May 17, 2019


The Opportunity of White Anxiety




ANDREW SULLIVAN, NEW YORK

There are times when it feels as if two huge tectonic plates are colliding beneath the surface of Western politics, and, right now, neither seems to be giving ground.
The first plate is the force of demography. In most Western countries, the pace of immigration from the fast-growing and ever-younger global South, and the higher birth rates of immigrants, is shifting us to a whole new model of nationhood: culturally and ethnically far more diverse, with no single historical or traditional national narrative. At the same time, the inhabitants of those countries — still largely white — are increasingly troubled by the pace of change, panicked about the fast-shifting identity of their country and angry at the elites who created this swift ethnic transformation. You have an almost irresistible demographic force and a near-immovable psycho-political response. Hence the deadlock. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born,” in Gramsci’s words. “Now is the time of monsters.”
Maybe this is, in fact, the single most powerful force in Western politics. That’s the really engaging thesis of Eric Kaufmann, whose new book, Whiteshift, is by far the most thorough and scholarly treatment of the politics of white majorities I’ve read. Kaufmann is a professor at Birkbeck, University of London; a Canadian born in Hong Kong and living in England, one-quarter Chinese and one-quarter Latino, he passes as “white.” And what’s so refreshing is that Kaufmann is not afraid to go there. He’s candid about race and identity — and how they fit into any immigration debate — and argues that much of the right’s gains (for decades, in fact) have come from a white majority witnessing its own decline and even disappearance, and freaking out. In this, Kaufmann echoes in some ways the critique of the left: that all that’s really going on right now is white fear of a nonwhite future. But that’s a whole lot going on!
The difference is that where the left regards “whiteness” as a form of unending oppression, Kaufmann sees the potential for a kind of inclusive liberation. Yes, white racism is still around. Perhaps a good deal. And it’s vital to call that out. But what Kaufmann insists on is that much of the resistance to mass immigration is not so much racist as merely conservative, emerging not from generalized loathing of others but from attachment to one’s own in times of rapid change. He makes a distinction between “racism” and “racial self-interest,” the first abhorrent, the second understandable. No one objects to nonwhite groups defending their self-interest. So why not whites as well, Kaufmann asks? I learned from Kaufmann’s book, for example, that in the 1990s, Congress granted five territories — including American Samoa, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands — the right to control immigration to maintain their ethnic majorities.
The lack of outrage at that policy, Kaufmann argues, is due to something he calls “asymmetrical multiculturalism.” That’s a definition of diversity that does not include white people (i.e., the current definition of “diversity”). And if your model of society uniquely excludes white people from the rights and privileges of being an ethnic group, or denies them the right to express their racial self-interest like every other ethnicity, then whites will begin to push back. And, when they push back, they are called racists, or deplorables, or bigots, and they tend to double down. That’s what’s behind increasing numbers of Americans, specifically most Republicans, telling pollsters that white people are more discriminated against in America than black people. That’s absurd in almost all cases, but I suspect it’s more of an expression of frustration at being left out of the future than an accurate view of the present.
Sure, you can stigmatize this resistance to a majority nonwhite America (and a little stigma is probably a good thing). But the truth is that repression often strengthens the thing it is trying to repress. Resistance to mass nonwhite immigration was intense when diversity began to take off in the 1960s. If you go back and read the debates around the 1965 Immigration Act, which ended a national-origin-quota system that favored immigrants from majority-white countries, you find that no one seemed to believe it would alter the ethnic composition of the country at all! Robert Kennedy, for example, was asked at one point how many Asian immigrants he foresaw as likely to come to the U.S. in the future and he replied: “I would say for the Asia-Pacific Triangle it [immigration] would be approximately 5,000, Mr. Chairman, after which immigration from that source would virtually disappear.” Later this century, Asians are forecast to be the single largest group of immigrants.
Similarly, the British public were never formally asked whether they wanted their country to be a multiracial society when they first began admitting immigrants from the Commonwealth countries in the 1950s and 1960s. When the British Tory, Enoch Powell, made his infamous (and racist) “Rivers of Blood” speech, denouncing nonwhite immigration in 1968, he was buoyed by 74 percent support in the polls. But he was dismissed from his Shadow Cabinet position, exiled from the Tory party, banished from respectable society, and the taboo against any mention of race deepened.
What we’re seeing now in both Europe and the U.S., Kaufmann argues, is the long-delayed, long-suppressed consequences of this suppression. We have forgotten in our good intentions that human beings are tribal creatures, that race is a part of tribal identities, and that the racial composition of a country, for good and ill, is something people care about. But you can only ignore human nature for so long until it comes back to bite you.
