Year: 2016

Jokes about a Republican fact-free universe have circled the late-night and high-brow magazine circuits since the Bush-Cheney public relations program to build support for the invasion of Iraq. On the first day of the 2016 Republic National Convention, we got to see what a fact-free universe looks like.

Speaker after speaker bemoaned that the United States is under siege, rapidly being destroyed from within by the actions of a weak president and his sketchy former secretary of state. They painted a picture of an America cowering before both domestic and foreign threats. They advocated strong actions against our enemies with a harsh, merciless bellicosity. Many blamed immigrants, the Muslim religion and the supporters of “Black Lives Matter.”

But where were the facts? There were none, because studies show that over the past 40 years, cop killings are down, the rate of violent crime is half of what it was in 1990, and there are fewer acts of domestic terrorism than in the turbulent 1960s.  Illegal immigration is currently almost nonexistent and legal immigration is already tightly controlled.

I’m not saying that we don’t have problems in these areas, but the fear-mongering speakers at the GOP National Convention exaggerated the current dangers to a degree that borders on explicit lying. The current publicity stemming from tragedies such as Ferguson (cops killed), Dallas (cops are killed) and Orlando (U.S.-born terrorist) may represent an upturn in crime and terrorism or may just be highly publicized anecdotes of tragic violence. We won’t know for a few years. But the Republicans use these incidents as proof that we face more dangers now than eight years ago. Then again, the Republicans have long argued from anecdote, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens and Bush Senior’s demonization of parolee Willie Horton. It’s Donald Trump’s preferred method.

The Republicans were able to get through the entire night fact-free, with the exception of the very angry Sheriff of Milwaukee County, who quoted a recent study that did not measure rates of crime or terrorism, but public perceptions. The survey found that the public is more fearful than a few years ago—of course, why wouldn’t they be when rightwing and mainstream news routinely feature this collection of roid-raged Chicken Littles? The Sheriff was talking about how people feel, not about the reality of falling crime, which he denied by hiding behind an attitudinal study.

Virtually every speech closed with the same words, “God bless the United States.” Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, the traitor who went over the heads of U.S. negotiators to deal directly with Iran via a threatening letter, said, “God calls us to serve.” (FYI, CNN, which treated the first night of the convention as if it were the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, was trying to sell Cotton to the public as a 2020 candidate for president if Trump doesn’t win.) Didn’t this procession of saintly authoritarians ever think that maybe their god was giving them a message through the U.S. failures in Iraq and Afghanistan? Heaven to America: stop invading other countries. Of course, many in the audience believe that their god is punishing the United States for allowing LGBTQ rights, abortion, the teaching of evolution, birth control and other abominations.

Besides seeking the blessing of their deity, the other thing that virtually every speaker did was to condemn President Obama and Hillary Clinton for not using the term “Islamic terrorism.” This insistence by every speaker that not using those precise words—“Islamic terrorism”—bordered on the criminal has tremendous significance.

First, it symbolized how little they really can criticize Barack Obama. Many speakers advocated that the United States do what it is already doing. Many talked of war and violence, without recommending a single measure that would endanger American lives. With no specifics with which to indict Obama and Clinton, they reverted to becoming language police. Unless they use these exact words, the GOP states, nothing Obama or Clinton do will help keep us safe.

The words themselves, “Islamic terrorism” are particularly important to these Bible-touting Christians because it communicates that we are in a Holy War against those of another faith. While occasionally paying lip service to inclusiveness and diversity, the GOP wants us to connect terrorism with the religion of Islam. The GOP conveniently forgets that Christians still commit the majority of acts of terrorism and mass murders taking place in the United States. Obama, Clinton, Kerry and the State Department avoid the term “Islamic terrorism” because they understand that the terrorists represent a miniscule part of Islam and they don’t want other Muslims to think we are blaming them or lumping them in with people they themselves despise.

Keep in mind, too, that “Islamic terrorism” is one small piece of a large racially-tinged lexicon that Republicans have employed since the inception of Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy.”

The insistence on shaming Obama and Clinton for not using two words also contrasts the styles of the parties and the candidates who will represent them in the fall. Obama and Clinton take studied, fact-based approaches to problems, attempt to understand all sides and try to reach consensus. Their careful phraseology reflects all these concerns. Donald Trump and all the other Republicans want to dominate, humiliate and crush. They see a world of good guys and bad guys, and if you’re a good guy, you can do anything, even bad guy stuff.

Beyond these political concerns of attacking the opposition and claiming the beneficence of a caring deity, the focus on the use of language fits right into the Trump ideology because it is concerned most with branding reality. The constant disparagement of Obama for failing to use two words was an example of branding the other side.

The Trump brand is based on the lie that everything the Donald touches turns to gold. In reality, he failed as a real estate developer and casino owner, then succeeded as an entertainer and a brand marketer, although it should be pointed out that most of the businesses selling merchandise with the Trump brand have failed. Trump wants us to believe that his genius will fix everything, perhaps merely by his getting involved with addressing the problem. Trump slapped his name on vodka and claimed it was better. He slapped his name on a hotel room and claimed it was better. He slapped his name on a steak and claimed it was better. His campaign consists of saying that he will slap his name on solutions to problems—some which don’t even exist—and they will be solved. Too bad that while Trump was always a genius in branding, he proved almost always to be a failure at actually doing things, such as running casinos or building curricula.

The first night of the Republican convention was about slapping a negative brand on Obama, Clinton and the Democrats. To do so, they slapped a negative brand on our current world.

News reporting has never been objective. From the selection of which stories to cover to the determination of which people to quote and what words to use to describe reality, the political and social beliefs of media outlets and their owners—and on occasion of the journalists—have always shaped media coverage.

Here are some of the starker examples of mainstream media influencing what is supposed to be an objective fact-finding process:

• The unquestioned support of both Iraq Wars. In both cases, the news media didn’t ask hard questions, trusted government information and ignored the estimates of costs and likely outcomes predicted by the critics of the war, criticism that turned out to be 100% right on.
• The creation of the Tea Party, which the mass media supported even as it ignored an incipient locally based progressive movement that eventually evolved into the Occupy! Movement and the revitalization of the Democratic Party by the Sanders candidacy. The mass media focused all its attention and most of its space and time in the 2010 election cycle on Republican primaries that pitted Tea Partiers against run-of-the-mill Republicans, covering none of the races in which progressives were taking on centrist Democrats. It seems as if no one but me remembers that in 2010 there were three Washington marches, each of which attracted about 80,000 people: one by Glenn Beck, one by leftish American unions and one by left-leaning Comedy Central personalities. The media ignored the two left-leaning marches and allowed rightwing liars such as Michele Bachmann and Rush Limbaugh to bloat the attendance numbers of the Tea Party march to as high as 2 million, a figure that pretty much defines “the Big Lie.”
• Promoting the myth that we had to close deficits and that the only way to do so was cutting spending on social services. From 2008 until the growth of the Occupy! Movement and the release of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, the mainstream news media ignored virtually every economist and pundit who said that the government had to invest in basic infrastructure, alternative fuels, education and job creation. Instead it trotted out expert after expert who called for cutting federal deficits. The news media ignored the voices suggesting that that the best way to close the deficit was to increase taxes on the wealthy, then and now paying historically low rates. Instead, the media gave voice only to those who wanted to close the deficit by cutting spending on critical government programs.
• Ignoring the overwhelming scientific evidence that global warming is occurring, and instead covering it for years as if it were an open question still debated by scientists.
• Playing up personalities instead of issues in the 2000 presidential election, making it seem as if there were little to choose as far as the issues went between “great guy” W and the wonkish and supercilious fussbudget Al Gore.
• Supporting racist drug policies. The only policy turn over the past 40 years that the mainstream news media has been more solidly behind than stiff sentencing for crack cocaine users (mostly Black) has been the current movement to loosen penalties and focus on rehabilitation to respond to the epidemic of opioid use (mostly white).

