Xi Jinping in His Own Words | What China’s Leader Wants [foreignaffairs.com]

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/xi-jinping-his-own-words

Xi Jinping in His Own Words

What China’s Leader Wants—and How to Stop Him From Getting It

By Matt Pottinger, Matthew Johnson, and David Feith

November 30, 2022

In October, at the 20th National Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), General Secretary Xi Jinping set himself up for another decade as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, replaced his most economically literate Politburo colleagues with a phalanx of loyalists, and enshrined the Stalinist-Maoist concept of “struggle” as a guiding principle in the Party Charter. The effect was to turn the page on “reform and opening,” the term the CCP uses to describe the economic liberalization that began in the late 1970s and led to the explosive growth of the Chinese economy in the past four decades.

At the party congress, Xi was granted a third term as the CCP’s top leader—an unprecedented development in the contemporary era and a crucial step in his effort to centralize authority. But perhaps even more significant was the way the congress served to codify a worldview that Xi has been developing over the past decade in carefully crafted official party communications: Chinese-language speeches, documentaries, and textbooks, many of which Beijing deliberately mistranslates for foreign audiences, when it translates them at all. These texts dispel much of the ambiguity that camouflages the regime’s aims and methods and offer a window into Xi’s ideology and motivations: a deep fear of subversion, hostility toward the United States, sympathy with Russia, a desire to unify mainland China and Taiwan, and, above all, confidence in the ultimate victory of communism over the capitalist West. The end state he is pursuing requires the remaking of global governance. His explicit objective is to replace the modern nation-state system with a new order featuring Beijing at its pinnacle.

Granted, Beijing’s aspirations, like Moscow’s, may be greater than what it can realistically accomplish. But Xi, like the man he has described as his “best, most intimate friend,” Russian President Vladimir Putin, does not seem to believe that his reach exceeds his grasp. Policymakers around the world should take note. 

It would be better to constrain and temper Xi’s aspirations now—through coordinated military deterrence and through strict limits on China’s access to technology, capital, and data controlled by the United States and its allies—rather than wait until he has taken fateful and irrevocable steps, such as attacking Taiwan, that would lead to a superpower conflict. The war in Ukraine offers constant reminders that deterrence is far preferable to “rollback.” 

The Biden administration’s recent steps to constrain Xi’s quest to make China the world’s dominant semiconductor manufacturer—a status that Beijing has already achieved in telecommunications equipment, solar panels, advanced batteries, and other key sectors—mark an important evolution in U.S. strategy. If Congress, the White House, and U.S. allies move quickly to enact similar measures that sustain Chinese dependence on the rest of the industrialized world, it could blunt Xi’s growing appetite for risk. 

There is a moral imperative for concerted action, too, highlighted by the street protests that have erupted in several Chinese cities in recent days as people have grown exasperated with draconian anti-COVID measures bearing Xi’s signature. If the demonstrations gain momentum, Xi’s response could be severe, judging from some of his more ominous statements. In any case, democracies should do more to side with the Chinese people by facilitating safer means for them to communicate with one another both inside and outside China.

MOUTHFULS OF SAWDUST

Reading CCP documents can be a brutal exercise. The late Simon Leys, one of the most insightful China watchers in the West, compared it to “swallowing sawdust by the bucketful.” Wading through the texts of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” as the leader’s ideology is officially known, is no exception. Much of Beijing’s rhetoric, particularly when it is directed at foreign audiences, is confusing and ambiguous. But Xi’s most revealing statements are not the ones he makes at Davos or while standing next to the U.S. president in the Rose Garden. Rather, he is at his most trenchant when delivering speeches to top CCP leaders. Such speeches, which serve as guidance to the party faithful, are sometimes kept secret for months or years before appearing in Chinese-language publications. But as Leys understood, they contain slivers of insight if one is patient and diligent enough to search for them. 

Xi’s texts reflect his inheritance, as the latest in a long line of communist theorists and leaders steeped in similar doctrines, traditions, and desired end states. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao can all be seen in Xi Jinping Thought, in letter and in spirit. And Xi does not represent as radical a departure from his more immediate predecessors as some analysts believe; his ambitions and those of the party that elevated him are broadly in sync. 

None of this is to say, however, that CCP bosses are interchangeable. Leadership matters in Leninist systems as much as in any other system. And Xi’s personal imprint is all over Beijing’s current approach, even if his desired end states are consistent with those of his predecessors. Chinese critics mock him as “The Great Accelerator,” alleging that he is speeding the eventual demise of the party’s monopoly on power. His champions would probably agree that he is an accelerator—but in their eyes, he is speeding up the process of achieving the party’s long-standing goals. Either way, there is no denying that Xi is the most important person to watch and read if one is to understand where China is headed and why. 

One key to understanding Xi is to look at his interpretations of history. It is well known that Putin once declared the Soviet Union’s collapse to be the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. Less well understood is the extent to which the Soviet collapse also haunts Xi and how it functions as a fundamental guide to the Chinese leader’s actions. 

In December 2012, just after becoming general secretary, Xi gave a closed-door speech to cadres in Guangdong Province, excerpts of which were leaked and published by a Chinese journalist in early 2013. Xi’s speech, framed as a cautionary tale, provided an early window into his worldview:

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken. . . . It’s a profound lesson for us! To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the Party’s organizations on all levels. 

Xi’s mention of “historic nihilism” may have been an implicit criticism of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had faulted the record of his predecessors. But the explicit villain in Xi’s speech was Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader whose perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (opening) reforms set the stage for the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “A few people tried to save the Soviet Union,” Xi said. “They seized Gorbachev, but within days it was turned around again, because they didn’t have the tools of dictatorship. Nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.” The phrase “the tools of dictatorship”—the idea that it is essential for the party and especially its top leader to control the military, the security apparatus, propaganda, government data, ideology, and the economy—would recur again and again in Xi’s speeches and official guidance over the next decade. 

A month later, in January 2013, Xi gave another speech, effectively an inaugural address, to new members and alternate members of the CCP’s Central Committee, which is composed of China’s top few hundred highest-ranking officials. This speech, kept secret for six years, shows Xi directing the party-state in terms borrowed right from the Cold War: 

Some people think that communism can be aspired to but never reached, or even think that it cannot be hoped for, cannot be envisioned, and is a complete illusion. . . . Facts have repeatedly told us that Marx and Engels’s analysis of the basic contradiction of capitalist society is not outdated, nor is the historical materialist view that capitalism will inevitably perish and socialism will inevitably triumph outdated. This is the irreversible overall trend of social and historical development, but the road is winding. The ultimate demise of capitalism, and ultimate triumph of socialism, will inevitably be a long historical process.

Three months after that, in April 2013, the Central Committee issued Document No. 9, an internal directive to party cadres that has proved to be a foundational text of the Xi era—systematic and strategic in its vision, hugely influential on the course of Chinese governance, and deeply hostile toward the West and Western ideas. Kept secret until it was leaked to overseas Chinese-language media in the summer of 2013, Document No. 9 was formally titled “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere.” It told an unambiguous story: Western countries conspire to infiltrate, subvert, and overthrow the CCP, so the party must stamp out Western “false ideological trends,” including constitutional democracy, the notion that Western values are universal, the concept of civil society, economic neoliberalism, journalistic independence, challenges to the party’s version of history, and competing interpretations of the party’s “reform and opening” agenda. “In the face of these threats,” exhorted Document No. 9, “we must not let down our guard or decrease our vigilance.”

