The Misogyny of Donald Trump

It has become a commonplace of the analysis of the Trump phenomenon to say that he throws away the dog whistles of previous Republican campaigns with his direct racism and xenophobia.  The pundits say that GOP leaders frightened by the rise of Trump have nobody to blame but themselves.  I think this is unarguably true.  Politicians of both parties have raised the specter of "terrorism" to distract the voters' attention from real threats to our safety, like gun violence.  Trump just says he will bar an entire religion from this country!  Politicians of both parties use the coded phrase "border security."  Trump just says that Mexicans are rapists.

Besides his open white supremacy and hatred of foreigners, Trump's other vulgar verbal habit is the disgusting misogyny that his fans applaud as "telling it like it is."  He called candidate Carly Florina ugly: "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that face? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?"

He refused to participate in a debate because of the presence of FOX-TV anchor Megan Kelly and argued that she questioned him sharply because she was menstruating: "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever!"

He has a long history of calling women "fat slobs" and "pigs", accusing them of gold-digging and manipulation, and bragging about his sexual conquests.  In short, his conversation about women is characteristic of a junior high school boy who is scared stiff of the girls, who are taller and more mature than he.  Trump has never matured emotionally.  If his rally attendees who applaud his oafish comments on race are closeted (or open) Klansmen, then those who love his attacks on women are Gamer-gate boys bringing their fears into the national political arena.

All this begs a question.  What, then, were the dog whistles that Republicans used to disguise their hatred of women before Orange Hitler came along?

I think the answer is the so-called "right to life."  The Trump phenomenon has made it utterly transparent that the self-described "religious right" is not religious in any way, not even Christian according to their own definitions.  Donald Trump has repeatedly revealed himself to be profoundly ignorant of Christian belief and practice.  These "religious" folk are now supporting a candidate who freely and casually uses obscenity, vulgarity and blasphemy in his own speech, who brags relentlessly about his sexual adventures, who has divorced twice, and whose current wife poses nude for publication.  The double standard of people who speak of a "right to life" while opposing gun control and supporting capital punishment has long been obvious.  But Trump doesn't even oppose abortion!

So why did those "Christians" (now exposed as worshippers of a very different sort of God) oppose abortion?  Again, their opponents understood this all along.  It was always all about controlling women, especially controlling their frightening sexuality.  When off-message elected officials claim that women can't get pregnant from rape they show that same magical terror of women's bodies, along with the patriarchal need to get them under control.

We have generously allowed them their religious conservatism, arguing that they shouldn't impose it on others, but trusting that they themselves were authentic in their beliefs.  It should be clear to everyone now that there was never any political conservatism in the Republican "base", there was just white supremacy and opposition to the rights of people of color.  There was never any economic conservatism.  A social safety net was a good thing as long as it wasn't extended beyond white people.  The support of Donald Trump by people who laughably call themselves "evangelical" should show once and for all that they are not religious conservatives:  they are just terrified of women.

Who is the real "pharma bro"?

The Martin Shkreli story was a good one for the Twitter age.  It is both easy to understand and outrageous when a "pharma bro" purchases the rights to an essential anti-AIDS medicine (one whose patent expired sixty years ago!) and then raises its price from $13.50 to $750 a tablet.  Those numbers are still astonishing, even now, six months after the scandal broke.  The optics were good, too.  Shkreli has a cartoon villain's smirk that would go well in a low-budget Batman feature.

From the beginning observers who are knowledgeable about the pharmaceutical industry raised storm flags about personalizing this story about one greedy hedge-fund capitalist.  They argued that all of Big Pharma was doing even worse.  Now, the collapse of Valeant Pharmaceutical stock prices is offering a different window into that world.  In August, right when Shkreli bought the rights to pyrethamine, Valeant was trading at $263.70 a share.  At the moment I write these words, the price is $27.13 a share, and falling.

One question might be, "How does a company lose 90% of its value in seven months?"  An equally interesting one, though, is "What was the source of Valeant's value in the first place?"  After all, it was trading under $70 a share only three years ago.  Five years ago its price was close to what it is right now.  Valeant's business model was not dissimilar to Shkreli's: Obtain the rights to drugs and then jack up the prices. They had a few additional components, though.  Instead of buying drugs that they considered undervalued, Valeant was buying the entire companies that owned those rights and then firing all their scientists!  Valeant was a drug company with no interest in developing new drugs unless they could do it on the cheap.  For decades Big Pharma has been justifying their outsized prices as the cost of developing new cures.  Valeant simply declared their indifference.

