Shining light on sexual abuse

Films generally rely on drama to attract the attention of viewers. And with viewers’ attention spans becoming shorter and shorter, a drama like Spotlight is a rarity.

The film tells the story of the investigation by a team at the Boston Globe newspaper, beginning in 2001, of cases of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests in the Boston diocese.

 

 

That investigation took many months of sustained, difficult work. And the film is faithful in showing the careful, persistent work that journalism requires, especially in uncovering a story of such magnitude.

Marty Baron, an outsider—“an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball”—arrives from Miami as the new editor of the Globe and assigns a team of journalists to investigate allegations against John Geoghan, an unfrocked priest accused of molesting more than 80 boys.

The paper’s “spotlight” team, the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative unit in the United States, is led by editor Walter “Robby” Robinson and includes reporters Michael Rezendes, Matt Carroll and Sacha Pfeiffer. They interview victims and try to unseal sensitive documents.

They run into many roadblocks. The cases brought against various priests were settled in mediation, and the information about those cases is sealed and unavailable.

The culture of Boston is infused with the sense that the Catholic Church is an important and necessary player in the city’s life. Robinson keeps hearing warnings to back off. The church does many good things; you don’t want to spoil that.

As part of their investigation, they interview some victims who are now adults. These are the most moving scenes in the film. While the abuse happened when they were young boys and they are now grown men, it’s clear their souls are broken. We get a glimpse of track marks on one man’s arm. Another man explains that he’s now sober but struggled for years with addiction.

A greater damage to these victims, however, is that the abuse helped destroy their faith in God. Even Rezendes, the reporter, who, like most of the others, grew up Catholic, says that while he hasn’t gone to church in years, he always thought he would return. Now, it’s clear, he won’t.

Pfeiffer, while going door to door, encounters the retired priest who had molested one of the men she had talked to earlier. He admits what he did, then adds, “but I never felt gratified myself,” as if that made it OK.

The film is especially good in its attention to detail. It gets so much right about journalism—how diligent reporters must be to obtain multiple sources, how they have to write everything down, how every piece of information is important.

In one scene, Rezendes is talking with a lawyer named Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) about addenda to court documents. Garabedian says, “You don’t know the half of it.” Like a good reporter, Rezendes says, “Tell me the half of it.” And that leads to a key piece of evidence in breaking the story.

When they’ve turned in their initial story (they end up publishing over 600), Baron, the editor-in-chief, is copyediting the piece and says, “Too many adjectives.”

The film also shows that Robinson had a chance to break this story five years earlier but buried it and didn’t pursue the information he received.

Spotlight is an outstanding film that shows the power of the press in exposing the injustices of powers, like the Catholic Church, that try to hide their sins “for the greater good.”

Banks are no friends of the poor

I have a friend who lives below the poverty line. She and others I know do not use banking services. They can’t afford it. At her job, she receives her weekly pay in cash because she can’t cash a check. One time she lost her pay. This meant it was lost for good. She couldn’t go to her employer and say, “Cancel that check and write another.” It was gone.

I volunteer for Circles of Hope, which works to help people get out of poverty. Every month, we hold a “big view” meeting to consider issues that affect people in poverty. We’ve looked at transportation, housing, health care and employment, among others. One evening, a man spoke about financial services and told people to keep in mind that banks are about making a profit.

 

 

You may say, Of course, they have to make a profit. However, as Mehrsa Baradaran of the University of Georgia School of Law argues in her book How the Other Half Banks, by denying financial services to the poor, banks have broken the social contract that justifies their public charter.

In his article “When the Bank Robs You” (In These Times, November), David Dayen points out that “the average unbanked family spends more on financial transactions than they do on food.”

The Ferguson Commission, convened by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to identify root causes that led to the social dislocation of racially segregated cities around St. Louis, named banking as one of those causes. “Without a bank or credit union account,” Dayen writes, “simple functions like converting government benefits into cash or converting that cash back into a check to pay bills or securing a small loan in emergencies become exorbitantly expensive.”

Dayen refers to Baradaran’s book, noting that modern banking wouldn’t exist without the state. “Customers freely deposit trillions in banks because of government-backed insurance, and the quasi-public Federal Reserve lends directly to banks at slim interest rates.”

Under the Reagan administration in the 1980s, when deregulation ruled the day, “banks won the argument that they should be treated like any other industry, without a public responsibility,” Dayen writes.

