way to work. “They were pushing the limits of what you could hear on the public airwaves,” TALKERS Magazine publisher Michael Harrison told Thrillist of mavericks like Pyne and Don Imus, who set the stage for Stern. “That was the key to the whole thing: that it was on the ‘sacred public airwaves.’”

Full disclosure: I have always hated Howard Stern. His banality offends me: “The closest I came to making love to a black woman was I masturbated to a picture of Aunt Jemima on a pancake box” — that’s the kind of joke he makes. It’s the sort of quip that leaves a dumb bro stuck in 1992 in stitches. To be offensive your words have to have power, and his … don’t. He swears a lot and cajoles his guests into talking about fucking and snorting and it’s all very Free Speech, Motherfuckers! He can be sexist and racist and classist, because, hey! He’s sexist about men too! He’s racist to everyone! He drags every class!

Sorry, I just fell asleep.

The rebellion is a pose, because at the heart of Stern and all the other shock jocks is conservatism — 2.1 kids, strong moral fiber. They can joke about fucking and inhaling, because they ostensibly aren’t doing either. So what positions itself against PC America, in fact, at its core, feeds into it — the conservatism is the rebellion. Knowing that, you can see how Don Imus calling the members of Rutgers’ women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos” can happen as late as 2007 on his radio show Imus in the Morning (he was fired by CBS and NBC, then hired by ABC). As David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker 10 years before Imus’s offense, personalities like Stern and Mancow Muller and Opie and Anthony appeal to the “audience that feels put upon by a new set of rules — sexual harassment guidelines, the taboo against certain kinds of speech — and wants release, if only in the privacy of the drive to work.”

The audience meaning white heterosexual men. The shock jock industry itself is predominantly white men (Stern’s foil, Robin Quivers, is a black woman, but she has never been the star attraction). Which is not to say that women can’t be as “offensive,” it’s just that the people in charge of hiring them would prefer them to be barefoot and pregnant. There are shockingly few exceptions. Wendy Williams, who rode the wave of ’90s hip-hop and shamelessly confronted celebrities like Whitney Houston with tabloid gossip (she also had a bad habit of trying to out rappers) was christened by New York magazine in 2005 as the “shock jockette.” She was “the black Howard Stern” right down to the middle-class moralism. Other than Williams, the female media personalities who cause offense — Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham — tend toward conservative commentary, presumably because the men on the top floor think they will be less likely to break a nail in those environs. “The complaints of Western feminists look like petty self-absorption when you line them up against human rights abuses in Third World military dictatorships,” is a thing Ingraham came up with — a misogynistic comment cloaked in doublespeak.

This genre of radio personality was dubbed by my colleague Ethan Chiel as the “outrage jock,” the political version of a culture and entertainment-aligned predecessor, who arose in the late 1980s after the FCC regulations on political talk became less clear. This is where a bow tie comes in handy. The outrage jocks market themselves as transgressive, but instead of fighting conservative America, they uphold it, a stance they brand subversive in a sea of progressive liberal media. Rush Limbaugh, who has the most popular talk radio show in America — 15.5 million listeners, according to Talk Magazine — was dubbed by National Review as the “Leader of the Opposition” back in the ’90s. “Rush took radio at a time when the norm was basically NPR. He comes into that church and blows it up,” radio host John Ziegler told The Washington Post in 2015. “Our presidential politics have become a kind of church. The media says, ‘You’re not allowed to say this, or this, or that, because we’re in church.’ People are sick of that.”

So: Stern 2.0, except instead of shouting about pussy, Limbaugh — not to mention Glenn Beck and Michael Savage — shouts about policy. You may remember him calling women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke a “slut” in 2012 for advocating for contraceptive insurance coverage. “She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception,” said the man who has been married four times. “She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.”

Limbaugh needs a brushup on his sex work nomenclature, among other things. But if you want to talk about pimp: Janet Jackson’s nipple ultimately killed the shock jock. In case you aren’t old, it happened during a performance of “Rock Your Body” at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show in 2004, when Justin Timberlake tore off the right cup of Jackson’s bustier, exposing her breast. (Per Jackson, the red bra underneath the rubber was supposed to stay behind, but came away accidentally.) In response, more than 500,000 complaints, all of them from people presumably with nipples of their own, were reportedly lodged with the FCC. President Bush responded two years later by signing the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which raised the penalty for broadcasting “indecency” tenfold. With that, Howard Stern fucked off to satellite radio and the rest of the shock jocks kind of followed suit. Tucker Carlson was what was left behind.

* * *

“Does she have a good body? No. Does she have a fat ass? Absolutely.” Tucker Carlson did not say that. That was Donald Trump in 2013 talking to Howard Stern about a pregnant Kim Kardashian in a radio show appearance that reemerged during his election campaign. On the same show, across almost two decades, the future president also agreed that his daughter was “a piece of ass” and dismissed flat-chested women and women over 35 (thank God). For all his work to divide the nation, Trump had a big hand in bringing shock and outrage jocks together, dissolving any sort of wall (!) between them. “If the political class is appalled by the notion that anything from the morass of ’90s shock-jock radio could become part of a presidential race,” wrote Virginia Heffernan in Politico in 2016, “it may be just as surprising to Stern’s fans, who proudly embraced the outsider-ness of a guy who couldn’t seem further from inside-the-Beltway political chatter.” TALKERS’s Harrison has called Trump “the first shock-politician.”

By the time Trump entered politics, shock jocks were no longer defining the culture and conservative commentators were filling the vacuum. They entered the mainstream on networks like Fox and the intellectual dark web via Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin. “The shock jocks weren’t defeated,” wrote Dan Jackson at Thrillist. “They went viral.” This is where Tucker Carlson fits in. He called his resurfaced xenophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic comments from Bubba the Love Sponge’s show (he described women as “extremely primitive,” supported child rapist Warren Jeffs, and compared the behavior of Muslims to animals) “naughty,” then equated contrition with betrayal. “We’ve always apologized when we’re wrong and will continue to do that,” he said on Tucker Carlson Tonight Monday. “That’s what decent people do; they apologize. But we will never bow to the mob.”

Almost 70 years after the first shock jock hit the air, Carlson was toeing the same party line as his predecessors. “They claim that they’re just entertainers and yet they deliver this toxic mix of pseudo journalism, misinformation, hate-filled speech, jokes,” Rory O’Connor, author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio, told The Guardian in 2009. “It’s all bound together so when it’s convenient for them to be entertainers they say, hey, it’s all just a joke. But when it’s not, they say they’re giving you information that you need.” Carlson’s comments were only shocking because they veered so sharply away from Beltway politics; with his regressive approach no longer couched in policy, they revealed him for the person he is. And even though advertisers have pulled out of his program, the notion that he could disappear like Stern is one from another time — conservatism is the status quo and there’s always room for it now, particularly when it masquerades as information rather than entertainment.

After Megyn Kelly left Fox, Tucker Carlson took her spot, and if Carlson were removed, a new version of him would sprout in his place. This whack-a-mole quality to outrage jocks extends, more troublingly, to their politics — if they are not outraged about one thing, they will immediately find another. They are as adaptive as comedians like Stern, use facts as props to play journalists like Cronkite, and influence voting and policy just as seriously. As Jon Stewart scolded Carlson and his cohost in 2004 on the CNN show Crossfire: “You’re doing theater, when you should be doing debate.” And without the FCC to shut them down for good, or at least out them as entertainers, the only hope is that their audience will realize that the most transgressive thing to do is to stop listening.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Women and Pain: A Reading List

Getty Images

“But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted — beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.”