It’s that force of human nature — often an irrational but still potent force — that has given us the agonies of Brexit and Trump. A revolt against mass nonwhite immigration lies at the heart of both developments. It’s perfectly clear by now that Brexit was not about trade: If the E.U. had allowed the U.K. to control E.U. immigration, the Brits would have been fine with the customs union and the single market. But they were told they had to lose trade if they wanted to control borders. So they chose to control their borders. In the U.S., Trump’s core distinction was his appeal to white Americans to cut down on nonwhite immigration. It was his first message, it was a winning message, and it will be central to his reelection attempt.
And look at what has happened in both countries, with respect to immigration, over the last three years or so: Nothing. The U.K. remains in the E.U. — with freedom of movement — and there’s now a distinct, if small, possibility of never getting out, as Brexit’s cliff edge is extended to — yes! — Halloween. In the U.S., undocumented immigration will likely be higher this year than in any year under Obama, and there seems to be absolutely no way to change that. Over 100,000 migrants entered the U.S. last month — on pace for more than a million this year alone, including many, many children (it’s forecast that 2019 will have more unaccompanied minors entering the country than in the last influx in 2014). Finally, liberal outlets are beginningto cover this as the crisis it is. These migrants are being ushered in quickly and will get a court hearing in a few years’ time, if the system works as it should. But the system is not working as it should. It’s on the verge of what even the New York Times has to report is a “breaking point.” Yes, a majority will probably show up for their asylum court hearings. But between 25 and 40 percent will not. And for that group, there is no quick or easy mechanism for deportation. There are no cops in immigration courts tasked with arresting or detaining anyone. There’s no good data on what percentage of those deemed deportable are actually removed from the country. “ICE officials occasionally make a statement about the very low number of failed Central American asylum seekers who are removed, and it’s probably around 5 percent or less of the number who could be,” says Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the restrictionist group the Center for Immigration Studies. That means that more than 95 percent of all immigrants showing up at the border get to stay in America. And that is a massive incentive, as we are now seeing, for yet more millions to come.
At some point, sooner rather than later, we will have to find a point between allowing mass immigration and outflanking white nationalism. “We can’t label everybody who is disturbed by immigration as racist,” Barack Obama said this week. “You know, that’s a self-defeating tactic. You push away potential allies, people who maybe just haven’t thought about it … but if they’re exposed to new information and they’re meeting people from other countries and they understand the nature of these different traditions and they see that others are eager to work with you, then suddenly they go, ‘Ah, okay.’” And he’s right. (As usual.) In a meta-analysis of all academic articles published between 1995 and 2016 on the relationship between support for diversity and opposition to immigration, Kaufmann found that “both ethnic change and raw minority levels counted at a national level — though minority change was a somewhat stronger predictor of white hostility than national share.” Yes, there are racists; but there are also many who are simply uncomfortable and conservative. The only way to stop the populist, white-nationalist right is to separate the former from the latter, and engage the conservatives.
What Kaufmann recommends is some kind of reassurance to the worried whites. I think that may be the only way forward — and it’s the only reason I favor Trump’s wall. Merely as a symbol of border control, it could calm people down, curtail some of the hysteria, and dampen the appeal of the far right. But it’s also why I favor limiting immigration, and reminding people that this kind of ethnic shift (if not quite on this scale) has happened in the past and America didn’t cease to exist. It’s a moment to remind ourselves how integrative and expansive and inclusive idea of “whiteness” has been in America, as new immigrant groups, with each subsequent wave, claim it as their own. Throughout the next century, it’s important to tell people, Kaufmann argues, that America will always have a large “white” majority — but this time with simply a lot of Hispanic last names. And this is in part because many Latinos want to integrate, admire the Anglo-Saxon roots of this experiment in self-government, and want to decrease immigration themselves. (A Quinnipiac poll last year found that 54 percent of blacks and 55 percent of Hispanics thought illegal immigration across the southern border was an “important problem.” One-quarter of Hispanics support Trump’s wall.)
I understand why this feels so wrong to many who believe that “whiteness” is the source of our problems rather than a semi-solution to them. But until we tell a convincing story of the future evolution of American identity, and include whites firmly within it, I fear white nationalism will only get worse. We can and should call out xenophobia and racism, but we also need to accommodate the deep human need for continuity in national and community life. Especially if the alternative only alienates those who are afraid, and empowers the demagogues who exploit them.