Document No. 9 also warned of “color revolution.” This term originated in the first decade of this century, when a series of antiauthoritarian popular uprisings in former Soviet states became known by colorful names, including Georgia’s Rose Revolution (2003), Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004), and Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution (2005). Beijing began using the phrase to evoke the ever-present specter of Western-instigated subversion. As Document No. 9 put it, “Western anti-China forces” will always “point the spearhead of Westernization, division, and ‘color revolution’ at our country.” 

In late 2013, Xi required party leaders at all levels to watch a six-part documentary titled “A 20-Year Memorial for the Soviet Loss of Party and Country.” This “internal educational reference film” attributed the Soviet collapse to deep problems within the Soviet Communist Party, including its inability to manage political and economic infiltration and corruption that it blamed on the United States. The film was jointly produced by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party’s internal loyalty enforcer.

The same year, Beijing’s National Defense University produced a separate documentary, Silent Contest, that was distributed by several party and state organs. The film similarly used the Soviet collapse to rail against the “world strategy” of the United States. This was the opening line of Silent Contest: “The process of China’s realization of the great undertaking of national rejuvenation must ultimately follow from testing and struggle against the system of American hegemony.” Later, the film shows a clip of Putin delivering his now famous remark that the Soviet collapse was a geopolitical catastrophe.

WHEN WATER BECOMES ICE

Xi’s decision-making can be understood only with reference to Marxist-Leninist theory. In Marxist dialectics, history moves inexorably toward its utopian destination “step by step,” accumulating “quantitative increases that culminate in a qualitative leap,” as Xi explained, paraphrasing Mao, in a speech delivered to high-ranking cadres in January 2021 and published in April 2021. 

Mao, in turn, was paraphrasing Joseph Stalin’s rendering of Friedrich Engels’s theories about the application of the laws of physics to the processes of societal development. According to Engels, as quoted in Stalin’s 1938 Short Course on the History of the Bolsheviks, this process of change is akin to water heating or freezing:

The temperature of water has at first no effect on its liquid state; but as the temperature of liquid water rises or falls, a moment arrives when this state of cohesion changes and the water is converted in one case into steam and in the other into ice.

In the Short Course—the most widely published book in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule and, as the China expert John Garnaut has pointed out, the closest thing to a religious text in 1950s China—Stalin and his co-authors explain that this “science of history” helps the enlightened see patterns and great trends where others might see only “a jumble of accidents and . . . absurd mistakes.” 

Xi believes that we are today witnessing a “qualitative leap” in world affairs, where China has moved to center stage and the U.S.-anchored Western order is breaking down. As Xi said in his speech published in April 2021:

The world today is undergoing a great change in situation unseen in a century. Since the most recent period, the most important characteristic of the world is, in a word, “chaos,” and this trend appears likely to continue.

Xi depicts the current historical period as one of great risk and opportunity. It is his “historical mission” to exploit the inflection point and push history along its inexorable course through a process of “struggle,” which includes identifying internal and external enemies, isolating them, and mobilizing the party and its acolytes against them. 

Xi expanded on these ideas in an impassioned address to the Sixth Plenum meeting of Communist Party leaders in November 2021, lauding Mao’s 1950 decision to send “volunteers” across the Yalu River into Korea to fight the U.S. and UN forces commanded by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur. 

Comrade Mao Zedong, with the . . . strategic foresight of “by starting with one punch, one hundred punches will be avoided,” and the determination and bravery of “do not hesitate to ruin the country internally in order to build it anew,” made the historical policy decision to resist America and aid Korea and protect the nation, avoid the dangerous situation of invaders camping at the gates, and defend the security of New China. 

Xi’s speech made an equally strong endorsement of the CCP’s “decisive measures” to crush the student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and withstand “the pressure of Western countries’ so-called sanctions” that followed. This saved the party, in Xi’s telling, and today “the CCP, the People’s Republic of China, and the Chinese nation have the most reason to be self-confident” of any “political party, country, or nation” in the world. The statements leave little doubt that Xi would be willing to adopt “decisive measures” again today if less violent means to disperse demonstrations failed.

Like many of Xi’s most aggressive and important statements, his Sixth Plenum speech was initially kept secret. It was delivered behind closed doors and published in Qiushi magazine nearly two months later. The CCP does not appear to have published an official English translation of it, and the speech was all but ignored by Western news outlets. 

But just over a year later, its implications have become clear: regardless of near-term economic considerations for China, Xi is being guided by ideology and his firmly held diagnosis that the West is declining and that Beijing, led forcefully by Xi himself, must take risks and act decisively to assert new spheres of influence and build a world conducive to Marxist autocracy.

MARXIST MEANS AND ENDS

Xi Jinping Thought makes clear that Marxism is not just the means to achieving global supremacy but also the goal of that supremacy. “Karl Marx dedicated his entire life to overthrowing the old world and establishing a new world,” Xi said in 2018 while presiding over Marx’s 200th birthday celebration in Beijing—an event surrounded by weeks of propaganda and publications timed to establish Xi as the designated heir to Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Xi called the German theorist “the greatest thinker in human history” and decreed that “Marxism is not to be kept hidden in books. It was created in order to change the destiny of human history.”

This phrasing evoked a major foreign policy initiative that Xi has embraced called “A Community of Common Destiny for Mankind,” which aims to shape the global environment in ways favorable to Beijing’s authoritarian model. (The ominous-sounding term “common destiny” is often misleadingly translated by the CCP into the more anodyne English phrase “shared future.”) Xi’s 2018 speech made clear that the initiative and Marx’s vision of a stateless, collectivized world are linked. 

“Just like Marx, we must struggle for communism our entire lives,” Xi said. “A collectivized world is just there, over [the horizon]. Whoever rejects that world will be rejected by the world.” 

Ian Easton, an American researcher, discovered a recent set of People’s Liberation Army textbooks focused on Xi’s ideology that elaborate further on the link between Xi’s foreign policy and global communism. These books, edited by top educators and administrators at National Defense University and labeled as “internal teaching materials” for senior military officers, can be taken as authoritative. In China, the military is subordinate to the party, not to the state, and ideological training figures heavily in the education of officers. Xi has described the National Defense University as “an important base” for training China’s officer corps. 

Passages from the textbooks, cited in Easton’s 2022 book, The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy, underscore the idea that overturning U.S. leadership around the globe is only one phase of Xi’s plan. Xi also seeks to upend the concept of equal and sovereign states that emerged from Europe four centuries ago and is the cornerstone of international relations, according to the texts. As one of them, Strategic Support for Achieving the Great Chinese Rejuvenation, explains:

The Westphalian System was founded on the notion of a balance of power. But it has proven unable to achieve a stable world order. All mankind needs a new order that surpasses and supplants the balance of power. Today, the age in which a few strong Western powers could work together to decide world affairs is already gone and will not come back. A new world order is now under construction that will surpass and supplant the Westphalian System. 

This and the other textbooks leave no doubt that the system that replaces the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia must be the socialist model made in China. “As we push for the fusion of the world’s civilizations on the basis of developing our nation’s unique civilization, there are several things that must be done,” reads one passage. “[We] must insist on taking the road of development with Chinese cultural characteristics. . . . And we must insist on our principles and our bottom line as we actively engage with others.”

Another passage states: “The Community of Common Destiny for Mankind will mold the interests of the Chinese people and those of the world’s people together.” At another point, that same text makes clear who has decreed this approach: “Xi Jinping has emphasized that our state’s ideology and social system are fundamentally incompatible with the West. Xi has said ‘This determines that our struggle and contest with Western countries is irreconcilable, so it will inevitably be long, complicated, and sometimes even very sharp.’” The textbook’s authors evidently took the term “very sharp” to mean violent. As the book continues: “To use war to protect our national interests is not in contradiction with peaceful development. Actually, such is a manifestation of Marxist strategy.”