–Virginia Woolf, The Waves

In a recent NPR piece, “Invisibilia: For Some Teens With Debilitating Pain, The Treatment Is More Pain,” readers are introduced to Devyn, a 14-year-old who develops intense bodily pain, seemingly out of nowhere. In search of the source of the pain or a cure, Devyn’s mother Sheila takes her to doctor after doctor. Each time, medical professionals tell Devyn, “‘You are healthy. Nothing is wrong,’” until, eight months later, when Sheila finds Dr. Sherry, a man responsible for a highly controversial treatment for pain: inflicting more pain.

As reported in the NPR piece, patients of Dr. Sherry’s “do physical workouts five to six hours a day.” All medicine, “even medication for apparently unrelated problems” is taken from patients. When Devyn experiences an asthma attack on the first day of practice, she is “directed…to simply walk around the gym” rather than take her inhaler.

At the end of the piece, Devyn claims to have been cured by Dr. Sherry’s program — she “even went back to dancing.” But for many readers, the essay was infuriating, unethical even. Maya Dusenbery, author of Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick, called the piece “irresponsible” and generated a list of 12 questions that journalists should have asked experts, including “An asthma attack and a nosebleed are not pain complaints. What possible justification was there to ignore these problems in Devyn?”

Abby Norman, author of Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain, tweeted that while she hadn’t been a patient of Dr. Sherry, she had tried swapping “one pain for another more intentional pain” and “just ended up with twice as much pain and a deep feeling of failure and shame that I couldn’t get ‘better’ and ‘beat it’ and ‘be normal.’” Norman is not alone in the ways she tried to ignore pain rather than accepting and learning to live with high levels of physical discomfort. Women’s symptoms — particularly pain, which is invisible — are often dismissed, disbelieved or diminished by doctors. Even when women do voice what’s happening with their bodies, they often do not receive treatment or even an acknowledgment of what’s ailing them.

Norman, in response to a series of questions I asked her about pain, wrote that she received pressure from “everywhere — doctors, friends and family, society” that “if you aren’t actively trying to get better, you’re wrong. If you aren’t making strides at getting well, you’re wrong. If you’re failing, if you stay sick, if your pain is still there, not only have you failed but you must want to be this way. Maybe you’re even faking it. Or making it worse than it really is.”

Women, in particular, are subject to this type of blame from doctors and others. As Norman notes, “on a sociocultural level, there are a lot of messages specifically undermining a woman’s interpretation of her own mind, body, and experiences. Not just in terms of physical pain, either. Where it becomes difficult (and in some cases life-threatening) is that the overarching patriarchal structures under which healthcare systems of the world operate, the very long history of misogyny in the medical profession and in our culture at large, vigorously and consistently reinforces these messages.”

Knowing this, how do we begin to change the narrative of how women’s pain is perceived, understood, and treated? How might we validate the experiences of women who have been repeatedly and systematically ignored, dismissed, and blamed by medical professionals and society at large? How do we treat pain without inflicting further physical and emotional harm?

I don’t think there are easy answers, but we can work to support initiatives dedicated to create lasting change to correct data that demonstrates the pain of women — affected even further by factors such as race, class, and weight — is routinely disbelieved by medical professionals. We can examine the language used to express and treat women’s pain, and work to find a vocabulary that allows us to rewrite the current narrative. We can listen carefully to women with histories of pain who write or speak about their experiences and heed their calls to action.

1. The Long History of Discrimination in Pain Medicine (Sarah Zhang, February 28, 2017, The Atlantic)

“The emergence of objectivity influenced the stigma around patients who suffered from pain without visible injury—and this stigma ends up overlapping with stigma that already exist along race, gender, and class lines.”

According to bioethicist Daniel Goldberg, author of a recent paper, “Pain, objectivity and history: understanding pain stigma,” the 19th century brought new instruments like the X-ray, which allowed for an “objective” means of understanding previously unseen pain, and these developments forced a reckoning with the way doctors had previously understood patients and the body. Sandra Zhang interviews Goldberg in order to learn more about how histories of racism, sexism, and classism have influenced the way doctors treat patients today.

2. I’m a fat Black femme searching for a doctor who believes my pain (Dominique Norman, January 24, 2019, Hello Giggles)

“I’m Black, fat, and femme, living with a chronic physical illness and mental illnesses. I can tell you that self-advocacy in doctor’s offices is incredibly difficult when no one will listen to you.”

Histories of racist practices in medicine such as the Tuskegee experiment or cells taken from Henrietta Lacks without her consent have left lasting negative impacts on the way black women are treated by medical professionals today, as Dominique Norman explains in her personal essay about being disbelieved and dismissed by a variety of doctors for years on end.

3. Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain (Leslie Jamison, Spring 2014, Virginia Quarterly Review)

“The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.”

How can we talk about women’s pain in a way that is true to their experience? What kind of pain is perceived as “real” and what kind is seen as a cry for attention? How can women write about their pain without adding to a history of narratives that have glamorized “wounded women”? By analyzing representations of women’s pain in art and literature, Leslie Jamison asks — and seeks to answer — these questions and more.

(Related: read “Writing Women’s Pain: Part Two of a Round Table, a conversation with Alethea Black, Abby Norman, Esme Weijun Wang, and more,” November 2018, 2018, Lit Hub)

4. Nothing Protects Black Women From Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth (Nina Martin, ProPublica, and Renee Montagne, December 7, 2017, ProPublica and NPR)

Shalon Irving, who earned a dual-subject Ph.D. and worked to “eradicate disparities in health access and outcomes,” passed away at the age of 36, just three weeks after giving birth to her first child. As Nina Martin and Renee Montagne report, Irving’s death is representative of a much larger issue: black women are “243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes.”

“Black expectant and new mothers frequently told us that doctors and nurses didn’t take their pain seriously — a phenomenon borne out by numerous studies that show pain is often undertreated in black patients for conditions from appendicitis to cancer.”

5. Pain bias: The health inequality rarely discussed (Jennifer Billock, May 22, 2018, BBC)

As happens to many women who have valid symptoms, Jennifer Billock was told by her doctor that she was “paying too much attention” to her body — he recommended she go home and relax.

“I still left his office thinking it was perhaps anxiety. And so, listening to the advice, I tried to ignore the pain.”

Billock explores the numerous ways in which women’s pain is dismissed and discredited throughout this piece, and also why.

6. It’s All In Your Head: The Dangers of Disbelieving Female Pain (Caroline Reilly, July 6, 2016, Bitch Magazine)

Caroline Reilly feels a sense of relief when she wakes from surgery and a medical professional tells her they “found a lot” of endometriosis within her. Her pain, previously disbelieved, was now validated by a name. Reilly, through research studies and personal experience, advocates for women’s pain to be legitimized.

“The disbelief of female pain is well documented. “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain,” a 2001 study in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, documents how women are given less pain medications than men for the same procedures. On the other hand, the study notes that women are more likely to be given sedatives—as women are more often perceived as anxious than in pain. Women also wait longer than men in emergency rooms.”

7. Black Health Matters (Jenna Wortham, August 27, 2016, The New York Times)

“In April, a study by researchers at the University of Virginia found that African-American patients were routinely undertreated for their pain, compared with white patients. Ultimately, black patients were conditioned to underestimate their own pain.”

Plagued by a mysterious rash and other health concerns, Jenna Wortham visits several doctors and an emergency room before her acupuncturist asks if her condition might be related to stress. Upon reflecting on the overwhelming trauma she encounters daily in her newsfeed, Wortham discovers Simone Leigh, “a renowned artist with a history of examining social movements and black subjectivities, with a focus on women,” and works to “deal with the psychological toll of racism” through practices such as yoga and acupuncture.

8. Treating Migraines: How Women are Harmed by Gendered Medical Language (Rachel Mabe, February 6, 2018, Catapult)

“So the question is: Does the stigma of migraines as a women’s disease, and the stereotypically feminine language still used to talk about them, affect patient treatment? Does it affect how much time and money are spent on studying migraines?”