PROMISES MADE

Colombia’s Peace Deal Promised a New Era.


  • Colombia’s government and the country’s main rebel group said the peace deal heralded a new era. But violence is soaring.
  • This is the first in a series in which we return to news events to see if promises by those in power were kept.



  • NY TIMES


    Venezuela’s Collapse Is the Worst Outside of War in Decades, Economists Say

    Butchers have stopped selling meat cuts in favor of offal, fat shavings and cow hooves, the only animal protein many of their customers can afford.




    NY TIMES

    May 16, 2019



    Pelosi Raises Impeachment as a Way to Break Trump’s Information Stonewall



    De Blasio Enters 2020 Race for President

    Republicans’ Messaging on Abortion Puts Democrats on the Defensive



    The Time Is Now’: States Are Rushing to Restrict Abortion, or to Protect It
    The Republican Party has aggressively reset the terms of one of the country’s most divisive and emotionally fraught debates.
    Democrats face challenges they did not expect as they struggle to combat misinformation and thwart further efforts to undercut access to abortion.



    NY TIMES

    With grisly claims that Democrats promote “birth day abortions” and are “the party of death,” the Republican Party and its conservative allies have aggressively reset the terms of one of the country’s most divisive and emotionally fraught debates, forcing Democrats to reassess how they should respond to attacks and distortions that portray the entire party as extremist on abortion.

    The unusually forceful, carefully coordinated campaign has created challenges that Democrats did not expect as they struggle to combat misinformation and thwart further efforts to undercut access to abortion. And advocates of abortion rights fear it is succeeding in pressuring lawmakers in more conservative states to pass severe new restrictions, as Alabama did this week by approving a bill that would essentially outlaw the procedure.

    These new measures, combined with the likelihood that the Supreme Court will agree to take up at least one case in the coming months where Roe v. Wade will be tested, have stirred intense passions on both sides and elevated abortion into a prominent issue in the presidential race.

    [Make sense of the people, issues and ideas shaping American politics with our newsletter.]

    Much to the distress of abortion rights supporters, their own polling is showing that the right’s message is penetrating beyond the social conservatives who make up a large part of the Republican base. Surveys conducted for progressive groups in recent weeks found that more than half of Americans were aware of the “infanticide” claims that President Trump and his party have started making when describing abortions that occur later in pregnancy.


    Initially, many Democrats and abortion rights groups believed that the notion was so absurd that it was not worth responding to it. But they discovered that was a dangerous assumption to make in an information environment dominated by Mr. Trump.



    Mr. Trump is using the issue to rouse his base, including the crucial voting bloc of Christian conservatives for whom abortion is an overarching issue. His false statements that Democrats would “execute” newborn babies — which he has repeated on his Twitter feed, during his State of the Union address and at campaign rallies, sometimes as he mimics swaddling a baby — are being picked up and repeated by conservatives all over the country.

    Activists in the anti-abortion movement, who during previous Republican administrations were left to drive their messages with far more measured public support from the White House, have welcomed the president’s approach as refreshing, saying it has infused them with new purpose and perspective.
    Richard Land said he believed Mr. Trump won the votes of evangelicals, and thus the presidency, because of his visceral response to a debate question on abortion.CreditMark Humphrey/Associated Press

    Trump Fulfills His Promises on Abortion, and to Evangelicals.
    Trump, through his appointment of judges who oppose abortion rights and his graphic language, is again speaking a language the evangelicals embrace.
    NY TIMES

    Richard Land, a prominent evangelical Christian leader, said he could pinpoint the moment that Donald J. Trump secured his election. It was in the third presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, and the question was about abortion.