Then they stopped paying taxes.  Buying a whole drug company instead of just its rights gave Valeant the ability to shift their corporate headquarters to the home of the company they purchased.  If it was a place with lower taxes they could -- and did! -- claim that as their home and pay their taxes there.  Like overpricing its products, like refusing to invest in research and development, reducing the corporate tax bill helped boost profit rates.

Finally, there were the secret mail order divisions.  Ordinarily when a customer goes to the local drug store (or even to a legitimate mail order pharmacy like Express Scripts) the pharmacist will look at a brand-name prescription and recommend a lower-priced generic substitute if one exists.  By refusing to sell through the normal outlets and making their drugs available only through their own mail-order subsidiaries, Valeant was able to leave pharmacists completely out of the loop and keep patients from getting that advice.  This is how a company makes super-profits on a medication which is no longer protected by a patent.

All this is why Valeant was the darling of the investor class and why its stock price was bid up so very high.  And that is how other pharmaceutical companies could be pressured to imitate their disgusting practices.  If investment is flooding into a scam artist that means it is leaving elsewhere and if those CEO's want to keep their companies capitalized, well then the market is telling them what to do!  And this means that those other companies have been imitating some of those practices -- especially avoiding taxes and reducing research -- for several years.

Valeant's initial fall began back in September when their deceptive practices regarding mail order sales came to light.  Just because hedge fund managers want to profit from robbing sick people doesn't mean they want to pay for lawsuits related to fleecing the public.  So they start unloading their shares and the price falls.  But what interests me even more is the drop three days ago when Valeant opened at $69 a share and closed at $33 a share.  What happened that day to this company to make the fund managers lose so much trust over the course of a single trading day?

They promised to stop their deceptive mail order tactics.

That is the beauty of the market.  The only thing worse than being caught robbing the people is deciding to stop robbing the people.  The pharmaceutical industry spends millions lobbying our representatives to reduce regulation.  So does the finance industry.  We cannot possibly match their influence.  But we can never forget why they are willing to forego all those millions of dollars spent on lobbyists: it is because their returns on that investment are in the billions.

A Carnival of Ignorance

Louis CK once described the strangeness of relying on online forums to research products.  He read a review of a Blu-ray player and wondered what particular expertise this total stranger brought to the task, imagining that the critic was about to “murder-suicide his entire family” but first stopped to comment on the unit’s “counterintuitive controls.”

This almost captures my view of the horror that is comments sections.  When I was a principal I once had to fire a new teacher only weeks into his first semester.  Minutes after a meeting in which I warned him about a pattern of abusive language toward students he returned to the classroom and told the kids that his mother hadn’t sent him to Harvard to be a zoo keeper for a bunch of animals like them.  The story actually made the NY Post, with me cast as the villain.  Most of the comments vilified me as a pencil-pushing bureaucrat empowering thuggish minority teens to threaten an idealistic, young, white Ivy graduate (while also mocking his unfortunate liberalism.)  The teacher in question was actually an African American man in his late forties who was still living with his mom, but that didn’t fit their imaginative rendering of the facts reported by the paper.

What interested me about this (and other similarly personal cases) was not the torrent of hatred I elicited from people who don’t even know me.  It was the highly-racialized narratives that people had about the Bronx, about the children I taught, and about their parents.  It mirrored what I saw in the responses to all kinds of news stories that had nothing to do with me.  People could not deal with what they read without first mentally re-writing it to fit their prejudices.  More than just seeing through the filter of a worldview, they actively rejected every fact that might challenge what they “know” to be true.

A little over a year ago I wrote in this space about reader responses to a New York Times op-ed on the US’s ugly history of lynching Mexican Americans.  One commenter complained that white people always have to “take it on the chin” and “grovel in the dirt.”  Several raised the time-worn defense that social norms were “different” in the past, as if somehow the Biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill” had not yet been written in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  And one even wondered what the point of this piece of “historical victimhood” might be, apparently rejecting history – the need to understand our past – itself.

The level of venom in so many online discussions suggests to me that there is a special class of lonely, damaged folk who sit home on their computers heaving poisonous grenades into cyberspace… usually anonymously.  It is a carnival of ignorance.  I try as a rule not to read it because it undermines my faith in humanity.

Or that is what I thought until yesterday.  Because it suddenly occurred to me that they aren’t sitting at home anymore.  The whole crowd of misogynists and racists and xenophobes now have arenas to fill to cheer each other and to cheer their avatar, the phony real estate developer and reality TV star, Donald Trump.  I cannot pretend that they are isolated, because they have found a way to break out of cyberspace and into the real world.  They have found a way to call women “cunts” to their faces instead of in online forums.  They have found a way to sucker-punch Black men from within the comfort of a jeering crowd of similarly minded criminals instead of just threatening to do so under the cloak of a computer pseudonym.  And instead of complaining about the “liberal” media (“liberal” because it publishes facts they don’t want to know) they can physically assault reporters who come to cover their hate fests.