Rachel Mabe seeks to answer these questions by sharing the story of Patty, a woman who experiences “twenty-two headache days a month,” analyzing words such as “oversensitive” used to describe women’s migraines, writing about her own experience with incapacitating headaches, and examining how the gender biases present within the history of language related to migraines has contributed to the way migraines remain understudied.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

America’s Post-Frontier Hangover

'American Progress' (1872), by John Gast, depicts settlers moving west, guided and protected by a goddess-like figure and aided by technology (railways, telegraphs), driving Native Americans and bison into obscurity. (Fotosearch / Stringer/Getty)

Will Meyer | Longreads | March 2019 | 17 minutes (4,498 words)

In the small New England town where I live, Hadley, Massachusetts, the common lies a few miles from the mishmash of corporate chains that make up the town’s economic center. A quiet residential neighborhood surrounds the common. It is a grassy patch, left vacant most of the year, save for occasional festivals and craft fairs; open space to be utilized as needed, hardly disturbed otherwise. Adjacent to the college towns of Northampton and Amherst, not much happens in Hadley. I go for walks around my neighborhood most days and seldom run into many people. The common feels like an oasis, a fleeting yet contained sliver of vastness.

In 1995, the Hadley Historical Commission installed a plaque on the side of a rock, near the end of the common, between where it meets the main road and a paved rail trail. The plaque commemorates the “17th Century Palisade,” a wall that was “3 fingers thick and 8 feet high” in 1676, 100 years before the American revolution. The “fortification,” the plaque states, “was one mile long by 40 rods wide.” Most saliently, however, “Hadley was then a frontier outpost which felt threatened by Native American attack.” In other words, the settlers built a wall (around the corner from where I live now) both to assert their settlement and ward off perceived threats — namely the brown-skinned Other the United States was founded, at least partially, to pacify and remove. Read more…

Jill the Ripper

Illustration by Lily Padula

Tori Telfer | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,226 words)

Before the Zodiac Killer named himself, before someone strangled poor JonBenét, before the Black Dahlia was sliced open, and before Tupac and Biggie were shot six months apart under eerily similar circumstances, someone was slinking through the slums of London, killing women.

This someone — a shadowy aichmomaniac, possibly wearing a bloody apron — left the women of the Whitechapel district in shocking disarray. Their intestines were thrown over their shoulders; cultish markings were carved into their cheeks. One of them was found without her heart. To most people who saw the crime scenes or read the papers, everything about this appeared to be the work of a man — the brutality, the strength, the misogyny. And so in 1888, when people started looking for the Ripper, they were looking for…well, for a Jack. Was he a mad doctor? A butcher? Queen Victoria’s weak-minded son? Everyone in Whitechapel found themselves peering nervously into the fog, wondering which normal-looking male passerby was actually a maniac.

Everyone, that is, except for a few lone voices, suggesting something totally radical: what if they should actually be looking for a Jill? Read more…

After the Tsunami

Annykos / Getty

Matthew Komatsu | LongreadsMarch 2019 | 24 minutes (6,092 words)

This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center. 

Ichi (One)

Obā-san tasted ash. Yes: ash and dust. Her youngest son’s kanji and hiragana on paper could not assuage the bitter news the letter delivered: that her youngest son would not return from America to his hometown of Kesennuma, Japan. He would stay to marry the American woman who carried his child. Dishonor. Shame. Betrayal. And I was the ash she tasted: the end of the pure line of the Komatsu name. Nothing more than an accidental flutter in the brine of my mother’s womb.

My grandmother would not have considered this metaphor of the sea, despite the proximity of her home to it, the wind-borne scent of the waterfront fish market and processing plants mere blocks away, burbling down the streets, seeping through the window and door cracks of her home. And beyond, the vast blue-gray of the Pacific Ocean, heaving and rolling the life it contained. She would not have thought of the sea’s power to both create and destroy.

***

A soccer ball washes ashore on Middleton Island in the Gulf of Alaska. On it, handwritten script in permanent marker that identifies its origin as a grade school in Rikuzentakata, Japan, 30 minutes north of Kesennuma. Its owner, Misaki Murakami, survived the tsunami but his family lost their home. It is a personal effect recovered from his home. On one of the panels are kanji characters inscribed by a classmate that read Ganbatte. Good luck.

***

I can only imagine what changed Obā’s heart. Perhaps it was my grandfather. According to my father, Ojī was more sympathetic. It was Ojī who responded to my father’s letter to say that he understood. Or maybe the simple need of a grandparent to hold her grandchild eroded her pride. But these are all, in a way, little fictions: my American need to emote in conflict with a Japanese inclination to accept.

Regardless, Obā and Ojī came to the United States. I wonder what they thought when they held this chubby black-haired infant boy, whether they struggled to pronounce my English first name. What it felt like to stare into the deep, brown eyes of a grandchild whose blood ran mixed. Or if any of this mattered at all.

What I do know: When Ojī and Obā journeyed halfway across the globe to the unlikely destination of Duluth, Minnesota, they didn’t know my parents arranged to leave me with a family friend at the beginning of a cross-country road trip across America that doubled as both honeymoon and getting-to-know-the-in-laws. When Ojī said goodbye to me, he wept. It was the last time we were together and the only time my dad saw his own father cry. My grandfather died in Japan, in 1987.

The only Japanese uttered in my home was spoken into the telephone on holidays. On those days, I rushed to answer the phone in the hope of hearing the voices of my Japanese relatives. Moshi moshi, came the greeting. When I answered in English, the caller usually responded, Ahhhhh… Toshifumi-san?

Dad, for you.

If my mother answered, the single phrase she knew: Chōttō matte, kudasai. One moment, please. I would sit on the brown shag carpet speckled with gold and red and yellow, my back to the heat vent, shirt lifted so the hot air blew up my skin and ruffled the black hairs on my neck. The book on my lap stayed open to the same page as I listened to one half of a conversation, mouthed words whose accented syllables I will never utter with any meaning. A pause for the delay, then the muffled return. A smile, a laugh, an imperceptible head bow from my father.

***

A Canadian finds the rusted hulk of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle on the shores of British Columbia and traces its license plate to its owner, Ikuo Yokoyama. Photos of the bike reveal a year at sea: spokes rusting away and missing, corrosion widespread across a frame whose gleam has been replaced with a forlorn absorption of the light that reflects upon it. Yokoyama resists an outpouring of internet-fueled financial support to restore the bike and repatriate it. Instead he asks that it be preserved in a museum as is, a memorial to what was lost.

***

During a precious summer break from the Air Force Academy, I joined a family trip to Japan. Eager to show the Japanese I’d picked up over two years of college classes, I greeted Obā. My father told her that I knew Japanese now, that she should speak to me. We sat down in the living room of the small family home in Kesennuma. The air was heavy with the smell of the nearby ocean, mothballs, dust, and paper. But when she spoke, I could not understand.

***

Here is a list of Japanese words. Tsunami. Pronounced “tsoo-nah-mee.” Translation: “harbor wave.” E. Pronounced “a-ay.” Interrogative. Translation: “What?” Hayaku. Pronounced “hi-yah-koo.” Translation: “hurry.” Hashitte. Pronounced “hah-shht-ay.” Imperative. Translated to English: “Run.”

 

Ni (Two)

At 2:46 p.m. on Friday, 11 March 2011, a 100-mile-long section of the Pacific tectonic plate 19 miles deep thrusted beneath Japan. Richter scale needles twitched. Japan shifted eight feet east. The Earth shuddered off-axis. The seabed rose, lifting the ocean above it by 25 feet. All that water had to go somewhere. And it did — away, in a series of waves that raced west at 86 miles per hour. The tsunami made landfall roughly 45 minutes later on the shores of my father’s hometown of Kesennuma in northeast Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture.

