The human face of evil

We are inundated by news of the atrocities of ISIS and other jihadist groups, and many Americans live in an often misguided fear of Muslims. We tend to view these Islamic militants as monsters.

Abderrahmane Sissako’s outstanding film Timbuktu paints a different portrait by showing the complex humanity of his characters.

 

 

This French-Mauritanian film, which originally came out in 2014 but only came to the United States this year, takes its name from the cosmopolitan city in Mali that draws people from many places and where many languages are spoken. It takes place during an occupation of the city by Islamists bearing a jihadist black flag.

The film opens with a group of jihadists chasing a small antelope across the desert in a land rover, shooting their guns to scare it into submission. This becomes one of many symbols for the reality many people find themselves in.

Soon, in the village, we witness people’s quiet resistance to these thugs, who use a loudspeaker to announce silly laws: Women must wear socks. No music is allowed. Most of the resistance comes from women. A woman selling fish in the marketplace refuses to wear gloves, pointing out how ridiculous such a rule is. “Go ahead, cut off my hands now,” she tells them. They back away.

Another woman, who has moved to Timbuktu from Haiti after she lost everything in 2010, walks boldly through the village without socks and laughs at the soldiers. They get out of her way.

The local imam explains to several jihadists that his own jihad (the word means “struggle”) is with himself, to better himself in service to Allah.

Three of the soldiers argue with each other about who is the best soccer player in the world, even though sports are not permitted. They take a soccer ball from a local boy. Later we see a group of boys playing soccer without a ball, illustrating the power of imagination. When the jihadists show up, they stop playing and pretend to do exercises.

The film feels comedic at this point, but soon we witness the stoning to death of a couple charged with adultery. This scene is based on an actual event, a 2012 public stoning of an unmarried couple in Aguelhok. Another woman receives 40 lashes for singing and 40 lashes for being in the same room as a man not of her family.

Another story line involves a family that lives in a tent outside the city. Kidane is a cattle herder who loves his 12-year-old daughter, Toya. He gets into a fight with a fisherman who killed one of Kidane’s cows for damaging his fishing net. Kidane accidentally shoots him. The Islamists arrest Kidane and, per sharia law, demand a blood money payment of 40 cattle to the fisherman’s family. Since he only has seven cattle, he is sentenced to death.

Sissako’s film is a poetic tribute to people living in a difficult situation. It is beautifully shot and shows the quiet faith of some of the people. It also portrays the jihadists as humans who are misguided and more interested in power than in religion.

Timbuktu is that rare film that is both disturbing and inspiring. While it depicts some characters’ resignation to fate, it also shows the power of free will in resisting the evil of oppression by the jihadists.

The film is rated PG-13 and is available on DVD.

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.