I saw the way the mainstream news media shapes news coverage when I was a television news writer three decades ago in the San Francisco Bay Area. The three TV news gathering operations reported every incidence of gang violence in the primarily African-American Western Addition neighborhood, but refused to cover the real youth crime problem, the Chinese gangs in the middle-class Sunset District. My suggestion that we cover Professor Ernest Sternglass’s dire predictions regarding health problems after the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster was rejected, as was my request to follow a reputable lead that the CIA had murdered a former agent in the street.

All of this is a lead-in to my question of the day, and the year: Why is the news media giving so much more coverage to Donald Trump than to Hillary Clinton and why is it so even-handed?

The mainstream news media as a class decided to support both Iraq Wars. It decided to focus on deficit spending. It decided to support the Tea Party. And it decided to make what was a fait accompli—climate change—into a controversy.

Why isn’t it now pulling out all guns to make certain that Donald Trump is not our next president?

You would think that Trump’s overt racism, his frequent, almost pathological need to lie, the inconsistency in his positions, his sociopathic narcissism, his attempts to impinge on freedom of the press, his lack of experience and the growing evidence that he was a bad businessman should have made the newsrooms and editorial boards of all major media decide to generate a story that makes Trump look bad and another that makes Hillary look good every day of the week, just as 25 years ago, they all decided to have at least one story about AIDS a day ( a wise decision) and six years ago to have a positive story a day about Tea Party candidates and spokespersons (a bad decision).

Instead, there are far more stories about Trump than Clinton. Many are negative, such as the coverage of the lawsuits against Trump University and his racist comments, but others take the man seriously or even provide positive coverage. After the San Bernadino and Orlando mass murders, the killings by police in Baton Rouge and St. Paul and the Dallas shooting of police, the mainstream media gave Trump far more time and space to make comments than they gave to Clinton. True, Trump made some of his typical incendiary statements, but contrasting his idiocies with Clinton’s reasoned common sense would have clarified the choice we have in November—between a uncontrollable racist, sociopathic rich-boy business failure and one of the “best and brightest” of the baby Boom generation who rose through the meritocracy and displays intelligence, flexibility and stability, has plenty of experience and a solid program to address our many problems.

Let’s take the New York Times as an example: Over the past seven days, the Times has mentioned Trump in 333 stories, while mentioning Clinton in a mere 260 stories. I went through the front section of the last six days of the hard copy edition, plus the Sunday OpEd section, and found 22 stories primarily about Trump, of which 17 were balanced or positive towards him and five were negative. By contrast, I found 10 stories primarily about Clinton of which six were balanced or positive and four were negative. Included among the positive Trump coverage was an editorial from the Times editorial board declaring  that Trump was right to criticize Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg for her accurate comments about him. Let’s be clear, as Bernie would say: The Times could have easily written an editorial chiding Ginsberg without praising Donald Trump.

I will freely admit that most of the editorials the Times has published about the Donald condemn him, but why did the writers have to go out of their way to praise him in an editorial, when it wasn’t necessary for making the point?

A story in the July 14 Times titled “Nearly Four-Fifths of White Evangelicals Say They’ll Back Trump” provides the perfect example of how a Times reporter could have slanted a story in favor of Hillary Clinton, but selected to slant it towards Donald Trump. The story analyzes Pew Research Center’s most recent findings of how people of different religions view the two probable candidates. Most of the story focuses on Trump’s large support among white evangelicals, although other findings were mentioned. The only quote serves as an apology for Trump’s checkered marital history and support of abortion and gay rights.

But the Pew study found many things. The headline could have easily have read: “Catholics Overwhelmingly Support Clinton Despite Abortion Stance” or “Catholics split between Obama and Romney Overwhelmingly Support Hillary” The headline also could have read, “Fastest Growing Religious Group—Those With None—Favor Clinton.” FYI, those with no religion are now as populous a group as white evangelicals, which is shrinking as a percent of the population. Instead of a positive Trump story, the writer could have written a positive Clinton story.

My theory for years has been that the New York Times editorial board is centrist looking left, while its newsroom supports the rightwing and its editorial columnists run the gamut from slightly left (Krugman and Blow) to rightwing (Ross Douthat). But there’s no reason why the Times newsroom couldn’t change its bias in favor of Republicans for four or five months, seeing that not to do so aids in the potential election of an unqualified and dangerously erratic candidate.

Why would the mainstream news media decide to play the 2016 election straight, when it so often tips the balance through its biased coverage of issues?

I think the answer to this question also answers the question why so many Republicans who are not uneducated angry white males slipping out of the middle class are holding their noses and supporting Trump or saying that they won’t vote for either candidate.  No matter how incompetent a Republican president, no matter how much of a past failure, how erratic and how ignorant, it doesn’t matter to traditional business Republicans, and the mass media outlets they own and control. The only thing that matters is whether a candidate supports lowering taxes on the income and investments of the wealthy. It’s the politics of selfishness that has guided the ruling elite over the past 40 years as it has withdrawn support of public education, degraded the environment, allowed our infrastructure of bridges, mass transit and roads to deteriorate and taken needed aid from millions of poor people, all to line their pockets with windfall cash from lower taxes.

The mentally unstable and politically ignorant Trump expresses the politics of selfishness of the displaced uneducated white male. But if he’s elected, it will be because of the politics of selfishness of rich folk and the news media they control.

Those like Rudy Giuliani who believe that the Black Lives Matter movement has led to an increase in violence against police officers have not read the statistics. Killings of American police officers are way down, from 27.88 per 100,000 to 7.16 per 100,000 since 1976. Fewer police fatalities have occurred during the presidency of Barack Obama than under the presidency of Bush II, which saw fewer police killed than during the Clinton years, which experienced fewer police murders than under Reagan. During these 40 years, there have been occasional blips up, because no trend proceeds in a smooth fashion. Only fools and liars point to one cold winter to assert global warming is not occurring; it would be equally foolish or mendacious to look at any six-month period during the past four decades to deny a long-term trend. The decline in police fatalities pretty much tracks the overall decline in crime since the 1970s.

The math is simple: The Black Lives Matter movement can’t lead to an increase in something that isn’t increasing.