My 11 March dawned no different than any other. I woke up and checked Facebook over coffee. My sister posted something about a big earthquake in Japan, but the family was fine. Big earthquake, Japan: happens all the time. I didn’t think much of it during the 45-minute drive from Columbia, South Carolina, to Shaw Air Force Base, NPR now revising the magnitude, the Richter climbing. I paid it no mind during my 12-mile run before work. It was spring in South Carolina, flowers opening under a rising sun, the air heavy with their dewy scent.

The tsunami made landfall on the shores of my father’s hometown of Kesennuma in northeast Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture.

It wasn’t until after I showered and changed into my uniform that the narrative unraveled. I turned on the car and the radio cascaded breaking news of a large tsunami in Japan. But even then, I did not think of the risk to my father’s hometown, a fishing city in northeastern Miyagi Prefecture directly in the tsunami’s path.

At work, I punched a code into a keypad and walked through a door into the cubicled space I shared with close to 50 other officers. The room was quiet, all eyes glued to the televisions on the wall. I looked over my shoulder and from the second floor of the Air Forces Central Command Headquarters, I watched 22,000 Japanese die.

***

In the years that follow 3/11, I will often open my laptop to type “Japan Tsunami” into a search engine. In a half second, tens of millions of results cascade down the screen, many of them videos.

***

No phones were allowed in my office. I left to use the bathroom, checked my phone: a missed call and a voicemail from my mother: Matt, call home. My gut twisted.

My mother answered. They were driving from their home, nestled in the green pines and gray popple outside Duluth, to an aunt who had cable. My parents had never paid for cable television — considering it either unaffordable or unnecessary. Now, for the first time in their lives, a luxury became a necessity. The internet was too slow; they needed to see.

Yes, I’ve seen the news, I said. But Lauren posted something on Facebook. Everyone is fine.

No. Uncle Kazafumi called from his office in Kesennuma — it lasted eight seconds — to say he was okay. Then the call ended.

And he tried to call him back?

Yes.

And?

Nothing. Dad can’t get a hold of him, or anyone else.

***

11 March passed. Friday. 12 and 13, Saturday and Sunday. Monday, 14 March. Still nothing. I watched the same scenes looping on the office televisions.

A coworker blurted, “I’m just waiting for some Japanese person to show up on the TV and yell, ‘Godzilla! Godzilla!’” Someone nearby laughed mirthlessly.

The morning of the 15 March, my youngest sister, Lydia, received the news from our cousin in Tokyo. She spoke no Japanese and his English was broken but somehow he conveyed the news.

My uncle and aunt had survived. Tokuno Komatsu, our grandmother, was dead.

***

Sendai, a city two hours south of Kesennuma: Empty cars wash across the airport tarmac. The reporter flying above an ocean-covered Minami-sanriku: Where have all the people gone? Rikuzentakata. Ōshima. Ishinomaki. Miyako. Natori. And finally, Kesennuma, now burning an orange horizon of flame into the black pall of night.

***

Ten days after the tsunami, I boarded a flight to Japan. The U.S. military mobilized a relief effort called Operation Tomodachi. Friend. I called in every favor I had to deploy as a Tomodachi rescue planning officer.

Before the flight, my father told me that he was proud that a member of the family would be in Japan to help. He asked what I’d be doing there, but I didn’t know. I told him I sold my language abilities hard, maybe oversold them. That I was worried. Don’t worry, he said. It will all come back.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


The flight from Dulles to Narita International Airport was all but empty. Once aboard, I reviewed old Japanese textbooks and watched Harry Potter once in English, then twice in Japanese. I tried to sleep, but nightmares woke me with linguistic versions of the naked dream: Me, aside the American general to whom I’ve been assigned as a translator. His Japanese counterpart speaks a torrent of Japanese, then pauses to look at me and await the translation. The American nods intently, casting ever-increasing looks my way. I recall one word in 10, try to divine meaning from inflection and posture. My mouth works, but the words do not come.

The bus ride from Narita to Yokota Air Base on the outskirts of Tokyo bore no witness to the quake and tsunami. No billboards hung precariously, no cracks split the roadways, and the lights were on. It was as if nothing happened at all. At Yokota, I disembarked to a cold, snowy night and entered a hangar to process into the Tomodachi task force. Airmen, clad in multiple layers, walked between different stations in the hangar, pausing at powered space heaters to warm themselves in the frigid night. I thought of the thousands of Japanese shoved into tiny makeshift evacuation centers. I imagined how they huddled, warmed only by blankets and each other.

***

Yokota fell away from my window of an Air Force HH-60G helicopter as it lifted off and flew east. I needed to see affected Japan for myself. It wasn’t until we were out over the ocean, flying outside an imaginary bubble around Fukushima that I did.

Rivers of debris from the tsunami appeared on the surface of the Pacific and streamed to the horizon, a flotsam road of shattered wood and plastic. We flew low, eyes out and scanning for life. The last survivor had been pulled from the water a week prior, but we hoped despite the odds, knowing we were far more likely to spot the dead.

A crew member saw something, and the helo banked hard. Over the intercom, he admitted it was probably nothing but worth investigating. Lower, slower, we orbited until the rotor wash beat the sea into mist over what turned out to be a white sheet rippling into the depths.

The farther from Japan, the larger the debris. Refrigerators and freezers. Orange tiled roofs bobbed in the blue and gray, impossibly buoyant. The wall of a home, the glass of a window somehow intact, offered a view into the saltwater beneath. All of it surrounded by a mass of splintered wood.

***

The shivering woke me again. I blinked into the darkness of the Sendai Airport first class lounge and pressed a button on my watch. 0300. I retreated further into the insulation of my puffy coat. Snores came from airmen off-shift from their post on the airport roof. Periodically throughout the night one would return and hand off a radio the size of two stacked laptops, then pop a sleeping pill while the other ran air traffic.

It was supposed to be a short visit, an hour or less. Just enough to make contact with the senior officer on the ground and determine what, if any, help I could provide as a planner. But the sound of the helicopter was only audible long enough to make radio contact with the airman on the roof: Tell Major Komatsu that we have to return to Yokota. We’ll be back when we can.

The cold shook me awake every 15 minutes until I stood up at 0600 and crept out of the dark room and into the daybreak of the terminal. Behind glass windows stories high, I wandered the vacant space, pausing at the vendor stands. The airmen were initially ordered not to take any food, but soon after they arrived, vendors themselves showed up and told them to take what they wished. The stacks of dried cuttlefish and shrimp-flavored crackers vanished, leaving only inscrutable books of manga and the assorted comforts required to heel the modern traveler. I lifted one of the books and perused a few of the oddly colored pages, taking in black and white lines of manga from back to front. I set it back in its place and looked out the glass.

Refrigerators and freezers. Orange tiled roofs bobbed in the blue and gray, impossibly buoyant.

In between the east end of the runway and the coast, a road once connected Kesennuma with Sendai; I’d made the drive twice during family trips. Now, I thought about packing my ruck, stuffing it with MREs and walking north, picking my way through the detritus until I reached my father’s hometown. My grandmother lay in the freezer of a morgue. The old family home, gone. Dozens of extended family — great uncles and third cousins and aunties once-removed — missing.

***

The morning of 27 March, I sat in my room back at Yokota alone after a run inside the confines of the base perimeter, under the pink-white beginnings of the cherry tree bloom washing the country from south to north. A rebirth of spring, of hope, of all things green and full of life.    

Three hundred miles away, my relatives cremated Ōba’s remains.

***

Our rescue helicopters and crews went home, the work of finding and extracting the living long over. Only the dead remained missing, and the Japanese government politely declined U.S. military support to the search. My job as a rescue planner turned to playing games of what if. What if an American aircraft transporting radiation measurement crews crashes inside the Fukushima no-fly zone? Who will rescue them and how will we coordinate between Japanese and American operations centers?