With this profit motive in mind, and with the blessing of the government, banks abandoned poor areas because the poor don’t make profitable customers. “Between 2008 and 2013,” Dayen writes, “banks shuttered nearly 2,000 branches.” Of these, 93 percent were in postal codes with incomes below the national median.

Baradaran recounts the history of this kind of behavior. One 19th-century Chicago banker even said his firm levels “a prohibitory charge upon all accounts which average less than $300 for the express purpose of driving them away.”

Most attempts to bring the poor financial services have failed. Even credit unions are today more likely to serve upper- and middle-income customers, and community banks have been overwhelmed by mega-bank consolidation.

What to do? Baradaran notes that from 1911 to 1967, the post office offered savings accounts, attracting millions. She calls it “the most successful experiment in financial inclusion in the United States” and thinks we should restart it.

A USPS bank would not only reduce inequality, writes Dayen, “it would shore up the Postal Service’s finances and sustain post-office employment as a middle-class career.”

It would also eliminate predatory payday lenders and check-cashing operators, “interested only in skimming a hefty take for providing financial services the middle and upper classes take for granted.

The Bible denounces usury, lending money at exorbitant interest rates and preying on the poor. We need banks that provide public, not just profitable, service.

Caveat: the stores are out to get your money

 

In her article "Why You Bought That Ugly Sweater" in the December issue of The Atlantic, Eleanor Smith draws on a variety of studies to show some of the scientific tricks stores use to get you go buy their products.

Here are some of the ways she mentions:

1.       We perceive prices to be lower when they have fewer syllables and end with a 9.

2.       Stores overprice merchandise, then later mark it down. Smith says this is “a cognitive bias psychologists refer to as ‘anchoring.’ ”

3.       Stores know to give options, but not too many, since choice can be overwhelming to customers and discourage purchases.

4.       Believe it or not, snootiness can deliver a sale. Smith notes that one recent study found that “compared with friendly salespeople, rude clerks caused customers with low self-confidence to spend more and, in the short term, to feel more positively toward an ‘aspirational brand’ (that is, a brand that you covet but cannot afford).”

5.       Stores are wise to avoid communal dressing rooms because “when a customer who feels badly (sic) about her appearance tries something on and spots an attractive fellow shopper wearing the same item, she is less likely to buy it.”

6.       Stores jammed with merchandise may induce claustrophobia, while those that are too bare can cause agoraphobia. To counteract this, store often try to use the right scent.

7.       Cooler temperatures indoors may lead to a more emotional style of decision making, while warmth contributes to a more analytical approach. In addition, Smith writes, “Consumers prefer spending money in stores with cool, blue-toned interiors over stores with warmer, orange-toned interiors, where they tend to be less enthusiastic and balk at high prices.”

8.       Touch is important. “People are more likely to buy a high-quality item if they can handle it,” Smith writes.

9.       Music is also important. The right genre can cause customers to lose track of time. And one study found that “popular music leads to impulsive decisions, while lesser-known background music leads to focused shoppers—ones who are, say, more likely to carefully process information about promotions,” writes Smith.

OK, you’ve been warned. So get prepared and put on some lesser-known background music.

What's in a name?

More than a year ago, the murders of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., triggered debate about use of the Confederate flag. Eventually, that flag was removed from South Carolina’s Capitol. That flag, many argued, is a symbol of racism, not just Southern heritage.

Symbols evoke feeling and have great power. So, too, do names.

 

 

In “The Anti-Redskin” (The Atlantic, October), Ariel Sabar writes about the ongoing movement to eliminate the use of “Redskins” as a mascot for sports teams. While this movement has been going on for some time, it has heated up in the last couple of years in reference to Washington, D.C.’s NFL team, the Redskins.

Leading that move, writes Sabar, is Ray Halbritter, the leader of the Oneida Indian Nation. Drawing on his tribe’s wealth, Halbritter, a graduate of Harvard Law School and owner of a casino in upstate New York, has launched “Change the Mascot, a campaign of radio ads, polls, opposition research, academic studies, YouTube videos, Twitter hashtags and media interviews.”