In the meantime, the book advocates weaponizing economic dependence and greed: “We must gain a grip on foreign government leaders and their business elites by encouraging our companies to invest in their local economies.” 

STRUGGLE SESSION

Xi further codified this view of China’s mission at the party congress in October, as he adjusted official language to match his vision and made personnel changes to reflect his control of the CCP and the preeminence of his thinking. One way in which this was achieved was through an act of editing: Xi led the congress in unanimously voting to insert the word “struggle” into the Party Charter in several more places. These changes were missed by some foreign observers, perhaps because the CCP’s English-language propaganda selectively mistranslated the word “struggle,” using euphemisms such as “persistent hard work.” But the term now rivals references to “reform and opening” in the charter, signaling that Beijing’s focus will now be even more on confronting perceived enemies at home and abroad and less on growing the economy. 

The personnel changes at the top of the party suggest much the same. In a difficult-to-parse sequence of events during the proceedings, Xi’s elderly predecessor Hu Jintao was removed, seemingly against his will, from his seat next to Xi on a dais in the Great Hall of the People. That might have been passed off as clumsy choreography or perhaps as a response to some medical issue. But soon afterward, Xi dumped all three of Hu’s allies from the Politburo, replaced them with personal loyalists, and elevated military industrialists and security-apparatus officials in place of officials with national-level economic experience. These changes made Hu’s removal appear more like a public humiliation.

Xi’s picks to lead the military—the two vice chairs of the Central Military Commission, of which Xi himself is chair—further signal his disruptive geopolitical ambitions. Xi reappointed Zhang Youxia as first vice chair, despite Zhang’s advanced age (72), which put him well past typical retirement age. (Zhang’s father fought side by side with Xi’s in China’s civil war.)

For the second vice-chair seat, Xi selected He Weidong, a 65-year-old with a focus on joint operations and experience on China’s contested frontiers. He commanded ground forces in China’s west during a period of high tension (and some bloodshed) with India, then led the Taiwan-focused eastern theater, where he oversaw a dress rehearsal for war following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island in August. But to become vice chair, he required a double promotion. 

In short, Xi’s new leadership team appears tailormade for “the spirit of struggle” and for the “high winds and waves” and “stormy seas of a major test” that he referred to in his work report to the Party Congress. One wonders whether he had Taiwan in mind when he chose those particular words.

WARMING UP TO “CONSTRAINMENT” 

In May, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a major address laying out the Biden administration’s China policy. “We are not looking for conflict or a new cold war,” Blinken asserted in his speech. “To the contrary, we’re determined to avoid both.”

The Biden administration avoids using the Cold War term “containment” to describe its approach to China, and Blinken did not use that term in his speech. But what he described echoes the successful approach Washington adopted in its contest with the Soviet Union. As one senior American official explained in a briefing to preview Blinken’s speech, U.S. policy is focused on “constraining Beijing’s ability to engage in coercive practices.” Washington seeks to work with allies to “leverage our collective strength” and “close off vulnerabilities that China is able to exploit.” Blinken summed it up in these terms in his address: “We cannot rely on Beijing to change its trajectory. So we will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open, inclusive international system.”

This is not quite containment, but it bears a family resemblance. “Constrainment” is the term that one of us (Pottinger) has used to describe it. A policy of constrainment, unlike containment, accounts for the current realities of economic interdependence and seeks to tilt them to Washington’s advantage. Constrainment should seek to puncture Beijing’s confidence that it can achieve its aims through war and sap Beijing’s optimism that it can decisively accumulate coercive economic leverage over the United States and other democracies.

Putin’s belief that western Europe had become too dependent on Russian energy to meaningfully oppose his armored assault on Kyiv appears to have been a significant factor in his decision to re-invade Ukraine. Xi is working to acquire similar coercive leverage—what he calls the “powerful countermeasure” of “international production chains’ dependence on China”—in semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech inputs to the global economy. An allied constrainment policy would avoid falling into this trap, as well as extricate the United States where it has already stumbled into one. Washington and its allies must adopt, in essence, the opposite of Germany’s corporatist, antistrategic foreign policy that tethered European prosperity to the whims of adversarial “Führer states,” to borrow Wolfgang Ischinger and Sebastian Turner’s apt phrase. 

Rules regarding semiconductors that the Biden administration issued in October take an important step in the right direction. Beijing currently must import hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of chips annually—a dependence that Washington should work to sustain. The most important elements of the new rules are limits on the export of chip-making equipment and U.S. skilled labor to China. If enforced diligently, the rules will foil Xi’s ambition to make China the world’s largest chipmaker and erode its goal of commanding the high-tech supply chains of its trade partners. 

That dynamic is the essence of constrainment, which should strive to maintain a favorable balance of dependence in a wide range of areas. A policy of constrainment should, for example, strengthen the dominance of the U.S. dollar as a global reserve and trading currency, extending Washington’s ability to monitor and punish money laundering, weapons proliferation, bribery, and other dangerous actions by Beijing. Constrainment should remind Beijing of its dependence on foreign sources of food and energy while reversing the United States’ growing reliance on Chinese batteries, solar panels, and other “green” technology. 

Constrainment would also rectify the lead Beijing has, incredibly, opened over the United States in global Internet governance and control of information and data flows. The fact that ByteDance, a Chinese company, controls TikTok—the fastest growing news and video content outlet in the United States—represents a potentially grave failure by Washington to protect democracy and free speech. TikTok’s algorithms, whose source code Beijing has restricted from being transferred out of China, could be modified to suppress or amplify content according to the CCP’s preferences, which would give China the ability to influence the views of tens of millions of Americans. Zhang Fuping, who serves as editor in chief of ByteDance, is also the secretary of the company’s Communist Party Committee, tasked with ensuring the company’s alignment with the CCP’s interests. According to a report in Sina Finance, at a meeting in 2018, Zhang declared that the company should “‘take the lead’ across ‘all product lines and business lines’ to ensure that the algorithm is informed by the ‘correct political direction’ and ‘values.’” And according to a report in Taiwan News, in 2019, ByteDance signed an agreement with the Ministry of Public Security’s Press and Publicity Bureau pledging to boost “network influence and online discourse power” and enhance “public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility.”

TikTok and other content apps based in China or owned by Chinese firms represent potentially powerful instruments for censorship and mass manipulation; Washington should ban their use, just as India’s government has wisely done. If the CCP wants to influence international audiences, it should have to depend on digital platforms domiciled in, regulated by, and accountable to democracies. 

The contest between democracies and China will increasingly turn on the balance of dependence; whichever side depends least on the other will have the advantage. Reducing Washington’s dependence, and increasing Beijing’s, can help constrain Xi’s appetite for risk. When coupled with U.S. cooperation with Australia, Japan, and Taiwan to field an unmistakably superior and well-coordinated military presence in the western Pacific, constrainment offers the best way to prevent the “stormy seas of a major test” that Xi seems tempted to undertake as he begins his second decade as China’s dictator.

• MATT POTTINGER is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He served as U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser from 2019 to 2021. 
• MATTHEW JOHNSON is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has taught Chinese history and political thought at the University of Oxford and Grinnell College.
• DAVID FEITH is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. From 2017 to 2021, he served on the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia.

https://puck.news/the-cnn-green-room-massacre/

The CNN Green Room Massacre

End notes on a sad day or two at CNN as the Licht era enters a new phase.