    “If you go with what Hillary is saying in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby,” Mr. Trump said.

    That emotive, visceral answer, Mr. Land said, was probably enough to win over skeptical working-class Catholic voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, who at that moment found an unlikely champion in Mr. Trump on the single issue that would determine their choice and deliver the White House to Mr. Trump.

    “The relationship that evangelicals have with President Trump is a very transactional one,” said Mr. Land, who serves on a spiritual advisory board to the president. “They feel like their voices are heard and he is keeping their promises to them.”


    Mr. Land said that Mr. Trump, far more than Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, an evangelical himself, has given evangelicals a place at the table and a welcome at the White House.

    As he enters his re-election campaign, Mr. Trump, through his appointment of judges who oppose abortion rights, including to the Supreme Court, and his equally graphic language about late-term abortions, is again speaking a language that evangelicals embrace.

    The issue has taken on renewed prominence after the Alabama Legislature passed one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws, drawing fierce opposition from Democratic opponents and presidential candidates seeking to challenge Mr. Trump.
    CreditMark Humphrey/Associated Press
    Image

    Trump’s Latest Move Takes Straight Shot at Huawei’s Business








    NY TIMES

    The Trump administration has filed criminal charges against Huawei for stealing technology. It has all but snuffed out the Chinese tech giant’s sales in the United States, calling the firm an espionage threat. And it has tried to persuade other governments to do similarly.

    But Washington had not taken a straight shot at Huawei’s ability to do business anywhere in the world until late Wednesday, when the Commerce Department announced restrictions on the company’s access to American technology.

    American companies including Qualcomm, Intel and Broadcom sell Huawei microchips and other specialized parts that go into its smartphones and telecom equipment. Google’s Android software powers its phones. Of the $70 billion that Huawei spent on components and other supplies last year, $11 billion went to American companies, a Huawei spokesman, Joe Kelly, said.

    If Huawei is cut off from these suppliers, the effect could be catastrophic for the millions of people who use Huawei smartphones — and for the mobile networks, across a wide swath of the planet, that run on Huawei gear.

    It would be “the trade equivalent of a nuclear bomb,” said Kevin J. Wolf, a partner at the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and an assistant secretary of commerce under President Barack Obama.

    Much remains unclear, however, about the scope and potential impact of the Commerce Department’s move. The department says it is putting Huawei on its “entity list” of firms that need special permission to buy American components and technology. How it decides to grant such permissions, and how broad a range of products the policy covers, will determine how badly Huawei’s business is disrupted.

    Trump Tells Pentagon Chief He Does Not Want War With Iran.

    President Trump’s statement was a message to his hawkish aides amid an intensifying American pressure campaign against Tehran.
    It came during a briefing on the rising tensions. Officials said Mr. Trump was firm in saying he did not want a military clash.

     

    NY TIMES

    President Trump has sought to put the brakes on a brewing confrontation with Iran in recent days, telling the acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, that he does not want to go to war with Iran, administration officials said, while his senior diplomats began searching for ways to defuse the tensions.

    Mr. Trump’s statement, during a Wednesday morning meeting in the Situation Room, sent a message to his hawkish aides that he does not want the intensifying American pressure campaign against the Iranians to explode into open conflict.

    For now, an administration that had appeared to be girding for conflict seems more determined to find a diplomatic off-ramp.


    Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the leader of Oman, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, on Wednesday to confer about the threat posed by Iran, according to a statement. Long an intermediary between the West and Iran, Oman was a site of a secret channel in 2013 when the Obama administration was negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran.

    Mr. Pompeo also asked European officials for help in persuading Iran to “de-escalate” tensions, which rose after American intelligence indicated that Iran had placed missiles on small boats in the Persian Gulf. The intelligence, which was based on photographs that have not been released but were described to The New York Times, prompted fears that Tehran may strike at United States troops and assets or those of its allies.


    The developments cast into sharp relief a president who is instinctively wary of military adventures and a cadre of advisers — led by the national security adviser, John R. Bolton — who have taken an uncompromising line toward Iran. The internal tensions have prompted fears that the Trump administration is spoiling for a fight, even if the commander in chief may not be.