People of color have been observing for many weeks now that white folks have no right to be “shocked” by the Trump phenomenon.  Orange Hitler has simply given all these vicious folks a nucleus around which to coalesce.  My realization yesterday, though, was that these Trump rallies are an online comments section brought to life.  And I started to compose this post.

But our thoughts are rarely original.  And they are often better expressed by others.  Also yesterday a friend shared this tweet on Facebook:  "Donald Trump is like if a comments section ran for office."  Fifty-eight characters instead of 700 words.  Oh, well.  I am posting mine anyway.

Whose Gaze?

This morning I posted two short paragraphs from my sequel to the book Stones from the Creek on a Facebook page I put up to publicize that collection of short stories.  It describes a character’s first day as a convict worker in an Alabama coal mine.  It is a struggle for me to describe the end-of-shift beatings he witnessed… beatings for failure to make weight, to mine sufficient coal for the company.  I want it to convey horror and brutality, not to avert eyes from the inhuman viciousness of the prison industry in 1907.  But I don’t want to create a kind of violence pornography that fails in connecting the reader with the character in a full way.

One way of bringing historical text to life on the internet is the use of actual photographs.  More and more are being scanned and it is a rich resource.  While posting the selection from my work in progress I looked for a long time at a photo of two imprisoned coal miners — convict laborers, slaves — and considered using the picture to illustrate the excerpt.  And then I couldn’t do it.  The photo shows two young Black men sitting on what appears to be a wooden shelf about four feet high.  I suppose it to be a bunk bed in the mine dormitory.  They sit facing the camera, forearms across knees, bare feet pulled up to them.  Their eyes are closed… against the powder flash of the photographer?  Both of them have shackles around their ankles with three elongated links of chain tying those shackles together.  How could the truth of this picture (and the injustice it represents) possibly outweigh the humiliation of the subjects who sat for it?

In the early 20th century, when photography was still the province of professionals, pictures of lynchings were printed and sold as postcards.  James Allen put together a collection of these photos as an exhibition, a book and a website, all titled Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America.

Like visual evidence of the Nazi extermination, these pictures remind us of what should never be forgotten.  They demonstrate the horror of white supremacist terror in this country and the fact that it was not a secret or an anomaly.  The photos document large, excited crowds of white people — some with children in tow — cheering the annihilation and mutilation of Black people.

But these images do more.  Remember that they were not kept secret; they were sold as souvenirs to be looked at again and again.  So what does it mean for us to look at them?  What does it mean for ME, a white man, to look at a picture of the destruction and desecration of a Black person that was made for white people to savor and enjoy?

I have posted a photo twice on that Facebook page of soldiers of the 7th Cavalry standing over a mass grave of Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee.  It is a lynching photo by any standard and was sold as a postcard by the photographer to those soldiers and to others, as well as to tourists.  I have posted three times a photo of Texas Rangers posed on their horses with their ropes around the bodies of Mexican Americans in Texas in 1915.  It is a lynching photo by any standard and was sold as a postcard by the photographer to whites North Americans along the Rio Grande.

I agonize over those photos, which illustrate two American pogroms that I am trying to write about with sensitivity and care for the sequel to Stones from the Creek.  I have been unable to post photos of the Tulsa race riot of 1921.  Those, too, are lynching photos.  Those, too, were sold as souvenirs to the participants in a pogrom that killed hundreds and destroyed the entire African American district of the city of Tulsa, apparently in an effort to turn that city into another sundown town.  There is something too personal about those photos, something that captures the faces of people and glories in their objectification.

I know that Ms. Mamie Till insisted on an open casket for her son Emmet’s funeral.  I know that the photos in Jet magazine brought the savage beating and murder of Emmet Till to that publication’s readership.  I know that the generation who saw those pictures in Jet was moved to oppose and upturn the system of disfranchisement and Jim Crow.  I also know that those photos were Ms. Till’s and that she chose to share her personal loss and horror and to share them with an audience that would view them through her eyes and not through the eyes of the vicious criminals who took her son.  She had the right.

I don’t know that I have the right.  They are not my photos.  I know that I look at the photo of those two men — imprisoned in order to provide the steel companies with a captive work force — and I identify with them and not with their captors.  But who else knows that?  I am a white Jewish man who struggles to look at photographs of the Shoah.  The Nazis were proud to document their murders.  Even as I understand the absolute need never to forget I derive no satisfaction or pride from that memory.  And so, picture by picture and paragraph by paragraph, I struggle to decide how to capture these dark memories of how the United States became what it is today.