Since the late 1960s, Native American activists have been saying that the Redskins’ name is a slur, but they got little attention. Now, powerful people are speaking out. Sabar lists them: “Marquee sports journalists such as Bob Costas said they would stop using the name, as did more than a dozen news outlets and the editorial board of … The Washington Post; civil-rights groups and sports figures came out against it; 50 U.S. senators signed a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell …; and the Patent and Trademark Office revoked six of the team’s registered trademarks, calling them ‘disparaging.’ ”

Why the difference in attention? Money. Halbritter’s wealth buys media access.

Sabar visited Halbritter and heard a story that helps explain his passion for this cause. In 1976, his aunt and uncle burned to death in their trailer as calls to the City of Oneida Fire Department went unanswered. That, writes Sabar, “was the crisis that sapped the last of Halbritter’s faith in outsiders.”

Two weeks after the fire, the Oneidas opened a bingo hall. Over the next few decades, the tribe diversified into other businesses, including video production, marina management, journalism and sausage making. “Oneida Nation Enterprises, the commercial empire Halbritter founded and leads as CEO, is one of the largest employers in central New York,” Sabar writes.

In early 2013, Halbritter heard about high-school students in nearby Cooperstown, N.Y., pressing school officials to drop their team’s long-standing name, the Redskins. These were white kids in an overwhelmingly white town taking a stand. He offered Cooperstown $10,000 for new athletic uniforms. The school accepted and changed its name to the Hawkeyes.

Soon he took on the NFL team with Change the Mascot. He hired a Yale-trained psychologist to publicize peer-reviewed studies showing that American Indian caricatures lower young Indians’ sense of self-worth and possibility, which, Halbritter argues, “abets the cycles of poverty, alcoholism and suicide.”

Since 2013, at least a dozen schools around the United States have dropped the Redskins name, including Goshen (Ind.) Community Schools. (Halbritter considers the names Indians and Braves a lower priority because neither is “a dictionary-defined racial slur.”)

Other racial slurs have become taboo, but somehow “redskin” has not. At least not yet. Now that may be changing.

Halbritter thinks change will come, he told students at Harvard, “because a critical mass of Americans will no longer tolerate, patronize and cheer on bigotry.”

Let's hope so.

From 'protect and serve' to 'punish and profit'

The increasing number of cases of police officers shooting unarmed African Americans almost certainly reveals an inherent racism that afflicts U.S. society. But another, more economic factor may also contribute to these shootings.

Across the United States, police departments, like many other public-funded services, are increasingly short of money. As a result, cities look for more sources of revenue. One such source is arresting and fining people for petty offenses.

In “Collect and Serve” (Mother Jones, September/October), Jack Hitt points out that many of the victims of police shootings were apprehended for petty offenses. In April, police officer Michael Slager stopped Walter Scott for a busted taillight and then fatally shot him.

 

 

When the Justice Department released its report on Ferguson, Mo., in March, then-Attorney General Eric Holder referenced a woman in that town whose life sounded Walter Scott-like, writes Hitt. “She had received two parking tickets totaling $151. Her efforts to pay those fines fell so behind that she eventually paid out more than $500. At one point, she was jailed for nonpayment and—eight years later—still owes $541 in accrued fees.”

The judge largely responsible for extracting these fees from Ferguson’s poor, writes Hitt, was Ronald J. Brockmeyer, who “owed $172,646 in back taxes. … Even as he was jailing black ladies for parking tickets, Brockmeyer was allegedly erasing citations for white Ferguson residents who happened to be his friends.”

Is this just one person’s bad personal ethics, or is it part of a pattern? In 2010, the Ferguson police and courts generated $1.4 million for the city. This year, they expect to make $3.1 million.

And it’s not just Ferguson doing this. In Oklahoma, Robert Bates, a 73-year-old millionaire insurance broker with scant law enforcement background, was allowed to go out on patrol, “likely because he had donated lots of money and equipment to the local sheriff’s office,” writes Hitt. He killed an unarmed black suspect when he grabbed his gun instead of his Taser.

“Essentially, these small towns in urban areas have municipal infrastructure that can’t be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning,” says William Maurer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice.

Thus you get laws like these (in Pagedale, Mo.): You can’t have a hedge more than three feet high or a basketball hoop or a wading pool in front of your house. You can’t walk on the roadway. Pants may not be worn below the waist in public. Blinds must be neatly hung.