    Those divisions are playing out against a fierce internal debate among administration officials about the gravity of the Iranian threat. While officials and British allies say the intelligence about the threat is valid, lawmakers and some inside the administration accuse Mr. Trump’s aides of exaggerating the danger and exploiting the intelligence to justify a military clash with Tehran.

    The administration’s internal debate over Iran was described by five senior officials who demanded anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.

    Iran dismissed any suggestion of a dialogue with Mr. Trump.

    There was a new potential flash point in Iran’s standoff with the United States, stemming from its vow last week to step away from some of the limitations imposed by the nuclear deal, a year after Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of the agreement that was negotiated between Tehran and world powers in 2015.

    State Department officials, speaking to reporters, set a red line that they warned Iran would cross at its peril: It could not ramp up its nuclear fuel production to the point where it could produce a nuclear weapon in less than one year.

    May 15, 2019


    Americans Are Among the Most Stressed People in the World, Poll Finds





    NY TIMES

    May 14, 2019

    Trade Dispute Between U.S. and China Deepens as Beijing Retaliates.




    NY TIMES

    WASHINGTON — The United States and China intensified their trade dispute on Monday, as Beijing said it would increase tariffs on nearly $60 billion worth of American goods and the Trump administration detailed plans to tax nearly every sneaker, computer, dress and handbag that China exports to the United States.

    NY Times: Toys, Phones and Sneakers: The Chinese Goods Trump Wants to Tax Next

    An escalation of the president’s trade war with China is poised to hit every conceivable consumer product, and then some.The escalation thrust the world’s two largest economies back into confrontation. While President Trump said on Monday that he would meet with China’s president, Xi Jinping, next month in Japan, the stakes are only increasing as the president continues to taunt and threaten China, causing it to retaliate on American businesses.
    In this Nov. 9, 2017, file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump, right, chats with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The United States and China are scheduled Thursday, May 9, 2019, to resume talks to try to back off an escalating trade war. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, File)
    Financial markets fell on Monday after China detailed plans to increase tariffs, with the S&P 500 index down more than 2.4 percent for the day and more than 4 percent this month. Shares of companies particularly dependent on trade with China, including Apple and Boeing, fared poorly, and yields on three-month Treasury securities exceeded those on 10-year bonds, a sign that investors may be souring on the outlook for short-term economic growth. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down over 600 points for the day.

    China’s Finance Ministry announced Monday that it was raising tariffs on a wide range of American goods to 20 percent or 25 percent from 10 percent. The increase will affect the roughly $60 billion in American imports already being taxed as retaliation for Mr. Trump’s previous round of tariffs, including beer, wine, swimsuits, shirts and liquefied natural gas exported to China.

    Among the products that will be hit by higher levies is seafood from China imported into the United States.




    Credit
    Wu Hong/EPA, via Shutterstock
    The move came after Mr. Trump increased tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods to as much as 25 percent on Friday, and threatened to move ahead with taxing the remainder of goods that the United States imports from China. The Office of the United States Trade Representative released a list on Monday of the roughly $300 billion worth of products that could face up to a 25 percent tariff and requested public comment, which will begin the formal process for enacting those duties. The list includes almost every consumer product imaginable, from coffee makers to sneakers to telescopic sights for rifles.

    Economists and industry groups were not sanguine.

    “Americans’ entire shopping cart will get more expensive,” said Hun Quach, the vice president of international trade at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, which represents Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Dollar General and other stores.

    Rick Helfenbein, the president of the American Apparel & Footwear Association, called the measure a “self-inflicted wound” that he said would be “catastrophic.” While footwear and apparel were largely spared from Mr. Trump’s first two rounds of tariffs, they are on the list of items that would be taxed if the president follows through with his threat to raise taxes on an additional $300 billion worth of goods.

    “By tightening the noose and pulling more consumer items into the trade war, the president has shown that he is not concerned with raising taxes on American families, or threatening millions of American jobs that are dependent on global value chains,” Mr. Helfenbein said.

    Both China and the United States have left a window for negotiators to try to reach a deal before the latest round of higher tariffs goes into effect. China said it would delay the higher rates until June 1, while Mr. Trump’s new 25 percent rate affects only products sent to the United States as of May 10, leaving a two- to four-week gap from the time most goods leave China by boat to when they arrive at an American port.

