Author: Bruce R. Nelson

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN WHO SEXUALLY HARASS

The sexual harassment geezerhood is finally enduring some tough days, though hardly tough enough. From Bill Cosby to Bill O’Reilly, these dirty old men have the mental acuity of that Japanese soldier who spent 29 years on an island in the Pacific refusing to accept that World War II had ended. How else do you explain a guy like O’Reilly, 26 years after the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill episode, allegedly telling a subordinate that he’d like to rub her vagina with a falafel?

Headlines over the last six months have clearly established that you are never too old for sexual predation. Roger Ailes, the 76-year-old former Fox News CEO, faced sexual harassment accusations from more than 20 women who had worked for him. The initial case had been filed by former Fox Anchor Gretchen Carlson. She settled for $20 million. Ailes lost his job, but walked away with $40 million. O’Reilly, Fox’s 67-year-old star commentator, bit the dust a few days ago, on the heels of a New York Times investigation showing that the company had paid out $13 million to settle sexual harassment suits against him. Fox finally fired him and gave him $25 million. See the mathematical pattern here? Under Fox’s “Fair & Balanced” notion of distributive justice, there is approximately twice as much money distributed to the harassers than there is to the harassed.

Then there’s Cosby, 79, allegedly the Golden Arches of sexual abuse, with – at last count – 58 women drugged and violated. With an estimated net worth of $400 million, the former comedian has assembled a top notch legal and PR team to help him issue repeated denials, just as Ailes and O’Reilly have done. It remains to be seen how well his money was spent. Jury selection begins May 22 in a Norristown, PA court where Cosby faces sexual assault charges.

There is, of course, one prominent septuagenarian in this aging pack of sexual predators who has lost neither fame nor employment from extending his reach beyond the bounds of decency. That would be Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States of America. According to statisticians who track these things, the commander in chief has been accused of sexual assault and/or harassment by 15 women since 1980. A number of those suits remain active.

You might think that dodging the sexual assault bullet, at least for now, would prompt Trump to keep his distance from less fortunate fellow perpetrators. Just the opposite. Trump has served as a highly placed sexual harassment consultant to all of them. For example, drawing on his own approach of castigating, insulting and threatening to sue his accusers, the Donald was dumbfounded that Cosby was using a passive, reticent defense. Here’s what he told the E Channel: “. . . he should say something because he is being accused of terrible things,” Trump said. “And to have absolutely no comment ― I think he’s getting very bad advice from a PR standpoint.”

The president’s role with Ailes and O’Reilly was more breathtaking. He participated in meetings and conference calls with Ailes leading to the $40 million buyout. Early in the O’Reilly quagmire, after numerous sexual harassment accusations surfaced, President Trump declared that O’Reilly “is a good person,” He told the New York Times, “I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.” As president, Trump leads the executive branch, including the agency that handles sexual harassment cases, making his comments a most extraordinary verbal pardon.

Given his coziness with Fox News and its former accused sex offenders, Trump has managed to make one positive and deliciously ironic contribution to the battle against sexual harassment. His behavior is being held out as an example of what not to do in the workplace. According to the Hollywood Reporter, 21st Century Fox, parent of Fox News, is using the infamous Trump “grab-them-by-the-pussy” Access Hollywood tape in human resource training on sexual harassment. In the 2005 recording, Trump is heard boasting that he gets by forcing himself on women because he is famous. Although the revelation didn’t keep Trump from being elected, HR trainers hope the president’s abhorrent conduct will be a reminder for employees on how not to behave.

As much as I’d like to believe that the well-financed fall of two Fox giants represents a cultural sea change for sexual harassment victims, I’m afraid such an assessment is far off the mark. Experts in this field say most people who experience sexual harassment at work don’t come forward out of fear, of losing their jobs, not being believed, how they will look to their family and friends. Gretchen Carlson, a former Miss America making seven figures as a top on-air performer says she kept silent for years out of fear. Think of what it must be like for a minimum wage bank teller or grocery clerk.

Sexual harassment at work is an offense of power. It’s about powerful men (mostly) taking what they want because they can. The revelations about Ailes and O’Reilly didn’t just pop up. Fox spent years and millions of dollars quietly settling litigation with nondisclosure clauses. The company’s business plan was to pay whatever it had to for the sexual harassment by men they saw as profit centers. The strategy was jettisoned only when the harassment costs grew more expensive, including the loss of 50-some advertisers and a possible disruption of Fox Cochairman Rupert Murdoch’s plan to purchase a lucrative British satellite television operation.