Why such laws? Maurer says that in 2010, Missouri passed a law that capped the amount of city revenue any agency could generate from traffic stops. Pagedale saw a 495 percent increase in nontraffic-related arrests.

Scott’s busted taillight is not even a crime in South Carolina. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes. Michael Brown was walking in the street. Between 2011 and 2013, 95 percent of the perpetrators of this act were African American, writes Hitt, “meaning that ‘walking black’ is not a punch line. It is a crime.”

Police forces have become collection agencies for the municipal court. Jails have become debtors’ prisons. And who pays? We do.

Hitt quotes the director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program: “Having taxpayers foot a bill of $4,000 to incarcerate a man who owes the state $745 or a woman who owes a predatory lender $425 and removing them from the job force makes sense in no reasonable world.”

The mission of police departments have shifted from “protect and serve” to “punish and profit.” That’s just wrong.

A neglected period of history

Last Sunday, Sept. 13, Jeanne and I walked from our home in North Newton, Kan., over to the Bethel College campus to attend a showing of the documentary Slavery by Another Name, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and had its national broadcast on PBS on Feb. 3, 2012. KIPCOR (Kansas Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution) sponsored the showing and the discussion that followed.

 

 

Slavery by Another Name is a powerful film, based on the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Blackmon. It challenges one of our country’s most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The documentary recounts how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, keeping hundreds of thousands of African Americans in bondage, trapping them in a brutal system that would persist until the onset of World War II.

The film uses archival photographs and dramatic re-enactments to tell forgotten stories of both victims and perpetrators of this neoslavery and includes interviews with their descendants. It also features interviews with Blackmon and leading scholars of the period.

The film recounts how, since slavery was unconstitutional, local authorities in the American South arrested African Americans, often on trumped-up charges, and sent them to prison farms, where they served years in hard labor, to the profit of local businessmen. And when courageous people brought this practice of penury to the attention of the U.S. government, President Teddy Roosevelt looked the other way, not wanting to displease his wealthy supporters. After all, this penal servitude, unpaid labor, was good for business.

Only during World War II, when someone pointed out to President Franklin Roosevelt that this practice would provide the Japanese with propaganda, did the government act to end it. Still, its practice continued for some time.

Slavery by Another Name is hard to watch and elicits strong emotions. In a discussion after the film, Galyn Vesey, Ph.D., director of the Research on Black Wichita Project, asked people about their feelings, their thoughts and their own experiences.

In the audience were many people from Wichita, Kan., most of them African Americans, and what they had to say was as moving as the film. A pastor said that our nation is cursed because of its racism, which he defined as prejudice plus power. A woman pleaded for some kind of change in a society where her son is arrested by police and held in jail when he did nothing illegal. One man told of his experience as a veteran who was arrested at a gas station while simply sitting in the car while his friend pumped gas.

An eloquent man who said he will turn 83 in December recounted how talented blacks are leaving Kansas because jobs are closed to them. He said he has three daughters, all of whom have doctorates, as does he. Two are architects. One of them works at a firm in Atlanta that designed buildings for the 1996 Olympics and the Atlanta airport. Yet when Wichita decided to do a major expansion of its airport, she couldn’t even get an interview.

A white woman in the audience asked what many felt, What do we do? What will help?

A good question. One thing we can do is relearn our nation’s history, like this period that is ignored by most textbooks.

A tragic end to a giften singer

The British documentary Amy looks at the life and brief career of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse. It shows the perils of celebrity and addiction, which in Winehouse’s case, led to her death by alcohol poisoning on July 23, 2011, at the age of 27.

 

 

Directed by Asif Kapadia, who also directed the fine documentary Senna, Amy uses raw footage taken by friends and family, such as a home movie of her at age 14 singing with her long-time friend Juliette Ashby at a birthday party, as well as that of her performances in clubs, at concerts or that of paparazzi dogging her on the street.

I’d heard of Winehouse and knew she was popular, but I had not listened to her music. My loss. The film offers many examples of her performances and superimposes the lyrics on the screen as she sings.

Her final recording was a duet single, “Body and Soul,” with Tony Bennett, who she called her idol. He later says on film that she would have been one of the great jazz singers, on par with Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald. High praise indeed.

Her voice, even her honest, heartfelt lyrics, seem mature beyond her years. We get to witness her rise to fame and her thoughts about her art.