    But the two sides would have far to go to quickly resolve what has once again become a heated economic dispute. Progress toward a trade agreement between the United States and China nearly collapsed over the past two weeks, after American negotiators accused China of reneging on substantial portions of a potential trade agreement it had previously committed to. Significant differences remain over how tariffs should be rolled back between the countries, and whether the negotiated provisions must be enshrined in Chinese law.



    In remarks this week, Mr. Trump said companies that did not want to pay the tariffs could shift production out of China and into the United States or another country that has not been hit with tariffs. While there are signs that this shift is happening, it seems to be benefiting countries like Mexico and Vietnam more than the United States.

    DORIS DAY



    Doris Day, Movie Star Who Charmed America, Dies at 97.
    NY TIMES

    Doris Day, the freckle-faced movie actress whose irrepressible personality and golden voice made her America’s top box-office star in the early 1960s, died on Monday at her home in Carmel Valley, Calif. She was 97.

    The Doris Day Animal Foundation announced her death.

    dayles
    Ms. Day began her career as a big-band vocalist, and she was successful almost from the start: One of her first records, “Sentimental Journey,” released in 1945, sold more than a million copies, and she went on to have numerous other hits. The bandleader Les Brown,[above with Ms.
    Day] with whom she sang for several years, once said, “As a singer Doris belongs in the company of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.”

    But it was the movies that made her a star.

    Between “Romance on the High Seas” in 1948 and “With Six You Get Eggroll” in 1968, she starred in nearly 40 movies. On the screen she turned from the perky girl next door in the 1950s to the woman next door in a series of 1960s sex comedies that brought her four first-place rankings in the yearly popularity poll of theater owners, an accomplishment equaled by no other actress except Shirley Temple.


    In the 1950s she starred, and most often sang, in comedies (“Teacher’s Pet,” “The Tunnel of Love”), musicals (“Calamity Jane,”[above] “April in Paris,” “The Pajama Game”) and melodramas (“Young Man With a Horn,” the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “Love Me or Leave Me”).

    [Seeing Day as a hip sex goddess. | Four great Day movies (and one TV show) to stream now.]

    Image result for doris day love me or leave me
    James Cagney, her co-star in “Love Me or Leave Me,” said Ms. Day had “the ability to project the simple, direct statement of a simple, direct idea without cluttering it.” He compared her performance to Laurette Taylor’s in “The Glass Menagerie” on Broadway in 1945, widely hailed as one of the greatest performances ever given by an American actor.

    She went on to appear in “Pillow Talk” (1959), “Lover Come Back” (1961) and “That Touch of Mink” (1962), fast-paced comedies in which she fended off the advances of Rock Hudson (in the first two films) and Cary Grant (in the third). Those movies, often derided today as examples of the repressed sexuality of the ’50s, were considered daring at the time.
    dayhudson
    “I suppose she was so clean-cut, with perfect uncapped teeth, freckles and turned-up nose, that people just thought she fitted the concept of a virgin,” Mr. Hudson once said of Ms. Day. “But when we began ‘Pillow Talk’ we thought we’d ruin our careers because the script was pretty daring stuff.” The movie’s plot, he said, “involved nothing more than me trying to seduce Doris for eight reels.

    (Ms. Day and Mr. Hudson remained close. Not long before his death from AIDS in 1985, he appeared with her on her television show “Doris Day’s Best Friends” and at a news conference. “He was very sick,” Ms. Day said. “But I just brushed that off and I came out and put my arms around him and said, ‘Am I glad to see you.’ ”)By the time she retired in 1973, after starring for five years on the hit CBS comedy “The Doris Day Show,” Ms. Day had been dismissed as a goody-two-shoes, the leader of Hollywood’s chastity brigade, and, in the words of the film critic Pauline Kael, “the all-American middle-aged girl.” The critic Dwight Macdonald wrote of “the Doris Day Syndrome” and defined her as “wholesome as a bowl of cornflakes and at least as sexy.”
    bitesizecliftbar:
“ Doris Day.
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    But the passing decades have brought a reappraisal, especially by some feminists, of Ms. Day’s screen personality, and her achievements. In her book “Holding My Own in No Man’s Land”(1997), the critic Molly Haskell described Ms. Day as “challenging, in her working-woman roles, the limited destiny of women to marry, live happily ever after and never be heard from again.”