These questions could only be answered in conversation with my Japanese counterpart at the Japanese Rescue Coordination Center, located 53 minutes down the Ome train line, on Fuchu Air Base. When we met in the lobby of the Japanese Air Self Defense headquarters building, a fellow American officer acting as my linguist introduced Okahashi-san. We smiled and bowed, then he presented me with his meishi (business card) in the manner I learned in my sophomore Japanese class at the Academy: Both hands present, both receive. Study the card, then place it only in a chest pocket; never, ever in a disrespectful pants pocket.

Fatigue lined his face and eyes — Okahashi-san has worked twenty hours every day since the tsunami. Lt Col Okahashi said something, smiled and gestured toward an imaginary flat surface a few feet off the ground. He sleeps on a cot in the back of the Rescue Coordination Center.

As we ate pork katsu at the Japanese dining facility, I attempted Japanese the best I could. I explained my last name, and when I said Kesennuma, he said, haltingly, “Your daddy. From Kesennuma?” Yes, I said. He simply frowned, lowered his eyes, shook his head and said no more.

***

Cell phones document the tsunami’s arrival in Minami-sanriku from ground level. A woman’s voice reverberates across the town, alternating with sirens to warning the residents over a citywide loudspeaker system. Impossibly, it continues even as the tsunami piles into the streets and people scream to those who’ve not yet made it to high ground, continues even as the ocean continues its inexorable rise. Until it falls silent. And all that remains are the cries of the Japanese who have survived.

***

When I met my Japanese cousins for dinner, I’d been asking my father for weeks to arrange for me to visit Kesennuma at the end of my deployment. I missed my stop on the train from Yokota, had to double back at the next, then wait at the eki for the only cousin who spoke any English to walk from the restaurant. All around me, life streamed through automated ticketing gates amid the wall of sound that is a Tokyo train station during evening rush hour. And yet, not so far away, their countrymen were digging through rubble with their bare hands. Posting desperate signs for missing persons.

We did our best to converse around our sukiyaki. They showed me pictures from Kesennuma. The old family home, gone. My uncle’s two-story office, first floor hollowed by the tsunami. My uncle, passed out on his floor with an empty bottle of whiskey nearby. Uncle drink lot now.

When I asked my cousins about my request to visit Kesennuma, their eyes dropped and they picked at their food. Mizuki — the English speaker — pulled out his phone. We call your daddy. He dialed, spoke Japanese when my father answered. I could not interpret Mizuki’s body language. He handed me the phone. My father talked around the question — his mother’s death, the family shock, the loss of the business and deaths of two employees, the destruction, how his brother wouldn’t say no to my visit but wouldn’t say yes either — until I interrupted him.

“Dad, what’s the bottom line?”

“Culturally, they would lose face if they said no. But the timing is bad.”

“I’d be a burden.”

“Yes.”

“But I have to make the decision.”

“Yes. You will have to tell them you do not want to go.”

“OK, then. I’m not going.” I handed the phone back to my cousin, and the relief on his face told me everything I needed to know.

***

Of the 12 million tsunami videos, I will not watch them all. And yet it will be too much, as well as somehow not enough.

***

On my last day in Japan, I sat with the Air Force colonel who led my shift. He was a pilot without a cockpit anymore, his jet long mothballed. He’d flown a desk for years now, he said as he smiled and removed his glasses; this was his last hurrah. Then he asked about what drew me to volunteer for this. When I told him, he fell silent.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We should have found a way to get you to Kesennuma.” Then he handed me his card, thanked me for what I’d done, and I walked out of the operations center for the last time.

Before boarding the bus to Narita, I walked to a nearby cherry tree whose branches drooped under a blooming mantel. It stood above a patchwork of dirt and a browning white carpet of fallen blossoms. I found a living flower within reach and pinched its green stem, careful not to disrupt the delicate petals above it. Once free, I carried it two-handed; one pinching its base, the other cradling the bloom in my palm until I was back in my room. A book of devotions lay open on my desk, a gift from my parents. I placed the flower in the book, closed it.

 

San (Three)

 

2018. The shinkansen pitches us north from Tōkyō, picking up speed until the bullet train hits 200 mph and the endless series of the Tōhoku region’s ubiquitous rice paddies visible through my window blur green, flickering as dike-top roads come and go. I have returned to hear, yes, but also to touch. Taste, smell, and once again: see.   

We strategize. Three of us: my father, the linguist I’ve hired, and me. A cousin produced the name of the rest home where my grandmother perished: Shunpo. A classmate worked at Shunpo on 3/11, but my cousin is unwilling to connect us. So the linguist puts on her fixer hat and determines the former manager not only survived, but rebuilt Shunpo in a new location and now speaks internationally on tsunami readiness. It’s as good a lead on determining how my grandmother died as we’re going to get. Anticipation builds as we get off the bullet at Ichinoseki for the drive to Kesennuma until I’m straining against my seatbelt and we finally get where I could not go seven years ago.

I have returned to hear, yes, but also to touch. Taste, smell, and once again: see.

Kesennuma. No longer confined by glass or screen, I step from a cousin’s car in front of the vacant lot that was once 2-13-16 Nakamachi-cho. My father and he speak quietly in Japanese. The home I remember. His home. From where I stand, I could have reached over the street’s gutter and touched the house’s wall, perhaps taken in that odd mothball scent that seems to accompany my few memories of the texture of the place. But there is nothing but the tang of salt air in between me and the violet dusk of a sun long since set behind the hills of tall pine that mark Kesennuma’s western edge.

***

The tsunami is everywhere.

Blue placards on buildings show its maximum height with typical Japanese simplicity: a horizontal line and measurement in meters, in white lettering. Buildings still slated for demolition next to the orange-brown of cleared earth. Construction signs and workers and new roads unimpeded by human artifice. Signs along the sides of the road that undulates up and down through the endless series of ria (“bay”) that pocket the Sanriku coastline mark the tsunami’s maximum inundation points. Dystopian reconstructed landscapes behind massive seawalls that stretch across the horizon. The “Dragon Tree” of Kesennuma — a gnarled pine that survived the tsunami only to later die and be preserved where it stands on the cape of the Iwaisaki area of the city. The “Miracle Pine” of Rikuzentakata: the sole remaining tree of an estimated 70,000 that made up a coastal forest, eventually felled by the saltwater left in the ground by the tsunami, then preserved in detail at an estimated cost of 150 million yen (close to 2 million dollars based on the exchange rate at the time). O-tsunami, the survivors say, applying the honorific “o-” prefix because they cannot adequately capture in words a full integration of all senses. It roared. Smelled of salt. It burned, pulled, swept.

It was incomprehensible in a way that can only be assembled by a comprehension of  what it left behind.

***

We climb a path beneath old-growth pine and cedar until a panorama of the city reveals the tsunami’s reach, still clear, even now. Gray and green mark the untouched. Yellow earth, the scar of the destroyed, the still-being-rebuilt. My cousin guides my father and me to the family gravesite. A light breeze, cool with the ocean across my skin, the sound of traffic. The smell of needle and ocean. I grasp at the sensory through the mantle of jet lag and culture shock, hoping to hold on to this moment. My father stands in front of a polished granite marker, brings his palms together and lowers his head to offer a silent prayer.

It’s been a decade and a half since I last saw my Aunt Fumiko, but her face remains cherubic, her skin pale and smooth. She apologizes for not having the snack she recalls as a favorite: a mix of salted peanuts and chili-flavored rice cracker crescents. She looks thin but well. I show her pictures of my family. When I produce an app on my phone that lets her see my infant daughter at that very moment sleeping halfway around the globe, she smiles.

Kawaii, ne. So cute.