In 2003, she said, “I don’t think I’ll be famous. I don’t think I could handle it.” She was half-right.

The film shows her rise and fall with poignant detail. By the end, any viewer will feel sadness not only at the loss of a great artist but at how badly a human being was treated.

Like many young artists, she was naïve about the music business and depended on others to guide her. Many of these were in the business to make money. And many of them did.

The person who had perhaps the most profound effect on Winehouse was her father, Mitch, who left his family when Amy was 9. He reappears once she becomes famous and soon latches on to her, seeking to profit from her success. Despite his abandoning her, Amy is emotionally linked to him and generally does what he wishes. At one point, it’s clear she needs to go into rehab from her addiction to heroin and cocaine, but he won’t sign the papers because “it’s up to her.” Another time, he shows up with a camera crew in St. Lucia, where she is taking a long vacation.

If the father is one villain in the story, another is her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, an egotistical playboy who also plays on her popularity. Again, she is smitten with him, doing whatever he wants, including getting hooked on cocaine and heroin.

A third villain is a familiar one—the tabloid media. Winehouse, once she is popular, is constantly hounded by paparazzi, who wait outside her apartment to pounce on her whenever she emerges.

I don’t mean to imply that Winehouse has no responsibility for her choices or her actions. But the film unfolds this theme of the artist as a creature upon which others prey. There are many others who did care for her and helped her along in her career.

But in the end, this wasn’t enough. A wonderful artist came to a tragic end. In this powerful film, we get to see both the artistry and the tragedy.

How to address a 'jailhouse nation'

Perhaps most of us are familiar with the statistics: with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States holds roughly a quarter of its prisoners: more than 2.3 million people, including 1.6 million in state and federal prisons and more than 700,000 in local jails and immigration pens. Further damning stats: the U.S. incarceration rate has risen sevenfold since the 1970s and is now five times Britain’s, nine times Germany’s and 14 times Japan’s. At any time, one in 35 American adults is in prison, on parole or on probation. One-third of African-American men can expect to be locked up at some point, and one in nine black children has a parent behind bars.

We are, according to The Economist (June 20-26), a “jailhouse nation.” While many bewail this situation, this article asks how to make America’s penal system less punitive and more effective.

 

 

The first step is understanding the extent of the problem and clarifying what it does or does not mean. Some like to say that the decline in America’s crime rate in the last several decades is due to the increase in incarceration.

While it may be true that “in the 1980s expanding prisons … did help slow the rise of crime by taking thugs off the street,” the article says, “mass incarceration has long since become counter-productive.”

For example, the article points out, the number of prisoners over the age of 50 has more than tripled since 1994. “Many of these people are no longer dangerous, but locking up the elderly—and treating their ailments—costs taxpayers a fortune, typically $68,000 per inmate each year.” In addition, the longer prisoners are inside, the harder it is for them to reintegrate into society.

Prison has had a huge effect on working-class families, especially black ones. “Among African Americans aged 25-54, there are only 83 free men for every 100 women,” the article says. “Men behind bars cannot support their offspring, and when they are released, many states make it preposterously hard for them to find jobs.”

In my volunteer work with people in poverty, I’ve seen that having a felony on one’s record makes it almost impossible to get a job. Employers won’t even consider a person’s application, no matter what the circumstances of the crime or that they have served time for it.

So what does this article recommend?

1. End the war on drugs. In fact, the drug war is ebbing: in 1997, drug offenders were 27 percent of all prisoners; now they are around 20 percent.

2. Amend or repeal rules that prevent judges from judging each case on its merits. State and federal “mandatory minimum” and “three strikes” rules compel courts to lock up even relatively minor repeat offenders for most of their lives.

3. Reduce the prison population. “There are roughly 165,000 murderers and 160,000 rapists in U.S. prisons. If America released every single prisoner who has not been convicted of killing or raping someone, its incarceration rate would still be higher than Germany’s.” But it would be a start.

4. Don’t lock up people for so long. Some 49,000 Americans are serving life without the possibility of ever being released. (In England and Wales the number is 55.) “A 50-year sentence does not deter five times as much as a 10-year sentence (though it does cost over five times as much).” Money wasted on long sentences is not available to spend on catching criminals in the first place, which is a more effective deterrent.

There are reforms happening, but more is needed. The article concludes: “There is no single fix for America’s prisons, but there are 2.3 million reasons to try.” We all can add our voice to needed reform.