    Image result for doris day
    "Young at Heart"
    Ms. Day in fact was one of the few actresses of the 1950s and ’60s to play women who had a real profession, and her characters were often more passionate about their career than about their co-stars.

    “My public image is unshakably that of America’s wholesome virgin, the girl next door, carefree and brimming with happiness,” she said in “Doris Day: Her Own Story,” a 1976 book by A. E. Hotchner based on a series of interviews he conducted with Ms. Day. “An image, I can assure you, more make-believe than any film part I ever played. But I am Miss Chastity Belt, and that’s all there is to it.”
    Image result for doris day love me or leave me
    While Ms. Day was instantly successful as a singer and a movie actress, she was fated always to marry the wrong men. By the time she made her first movie she had been married and divorced twice.

    Her first husband, Al Jorden, a trombone player, was violently jealous and had an uncontrollable temper. He hit her on the second day of their marriage and continued to beat her when she became pregnant and refused to have an abortion. She was married at 19, divorced and a mother at 20.

    But she was undaunted. “All my life,” she told Mr. Hotchner, “I have known that I could work at whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.”

    Her second husband, George Weidler, a saxophonist, was a gentle man. She was happily living with him in a trailer park in Los Angeles when he left, after telling her that he thought she was going to become a big star and that he didn’t want to be Mr. Doris Day.


    Romanceonthehighseasposter.jpg
    She was approached at a Hollywood party by the songwriters Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, who had written the score for “Romance on the High Seas,” a movie planned for Judy Garland. But Garland had turned the role down and Betty Hutton, her replacement, was withdrawing because she was pregnant. Warner Bros. was desperate, and the songwriters insisted that Ms. Day audition for the part.

    Greatest Hits by Doris Day

    “Acting in films had never so much as crossed my mind,” she later said.

    As candid in real life as her perky screen characters, Ms. Day admitted to the movie’s director, Michael Curtiz, that she had never acted before. But “from the first take onward, I never had any trepidation about what I was called on to do,” she said. “Movie acting came to me with greater ease and naturalness than anything else I had ever done.”
    dday2
    Reviewing “Romance on the High Seas” in The New York Herald Tribune, Howard Barnes wrote, “She has much to learn about acting, but she has personality enough to take her time about it.”
    Playing the Wholesome Girl

    Under personal contract to Mr. Curtiz, Ms. Day followed “Romance on the High Seas” with a series of musical comedies in which she played the pert and wholesome girl with hair and personality the color of sunlight. But even in the early 1950s she was nobody’s fool, and her characters had an unusual resilience, cockiness and competence.

    In “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” (1953), about the trials of a small-town family, Ms. Day is first seen repairing her boyfriend’s car. If her fearless sharpshooting title character in “Calamity Jane” (1953) is finally induced to exchange her buckskins for a dress to wed Howard Keel’s Wild Bill Hickock, she still slips her six-shooter into her pocket to take along on the honeymoon.

    And when Ms. Day opened her mouth to sing, the effect was magical. She had a perfectly controlled voice that brimmed with emotion. “It’s Magic,” which she sang in “Romance on the High Seas,” and “I’ll Never Stop Loving You,” which she sang in “Love Me or Leave Me,” were nominated for Academy Awards for best song. The two with which she is especially identified, “Secret Love,” from “Calamity Jane,” and “Que Sera, Sera,” from “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” won Oscars.
    Universal Pictures

Cary Grant stars with Doris Day in the 1962 romantic comedy “That Touch of Mink.”
    "A Touch of Mink"
    “Doris Day was the most underrated film musical performer of all time,” said Miles Kreuger, president of the Institute of the American Musical. “If only she had been at MGM instead of Warner Bros., they’d have given her challenging roles.”
    Day was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Award, for outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment, at the 1989 Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles.
    Ms. Day was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Award, for outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment, at the 1989 Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles.
    When Ms. Day did get a chance to stretch as an actress, she could be memorable. In “Love Me or Leave Me” (1955), she gave a stirring performance as the singer Ruth Etting, whose life and career were dominated by a violent manager-husband who had ties to gangsters. She held her own against James Cagney’s powerful performance as the husband and flawlessly sang Etting classics like “Ten Cents a Dance” and “Chasing the Blues Away.”