Behind the idea that a movement to get the police to refrain from racially based excessive violence would embolden people to start shooting at cops is the unspoken idea that the police need to kick a little ass—or, I should say, kill a little ass—once in a while to keep the peace. The same people routinely defend racial profiling and the application of stop-and-frisk policies in minority neighborhoods, two discredited policing techniques. It’s not the first time that a false idea masks racism in American public debates.

We know that fewer police officers are being killed nowadays, not more. What about the idea behind Black Lives Matter, that innocent blacks suffer a disproportionately high number of fatalities at the hands of the police? Is that also a myth?  On its surface, a new study by a Harvard economics professor seems to prove that nationwide police officers display no racial bias in their use of guns. Too bad, the study has many flaws including: 1) It analyzed only incidents after the victims were in police custody; 2) it measured the use of firearms, not deaths in custody; 3) all “non-gun related” force by police showed an extreme racial violence, being used on blacks much more frequently than on whites; 4) researchers studied only 4% of the population. No, this survey does not in any way disprove the contention that blacks suffer more deaths per capita at the hands of police than whites do. Meanwhile, other evidence strongly demonstrates that young black men are nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers.

There is very little that connects the awful killing of five police officers in Dallas with the equally horrifying killings by police of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in a St. Paul, Minnesota suburb, except that all three—like Orlando, Newtown, San Bernadino and the deaths of Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Michel Brown, Eric Garner and thousands more—are national tragedies.

While guns were used in all three of these recent acts of violence, our society does want the police to carry firearms. Firearms have never been the problem in the numerous cases of unnecessary police violence against people of color. The problem has been how the firearms have been used—not to protect, not to defend and not to disarm, but to aggressively kill as if the victims were not an American citizen the police officers had sworn to protect, but foreign soldiers on the battlefield.

The ways to stop police violence against citizens and violence against police have virtually nothing in common and are related in no way. Reducing one will not lead to an increase in the other, nor will reducing one lead to a reduction of the other.

Ending racially based excessive violence by police against innocent citizens will take a complicated combination of training, new recruitment techniques and punishment. We have to educate police officers to shoot to disarm, not to kill, to understand the culture of the neighborhoods they patrol, to learn how to deescalate situations and to analyze threats and possible perps without racial bias or cultural bias. We have to stop gearing our police recruiting material to people who like to fight (soldiers) and start gearing it to people who want to protect and defend. Finally, we have to stop letting police who harm people of any color with excessive force literally get away with murder.

By contrast to the complicated mix of training, recruitment and punishment that will reduce the number of murders by police, to continue to decrease murders of police is relatively easy: Pass stricter gun control laws.

Every study that has ever been done on the issue comes to the same conclusion. The more guns there are in a society, the more people are hurt and killed. The fewer guns there are in a society, the fewer people are killed and hurt by guns. Ipso facto, reducing the number of guns in society will reduce all gun violence, including against police officers.

My caveat is that the overwhelming number of gun deaths and injuries in America (and elsewhere) are from suicides and home accidents. Simple math tells us that you are much safer living in the worst neighborhood in Chicago without a gun in the house than living anywhere with a gun in the house. So police officers will represent very few of the large number of reduced deaths we could anticipate from limiting the number of guns people can own, outlawing automatic weapons, making gun owners take exams before getting licenses, establishing a mandatory federal database and requiring a one-week wait for all gun purchases. But then again, very few of the current 35,000 or so U.S. deaths a year from firearms are currently police officers.

The rearguard action against raising the minimum wage continues quietly in the opinion pages of our major newspapers, and it’s one of the reasons that progressives, liberals and centrists should vote party line Democratic this fall.

Simply put, the Democrats want to raise the minimum wage and the Republicans want to keep it at $7.25 an hour, far below the level at which anyone could support her/himself or a family.

The big Republican argument against the minimum wages is that it will cause companies that can’t afford the raises to let people go. For example, Peter D. Salins, a political science professor who takes money from the right-wing Manhattan Institute, estimates in a New York Times article titles “A Better Way to Raise Incomes” that raising the minimum wage to $15 could reduce the number of jobs nationally by three to five million. Keep in mind that Salins is not an economist, but a political scientist paid by people who would benefit by keeping the minimum wage down. At best, Salins is wrong; at worst, he’s a liar.

As the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) points out in a short report exploding a bunch of what they call “myths” about the minimum wage (and what I call “lies”), advanced thinking by current economists minimizes the risk of greater unemployment when the minimum wage increases. Here is the exact quote from DOL: “In a letter to President Obama and congressional leaders urging a minimum wage increase, more than 600 economists, including 7 Nobel Prize winners wrote, ‘In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market. Research suggests that a minimum-wage increase could have a small stimulative effect on the economy as low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth, and providing some help on the jobs front.’” 

In other words, current thinking by mainstream economists (i.e., those not employed by rightwing think tanks) is that raising the minimum wage does not lead to job losses. In fact, a higher minimum wage can stimulate job growth because the low-wage workers have more money to spend.

Like many Republicans, Salins declares that he feels great empathy for the plight of our lowest paid workers. That’s why he supports earned income tax credits (EITC) for the working poor. First enacted in 1975, EITC are payments made to qualifying workers based on their annual income tax returns. In his Times article, Salins launches an impassioned advocacy of the EITC program. What he likes most about it is that it’s based on need. As the income of a recipient goes up, he or she will get lower EITC payments from the federal government.

Instead of raising the minimum wage, Salins instead supports the Paul Ryan proposal to raise EITC payments and make more people eligible for the payments. He claims that growing the EITC program helps the working poor to improve their lives without the fear of job losses.

What he really wants to do is help corporate America rip billions of dollars off the American people and their own employees. To see why the EITC is a massive scam, let’s follow the money in two scenarios: 1) The minimum wage is raised; 2) The EITC is raised to produce the same amount of additional income for our working poor.

If the minimum wage is raised, employers will pay the additional amount to employees. If we enhance the EITC program instead, the money is also paid to employees, but it is not businesses that pay the additional amount, but the government paying it from everyone’s taxes. The employees get the same money, but the federal government is left with less money and employers are left with more. Imagine that instead of any EITC payments, the collective incomes of the working poor increased through salary bumps. Again, the working poor make the same, but the part paid by the government from taxes is now paid by employers. Keep in mind that the EITC is always a substitute for higher wages (minimum or not) since only someone who is working can get the payments. Thus, almost by definition, the EITC is not really a program that helps poor workers, but one that helps employers avoid having to pay a living wage. It’s really a form of corporate welfare masquerading as an anti-poverty program.

If Salins really cared for the working poor, he would advocate a higher minimum wage, which would not only pour money into the economy, but also save the federal government in EITC payments. Of course, like virtually everything else we need to do to get the economy growing again, raising the minimum wage would take money from the wealthy and upper middle class, who are the primary owners and operators of business. For about 35 years now, we have been robbing Peter to pay Paul, which in this case, means taking money from the poor and middle classes and giving it to the wealthy. We’ve been doing it in many ways, including lowering taxes on the wealthy, cutting back on government programs, making it harder for unions to operate, suppressing the minimum wage and privatizing basic government services to for-profit companies that pay their workers less and their bosses more.