The benefits of reading literary fiction

As an avid reader, I often take for granted the importance of reading and think, naively, that others do as well. Then I come across statistics such as these (from the Statistic Brain Research Institute):

• 46 percent of U.S. adults can’t understand the labels on their prescriptions;

• 50 percent of U.S. adults are unable to read an eighth-grade-level book;

• 33 percent of U.S. high school graduates will never read a book after high school;

• 42 percent of college students will never read a book after they graduate.

My disappointment deepens when I read of studies showing that a person’s ability to be empathetic increases through reading.

Is this connected to the increasingly vitrolic and mean comments we read online? Do these voices showing hatred, seeing the world in black-and-white terms and failing to allow for the complexity of other human beings reflect the dearth of reading?

In her article “Reading as a Form of Therapy” (newyorker.com), Ceridwen Dovey refers to a study in 2013 in Science that found that “reading literary fiction (rather than popular fiction or literary nonfiction) improved participants’ results on tests that measured social perception and empathy, which are crucial to ‘theory of mind’: the ability to guess with accuracy what another human being might be thinking or feeling, a skill humans only start to develop around the age of 4.”

But what is literary fiction? Some would say it’s elitist, snobbish, hard to understand, an arbitrary label. Wikipedia defines it as “works that offer deliberate social commentary, political criticism, or focus on the individual to explore some part of the human condition.” I would add that it generally presents characters that are complex, not one-dimensional or predictable.

Dovey refers to Keith Oatley, a novelist and emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, who has for many years run a research group interested in the psychology of fiction. He says: “We have started to show how identification with fictional characters occurs, how literary art can improve social abilities, how it can move us emotionally, and can prompt changes of selfhood.”

Dovey writes about her experience with a bibliotherapist named Ella Berthoud, who asked her about her reading habits. After several sessions, conducted via email, Berthoud recommended a list of books for Dovey to read.

She worked her way through the books over the next couple of years and gained some insights. “In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks,” Dovey writes. “Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself.”

Dovey calls bibliotherapy a “broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect.” She traces the first use of the term to a 1916 article in The Atlantic Monthly, “A Literary Clinic.” The author refers to an early bibliotherapist who says: “You must read more novels. Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be searching, drastic, stinging, relentless novels.”

Bibliotherapy is not a panacea, and not every reader is necessarily empathetic. Yet regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than nonreaders.

 

Jeanette Winterson has written that fiction and poetry heal "the rupture reality makes on the imagination." It's worth a try.

Brian Wilson, troubled genius

Love and Mercy, the new bio pic about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, is a searing portrait of a musical genius who suffered from an abusive father, mental illness and an abusive psychotherapist.

 

 

The film, directed by Bill Pohlad, takes an interesting and effective approach, using two actors to portray Wilson. Paul Dano plays the young Wilson, of the 1960s, while John Cusack plays Wilson in the 1980s, after he came under the care and guardianship of Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). The film’s narrative moves back and forth between the younger and older Wilson, which helps with the pacing of the story, a key element when showing a character’s inner life as much as their outer.

After a panic attack, Wilson withdraws from touring with the popular Beach Boys—made up of his brothers Dennis and Carl, their cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine—and decides to devote his energy to making “the greatest album ever made.”

The film is most alive when showing the making of Pet Sounds, which indeed came to be seen as one of the greatest albums ever made. Wilson’s genius, his detailed attention to combining the sounds of various instruments—many not used in a pop song recording—and the harmonies of the Beach Boys, is on display. We learn of the competition they felt with the Beatles after the release of Revolver, and the Beatles, inspired by Pet Sounds, later produced Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which many consider the greatest album ever made.

While under the care of Dr. Landy, Wilson meets Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), who sells him a Cadillac. They begin dating, but are rarely alone, since Landy and his assistants accompany Wilson wherever he goes. While the controlling, abusive Landy character seems outlandish at times, he was apparently every bit as bad or worse.

Dano and Cusack are excellent in their portrayals, with Dano carrying more of the screen time, while Cusack’s role is more subtle.

The film effectively shows the growing torment Wilson experiences as he hears voices in his head and experiences anxiety. But some of these scenes go on too long and drag, hindering the film’s pacing.