Dylan Byers

December 2, 2022

 

On Thursday morning, ahead of a long-anticipated day of corporate bloodletting, CNN C.E.O. Chris Licht let his some 4,000-plus staff know that he would be spending the entire day in the executive conference room of his New York headquarters, door open, so that employees could talk directly with him about the new round of layoffs that has now left hundreds of people jobless. The optics were notable. When Licht took this job, seven months earlier, he had made a point of distancing himself from the newsroom, ensconcing himself in a corporate office five stories above the fray, and establishing a chain of command that allowed him to avoid direct, day-to-day communication with the vast majority of his staff. This was a meaningful departure from his predecessor, Jeff Zucker, who kept his office on the newsroom floor and texted and emailed with employees at all hours. 

Licht’s latest gesture was a sign of maturation. In his first months on the job, the former executive producer of Morning Joe, CBS This Morning and The Late Show had made a number of missteps evidencing his inexperience in the executive role—including, most notably, telling his employees that there would not be layoffs, and also planning a trip to Abu Dhabi ostensibly for sales meetings, a family vacation, and a Formula One race during a company-wide travel freeze. Now, on the most challenging day of his tenure to date, he was demonstrating compassion and courage: he would not hide while people lost their jobs. Instead, he would be there to answer questions, to comfort, and to assuage anxieties. “That’s actual leadership,” acknowledged one veteran media executive who has been critical of Licht. “That’s not easy.”

Some employees did pay Licht a visit, though most did not. “What were we supposed to talk about?” one staffer who survived the cuts said. Many were too busy consoling one another, or being consoled. One casualty of Licht’s cuts was the New York bureau, encompassing the journalists who cover the broader northeast region and are usually first on the scene for an event like the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Boston Marathon bombing, or the Sandy Hook school shootings—the kind of events that a smartphone-addicted nation still turns on the television for. Several sources described a poignant scene wherein a group of employees broke down in tears while saying goodbye to Brian Vitagliano, a producer on that desk who had been with CNN for nearly 25 years, and was laid off on Thursday along with bureau chief Mary Anne Fox. Similar scenes poured forth from sources at CNN’s various domestic and international bureaus.“Everyone’s depressed,” a CNN source in D.C. texted.

Some CNN sources who passed by Licht on Thursday did notice the presence of multiple security guards standing outside of the conference room, and at least one walking around with Licht as he moved about the floor. Guards are always present on the 17th floor at Hudson Yards—this is a global news network, after all, and one all-too-familiar with angry protestors and bomb threats—but the heightened security presence on a day of layoffs suggested Licht was mindful of how raw emotions were, and that a Jerry Maguire moment, or something worse, was not out of the question.

The Brain Trust Is Vanquished

The layoffs at CNN will reduce the company’s overall headcount by less than 10 percent. While some of the people affected will be very familiar to CNN viewers—contributors like Paul Begala and Preet Bharara, commentators like Chris Cillizza, correspondents like Alison Kosik and Dan Merica—the vast majority will be off-camera staffers. Some, surely, are replaceable, and some may have been in positions that were, to use the dreaded corporate buzzword, redundant. But many of those leaving CNN this week are folks who have historically been seen as crucial to the organization.

Among them is Tommy Evans, a vice president and London bureau chief who oversaw news gathering for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. His title belied his true role at the company: Evans played a leading role overseeing CNN’s peerless coverage of the Ukraine war and other international conflicts—precisely the type of events that make CNN indispensable to viewers—and he was revered for his ability to shepherd CNN’s production teams in and out of war zones. He was a victim of a restructuring happening across bureaus, from Atlanta to London to Hong Kong, that will reduce headcount at the local leadership levels. David Ford, the head of programming in London, and Chris Eldergill, the head of sports in London, were also cut.

The biggest blow to the organization this week, arguably, is the loss of John Antonio, the vice president of programming in Atlanta and the number-two to Michael Bass, the head of programming and Licht’s conduit to the newsroom, who recently announced that he would leave at the end of this year. Programming a 24-hour global cable news network is a uniquely complicated task, and Bass and Antonio were the No. 1 and No. 2 leaders of a very small group of people who had an institutional knowledge of how that worked. With Bass and Antonio gone, that brain trust has been effectively dismantled, resulting in an even steeper learning curve for Licht and his longtime deputy Ryan Kadro, neither of whom has ever been responsible for more than a broadcast morning or late night show. The news of Antonio’s departure, which Bass announced on Friday, left people across the organization stunned. As it turns out, Antonio had fired himself, sources familiar with the matter said. He believed that by laying himself off and promoting his second in command, Nima Ahmed, he could save other people’s jobs. 

The most notable on-air personality affected by the cuts is almost certainly Robin Meade, the HLN morning show host who, by Licht’s own admission, is “an exceptionally popular anchor.” Meade was a victim of Warner Bros. Discovery’s decision to cut live programming on HLN entirely, and effectively merge the longtime CNN sister network with Discovery’s iD channel, which is overseen by Kathleen Finch. Meade’s show will be replaced by a simulcast of CNN’s new morning show. But, given Meade’s popularity, one wonders if Licht wouldn’t have been smart to find a role for her alongside Don Lemon, Poppy Harlow, and Kailan Collins, who are still struggling to move the needle on ratings.

From a programming perspective, Licht’s most notable decision was to end contributor deals for the majority of CNN’s green room denizens. In the flush days of the previous regime, Zucker had doled out six-figure contributor gigs to all manner of veteran political operatives, partisan advocates and real or self-appointed experts, as well as several star Times, Post and Politico reporters who used the money to subsidize their relatively meager journalism salaries. 

The rationale was twofold. First, by keeping a Maggie Haberman or a David Axelrod on retainer, Zucker ensured that they’d never show up on MSNBC. Second, and more importantly, these people became regular cast members in the CNN show, color commentators who were as important to the CNN brand as the anchors and journalists who were actually relaying or producing the news. Maybe you were a Van Jones person who couldn’t stand Jeffrey Lord, maybe you were a John Kasich person who couldn’t stand Jennifer Granholm. No matter. The point was viewers had their people, and the people they loved to hate, and this kept them engaged.

The Green Room Mafia

The David Zaslav-Lichtian philosophy of CNN—a straightforward, old-fashioned news network that doesn’t treat politics as sport—apparently doesn’t need this cast of characters, nor does the news division of a debt-ridden company feel the need to pay for most of them. Dozens of contributors lost their deals this week: Begala and Bharara, star Politico journalist Jonathan Martin, New Yorker staff writer and Russia expert Susan Glasser, veteran Democratic operative Hilary Rosen, former governor John Kasich, former congressman Joe Kennedy III. The list goes on, and touches a lot of non-political contributors who rarely appeared on the air, but were paid all the same. 

In a memo to staff, Licht said the cuts would “strengthen our ability to deliver on CNN’s core journalistic mission and enable us to innovate in the years ahead.” Most of the several dozen CNN sources who I spoke to this week still don’t feel like they have a clear sense of exactly how these cuts will enable them to do that, nor where the innovation is going to come from. Nevertheless, there is a clear view from the executive level of where CNN is headed. The Licht playbook is all about getting back to basics, removing all the ancillary content and myriad growth efforts like CNN+ and CNN Films. His mandate is to turn CNN into a narrowly focused linear news network, with a website on the side—effectively what it was a decade ago, before Zucker took over. Meanwhile, while Zaz continues to profess his love of news and WBD executives privately say there are no plans to sell the network, people are growing increasingly skeptical about where CNN fits into the larger company’s plans. “I’ve been through a few of these restructurings,” one veteran CNN employee told me. “I think this one is the most upsetting because we just don’t know what WBD actually intends to do with us.”