When Peter Salins, Paul Ryan and other Republicans advocate keeping the minimum wage low and subsidizing corporations by giving payments to their impoverished workers, they really only have the interests of the wealthy at heart.

To raise the minimum wage is going to take a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President.

I was dismayed to learn that a new study published by JAMA Dermatology, a respected scholarly publication, finds that 62% of a representative sampling of 3,316 American women said they completely remove their pubic hair. I was also shocked, as in my decades as a heterosexual adult male, I never encountered a shaved vagina. (I won’t answer the begged question except to say “enough.”) My unfamiliarity with the phenomenon of the bare pudenda may be generational: I’m a baby boomer and the women most inclined to groom their genitals are between 18 and 34 years of age.

I have always considered shaving the vagina to be completely weird and a sign of some disturbance, either in the individual or in a society that favors pubic hairlessness. My dislike of genital shaving goes back to the time of my first sexual awakenings, when, after seeing a woman in the flesh for the first time, I suddenly became disappointed and angry at the artificiality of the many Old Master nudes which revealed hairless pudenda. I wondered whether it was the painters or the society that so denigrated women that they wished to submit them to a mild form of mutilation.

My argument in favor of pubic hair begins by asking readers to consider the difference between the vagina of a woman and a pre-pubescent girl. If we shear the woman of her pubic hair, her close-up will resemble that of the girl’s. My belief is that at the heart of all shaving of female pubic hair is the desire to keep the woman a girl and all that means—callow, servile, possessing fewer rights, dependent upon the mature and experienced adult. The shaving of female pubic hair (male, too) is almost a perversity. Because it makes the woman resemble a little girl, it suggests the playing out of a pedophilic fantasy.

Thus, the men who want their women to shave their vaginas want to “puerilize” or “infantilize” them—turn them into immature girls, as opposed to enjoying their company and sexuality as adult women. Most of the women who want to remove their pubic hair, however, probably don’t have an unconscious desire to be little girls, but rather are followers of fashion or subservient to their significant other. The cultural authority of reality television, fashion/celebrity media and pornography (much of which involves pubic-ly-shaved women) is particularly pernicious, because it influences women to do something that isn’t healthy for them. Like tattoos, shaving pubic hair makes a woman a slave—either to society or to her significant other.

The really strange thing is that once again, Americans do something directly against their best interests. The overwhelming majority of women who shave say they do so for hygiene. They think they would be healthier without the hair. Wrong. The study points out that pubic hair traps bacteria, preventing it from entering the vaginal opening. It can also provide a cushion for what is particularly sensitive skin. In other words, like the small business owners and blue collar white worker who votes Republican, most women who go hairless down there are hurting themselves by doing something they mistakenly think will help.

So far, I have discussed three reasons for what is either a sudden fad or a cultural turn similar to rock-and-roll and smartphones: 1) The desire of certain men to transform women to girls for erotic fulfillment; 2) Extensive coverage of the trend in certain mass media, i.e., pornography, reality television and fashion/celebrity news; 3) The “new wife’s tale” that shaving is hygienic, when in fact it is not.

But I also connect the current prevalence of pudenda shaving as another manifestation of the infantilization of American society, which I have discussed many times, most recently on October 28, 2014, May 10, 2014 and December 7, 2013.

Infantilization occurs when adults focus on childhood entertainments and predilections. Their symbolic or cultural lives imitate the activities of children or extend children’s activities into adulthood. The growing number of adults who collect “My Little Pony” toys, play with Legos, vacation at amusement parks, attend adult sleepover functions at museums, spend hours playing video games, eat Gummi-bear vitamins, read juvenile fiction such as the Harry Potter books and watch superhero movies have all been infantilized in one way or another.

Consumer culture encourages adults to keep behaving like children. Museums offer adult sleepovers. Both General Mills and Kellogg’s sell dry cereals to adults by showing them playing at a children’s activities. Glorification of men and women who refuse to grow up and instead act like teenagers or preteens is one of the two or three most significant trends in movies over the past 10 or so years. Think of the “Harold & Kumar” movies, “Old School,” “Big,” “Grandma’s Boy,” the two “Ted” flicks, “The Wedding Crashers,” “Billy Madison,” “You, Me and Dupree,” “Dodgeball,” “Step Brothers,” “The 40-year-old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” all three “Hangovers,” the “Jackass” movies, “Bridesmaids,” “Hall Pass” and “Identity Thief,” just to name a few.

Consumer capitalism thrives when adults behave like children. Children find it harder to delay gratification. Children act on impulse more often than adults. Children are more prone to be taken in by magical and illogical thinking. Children more readily accept the word of authorities. Children are easily influenced by their peers, social custom and advertising. In every way, children make for better consumers than adults. It’s no wonder then that our mass media and mass culture do so much to encourage adults to remain as children in their entertainments and their thought processes.

The sick twist to pudenda shaving is that be it reading Harry Potter or collecting My Little Ponies, infantilized adults are doing something that children do. Shaving the vagina represents not a participation in childish activities, but a sexualizing imitation of the physical state of childhood. I write “sexualizing,” because there is nothing sexy about a child’s vagina. That simple fact combined with the knowledge that shaving is not healthy should convince American women to stop applying razors to their vaginas and run—don’t walk—from any man who wants them to shave down there.

The New York Times soiled itself twice this past weekend, on the front page of the Saturday print edition and in the Sunday editorial section.

The Saturday front page was more disturbing, because it suggested that the news-gathering operation, which so often has given more coverage to Republican candidates than to Democrats in the 21st century, will use this subtle technique to help the election campaign of an autocratic sociopath ignorant of the issues and without experience in government.

Of the six stories on the front page, five concerned the impact of Brexit, the exit of Great Britain from the European community. The five articles referenced and quoted a range of Europeans on the front page, but included mention of only two Americans: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Only one American was quoted—extensively—and that was Trump. There were three photos on the front page, and one was a standard head-and-shoulders shot of an angry Trump wearing his notorious “Make America Great Again” baseball cap.

By contrast, President Obama’s reaction to Brexit was on page 11, facing, on page 10, an article about Trump’s visit to his new golf course and his extended comments about Brexit. Thus, the hard copy reader encounters Trump three times before learning what our head of state thinks about this earth-shaking news. By the way, the Times buried the studied and knowledgeable remarks of Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the November presidential elections, at the bottom of page eight, at the end of the page-one story about the potential impact of Brexit on the elections, the story in which Sanders appears on page one.

FYI, Trump’s reaction to Brexit was his usual stew of ill-informed and ignorant ramblings. But before he displayed his ignorance of the potential economic and political ramifications of Brexit, Trump proved once again that his top priority is always himself, claiming that the pound going down would help his new golf course in Turnberry, Scotland attract more customers. Of course, Trump was oblivious to the likelihood that Scotland will now vote to leave the UK so that it can reunite with Europe, resulting in Turnberry probably doing business in euros, not British pounds.