Love and Mercy (the title comes from a 1988 song by Wilson) is a powerful exploration of one man’s descent into mental illness and his emergence into a measure of health. It’s an enjoyable depiction of the creation of a great piece of music. And it shows the power of love and mercy to rescue a person from those wanting to control him.

And for those who love The Beach Boys’ music, there’s plenty of that as well.

The cost of gun violence

We in the United States live in a gun culture. This is, we live amid a plethora of guns and people with guns—so much so that it had become unsurprising when we hear about someone being shot, either by intent, by accident or self-inflicted.

But what is the cost of such gun violence? Interestingly, while the U.S. government has assessed the economic toll of various problems, such as motor vehicle crashes, air pollution, heart disease and domestic violence, it has not collected data on the costs of gun violence. Why not?

According to “What Does Gun Violence Really Cost?” (Mother Jones, May/June) by Mark Follman, Julia Lurie, Jaeah Lee and Ted Miller, “the National Rifle Association and other influential gun rights advocates have long pressured political leaders to shut down research related to firearms.”

 

 

An April 7 editorial in the Annals of Internal Medicine called this “suppression of science.” It noted that “polictical forces had effectively banned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies from funding research on gun-related injury and death.” This suppression worked, since no relevant studies have been published since 2005.

Not to be deterred by such influence, Mother Jones set to work investigating this question in 2012. The article goes into detail about what these writers learned. For example, in the last decade, more than 750,000 Americans were injured by gunshots, and more than 320,000 were killed. Each year, more than 11,000 people are murdered with a firearm, and more than 20,000 others commit suicide using one. In addition, “hundreds of children die annually in gun homicides, and each week seems to bring news of another toddler accidently shooting himself or a sibling with an unsecured gun,” write the authors. And while “violent crime overall has declined steadily in recent years, rates of gun injury and death are climbing (up 11 and 4 percent since 2011), and mass shootings have been on the rise.”

As the editorial by a team of doctors in Annals of Internal Medicine said: “It does not matter whether we believe that guns kill people or that people kill people with guns—the result is the same: a public health crisis.”

The writers in Mother Jones have not accumulated a lot of data, they also tell a half dozen stories of specific individuals affected by gun violence and the approximate costs to them and to society (i.e., taxpayers). Such stories help bring the statistics home, make them real.

To help get a hold of the economic toll of gun violence, Mother Jones turned to Ted Miller at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, an independent nonprofit that studies public health, education and safety issues.

Miller looks at two categories of costs: direct and indirect. “Every time a bullet hits somebody, expenses can include emergency services, police investigations and long-term medical and mental-health care, as well as court and prison costs.” These are direct costs, and about 87 percent of them fall on taxpayers.

Indirect costs include “lost income, losses to employers and impact on quality of life, which Miller bases on amounts that juries award for pain and suffering to victims of wrongful injury and death.”

Mother Jones crunched data from 2012 and found that “the annual cost of gun violence in America exceeds $229 billion.” Direct costs account for $8.6 billion, which means “the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day.”

Our gun culture, which places a high value on owning guns, is expensive.

Art and poverty

Many people see art, whether it’s literature or painting or film or theater, as a useless activity or product for the benefit of an elite group of people, not for the poor.

If people don’t have adequate food or shelter, what good is art, no matter what the medium?

Gregory Wolfe, publisher and editor of Image, a journal that focuses on art, faith and mystery, spoke about art and poverty in January at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. An adaptation of his talk appears in the latest issue of Image (No. 84).

 

The Potato Eaters by Vincent Van Gogh

 

This is a topic that many people concerned about justice issues, including many Mennonites, have trouble with. Many respond like the disciples, particularly Judas, responded to the woman who anointed Jesus with an expensive perfume (John 12:1-8; Mark 14:3-9). What a waste! The money spent on that could have been used to feed the poor.

But Jesus blesses her action. Wolfe comments: “The anointing is wholly gratuitous, which also happens to be one of the fundamental characteristics of art.”

Over the centuries, Wolfe points out, the poor have shown their desire for beauty. In the Catholic tradition, for example, look at the great cathedrals as well as household shrines and murals.

Art comes in many forms and serves many purposes. Folk art has a long tradition and often comes out of poor communities. Pop art, however, has become mostly a commodity that makes millions for various corporations.

Many concerned about justice fear art may be a distraction. However, says Wolfe, “beauty, whether manmade or natural, evokes in us the desire to protect what is both precious and vulnerable.”