She tells me that the earthquake found her in the midst of shopping. When the world ceased shaking, she felt an overwhelming urge to immediately head home. Something horrible was going to happen. She followed her instinct and drove straight to the new house, three miles inland from the old one that no longer exists. Her son called at about 3:15 p.m. after seeing tsunami warnings on the news. Obā was at Shunpo, but my aunt thought it would be safe. It had two floors, a good flat roof, was a fair distance from the ocean. She worried about my uncle, whose office was on the downtown waterfront at the tip of Kesennuma Bay.

Read more…

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Pearls

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,107 words)

In The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, Katy Kelleher lays bare the dark underbellies of the things we adorn ourselves with. Previously: the grisly sides of perfume and angora.

* * *

“There was once upon a time a very old woman, who lived with her flock of geese in a waste place among the mountains, and there had a little house,” begins The Goose Girl at the Well. Published by the Brothers Grimm, this strange little story describes a princess who comes to live with a poor crone in that wretched waste place after she fails her father’s Lear-like test to profess her love and devotion. The girl is lovely, as befits a fairy-tale princess — “white as snow, as rosy as apple-blossom, and her hair as radiant as sun-beams” — but there is one detail that always snags in my mind: “When she cried, not tears fell from her eyes, but pearls and jewels only.”

The rest of the story is a bit boring, I’m sorry to say. The girl returns home, the king learns his folly, and the old woman disappears into thin air, taking only the precious stones that fell from the girl’s magical tear ducts. But it ends on a funny note:

This much is certain, that the old woman was no witch, as people thought, but a wise woman who meant well. Very likely it was she who, at the princess’s birth, gave her the gift of weeping pearls instead of tears. That does not happen now-a-days, or else the poor would soon become rich.

I wish Grimm’s narrator had lived to see our world, one where pearls are so inexpensive that almost anyone can own a pearl necklace or a set of earrings. These gemstones are no longer precious, and they come neither from red-rimmed eyes nor from secret caverns in the ocean, but from underwater baskets strung together on sprawling sea-farms. Pearls were once mystical objects, believed by some to be the tears of Eve, by others to be the tears of Aphrodite. There are stories of pearls falling out of women’s mouths when they utter sweet words, and pearls appearing from the spray of sea foam as a goddess is born. Now we know better: pearls are made from some of the basic and common building blocks of nature — calcium, carbon, oxygen, arranged into calcium carbonate particles, bund together by organic proteins. They are created out of animal pain, which has been sublimated into something iridescent and smooth, layered and lovely. Born of irritation, these gemstones can be mass-produced and purchased with the click of a button. These gems, like so many things, have lost some of their luster thanks to the everyday degradation of value that comes with globalization and 24/7 access to consumer goods. Thanks to Amazon, you no longer need to plumb the depths of a river or visit a jeweler to purchase a set of freshwater pearl drops. With one-click ordering, you can have a pair of dangling ivory orbs delivered to your house within days — in some places, hours..

And yet: imagine opening an oyster and seeing that slimy amorphous lump of muscle, and nestled among it, a single pearl. The fact that such iridescent, shape-shifting beauty can come from a mucus-y mollusk remains something of a miracle, primal evidence that the world orients itself toward beauty. Or so I want to believe.

Read more…

The Blaming of the Shrew

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,982 words)

 

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.

 
As night follows day, so must the announcement of a woman’s candidacy for high political office compel a verdict on her likability, a quality so ineffable that we can really only say we know it when we see it. And so rarely do we see it in people who aren’t men. Still, likability endures as our gold standard, our north star. Almost 20 years after Sam Adams polled voters on which candidate they would rather get a beer with, we are still obsessed with a candidate’s perceived likability and relatability, despite the fact that we now have the least conventionally likable or relatable president in history. This debating of female candidates’ likability while a man like Donald Trump occupies the Oval Office is confusing but it makes much more sense if you see the current political moment for what it is: our least compelling antihero show.

Whether the antihero show is in its twilight or we’re not quite ready to let it go, there is no doubt that it has been a huge cultural presence for the better part of two decades. As the proliferation of think-pieces around the 20th anniversary of The Sopranos premiere revealed that we’re still in the thrall of the show and the genre it spawned, it’s worth noting that the election of Donald Trump to the highest office in the land followed nearly two decades of tuning in to men who were supposed to be unlikable but whom we somehow liked enough to keep watching. Thinking about political likability and a world in which we say things like “President Trump” is kind of like looking at the wall of Homeland’s Carrie Mathison: it seems crazy but the connections are all there. And in this case, many of the threads lead back to television.

TV is a medium with a particular reliance on likability. Seeing a movie involves just one decision, but when we watch a TV show we must repeatedly make the choice to encounter its characters, tuning in week after week or, in the age of streaming, contributing to a show’s completion rate. When a show features a protagonist who is not conventionally “likable” — someone who does things we recognize as illegal, immoral, or just plain offensive — we must engage in some mental gymnastics. We either flip a switch and start seeing that character as a villain or we decide we’re going to excuse his behavior and continue to root for his success. With a television protagonist, if we choose the latter, it is something that we have to do over and over again, escalating our commitment to the character as his misdeeds pile up.

Trump’s path to the presidency was made smoother by a complex relationship to women and gender that finds its expression in pop culture, like television shows about bad dudes.

TV is also what brought us the concept of likability in politics in the first place because most of the time when we talk about likability, we’re really talking about the appearance of likability, and TV brought us unprecedented access to candidates’ appearances. Each emerging communication technology has changed the formula for successful candidacy and television’s contribution has been to reward a certain type of image. Most radio listeners called the first debate between Kennedy and Nixon a draw, but television viewers overwhelmingly perceived a Kennedy victory because of how Kennedy looked. When we consider TV’s role in the 2016 election, we should be thinking about the way in which television itself took Trump from a local D-lister to an icon of American success with a national profile, but also about the image that we now look for, how the medium has changed our expectations for main characters and, in doing so, changed our expectations for the main character of the country: the president.

And after an election in which we faced two very different potential main characters, we should acknowledge the role that gender plays, in politics and in television. Trump’s path to the presidency was made smoother by a complex relationship to women and gender that finds its expression in pop culture, like television shows about bad dudes. Understanding the mechanics of the antihero genre that came to redefine TV drama, particularly the ways in which the phenomenon of the likable unlikable man relies on the way that man interacts with women, might help us reckon with the politics of gender, and gendered politics, as we look toward another election cycle.

***

The mythology of the antihero has him spring from David Chase’s head like a late ’90s Athena. In his book on the transformative shows of the late ’90s and early 2000s, The Revolution was Televised, Alan Sepinwall writes that Chase was fighting against “the notion that a TV series had to have a likable character at its center.” It was important to Chase that this new kind of protagonist not be rehabilitated, like Detective Sipowicz of NYPD Blue. There would be no redemption arc but instead further descent into whatever nefarious activities had characterized him as unlikable in the first place.

But there was a disconnect between this vision and the way viewers reacted to Tony Soprano and the other unreformed Sipowiczes who would follow in his wake. Chase has been known to complain about his audience’s relationship to Tony, cheering him on one minute and wanting to see him punished the next; Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, similarly expressed his surprise that fans were still “rooting for” Walt as his misdeeds became ever more serious and destructive. These kinds of fans have been criticized as “bad readers” missing the point of a groundbreaking new form. But I have always found showrunners’ professions of bafflement at audience reception to be disingenuous at best because the whole enterprise of the antihero show was to create a bad guy people would like anyway. Gilligan seems more in touch with his intentions when he recalls that he cast Bryan Cranston as Walter White because he recalled Cranston’s ability to convey “a basic humanity” in another otherwise unappealing character. When thinking about casting Jon Hamm as Don Draper, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner made a similar observation: “I asked myself a question: ‘When this man goes home to his wife at the end of the pilot, are you going to hate him?’ And I said, ‘No, I will not hate him.’”