I fully understand that Donald Trump’s ignorance is as much of a recurring news motif as his unethical business dealings and his record of failed businesses. These topics are inherently newsworthy, to be sure, but they shouldn’t skew the coverage so much that the Times considers the opinion of this loud-mouthed ignoramus before those of the President of the United States. I grant that the Times was probably correct to include a story on the front page comparing Brexit to the growth of American populism, but that could have been combined with the story on the impact on the elections, since the writers are really talking about the same thing. That would have left room for a story on the reactions of Obama, Clinton, Kerry, Ryan and maybe Lindsay Graham. All ignored in favor of the one person who knows the least.

The Times second questionable editorial strategy came in the letters to the editor, which every Sunday always covers one big issue, giving the truncated views of 10-12 of the hundreds of readers who sent in letters. This week, the Times employed the propaganda trick of “giving both sides equal say when one side is wrong” to distort the true views of its readers. I refer to those articles which quote two experts, one on each side, or four experts, two on each side, when 98% or 99% of all experts fall on one side of the issue.  Global warming and the safety of vaccinations are two issues which the Times and other mainstream news media covered in this way, conflating the overwhelming support of the existence of global warming and the safety of infant vaccines with the flimsy and fact-starved opposition to these scientific facts.

The hard copy version of the Sunday’s letter column applied this inherently distorting approach to the topic of whom Hillary Clinton should select as her running mate. In a short paragraph lead-in in italics, the Times editorial staff informs us that “Elizabeth Warren was the clear favorite, followed by the current V.P., Joe Biden, and Sherrod Brown.”

We never learn by how much Warren is favored. The expression “clear favorite” could mean that 30% of the 800 readers who submitted letters on the topic endorsed her. Or it may mean 60% did. Since the Times published letters recommending 12 different people, even 15% could be considered a “clear favorite,” although not as impressive as 30%.

The letters turn the confusing imprecision of “clear favorite” into a deception, by featuring 12 different candidates, including Michael Bloomberg, John Kasich and Jerry Brown, who will never be considered. If the letters had to some extent reflected the opinions of the 800 letter writers, the column would have been much more informative and helpful to readers. Such an approach would not have included the letters of impossible candidates and would have reflected the relative strength of Warren. For example, the Times could have printed excerpts from letters supporting six candidates; assuming Warren was supported in 50% of the letters, she could have been the topic of six of the 12 letters, leaving one each for the other five and one for Biden, another impossible candidate who at least came in second place. If Warren was the choice of 30% of the letters and no one else got more than 10%, the Times might print fewer letters supporting her.

If we analyze these two instances of manipulating the news from the standpoint of news-gathering strategies, it seems as if in both cases the Times preferred entertainment over news. Trump’s incendiary ejaculations may be frightening, but they are more entertaining than the rational and calm approach of Obama and Clinton, and the more balanced tonalities of virtually every other politician. It is more entertaining to read a few glib statements about 12 different candidates—four or more of whom are mere fantasies—than to read about the various advantages of one candidate, or a pro contra discussion of three or four candidates, no matter how favored one or more of them may be.

If we analyze these editorial decisions from the political standpoint, however, they seem to express a subtle anti-woman or anti-Hillary sentiment. The Times cannot deny that they gave far greater coverage to the views of an ignorant white male than to those of his opponent, a woman. The fact that the Times did not publish a letter endorsing any other woman as Clinton’s running mate suggests the bent may be anti-woman, or at least express a resistance to considering a woman as vice president. The Times is expecting us to believe that more people proposed the smiling rightwing Republican John Kasich than proposed whichever woman got the second number of letters after Warren. Really?

I’ve been wondering for some time how much resistance to Clinton as president, especially from Bernie Bros and well-educated independents, really expresses an opposition to handing the reins of power to a woman, no matter how competent. When I encounter reluctance to support Clinton from people who I know to be progressive or centrist, I have begun asking them point blank whether they feel uncomfortable conceiving of a female president. These people mumble about trust and past scandals or decisions, but tend not to be able to name any specific wrongdoing or mistake, except for the decisions that others made for which everyone but Clinton is given a free pass. Every time Trump comes out with another outrageous statement based on lies and reflecting racism, authoritarianism and ignorance, the question about why certain educated progressive and centrist voters resist Hillary Clinton becomes more critical.

Those opposing Clinton in the face of the alternative should look into their hearts and see if they discover any residual misogyny. And that includes the collective heart of the New York Times.

You may have missed the thorough verbal whipping Hillary Clinton gave to Donald Trump’s economic ideas and business history this week. The New York Times put it on page A14, although there was a tease for it at the very bottom of page one. You could not find it on the Google News home page at all when I checked it at 7:00 a.m. EST, although there were two stories about Trump and one reporting that Clinton’s lead over Sanders in California in the popular votes had decreased by an inconsequential amount.

Every day the Times puts a story about Donald Trump on the front page, and sometimes, like Tuesday, June 21, there are two. By contrast, Clinton hardly appears on the front page, and often when she does, it is in a story that starts with the Donald. This lopsided coverage stems partially from Trump’s many outrageous statements and the many controversies surrounding both his candidacy and his business interests. When faced with reporting manufactured and fabricated charges against Clinton or the real and verifiable scandals, underhanded dealings, lies and feuds that attach to Trump like fuzz to a sweater (at first I wrote something more disgusting involving shoes), the news media is correctly—and finally—chasing the real misdoings.

A good part of the emphasis on Trump, however, reflects a predilection by the mainstream media to cover Republicans more than Democrats. In 2010, 2012 and 2016, the mainstream news media, and in particular New York Times provided much more space to covering Republican statewide and local candidates and to Republican primaries than they did to those of the Democrats. The media ignored the many progressive movements of 2010 to focus exclusively on the Tea Party.

Those who haven’t been watching mainstream cable news or not found the text of Clinton’s speech online missed a very clever and impassioned job of cutting Trump down to size. Clinton made all the major points:

• Trump started with more money than most rich people have
• He sent four companies into bankruptcy, hurting thousands of employees and investors
• He has had many other business failings
• He has a reputation for not paying his bills
• He is involved in thousands of lawsuits, including a fraud suit against Trump University.

Of course her most important point was that Trump’s economic proposals would send the country into another deep recession. She cited an independent analysis released this week by Moody’s Analytics that concludes that if Trump’s policies were fully implemented, they would drive the U.S. economy into a lengthy recession, with 3.5 million fewer jobs at the end of his four-year term and a substantially larger federal debt and deficit, note that the lead author is a former McCain advisor and has contributed to Clinton’s campaign.

Along the way, Clinton got off a number of zingers. Here are some of the best:

• “Just like he shouldn’t have his finger on the button, he shouldn’t have his hands on our economy.”
• “Trump would take us back to where we were before the crisis. He’d rig the economy for Wall Street again.”
• “He has no credible plan for rebuilding our infrastructure, apart from the wall that he wants to build. Personally I’d rather spend our money on rebuilding our schools or modernizing our energy grid.”
• “He just says that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese. Well I’ll give him this – it is a lot easier to say a problem doesn’t exist than it is to actually try to solve it.”
• “He’s written a lot of books about business – they all seem to end at Chapter 11.”