As for Licht, he still has Zaz’s backing, despite his handling of the layoffs. Of course, Zaz is a clear-eyed and unsentimental corporate leader in the Jack Welch mold, and he will ultimately judge Licht based on performance. Internally, sources say, Licht will be judged by three metrics: reputation, ratings and revenue. It is perhaps too soon to tell whether the pivot away from Zucker’s anti-Trump programming, and Licht’s overtures to Republican leaders, will actually result in conservatives coming back to the network. As for ratings, they are among the lowest in CNN’s history, which stands in stark contrast to the record-high ratings the network enjoyed during the Zucker-Trump era. And on revenue, the most important of metrics, CNN is anticipating roughly $750 million in profit this year, down considerably from the more than $1 billion in profits that Zucker brought in every year for the last five years of his tenure. Warner Bros. Discovery executives have a very different view on Licht’s predecessor than the hundreds of Zucker loyalists who still work at CNN, and some argue that he and his deputies spent recklessly. There may be some truth to that. Whatever the case, for guys who live and die by the P&L, it can be hard to argue with the scoreboard.

WTF BREAKING: Right-hander Jacob deGrom has signed a five-year, $185 million contract with the Texas Rangers, sources tell ESPN. Physical is passed. Deal is done. Includes conditional sixth-year option that would take total deal to $222 million. Full no-trade clause. A massive haul.

 W T F. Never going to root for the Texas Rangers. F/ck You deGrom.

Mets are in SHAMBLES. The deGrom exit is a World Series for anti-Mets fans. deGrom's career is over. Rangers spending a ton of money to finish behind the Cheatsros and Mariners. This is like Curry going to Magic. Jacob deThirdPlaceInTheALWest. The Mets are still paying Bobby Bonilla FFS.

The lawyer who could deliver on Biden’s wish to be the most pro-union president [washingtonpost]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/15/jennifer-abruzzo-union-biden-nlrb/

The lawyer who could deliver on Biden’s wish to be the most pro-union president

Biden’s general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, Jennifer Abruzzo, is wielding her power in new ways

Updated October 17, 2022 at 1:41 p.m. EDT|Published October 15, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

 

Starbucks was forced to rehire baristas after firing them during a union drive at a store in Memphis. Las Vegas laundry service Apex Linen was forced to rehire workers involved in union organizing it laid off. And Amazon may soon be forced to rehire a warehouse worker it fired in Staten Island who co-led the first successful union campaign at the company’s U.S. locations.

The lawyer who helped these workers get their jobs back this past year is Jennifer Abruzzo, 58, general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, the agency tasked with protecting workers’ rights to organize in the United States.

Abruzzo has worked at the NLRB for nearly a quarter-century. But now, as the agency’s leader and chief enforcer of federal labor laws, she wants to make it far easier for workers to unionize than it has been in decades. Her tenure comes at a pivotal moment for unions. Union membership has fallen over the past four decades, but pandemic-era pressures that prompted millions of workers to retire or leave the workforce have also afforded workers new leverage to demand more from their employers. Union elections increased by 53 percent in fiscal year 2022 over 2021.

In a little over a year on the job, the Biden appointee has become a household name throughout organized labor for reshaping the agency in new ways. In memos, she’s directed roughly 500 staff attorneys to invoke a rarely used legal tool to help union supporters return to work after retaliatory firings. She’s directed them to impose harsher penalties on employers who violate labor law and dusted off a decades-old legal doctrine that could halt employers’ anti-union campaigns.

“I’ve been with the agency for a very long time for a reason,” Abruzzo told The Washington Post. “I wanted to try and make a difference in workers’ lives. As I’ve gotten positions with more responsibilities, I was able to effectuate what I believe is our congressional mandate, which is to protect workers’ rights. We’re not pro-union. We’re not pro-employer. We are pro-worker. That’s the lens from which I view my job.”

Abruzzo is also President Biden’s best chance at achieving his goal to be the most pro-labor president in U.S. history. At a time when Congress is so narrowly divided that Biden has yet to deliver on major labor priorities, including a package of measures that would reinforce stronger union rights and enshrine them into law, Abruzzo’s NLRB could make it more difficult for companies such as Starbucks and Amazon to fight union campaigns.

“You have a president who is unabashedly and unapologetically supportive of workers’ rights, and I think Jennifer has been given permission to pursue the issues that people around the labor movement have been advocating for over a long time,” said Seth Harris, former top labor adviser to Biden. “Jennifer understood the power of these issues and decided she’s going to try to solve the problems that we’ve all been wringing our hands over for years.”

In the meantime, Abruzzo has earned the ire of conservatives, including the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which declared that she intends to “turn the labor board into a spear for unions against employers.”

Attorneys who represent employers have described Abruzzo’s proposals as further left than her predecessors under Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. For example, Abruzzo argued in a memo in April that employer-led “captive audience” meetings that pressure workers against unionizing violate labor law. Her critics disagree and say she is infringing on employers’ free speech rights.

“At least with some of my colleagues, there’s surprise and shock about how much the pendulum is swinging back. With some of the agenda items, we’re like, ‘Holy smokes, this is pretty radical,’ ” said James Plunkett, an attorney at Ogletree Deakins, a law firm that has represented Amazon and other large employers. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Abruzzo maintains her top priority is protecting workers. And on the issue of captive audiences in particular, she said she wants to ensure “those meetings are voluntary … because workers have a right to refrain from listening to [that] rhetoric.”

Abruzzo grew up in Jackson Heights in Queens. Her father was a union engineer at a utility company and her mother was an X-ray technician and member of Service Employees International Union Local 1199, one of the city’s most powerful unions. “We didn’t have a lot,” Abruzzo recalls. She got her first job helping at a cardiologist’s office at age 13.

She credits her parents for teaching her to stand up for what she believed in. In the 1980s, as a high-schooler, Abruzzo knocked on the Manhattan front door of former president Richard Nixon, she said, and confronted him in his foyer about statements he had made on national television about the moral failings of her generation. He apologized to her.

Abruzzo married young and had her first and only child at age 23, following her spouse to Florida. They divorced after a few years, and Abruzzo put herself through law school night classes as a single mom. Labor law professor Michael Fischl took notice of Abruzzo as “a standout” in his class and urged her to apply for a job at the Miami offices of the National Labor Relations Board.

Abruzzo has mostly worked at the agency ever since. She spent 11 years in the Miami field office, advising workers about their labor rights and assisting them in filing for union elections. But she’s also served as a political appointee under the Obama administration, as deputy general counsel.

“I interacted with workers from all walks of life. [Miami] was a very large melting pot,” Abruzzo said. “But you’d hear the same sort of workplace concerns, whether it was about inadequate wages or inequities in the workplace or retaliation. That experience actually cemented for me the need to be available for workers whenever and wherever they needed us.”

Former leaders at the NLRB credit her years of experience for positioning her to transform the agency into a champion for workers. Abruzzo is distinguished from many of her predecessors because she spent so much time at the agency, especially its field offices.

Past colleagues described her as a highly efficient and energetic leader. She expects staff attorneys to be as well prepared as she is for meetings. She also is known for taking a special interest in young lawyers.