I volunteer for Circles of Hope, which seeks to help people move out of poverty. The people I’ve come to know show that they aren’t solely concerned about money. They want to live, to enjoy life with their families and friends. And they are quite creative in finding ways to get by on little.

Kansas governor Sam Brownback signed a bill last month preventing Kansas families receiving government assistance from using those funds to visit swimming pools, see movies, go gambling or get tattoos. As the Washington Post writes: “There’s nothing fun about being on welfare, and a new Kansas bill aims to keep it that way.”

These legislators seem to have no clue how poor people live or the struggles they face to survive.

In an earlier issue, Image ran an interview with Roberta Ahmanson, who has worked to serve the homeless through a nonprofit called Village of Hope. She notes that the founder “intuitively understood that the places you bring people to speak to them about their own value.” Village of Hope, she says, “is probably the only homeless shelter in the world that has stained-glass windows and an 18-foot vase and Albert Paley gates.”

Art reflects beauty. It also reflects the artist’s own poverty. An artist creates a “nothing” that does nothing. But while it “does not in itself alleviate the suffering that poverty entails, … it remains one of the most compelling means by which we can be turned from distraction and denial and enabled to dwell for a time among those we would pass by.”

While poverty isolates people, art brings us together.

We all need bread and roses, food and art. Beauty enriches our lives and makes us want to enrich others’ lives as well.

Scientists judge climate change reporting

Reports keep coming out about climate change. For example, despite the record snowfalls in the eastern United States, December 2014 through February were the hottest winter (or summer in the Southern Hemisphere) ever recorded, since such records began being kept in 1880. Yet some articles play down such findings.

Now a group of climate scientists is reviewing articles and trying to counter some of the misinformation being published. Calling themselves Climate Feedback, the group includes scientists, oceanographers and atmospheric physicists.

The group is making use of a browser plugin from the nonprofit Hypothes.is to annotate climate journalism on the Web, writes Laura Dattaro in “How Climate Scientists Are Annotating Climate Reporting” at cjr.org, the website of Columbia Journalism Review.

“Readers with the plugin, or with a link created through it,” writes Dattaro, “can read an article while simultaneously reading comments and citations from a cadre of experts. Click on the headline, and you’ll see an overall rating, based on the article’s accuracy, fairness, and adherence to evidence.”

Climate Feedback lists about 25 scientists who contribute criticism, and more can apply as long as they’re actively publishing climate research.

Dattaro gives a couple of examples of articles the group has critiqued. The first one was an article by Steve Koonin, a theoretical physicist and former BP scientist who now heads NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, which was published in the Wall Street Journal’s Saturday Essay section last December.

“Koonin argued that it’s too early to shape climate global policy because the specifics of the science are not settled,” writes Dattaro. Climate Feedback uses a rating system much like that for rating movies: four points (rather than stars) is the top grade. Six scientists gave this article a rating of a half point, which places it between “poor” and “very poor.”

Another Wall Street Journal column got a similar review. Danish author and analyst Bjorn Lomborg, has been accused of having links to the Koch Brothers, who are notorious for funding misinformation around climate science, writes Dattaro. Lomborg claimed “climate-change alarmists” are ignoring a wealth of climate data that “are actually encouraging,” to the detriment of us all, according to the review.

A major spokesperson for Climate Feedback is Emmanuel Vincent, a climate scientist at the University of California, Merced’s Center for Climate Communication. He says he wants to see a more scientific point of view on what is said about climate change. “Climate change has been taken a little bit outside of the realm of science,” he says.

Many magazines employ fact-checkers (though fewer than used to), but Vincent says that’s not how he sees his group. According to Kattaro, he says “the ultimate goal isn’t to fact-check but to foster more scientific thinking in journalists and ultimately build more communication between the two parties.” The group often makes responses on articles in the comments section of the magazines where the articles appear.

New York Times climate reporter Justin Gillis says: “We’ve seen some pretty serious misrepresentation of climate science in certain news outlets. I would hope those outlets would take the comments seriously.”

Editors still make the call about what gets published. Vincent’s hope is that journalists and scientists will be more critical in their work and will “listen to each other (while also informing the reader),” writes Dattaro.

Unfortunately, too many readers aren’t interested in facts, only ideology.