The Trump campaign, which kept silent during Clinton’s evisceration of his dangerous foreign policy, mounted a spirited Twitter and news release assault on Clinton’s comment even while she was speaking. Too bad that most of his comments were lies—sometimes some very big ones, such as “How can Hillary run the economy when she can’t even send emails without putting entire nation at risk?” and “Hillary Clinton surged the trade deficit with China 40% as Secretary of State, costing Americans millions of jobs.” Today in his diatribe against her, Trump made the vile and totally baseless charge that Clinton’s decisions as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of state were influenced by donations to her family’s Clinton Foundation charity, even though no one anywhere has evidence of any such link.

It will be interesting to see if today’s attack on Clinton by Trump dominates the 24 hour news cycle. Or will it be the continued fallout from the double news that Trump’s campaign has less money than Ted Cruz’ or Bernie Sanders’ and that from 10-20% of money Trump has spent on the campaign goes to Trump business entities, which means that if Trump were to get enough donations to pay back the money he has loaned the campaign that he will have made money running for office. I’m hoping that the news media takes the high ground and that the story that dominates the news cycle in not the announcement that someone is trying to sue Trump for raping her multiple times when she was 13.

But two things I know for sure: 1. Unless there is another mass murder, Trump, not his presumed opponent in the fall elections, will be the center of media attention. 2. Whatever Trump says will be full of lies, exaggerations and distortions.

Lately I’ve been wondering if Donald Trump is trying to lose the election.

Maybe he started running as a way to burnish his brand, similar to what Ben Carson evidently was doing. What he wanted to do was raise his awareness, especially among the uneducated, so he could continue to place his name on dubious ventures and sell them to his public at inflated prices.

But then things got out of hand and he found himself alone in what pundits called the “establishment lane,” with every other candidate tacking to the extreme right on social issues, tax and spending policies, Social Security, healthcare and foreign affairs. While Trump jumped to the right of them when it comes to immigration and articulated with extreme explicitness the racism which GOP regulars have whispered in code for 40 years, on many issues he was much more centrist than any of the candidates to whom the news media affixed the “establishment” label. No one said he was in the establishment lane, but take a look at who has won the last two Republican nominations—the most centrist-looking candidates of their election cycle, although both McCain and Romney, just like Trump, advocated lowering taxes even more on the wealthy. No one called Trump establishment, but the relative centrality of many of his positions appealed to Republican voters as much as his outrageous statements and ultra-nationalist and isolationist trade and immigration proposals.

Trump now finds himself as the presumptive candidate and maybe he doesn’t want the daily stress and hassles of the presidency. Maybe he realizes he bit off more than he could chew. Or maybe, like Rubio, Cruz and many other candidates from both sides of the aisle, Trump likes running a lot more than he likes governing.

Whatever the reason, his recent actions have me thinking that he’s throwing the race to Hillary. (And thank goodness for that, since the choice is between a sociopathic narcissist who has failed at many business ventures and perhaps the most qualified candidate in the history of the country.)

How else do you explain him accusing American soldiers as a group of stealing millions of dollars from the army that they were supposed to distribute in Iraq? In one fell swoop, he has alienated active military and veterans alike, groups that should inherently favor the Republican, no matter who he (or hypothetically “she”) may be. It may be the first time ever in history that a candidate for office on any level in any country has maligned soldiers. Not generals, not war leaders, but dogfaces in the field!

And how else can you explain his terrible two-ish temper tantrum against Judge Gonzalo Curiel that lasted a week? Or his pulling the media credentials from media outlets that piss him off, thereby establishing himself as an opponent of free speech? Or his insults of other Republicans who have not fallen in line behind his candidacy?

How else do you explain Trump intimating that Obama is surreptitiously helping the terrorists? Remember that eight years ago when an audience member made a scurrilous accusation about candidate Obama, John McCain immediately corrected the benighted fellow and said that Obama was a patriotic American with whom the Senator happened to disagree. It’s the kind of irresponsible accusation that upsets a lot of right-looking independents and centrist-looking Republicans.

And how else do you explain his lunatic and racist statement that if we had not let the father of the Orlando killer into the country, the killer would not have been in Florida to shoot up a gay night club? This kind of logic would lead to the deportation not just of a generation of new Americans, but of virtually everyone whose ancestors immigrated here. Can’t be too safe!

These recent comments and the strong responses by Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and President Obama have sent Trump’s negatives higher than any candidate of any major party has had in U.S. history. The latest polls show Hillary’s lead growing on him. Meanwhile, more Republicans are distancing themselves from the Donald. Some like Kasich have reiterated their lack of support. Others like Senator Mark Kirk and Representative Bob Dold have rescinded prior endorsements. Bernie Sanders has brought a tremendous number of new voters into the Democratic Party and Hillary shows every signs of doing what it takes to make them happy. I’m the only one saying it now, but I think it’s shaping up to be a Democratic sweep—presidency, Senate and the gerrymandered House.

And yet.

The Orlando tragedy has fortuitously provided Trump with an opportunity to make a tremendous grandstand play that could convince the unsophisticated that he can engineer deals to grow the economy and protect us from terrorism.

As you may know, Republicans have repeatedly blocked legislation that would prevent people on the “no-fly” list of those suspected of having terrorist connections from buying or owning guns.  It looks as if a “no fly, no gun” law would have prevented the Orlando killer from buying the weapon he used to assassinate 49 people and injure scores of others. “No fly, no gun” legislation was one of the two bills for which Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy and other Democrats filibustered this week, the other being extending background checks and waiting periods to guns purchased at shows and on the Internet. Not up for consideration is a reinstatement of the ban on assault rifles such as the ones used by the Orlando nightclub and Newtown elementary school massacres.

At this point, it’s anyone’s guess whether these basic, common sense gun safety measures will pass the Senate, let alone the House. It depends upon how many Republicans dare to cross the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Believe it or not, Trump has come out in favor of a “no fly, no gun” law. He is scheduled to meet with the NRA in a few days and he says he is going to talk to them about a “no fly, no gun” proposal. What if, after the meeting, the NRA announces that it has dropped its opposition to “no fly, no gun” and Trump takes credit for negotiating a deal that passes legislation which 90% of all Americans, including most gun owners, want? Wouldn’t Trump say that it proves that his master negotiation skills can solve the country’s problems?

With Republican candidates already weakened by the Trump candidacy, many GOP incumbents, especially in blue and purple states, must be feeling the heat for their recalcitrant positions regarding gun legislation that most of their constituents back. Perhaps the NRA will feel it must evolve its position on maintaining the rights of people suspected of terrorism or risk losing the Republican majorities that will keep every other type of gun safety legislation from passing.

But the public may not consider the internal machinations of the gun lobby and Congress when evaluating the success of a “no fly, no gun” law, if the NRA support comes after a meeting with Trump. They may see Trump as the all-conquering hero who got the NRA to compromise and thereby kept guns out of the hands of terrorists. The Trump script for his presidency will be coming true, or at least many voters could see it that way.