Nearly every colleague interviewed credited her for being a good friend who plans birthday parties and retirements dinners and checks in over email and phone calls, helping all attorneys, regardless of politics, adjust to life in Washington.

During the Obama administration, Abruzzo invited new NLRB board appointees over to her house in Virginia. Often, her husband, an Italian cookbook author, led pasta-making lessons. Guests included Harry Johnson, a well-known Republican attorney with Morgan Lewis, who went on to help Amazon oppose a contentious union campaign in Bessemer, Ala., in 2021. She also hosted Philip Miscimarra, the Trump-appointed NLRB board chair, also with Morgan Lewis, who has represented the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“For Jen, it’s hard to know where work begins and ends,” said Celine McNicholas, an Obama-era NLRB attorney and a close friend of Abruzzo’s. “Work is her life, but I think she makes everyone around her feel like part of her family.”

The NLRB made headlines when Biden first took office because he had taken the extraordinary step — on his first day — of firing Abruzzo’s predecessor, Peter Robb, a Trump appointee who was despised by labor unions and refused to resign when asked.

Later that summer, Abruzzo was sworn in to run the NLRB, 16 months into the pandemic. The vaccine was being distributed but covid was still raging and the delta variant was about to take hold. Millions of workers had started quitting their jobs in search of better opportunities. In the months surrounding Abruzzo’s swearing-in, strikes broke out at Frito-Lay, Nabisco and John Deere, and popular support for labor unions had reached the highest point since 1965.

Sitting in a corner office overlooking the Washington Navy Yard, Abruzzo has fired off some 11 legal memos, nearly double her predecessor’s output over a similar period.

She aims to reverse a host of Trump-era decisions. She wants the NLRB to overturn a measure that prevents union organizers from accessing company property, and another that bans workers from organizing on company email. But she also wants to go further.

She has requested that staff attorneys sharpen financial penalties against employers that illegally fire employees for union activity. In the past, employers have been required to provide back pay, but she says that they should be held responsible for expenses workers accrue while unemployed, such as health-care insurance, loans, credit card late fees and even lost homes or cars. She has asked agency officials to require employers to pay unions for expenses they incur fighting illegal anti-union activity. She has also argued that student athletes, such as football players at Northwestern University, who generate millions of dollars in profit for colleges, should be able to unionize.

In perhaps her boldest proposal, Abruzzo wants to revive a mid-20th-century doctrine, known as “Joy Silk.” The standard would force employers who violate labor law to recognize unions without a secret-ballot election, if most of a workforce has indicated interest in unionizing by signing union authorization cards. The doctrine was abandoned by the board in 1969.

“Back when Joy Silk was the law of the land, there were about 6,000 to 8,000 union elections a year. Now there’s about 2,000,” said Brian Petruska, a union lawyer who has written extensively about Joy Silk.

Employers have balked at the idea of Joy Silk returning, saying it would shortcut the union campaign process and fail to give workers enough opportunity to make an informed, private decision about whether they want to unionize.

Abruzzo is also coordinating with other federal agencies and has met several times with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who has vowed to rein in the power of Big Tech. Abruzzo said these partnerships have allowed the agencies to tackle complicated workplace issues, in particular the misclassification of gig workers as independent contractors.

But there are limits to what Abruzzo can accomplish during her four-year term, which goes through July 2025. The agency’s budget has been given no new funding in nine years. It has lost 50 percent of its field staff since 2002, meaning staffers have bigger caseloads and aggrieved workers wait longer to receive relief, board officials said. The speed at which the board operates can be critical for the success of union elections, labor organizers said.

“Abruzzo is doing an amazing job and has this ambitious agenda but she just does not have the resources to execute it, and that’s because Democrats have not made this a priority in government funding bills. That needs to change,” said one senior congressional Democratic aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private dynamics. “We’re gearing up to make this a fight in the coming months.”

Labor organizers say the five-person NLRB panel that rules on cases Abruzzo has selected is moving at a frustratingly slow pace, despite its Democratic majority. They point to the amount of time it has taken to reverse Trump-era union election rules.

Abruzzo is undeterred and points to renewed popularity in unions and the NLRB. She credits workers themselves, and labor leaders such as Christian Smalls, the leader of the independent union that won the first election at an Amazon warehouse in April.

“Chris Smalls said that the hardest part of unionizing was convincing his colleagues they had the right to organize, that there was an agency out there that would protect them,” Abruzzo said. “He told them, ‘No, you have a right to do this. They can’t fire you.’ I appreciate that he was an ambassador for our agency.”

Jeff Stein contributed to this report.

correction

The general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board serves a four-year term through July 2025. A previous version of this story stated an incorrect length of the term.

This year we used public records requests and litigation to investigate abuses of power and threats to our democracy. Here are our “greatest hits” of the year. #FOIA

 https://twitter.com/weareoversight/status/1598790239862067206

  

Transparency By the Numbers: So far this year we have received 1,736 productions of records, totaling 750,359 pages of documents

The Plot to Overturn the Election: We obtained the fake electoral certificates submitted to Congress by Trump supporters in seven states as part of the failed attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

  

Justice Clarence Thomas and Ginni Thomas’ Political Connections: Records we obtained revealed Ginni Thomas’ ties to 2020 election subversion efforts as well as evidence of Justice Thomas’ contact with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

 

Exposing Partisan Election Reviews: We stood up against egregious attempts to sow doubt about the 2020 election results in Arizona and Wisconsin.

 

Anti-Immigrant Political Stunts: This year, conservative governors in Florida, Texas, and Arizona began sending asylum-seekers and other undocumented immigrants to places like Washington, D.C. We uncovered documents related to Gov. DeSantis’ Sept. 14 flights to Martha’s Vineyard. 

 

“Wiped” Phones: Our FOIA litigation revealed that the Defense Department and the Army failed to preserve text messages from Jan. 6, 2021 and that the phones of certain Trump administration officials were wiped.

 

 

See what we do in 2023 by signing up for our newsletter: https://americanoversight.org/mail-lists

 

Lars von Trier Behind The Curtain [the newyorker]

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/lars-von-trier-behind-the-curtain

 

Lars von Trier Behind the Curtain

The Danish director’s new installation of his sci-fi hospital soap opera “The Kingdom” arrives in conjunction with unfortunate medical news of his own. 

By Adam Nayman

December 1, 2022

Lars von Trier’s supernatural soap opera “The Kingdom,” which ran on Danish public television in 1994, is set in a Copenhagen medical facility overrun in equal capacity by vengeful ghouls and pale Scandinavian bureaucrats. A typical episode might find a doctor grafting a cancerous liver onto his body as a trophy or staff members engaging in a game of blackmail over a severed head. In the most notorious sequence, a pregnant woman gives birth to a blood-soaked, full-grown man with the face of the creepy German character actor Udo Kier. The series was part “The Shining” and part “E.R.,” with an atmosphere of absurdist clock-punching dread that weirdly anticipated “The Office.” The voluble neurosurgeon Dr. Stig Helmer (Ernst-Hugo Järegård), newly imported from Sweden and lording over his “Danish scum” colleagues, was the Ricky Gervais figure, a world’s-worst-boss type raging impotently against his own obsolescence.

“The Kingdom” ran for two raucous seasons and von Trier had hoped to make a third, but Järegård died in 1998, and von Trier eventually moved on. A remake developed by Stephen King, in 2004, retained little of the original’s genre-bending alchemy. So it came as a welcome surprise when von Trier announced, in December of 2020, that he would be reviving the series for a final installment titled “The Kingdom Exodus.” This time, the hapless antagonist is the late Dr. Helmer’s officious son (Mikael Persbrandt), who is belittled among staffers as “Halfmer” and abandoned to assemble his own faulty IKEA office furniture alone. The series, which is streaming on MUBI, balances demonic intrigue and slapstick medical gags with wry in-jokes, callbacks, and cameos aimed at diehard fans.