Feigned surprise at audience reactions aside, it seems likely that the men who created these “unlikable” men understood that they would still need an audience to invest in them, and that such an investment would not be a slam dunk but would instead require delicate rigging. I like to break down the mechanics of the antihero in the following way:

The antihero is marked as special.

David Chase has said that he used to quote Rockford Files creator Stephen Cannell in the Sopranos writers’ room: “Rockford can be a jerk-off and a fool, but he’s got to be the smartest guy in the room.” The other Golden Age antihero shows followed this formula. Don is a creative genius (“It’s Toasted!”) and Walt is a talented chemist who regularly outsmarts very dangerous people. This distinction of being set apart is something the antihero has in common with regular heroes.

The antihero has interiority.

If, as Chase declared, his character was not going to evolve toward to a more sympathetic future, the case for sympathy would have to be rooted in the past or justified by the present. These shows gave their protagonists an interiority that made sympathizing with them feel less icky. This is where the antiheroes of the early aughts differed from a character like J.R. Ewing, who was also a popular bad guy protagonist. Therapy sessions and flashbacks, revealing monologues, and contemplative moments set to music all softened the blow of the bad things they did. Whatever interiority Chase, Gilligan, and Weiner allowed other characters, it always paled in comparison to that given to their protagonists. Like their smarts and talent, this was another way of distinguishing characters who would have ordinarily coded as villains and instead marking them as the hero of their story.

The antihero is stacked up against antagonists slightly to exceedingly more unlikable than he is.

To me, this is the real key to the antihero’s appeal. Being special and having a sympathetic backstory will only take a traditionally “unlikable” character so far, and there are plenty of movie and TV villains who have been given similar treatment. What separates a true antihero from a villain is that we’re in his corner, we want him to succeed. If we are to root for Don Draper, an identity thief and rampant philanderer, we need to see him opposite, say, a Pete Campbell type: lothario sans charm and talent. Walter White is the small business owner to Gus Fring’s Amazon. Villainy is not a fixed point, it’s a sliding scale. Real people aren’t neatly divided into Supermans and Lex Luthors. Most of us are equal parts potential for good and propensity for shittiness, a heady brew of good instincts and bad inclinations. Our virtue is contextual. While the nature of these men’s misdeeds are (hopefully!) of a different magnitude than our own, part of their appeal is certainly, as Gilligan suspected, the way they mirror our own humanity, the good and the ugly both. And we are able to focus on the former and excuse the latter when showrunners give us other characters who are less multidimensional and therefore easier to hate.

But alongside the Phil Leotardos and Gus Frings, those easier-to-hate people often ended up being women. Skyler White is the most obvious example. Walt was stacked up against all kinds of villains but none inspired the kind of vitriolic responses Anna Gunn famously described in a 2013 New York Times op-ed: the thousands of people who liked the Facebook page “I Hate Skyler White,” the posts complaining that Skyler was “a shrieking, hypocritical harpy … a ball-and-chain, a drag, a shrew, an annoying bitch wife.” Some fans of the show even conflated Gunn and the character she played. One message board post read: “Could somebody tell me where I can find Anna Gunn so I can kill her?” Reddit boards still use her as the bar against which all bad wife characters should be measured. Even the neo-Nazis who killed Hank and made Jesse their slave never raised viewers’ hackles the way Skyler did and still does years later. Fan reaction to Betty Draper was similarly harsh (apparently, the only way to make her “likable” was to kill her) despite the fact that the show was premised on the fact that her life was a lie Don had to tell her over and over.

Women were the accidental antagonists of shows about ‘difficult men,’ but what does it look like when a woman steps into the antihero mold, when it is a difficult woman at the heart of a series?

Sopranos viewers rarely saw Carmela this way because for the most part she declines to take on the role of antagonist. She is instead, as the psychiatrist in season three points out, an enabler. She doesn’t stand in the way of our guy but the show is still built on the foundation of a woman who could wear a man down. In his very first conversation with Dr. Melfi, Tony talks about his parents’ relationship: “My dad was tough. He ran his own crew. Guy like that and my mother wore him down to a little nub. He was a squeaking little gerbil when he died.” Viewers dutifully saw Livia Soprano as an antagonist and a burden Tony had to overcome. In their just released book The Sopranos Sessions, Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller-Seitz write: “Tony adored the ducks in the pool because they were guarded by a mother who protected and nurtured them in a manner free of ulterior motive, of deceit and manipulation, of the urge to annihilate. Livia, for all her evident helplessness, is the most actively destructive force in the pilot, a black hole vacuuming up hope.” They’re talking about the episode where Tony runs over a guy who owes him money with his car but somehow it’s his elderly mother who is the most actively destructive force.

In interviewing Chase for The Sopranos Sessions, Sepinwall reminds him that he once said that The Sopranos, as an idea, began with his friends encouraging him to do a show about his mother. The Sopranos’ origin story is rooted in the trope of the “nagging harpy” and Chase himself suggests that the show was successful in large part because he imported domesticity into the mobster genre: “family shows were a women’s medium, and this was a family show. I thought this might be successful, or at least keep its head above water, because it would attract, unlike most Mob pictures, a female audience because of the family show aspect.” But the kind of domesticity of which he availed himself, one that would become a familiar element of shows about “difficult” men, was one in which women are set up to be either enablers or antagonists. Livia might have been the black hole, but all of the women in Tony’s life are implicated. In that same therapy session in episode one, Dr. Melfi asks Tony, “What’s the one thing your mother, your wife, your daughter all have in common?” His response? “They all break my balls.”


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


Wives get the raw end of the deal in an antihero show. They are there to humanize the protagonist but we often see them as villains instead of the victims they truly are because, in opposing our guy, they stand in the way of the show’s plotline. Wives pose a problem in that they fail to deliver on what we perhaps subconsciously assume to be their role. These men provide for their families. They work hard — never mind how or what they do with their leisure time — so that their families can have what they need and all their wives have to do is not call them on it. Philosopher Kate Manne argues that a central dynamic of misogyny is the obligation by, or expectation of, women to give men “feminine-coded goods and service” like attention, care, sympathy, respect, admiration, security, and safe haven. There is, according to Manne, “the threat of withdrawal of social approval if those social duties are not performed, and the incentive of love and gratitude if they are done willingly and gladly.” Viewer response to characters like Skyler and Betty is the natural result of the expectation that wives are supposed to help, not hinder, their husbands. Carmela, on the other hand, explains to Dr. Krakower that her role is to “make sure he’s got clean clothes in his closet and dinner on his table.”

Once you see the degree to which the antihero show is dependent on marriage and heteronormativity, you can’t unsee it. The role of a wife in an antihero story is not incidental but integral: domestic antagonists are a large part of the reason we feel OK about rooting for bad guys like Tony Soprano, Walter White, and Don Draper. These shows taught us to look for the humanity in our male protagonists and ignore it in the women who stood in their way. Television audiences’ identification with and adoration of male antiheroes were the canaries in the coal mine, warning us of the ease with which we might see villains as victims and vice versa.

Looking back, it’s painful to admit that for many in the electorate, Hillary Clinton was the Skyler to Trump’s Walt, the Betty to his Don. We had already spent years seeing her as the Carmela to Bill’s Tony, implicated in her husband’s misdeeds by dint of staying with him, forever tainted by her own moral compromises that, while they paled in comparison to his, were for some reason less forgivable and rendered her eternally “unlikable.” It made sense, then, that when Clinton took a jab at Trump’s penchant for avoiding paying taxes while explaining her plan to raise taxes on the wealthy during the third debate, Trump interrupted to call her “such a nasty woman.” This one, he seemed to be telling viewers at home, is a Skyler.