It is possible then that by compromising on the most absurdly extremist position it holds, the NRA could give the presidency to Donald Trump, or at the very least get him back on a positive track.

Of course, even if the NRA does give the Donald an early Christmas present, he will still be the same narcissistic sociopath who never censors his thoughts, tends to authoritarian solutions, lies a lot and is ignorant of the basic mechanics of government and the pressing issues facing the country. There will be lots of time between now and November for Trump to insult, lie, get personal and generally demonstrate his inadequacies as a head of state.

In what many are calling a brilliant marketing coup, Sprint is using the same actor who used to be in the Verizon “Can you hear me now?” commercials, sporting the same goofy black glasses, to talk about how great the Sprint network is for cellphones—excuse me, hand-held computers that also take photos and makes phone calls—excuse me again—portable devices.

In the original commercial, the short and compact imaginary Verizon employee, whose real name is Paul Marcarelli, goes from place to place asking, “Can you hear me now?” as a means of communicating that Verizon’s wireless network was the most extensive in the country.

Then a funny thing happened. The character transcended the commercial and became a punchline for political speeches, editorial cartoons and late-night humor. Just as it seems as if everyone in the early-1980s was saying “Where’s the beef?” and “I’ll be back” and everyone in 2003 was saying “Shake it like a Polaroid” and every other joke included the expression “twerk” two years ago, so did it seem for many moons as if every conversation included someone cleverly wise-cracking, ”Can you hear me now?” or any of a number of smarmy variations like “Can you see me now?,” “Can you feel me now?” and “Can you smell me now?”

It was some years ago that Verizon retired the “Can you hear me now guy?” and now Sprint is resurrecting him to make the point that nowadays—as opposed to 15 years ago when the “Can you hear me now?” guy was popping up in TV spots, on billboards, in magazines and on the Internet—every wireless company has a wonderful network. He claims that Sprint’s “reliability” is within one percent of Verizon’s, but costs a fraction of the price, and then defiantly asks, “Can you hear that?”

Brilliant to build on the Verizon brand identifier to demonstrate that Sprint is as good as Verizon in the key attribute by which Verizon has always sold its product. This aggressive attack on the Verizon brand is not, however, the first time a television commercial has depended on viewers knowing about another, years-old TV spot. A few years ago, a commercial for a laundry soap parodied the old Mean Joe Greene commercial in which the gruff, mean-looking football player sentimentally trades a jersey for a can of Coke.  Without knowing about a commercial that was 30 years old, you couldn’t understand why it was so funny when Amy Sedaris threw Greene’s stinking jersey back to him saying it needed to go into the wash.

In the case of “Can you hear me now?” the viewer only has to remember back about a decade. Someone insightful on the Sprint marketing team recognized that the “Can you hear me now?” guy was 1) still remembered; 2) still respected; and 3) still linked to the idea of a wireless network that works and is state-of-the-art.

In short, the nameless character that Paul Marcarelli played for years has entered the American cultural vocabulary.

Cultural vocabulary comprises the quotes and images of literature, the visual arts, entertainment, current events and other cultural phenomena that people need to know to understand the cultural references that abound in the mass media, the popular arts and general conversation. Our cultural vocabulary consists of many artifacts:

• Real and fictional people, such as Adam & Eve, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Pascal and Don Quixote.
• Events, e.g., Hannibal crossing the Alps, the Battle of Waterloo, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Neil Armstrong stepping foot on the moon.
• Phrases, e.g., quotes from poems, books, movies and songs, anything from “No can do” and “Let’s get it on” to “To be or not to be,” from “Four score and seven years ago” to “I have a dream.”
• Inanimate objects, e.g., the Bible, the Holy Grail or a Super Bowl ring.

From almost the beginning of human culture, artists in all genres and for all purposes have used pieces of cultural vocabulary in their works. But in all case, the artist shapes the cultural vocabulary to his or her own purposes. For example, Odysseus’ wiliness is heroic for Homer, treacherous for Virgil and bombastic and legalistic for Shakespeare; in James Joyce’s hands, the character of Odysseus is transformed into a self-abnegating Jew in turn-of-the-20th-century Dublin. Botticelli’s Venus is a Christian Neo-Platonist symbol of divine love, whereas Titian’s Venus revels in the sensuality of the real world and Paolo Veronese’s embodies the civilizing effects of love. Select virtually any cultural icon that has been around more than a few hundred years and you will be able to find different versions of it throughout literature, art, pop culture and even history. In a sense, the artist “cannibalizes” the cultural icon by spinning the shared understanding of the icon with his or her own meaning.

Mass culture chews up images and concepts quickly—be it fictional characters like Robin Hood, Mr. Spock or Jason Bourne; historical figures such as Napoleon at Waterloo or Washington crossing the Delaware; sayings like “where’s the beef?” or “I’ll be back”; real incidents like the Spitzer prostitution scandal; fictional ones like movie plots; or new products, especially strange ones. Situation comedies, comedy sketches, TV commercials, spoof movies, newspaper headlines, news programs, comic strips, catalogue captions, advertising slogans, postmodern art and book titles are just some of the communication forms that routinely cannibalize cultural references. One week, we’ll see hundreds of references to twerking and a few weeks later, they’ll be gone, only to be replaced by hundreds of references to 1970s race car drivers, thanks to the movie “Rush.” Like twerking and “Rush,” most of this cultural phenomena is ephemeral—here today and gone tomorrow. But you can still provoke a heart swell with a reference to Moses and Lincoln, or a chuckle with an imitation of Richard Nixon.

Cannibalization of cultural iconography occurs primarily through direct reference or through imitation, parody and, travesty. James Joyce structures Ulysses after Homer’s epic and a secondary character in the “American Pie” movies calls himself the “Sherminator,” referring to another movie in another genre. Over time, we expropriate and distort the content of a cultural icon, sometimes to the point that we cannot recognize the original, as when Robin Hood becomes an anti-tax conservative in the Russell Crowe movie remake instead of someone who takes from the rich to give to the poor; or when Martin Luther King comes to represent general service to the community in place of seeing him as representing civil rights and civil disobedience. We morph cultural icons, as when the Terminator and Joe Isuzu transform into good guys. We take them out of context and thereby change their meaning, as Andy Warhol did with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe.

The surest sign that an event, person, character or saying has permanently entered the public collective consciousness is that it has undergone a large number of these cultural expropriations over a period of years. It’s one thing for Johnny Carson to joke about the Mean Joe Greene soft drink commercial in 1982. It’s quite another to recycle the concept as a homage-cum-parody 30 years later to sell suds to housewives.

The longer a cultural artifact remains part of the cultural vocabulary, the more it changes from its original form and meaning, until finally it can mean anything to anyone. In a sense, frequent morphing of a cultural artifact hollows it out so it becomes an empty vessel that can be filled with any idea. Take the United States constitution, not the document itself, but its cultural meaning as a holy icon that guides our society and sets our laws. In any given year, dozens of conservative, progressive and centrist writers invoke the constitution, each meaning something completely different. Years of reinterpretation and misinterpretation by the news media, politicians, writers, filmmakers, composers and public relations professionals have slowly hollowed out the concept of the constitution, so that it can come to represent anything—and everything.