By unfortunate coincidence, the project arrived in conjunction with medical news of von Trier’s own. In August, von Trier’s production company, Zentropa, announced that he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Von Trier told me recently, over Zoom, that his symptoms made directing the series a struggle. “The actors in ‘Kingdom Exodus’ are doing a good job,” he said. “But I felt terrible, because I had this disease, and I didn’t know that I had it at the time.” He eventually received a diagnosis, and with a characteristic mix of narcissism and self-abasement opted to make oblique reference to his condition onscreen. In the original “Kingdom,” von Trier appeared in formal wear at the end of every episode to recap the ludicrous plotlines and bask in his God-like creative control. In “Exodus,” his role is the same, but the exegesis is delivered from behind a curtain for reasons that he refers to, in voice-over, as “vanity.” All that’s visible are his shoes, peeking out from beneath the fabric—a poignant symbol for a filmmaker who once gleefully compared his cinema to a pebble lodged in a shoe.

Von Trier has always been a divisive filmmaker, both decorated and disparaged in art-house circles, but he has spent the last decade of his career under the pall of his clumsy offscreen provocateurism. In 2011, at the Cannes press conference for “Melancholia,” his film about a woman whose colossal unhappiness seems to bring about the literal end of the world, a journalist asked von Trier a question about his German roots. He responded with a rambling, kamikaze monologue in which he declared that he “sympathized” with Hitler and added, “How can I get out of this sentence? . . . O.K., I’m a Nazi.” As a close follower of von Trier’s gonzo career (not to mention as a Jew), I found the comment glib and distasteful, but not especially meaningful. Von Trier, a critic of far-right ideologies at home and abroad, has always had a devout sense of political incorrectness, and he has never been one to walk back an outrageous claim. When an uproar ensued, and Cannes declared von Trier “persona non grata,” he publicly declared remorse, then proceeded to have the phrase printed on a T-shirt and wore it to his next première, where it complemented the four-letter word newly tattooed on his knuckles.

During our conversation, von Trier spoke slowly and deliberately, with a certain self-consciousness about his frail condition. But he brought up Hitler unprompted, looking amused to be suddenly back on treacherous ground. He was in his home in Lyngby, just north of Copenhagen, sitting in front of a framed painting bearing a striking, enigmatic resemblance to Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Massacre of the Innocents,” depicting the slaughter of infant children in Bethlehem. When I asked him about his impulse to pick at the scabs of controversy, he said, “Are you asking if I’m a Nazi?” and added, “I should have put on my uniform.” He admitted that, upon reflection, l’affaire “Melancholia” may have been subconsciously premeditated. The day before the press conference, he’d gone to see his friend and mentor Gilles Jacob, the former Cannes president and power broker. “He gave me a book about Cannes, and there were two pictures of me in it: one where I was in a leather jacket with a bald head, and one with me in a tuxedo. And then underneath it says, ‘That’s how it always goes with rebels. They start off one way, and then they conform.’ I said to him, ‘I don’t think this is a nice thing to write. It doesn’t please me, anyway. So I have to find something very provocative to say at the press conference tomorrow.’ He said, ‘Yes, you do.’ ”

Such trollish tendencies have helped fuel misconceptions of von Trier as a gifted but immature delinquent. He has referred to himself as “a simple masturbator of the silver screen,” but a more accurate diagnosis might be that he is a cinematic prankster who believes, fervently and somewhat paradoxically, in innocence as a virtue. Films like “Breaking the Waves” (1996), starring Emily Watson, and “Dancer in the Dark” (2000), starring Björk, are hymns to martyrdom that pits holy fools against the emissaries of a cold and cruel world. Part of von Trier’s polarizing trilogy about physically and psychically brutalized female innocents, along with the Nicole Kidman-starring “Dogville” (2003), those films earned von Trier accusations of misogyny and masochism. But he rendered the protagonists’ Pyrrhic victories so ecstatically that any claims of bad faith seemed moot. Von Trier’s films have always been perched on a high wire between blunt-force shock tactics and bone-dry satire. To borrow the trilogy’s title, they also wear their “golden hearts” on their sleeves.

Von Trier has always been clear that he views filmmaking as a way of revealing himself. He grew up, in Copenhagen, in a radical Communist household where, as he once put it, everything was allowed except for “feelings, religion, and enjoyment.” This upbringing left him with a host of debilitating hangups and a complicated relationship to authority. His most widely circulated quote that’s not about Nazis is “I’m afraid of everything in life except filmmaking.” After trying and failing to win entrance to Denmark’s national film academy, he was finally admitted on his third attempt, in 1979, and found a suitably obnoxious way to mark the occasion. He told me, “The first thing I did was get a spray can and then, on the wall, just opposite the headmaster’s window, I wrote ‘film school is dead.’ ” Von Trier’s willingness to play the enfant terrible was a big part of his early legend, but so was his almost preternatural assurance with a camera. In 1984, at the age of twenty-eight, he won a technical prize at Cannes for his first feature, “The Element of Crime,” an expressionistic police procedural with a hypnotically immersive effect. He had taught himself filmmaking on his mother’s 8-mm. camera with the help of a how-to manual. “I still have it,” he said, of the book. “And it’s so worn out because I read it so many times.” He added, “I will say that I learned ten times more from that book than I learned from film school.”

Von Trier’s movies are filled with allusions to his favorite directors, but he speaks of his filmmaking as the work of a lonely explorer. “I wanted to see myself as a scientist who was put on a deserted island and asked to go west,” he said. “That meant that I should only go with my own compass and then go the route I was shown, because otherwise it would have no significance.” His pilgrim’s progress has been defined in part by fruitful detours, such as his co-founding, in the nineties, of the filmmaking collective Dogme 95, which was both a bold experiment and a publicity stunt. Its members took a semi-facetious “vow of chastity,” embracing an ascetic filmmaking process—shooting on location, using only handheld cameras; eschewing period pieces or genre tropes—in order to rescue cinema from manipulative visual beauty. (“I like rules and borders,” von Trier told me. “I also like when I have my back to a wall. I have to find something completely new to say.”) Dogme 95’s notoriety made von Trier’s cinema briefly synonymous with a kind of grubby, low-resolution ugliness, and his two most famous features—“Dancer in the Dark,” which won the 2000 Palme d’Or, and the epic Thornton Wilder pastiche “Dogville”—are united in part by their status as eyesores. But “Dogville,” which was shot on a bare soundstage meant to represent a Depression-era mountain town, exemplified von Trier’s powers of suggestion. With a devilish grin, he told me that he wrote the script, a fusillade of dialogue linked together by a magisterial voice-over, on a ten-day cocaine bender. “Normally, when you write, you stop and don’t know if you should go right or left. With coke, you just go right. You decide straight away.”