So where does this leave us, in art and in politics? Are we ready for a female candidate who is – like all of the male candidates over the last 230 years, like all of us – human? As I write this, about half of the announced Democratic candidates for president are women so it is likely that gender will play a starring role this election cycle. Similarly, as television diffuses like so many essential oils over ever-increasing platforms, there are more opportunities than ever before for female-centered shows. How have we done with female characters? Have depictions of women sharing a screen with unlikable men changed at all? Are we able to see the “humanity” that Gilligan identified at the heart of Walter White’s appeal in people who aren’t men? Women were the accidental antagonists of shows about “difficult men,” but what does it look like when a woman steps into the antihero mold, when it is a difficult woman at the heart of a series? What is it, actually, that makes a woman difficult?

When we talk about antiheroes, we’re really talking about the kinds of bad behavior we can countenance and the kinds we can’t, the conditions that need to be met for us to overlook bad behavior; the way we take the sum of some people and not others. Thinking about when and how we extend our understanding and forgiveness is key to understanding the genre and our world. Deconstructing the antihero genre may help us better examine our own attitudes toward women.

This is the first installment of an unscientific and hardly exhaustive journey through shows about difficult people, many of whom are women. Next up? The Good Bad Wives of Ozark and House of Cards.

* * *

Sara Fredman is a writer and editor living in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in Longreads, The Rumpus, Tablet, and Lilith.

 

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

Baring the Bones of the Lost Country: The Last Paleontologist in Venezuela

Photo courtesy of Ascanio Rincon / Tachiraptor admirabilis illustration by Maurílio Oliveira / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Zoe Valery | Longreads | February 2019 | 18 minutes (5,011 words)

 

— Orocual tar pit, northeastern Venezuela, 2007 C.E.

Ascanio Rincón was standing on a veritable fossil paradise when one of his students brought to his attention a tooth that was sticking out through the dirt. The site presented innumerable shards of prehistoric bones that had been fortuitously unearthed by a steamroller digging a trench for a pipeline. After assessing the value of the site, the young paleontologist stood his ground to protect the tar pit where millions of fossils have been preserved by the asphalt, eventually forcing the workers to redraw the course of the oil duct. When he cleaned around the tooth that was embedded in the trench wall, he found that it was attached to the skull of a creature that the steamroller had missed only by inches. He looked at the eye socket in disbelief: “A saber-toothed tiger was looking at me in the eye,” he recalls. This specimen would constitute a groundbreaking discovery for Rincón and a landmark for the field of paleontology in Venezuela and at large.

To this day, Richard Parker — named after the tiger in Life of Pi — remains one of the most remarkable findings in the country and one of Rincón’s dearest fossils. The sabre-toothed tiger has shed light on a migratory wave during the Ice Age that the scientific community previously had not been aware of. Due to the current mass migration of people from Venezuela, Rincón is one of the only scientists left in the country tapping into the overwhelming wealth of fossils yet to be uncovered at the Orocual tar pit. Like most of his colleagues, the eight students he had trained have all left the country, joining 3 million other Venezuelans fleeing the rampant economic crisis, creating what has been described by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees as the most dire refugee crisis on the continent. Rincón is an endling — the only extant individual of a species — in his field: the last vertebrate paleontologist in Venezuela.* Read more…

Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me

Associated Press / Unsplash / Virgin Records / Vertigo Records

Kimberly Mack | Longreads | February 2019 | 28 minutes (7,118 words)

 

“Will you sing to me?”

My mom’s pain had subsided for the moment, and her voice was strangely perky. Happy even. The morphine had kicked in. She was strapped in tight, on a stretcher, at the back of the ambulette. An assortment of pillows and towels cushioned her body to protect her from the impact as the wheels slowly rolled over each pothole, each bump, each uneven patch of street.

I had been warned that the ride from Midtown Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hospital to the Lincoln Tunnel would be the worst of it — a minefield for my 68-year-old mother, whose stage-four uterine cancer had metastasized to her liver and lungs and, as her palliative care doctor characterized it, “filled her entire abdominal cavity.” It was the pain that finally got my mom to visit the doctor seven weeks earlier. There had been other signs, but she had refused to go to the doctor before that, only repeating to me what I’d heard her say when I was growing up: “Doctors look for problems…they make you sick.”

It was August 2015. We were now headed by an ambulette service to my new home in Toledo, Ohio, ten hours away, where I was a college professor. The plan was for her to first spend a few weeks at a skilled nursing facility, so she could relearn how to walk after her recent long hospital stay. That would give us time to order a hospital bed and other medical supplies before bringing her to our house for in-home hospice care. I had been looking forward to showing my mom our new home ever since I texted a picture of it to her after we found it in June.

“Look, Mom!” I wrote. “I can’t believe the house comes with such colorful flowers. There are dark pink rose bushes in the backyard.”

“Oh Kim, it’s so beautiful,” she texted back.

“I can’t wait for you to see it,” I replied. And that was true. Neither one of us had lived in a house before.

Read more…

Maybe What We Need Is … More Politics?

Alfred Gescheidt / Getty Images

Aaron Timms | Longreads | February 2019 | 20 minutes (5,514 words)

Alpacas are native to South America, but to find the global center of alpaca spinning you’ll need to travel to Bradford, England. The man most responsible for this quirk of history is Titus Salt. Until the 1830s alpaca yarn was considered an unworkable material throughout Europe. Salt, a jobbing young entrepreneur from the north of England, commercialized a form of alpaca warp that made the animal’s fleece suitable for mass production. Within a decade alpaca, finer and softer than wool, had become the rage of England’s fashionable classes.

Already by the mid-19th century industrialization had begun to disfigure the English countryside with “machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled,” as Dickens put it in Bleak House. The immiseration of the working classes was under way. Troubled by the emerging horrors of the new industrial age, Salt built a model village to house the workers he employed in his textile mill. Saltaire, with its neat, spacious houses, running water, efficient sewerage, parks, schools and recreational facilities, became a symbol of what enlightened capitalism could look like. It was also a model in the truest sense, serving as the inspiration for workers’ villages built later in the 19th century by companies such as Cadbury’s and Lever Brothers, the soap manufacturer that eventually became Unilever.

According to economist Paul Collier, these Victorian capitalists instituted a tradition that survives, however precariously, today: the tradition of “business with purpose, business with a sense of obligation to a workforce and a community.” Among the modern successors of this model of compassionate capitalism, Collier has argued, are U.S. pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and John Lewis & Partners, the British department store. In the 1940s Johnson & Johnson set out a credo stating that the company’s first responsibility was to its customers. Thanks to this credo, Johnson & Johnson’s management led a mass recall of Tylenol off supermarket and pharmacy shelves following a contamination scare in the early 1980s. Now standard practice, this type of product recall was uncommon for its time — and allowed the company to maintain goodwill with its customers. John Lewis, for its part, has prospered through difficult decades for brick-and-mortar retail largely thanks to its unusual power structure: the company is owned by a trust run in the interests of its workforce.

The thread uniting this strain of capitalism, Collier contends in his new book The Future of Capitalism: Facing The New Anxieties, is ethics. An ethics of reciprocal responsibility and care — between owners, workers, and customers — has allowed different businesses to prosper in different eras without destroying the communities and environments around them. But very few businesses are run according to these principles today. According to Collier, it is to this model of reciprocal ethics that capitalism, having lost its way over the past four decades, now must return — and reciprocity must become the principle that guides human interaction at all levels of society, not just in the firm. “Our sense of mutual regard has to be rebuilt,” he says. “Public policy needs to be complemented by a sense of purpose among firms.” “We need to meet each other.” “A new generation needs to reset social narratives.” “Norms need to change.” Prescriptivism today, the future of capitalism tomorrow. Read more…