It’s likely that the “Can you hear me now?” guy will eventually disappear, much as most cultural artifacts do. I doubt anyone would catch a reference to Spencer Tracy in “Captains Courageous” anymore, although Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca retains a grip on the public consciousness. In a similar way, a reference to Christopher Marlowe would go over most heads; even an allusion to “Dr. Faustus” would probably be mistaken as referring to Goethe’s version of the medieval myth of the man who seeks all knowledge. But again, a television commercial in which a troubled-looking young man looked at a skull and said, “To network or not to network” would resonate with most high school graduates.

We could glibly predict that the “Can you hear me now?” guy and the advertising caricature of Mean Joe Greene will likely disappear in time, as will Joe Isuzu, the “Where’s the beef?” lady, the cannibalistic Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head nibbling potato chips and the prematurely retired Dell Dude. But we can’t really be sure. The line between fiction and truth blurred decades before the partially mendacious “The Imitation Game,” “Selma” and “The King’s Speech.” The right-wing news media long ago blurred the distinction between truth and falsity.  Sponsored content on the Internet and on TV has now blurred the distinction between programming and commercials. The commercialization and commoditization of most entertainment, information gathering and communications makes it more possible than ever for television commercial slogans and characters to remain memes long enough to make the leap to lasting, even permanent cultural relevancy. Perhaps centuries from now, a future Mel Brooks will have a character walk around in Renaissance tights, sword in scabbard, staring into a skull and saying, “Alas, poor Yorick. Can you hear me now?”

The first time Muhammad Ali—then known as Cassius Clay—beat Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight title later unfairly stripped from him, it was a big media event in the days in which there were many more newspapers, but only three television networks. Mass culture tended to be more homogeneous than today: people heard the same music, watched the same shows, read the same papers. People talked about the first Clay-Liston fight for days before, yet all the talk was of the beating Liston was going to inflict on the loud-mouthed punk. Every male I knew—my classmates, friends, the adults who supervised us, my father, uncles and cousins—predicted that Liston was going to win.

Except me. I was for Clay.

It wasn’t that I thought he was a great fighter. I knew nothing about boxing except that Emile Griffith killed someone in the ring and my father thought Rocky Marciano was the greatest heavyweight fighter ever, but that the greatest boxer was Sugar Ray Robinson. No, I didn’t care much for watching fighting, or for engaging in fisticuffs myself, although I had recently, after weeks of provocation, punched out a bully in gym class, earning me the admonishment of the teacher to take off my glasses before my next fight.

Nor did I like Clay all that much. His doggerel poetry was funny and clever, but it wasn’t the way I had been taught athletes were supposed to act. Clay taunted his early opponents. Mickie Mantle and Willie Mays rounded the bases head down and tight-lipped, not wanting to rile up the pitcher. Maybe all that proves is that you can inflict more pain and injury with a thrown baseball than a fist, but to me, quiet dignity during combat and in victory was part of the athletic code of ethics.

Nor was I playing the odds, figuring that no one would remember my prediction if Clay lost, and if Clay won, I would make sure they’d remember what a great fight picker I was.

No, I picked Clay for no other reason than to be different, to set myself apart from everyone else. I was thirteen and entering the stage when I felt myself a stranger, an “other,” and predicting Clay’s victory was another of many small acts of defiance. Like a freedom fighter in a ghetto uprising, even if I knew in my heart Clay would lose, I would still support him.

Little did I know at the time that Ali would come to symbolize all the “others,” not just in the United States but to all of humankind, the ultimate outsider in race, religion and political creed who fought peacefully with honor and dignity for a world in which all “others” can be embraced as part of the community of man. Like the mythic John Wayne in “The Quiet Man,” Ali was the man who earned a living with his fists who was a pacifist when it came to politics. Except unlike in the fictional John Ford movie, Ali never flinched, never faltered.

Ali preceded most Americans, including me, in his opposition to the Vietnam War. I had mixed feelings when he was stripped of his title for draft evasion, thinking that Ali had the right to his own views and that the boxing commissions were wrong to take away his crown, but wondering why he picked that unimportant distant war for his political martyrdom. Within months, my views on the Vietnam War changed, and soon after the rest of the nation’s did as well. The longer Ali was denied the right to fight, the more unfair his situation seemed to Americans, and to people around the world. It didn’t take long for the pariah became a hero. And he deserved to be. He deserves every honor he received in his lifetime and all the accolades he is gathering posthumously. That a man who emerged from the most brutal of sports should be a supreme representative of peace is one of the great ironies of the 20th century.

Because Ali was not just a great fighter, but also a great athlete, I can’t help but speculate how his life may have gone if he had gotten into another sport. He was unfortunately a little too short to play power forward, which would have been his natural basketball position. Although I suspect Ali would have been one of the greatest running backs or pulling guards of all time, I wouldn’t want Ali to exchange the dehumanizing brutality of boxing for the equally savage football. As a baseball player, however, Ali intrigues. With his tremendous strength and great hand-eye coordination, he would probably knock the lights, crap and stuffing out of the ball. I’m guessing that he would not be among the speediest of runners, but would likely have a good arm, and so would end up in right field. I imagine him hitting the ball with the authority of a Dick Allen or Manny Ramirez, two troubled and brooding outsiders who sometimes spouted off things better left unsaid. But Ali was a gregarious, social type with highly developed social skills, so it’s more likely he would have been like Reggie Jackson or Willie Stargell, natural leaders. If Ali were lucky enough to play for a good team, he would likely have dominated at least one World Series, if not several. Reggie Jackson put it best when he said that he didn’t get better in October, he merely got less tired than other players. Stamina is one of the central skills of any boxer, and Ali was one of the greatest of all time. With a team like the Yankees or the Orioles of the 1960’s, I’m thinking Ali would walk into the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.

Speculation of this sort is always idle, but one thing I know for certain: If Mohammad Ali played baseball, basketball, hockey, golf, tennis, soccer, Lacrosse, archery or just about any other sport, he would still be alive. Boxing apologists claim that the brain damage Ali sustained only occurred in his last few fights, when he was clearly over the hill with a diminished capacity to protect himself, but needed a few more paydays. Even if we accept that self-serving nonsense, it underlines what a few fights can do to someone and thereby serves as perhaps an even greater argument in favor of outlawing the sport.

We honor Mohammad Ali and all he stood for whenever we engage in peaceful protest. We honor him when we confront the police and judicial system about racist practices. We honor him when we open our doors to war refugees. We honor him when we walk for peace and against nuclear weapons. We honor him when we remove the barriers to same-sex marriage.  In short, whenever we stand up for the poor, minorities, immigrants, religious minorities—for the stranger and the other—we participate and honor Muhammad Ali’s memory.

I would like to honor him in another way: by outlawing the sport of boxing. Let the future Muhammad Alis find their glory in athletic endeavors for which the object is not to hurt the opponent.