Von Trier has been up front over the years about his various addictions and anxieties. “As a private person, I love medicine,” he told me. “I take so many pills because I have so many things now that have to be cured.” “Melancholia,” along with the bleak, annihilating sex-horror movie “Antichrist” (2009) and the two-part sex-addiction saga “Nymphomaniac” (2014) were billed as part of his Depression Trilogy, and he told me that the decision to return to the world of “The Kingdom” was partially an attempt to manage his mental health. “I was having—believe it or not!—depression,” he told me. “I had to start working because that was the only thing that really worked. ” If the arrogant, alcoholic Dr. Halfmer is the butt of the show’s jokes—and an avatar of its gently contemptuous Swedish-Danish rivalry—the elderly female patient Karen (Bodil Jørgensen), who gets admitted to the hospital in the first episode, is something like its soul. She is suffering from a unique case of “nyctophobia”—an extreme fear of the dark—which seems to put her in communication with a spirit realm. Like most of the unusual maladies depicted in “The Kingdom,” Karen’s condition is played simultaneously for laughs and for a kind of implicit empathy. As black as the show’s hell-is-other-people humor can be, it’s rooted in a tender sense of human frailty. It is not particularly scary in a horror-movie sense, instead accessing a more ephemeral, existential sort of terror that, in von Trier’s hands, is indivisible from comedy.

Von Trier told me that his health struggles affected the show’s tone. “I think I underestimated what horror really needs, which is time,” he said.“The reason there are so many jokes is because I could only work for about an hour and a half each day while I was writing. Everything became compressed.” I asked von Trier whether he viewed himself as an essentially comedic filmmaker. “I believe that humor and, let’s say, fascination, or fear, come from the same source,” he said. “I’m terrified of getting on a plane, but I have been a few times, and it’s fantastic to fly, when it goes through the clouds, all of that. The fear comes from the fascination of the thing.”

“Exodus” is von Trier’s first project since his infamous serial-killer movie “The House That Jack Built,” from 2018, whose title refers to the towering flesh-and-blood structure that the protagonist (played by Matt Dillon) erects out of the bodies of his victims. (When I asked von Trier if the focus on a male antihero represented a conscientious departure, he said mordantly, “I thought it would be nice to try to do something where there are no suffering women. There were a lot of women in it, but they died, they didn’t go on suffering.”) At once confrontationally repulsive and mesmerizingly abstract, the film was easy to interpret as a self-portrait of sorts, the story of a loner trying to reconcile his aesthetic impulses with his depressive misanthropy. It featured clips from von Trier’s own filmography, giving the proceedings a valedictory air. The same could be said for “The Kingdom Exodus,” with its endearing, old-school echoes of its predecessor. But, like “The House That Jack Built,” the series is ultimately too thorny to function as a victory lap. In 2017, Björk accused von Trier of sexual harrassment on the set of “Dancer in the Dark”; he claimed that he’d only hugged her. In the new series, he coyly includes a running subplot about Halfmer’s alleged (and utterly hapless) impropriety toward a female colleague—a spoof of P.C. culture from the experienced but untrustworthy vantage of somebody who’s spent decades working and living on the edge of cancellation.

Whatever von Trier’s desire for attention, the need to be liked (or forgiven) is simply not part of his artistic constitution. “I’m very aware of the risk of doing what I call old-man films,” he told me. “These are the films that happen because you have a house that is too big, and you’re striving to repeat your success.” He continued, “I don’t have this idea that there’s a film I haven’t made yet that has to be made, right now. Also, because of this Parkinson’s I’ve picked up, I could live with not doing more films.” He sounded less resigned about his status as a troublemaker. “Persona non grata? I like that very much,” he said, laughing. “I’m the only persona non grata that I know.” ♦

U.S. SENATE REPUBLICANS DEFEAT MEASURE TO REQUIRE RAILROADS TO OFFER SEVEN DAYS OF PAID SICK LEAVE TO UNION WORKERS

Fixed it for the incompetent trash media

Purity And Sass

 

https://twitter.com/StevieNicks/status/1598065336611647491

  

 

Christine McVie’s Most Miraculous Song [theatlantic.com]

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/12/christine-mcvie-fleetwood-mac-singer-death/672318/

Christine McVie’s Most Miraculous Song

“You Make Loving Fun” showed that the late Fleetwood Mac member was a titan in her own right.

By Spencer Kornhaber

 

December 1, 2022, 1:24 PM ET

The popular image of Fleetwood Mac is of the band as an unstable molecule, its parts best understood by their place in an ever-changing swirl of connections. The group’s long saga includes marriages and divorces and affairs, departures and firings and returns. Bustling with rumbling blues, painterly folk, and hippie pop, its songs are pleasant blurs from afar, and cathedral-ceiling complex up close.

To most people, the singer and keyboardist Christine McVie, who died yesterday at age 79, was the member most recognizable for her role in the whole. She was first a fan (back when she performed under her birth name, Christine Perfect, at the same gigs as Mick Fleetwood’s blues group), and then a pillar (described in multiple obituaries as something like the “eye of the storm” in Fleetwood Mac). She could be thought of as both the band’s first woman (joining in 1970 shortly after marrying its bassist John McVie) and the band’s second woman (having willingly ceded the spotlight to Stevie Nicks, who joined in 1975 and quickly became a superstar). She was a glory-agnostic musician’s musician, content to entertain the public from behind the buffer of an electric piano.

But the grief millions feel at the news of McVie’s death may help reframe her legend: She was a titan in her own right. We all know that voice of hers, a clear and strong river cutting through dry rock. She wrote and sang songs that suspended time and defined eras: the panting “Don’t Stop,” the plaintive “Songbird,” the irrepressible “Everywhere.” Classically informed and practical-minded, she was a crowd-pleasing genius (“I’m a hook queen,” she once said) who used her powers for art.

The exemplary song that first comes to my mind is “You Make Loving Fun,” which McVie wrote and sang on the group’s 1977 album, Rumours. Although it was a smash, the track does not quite have the reputational mystique of knottier, more grandiose cuts such as “The Chain” and “Dreams.” It is, in fact, that most suspicious thing—a capital-p Pop song with a silly name. But in just over three and a half minutes, an epoch’s worth of emotion circulates. McVie gives one of the prettiest renditions ever of one of the most elemental tales: the unhardening of a heart.

The song builds off one of the band’s characteristically magnificent grooves, a boogying pulse ornamented with rock-and-roll detail work. The rhythm conveys tension and grit, which are leavened by the song’s ethereal wind chimes, guitar solos, and harmonies. Really, though, McVie’s vocals are the main event. The opening verse is a seduction, her syllables long and lassolike. Then, in the chorus, something amazing happens: The song seems to surrender. The band slows, like it’s readying for a nap, and McVie ascends, as if picked up by wind, while confessing to never believing in magic. When she flutters down, she’s sighing in bliss, but measuredly, pragmatically, honestly: “I’ve a feeling it’s time to try.”

Perhaps you find most of the lyrics—“Sweet wonderful you / You make me happy with the things you do”—a bit mushy. Of course, giving oneself over to mushiness is the point of the song. “Don’t break the spell,” McVie pleads to a lover and, perhaps, to the unapologetically romantic music itself. When she says, “I don’t have to tell you but you’re the only one,” it sounds like a given—although the tangled, affairs-laden backstory of Rumours suggests other possibilities. After all, the song is about Fleetwood Mac’s lighting director (whom she was dating), but she reportedly told John McVie (whom she’d divorced in 1976) that it was actually written about a dog.

The complex mythology of Fleetwood Mac adds another layer of poignancy to the song: An ode to believing the unbelievable was written and delivered not by the famously mystical Stevie Nicks but by her hardy foil, Christine McVie. (The critic Robert Christgau once asked whether Rumours is good because the “cute-voiced woman writes and sings the tough lyrics and the husky-voiced woman the vulnerable ones.”) But this band, and McVie herself, was a story of multitudes—and the way that mastering those multitudes can create miracles.