    Ms. Day married for a third time in 1951. Although that marriage, to Martin Melcher, her manager, seemed happy, she discovered after Mr. Melcher’s death in 1968 that he and his lawyer had embezzled or frittered away the $20 million she had earned and had left her $500,000 in debt. She agreed to star in a situation comedy to earn the money to pay off her debts.

    Actors Fran Ryan (left) and Denver Pyle appear with Day on <em>The Doris Day Show</em>.
    That proved to be a wise move financially; “The Doris Day Show” had an extremely successful five-year run. (It underwent a number of changes in that time. Ms. Day’s character, a widow who lived on a ranch with her two children, got a job at a magazine in San Francisco in the show’s second season, and by the fourth season her children had been written out of the show.)


    James Garner, who co-starred with Ms. Day in two 1963 films, “The Thrill of It All” and “Move Over, Darling,” told Mr. Hotchner, “Marty was a hustler, a shallow, insecure hustler who always ripped off $50,000 on every one of Doris’s films as the price for making the deal.”

    Ms. Day sued the lawyer, Jerome Rosenthal, and eventually won a judgment for more than $22 million in 1974. In a 1986 interview Terry Melcher, her son by Al Jorden, said that she eventually got some of the money from an insurance company but “nothing like that amount.”

    In 1976 Ms. Day married Barry Comden, a sometime restaurant manager 11 years her junior. They were divorced in 1981. During her marriage to Mr. Comden, she moved from Los Angeles to Carmel Valley, and she and her son became part owners of the pet-friendly Cypress Inn in the nearby beach town Carmel-by-the-Sea.

    For the rest of her life she lived on a seven-acre estate with many more dogs than the zoning laws allowed. In the 1985-86 television season she was the host of “Doris Day’s Best Friends,” on the Christian Broadcasting Network, which focused on animal welfare.

    Ms. Day with her dog in 196. During the last decades of her life, through her foundation, Ms. Day spent much of her time rescuing and finding homes for stray dogs, even personally checking out the backyards and fencing of people who wanted to adopt, and she worked to end the use of animals in cosmetic and household-products research.


    Terry Melcher, her only child, above with Ms. Day. who became a successful record producer, died in 2004. Her survivors include a grandson.

    daymyheart
    In 2011, three years after she received a lifetime achievement Grammy Award, Ms. Day surprised a lot of people by releasing her first album in almost 20 years, “My Heart,” which consisted mostly of songs she had recorded for “Doris Day’s Best Friends” but never released commercially.


    Ms. Day, who summed up her fatalistic philosophy in the words of one of her biggest hits, “Que Sera, Sera” (“What will be, will be”), ... Ms. Day told Mr. Hotchner: “During the painful and bleak periods I’ve suffered through these past years, my animal family has been a source of joy and strength to me. I have found that when you are deeply troubled, there are things you get from the silent, devoted companionship of your pets that you can get from no other source.”

    “I have never found in a human being,” she added, “loyalty comparable to that of any pet.”






    May 13, 2019


    Alabama’s Gruesome Prisons: Report Finds Rape and Murder at All Hours


    • A prisoner was tied up and tortured for two days. Bloody inmates screamed for help from cells with doors that did not lock.
    • The Justice Department outlined shocking details in a report on the state’s prison system, which has some of the highest rates of homicide and rape in the country.


    We received more than 2,000 photos taken inside an Alabama prison. This is what they showed.



    NY TIMES

    May 12, 2019



    ‘Game of Thrones’ Changed TV. Let Us Count the Ways.

    It is a show whose budgets and scale were once unthinkable for television — and now it’s become the gold standard.




    NY TIMES

    May 11, 2019


    If Trump Country Soars, Will the President Glide to a Second Term?



    The rate of job growth in Republican-leaning regions is outstripping the rate in more Democratic areas.





    NY TIMES, THOMAS EDSALL

    May 10, 2019


    Trump’s Other Base



    In preparation for 2020, the president focuses on holding his minority vote steady.




    NY TIMES