And therein lies the lesson from this whole sordid affair. The eradication of sexual harassment will come only when offending employers are hit hard in the pocketbook, much harder than they are now. CEOs would have a quick come-to-Jesus moment on this issue if the EEOC had the authority to levy eight or nine figure fines, on top of punitive damages. Don’t count on that happening anytime soon, not with an unabashed sexual harasser in the White House.

A MURDER ON FACEBOOK CASTS LIGHT ON TECHNOLOGY’S DARK SIDE

“Facebook Murder” blared from the headlines a few days back. I took it as an extreme approach to unfriending and was all set to delete my sarcastic political memes. Figured my life depended on it. Turns out this was far more serious than un-liking a post. A guy in Cleveland actually filmed himself murdering a man, a random victim, and quickly uploaded the video to Facebook. The murderer killed himself a few days later, apparently off camera.

Although we seem to be building an immunity to shock and dismay, the reaction to this murder broadcast was close to apoplectic. “No More Snuff Videos on Facebook,” demanded the Boston Globe. “Facebook Helps Violence Go Viral,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. “What Could be Worse than Murder on Facebook?” asked Inc.com. Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post media columnist, said this of the episode: “Facebook’s existential crisis arrived with a vengeance this week.”

Really? So this is where we draw the line? This is where Facebook turns evil, when a guy kills somebody in cold blood and turns it into social media content? Death and violence are no strangers to Facebook. Earlier this year, a two-year-old boy’s death was streamed live there. He’d been riding in a car with his aunt and her boyfriend when a driver cut them off, left his vehicle and started shooting. The aunt filmed it for Facebook Live. Four teenagers filmed themselves on the same platform while torturing a mentally disabled man. Just last month, several men live streamed their sexual assault of a teenage girl while dozens watched on Facebook.

None of those cases provoked the wrath that followed Steve Stephens’ Easter Sunday murder of Robert Goodwin Sr., his handpicked snuff film victim. Rape, torture and a dead child fly under the radar, but this first made-for-Facebook murder was apparently a step too far over the line of outrage. Facebook is sympathetic and insists it moves as quickly as it can to delete offending content when users complain, but that the process can take hours. Amazingly, however, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a plan. It is called Artificial Intelligence. He says it will take many years to fully develop, but he envisions software sophisticated enough to distinguish between acceptable and deplorable content. Imagine that: an AI program to tell the difference between right and wrong, between a cute kitty video and a murder in progress.

Remember the days when technology was cool because it gave us more control over our lives? Think of that first time you sat smugly on the couch and changed the channel with the push of a remote button. If you weren’t up for a long diatribe on the wonders of supply side economics from your Republican brother-in-law, you could let the answering machine deal with him. And if you didn’t have the slightest idea what supply side economics was all about, along came Google. The technology was there to serve us. It was, in a sense, an extension of ourselves. We retained control.

That’s no longer the case. We now have social media networks so large and complicated that the only way they can be stopped from publishing vile, offensive content is to create a whole new layer of technology through Artificial Intelligence. When was it, exactly, that we, as a people, ceded control to technology? More importantly, how do we get it back?

This is about a lot more than one deranged man staging a murder on Facebook. A huge fact of our new technological life is that people are being constantly hurt and traumatized over social media with seemingly no remedy in sight, save a promise of AI and not-yet-invented software. Hundreds of kids kill themselves every year after being bombarded with cyber messages telling them they are too fat, or ugly, or dumb, or worthless. Over and over.

A sidebar of the Facebook killer story, one that got very little attention because it represented business as usual, involved the killer’s former girlfriend. Before Stephens pulled the trigger, he demanded, at gunpoint, that his victim pronounce the woman’s name for the video production. It was Joy Lane. Although she had nothing to do with this murder, Lane was quickly persecuted by the tapping of angry fingers on thousands of keypads. The messages: “Moral: don’t date Joy Lane.” “Joy Lane deserves to feel horrible.” “He killed people because of a fat bitch.”

Twitter hashtags emerged quickly. One was #JoyLane Massacre. “No disrespect but if somebody had to die it should’ve been Joy Lane,” read one of the tweets. Over on YouTube, there was an “Original Song About Stephens Ex-Girlfriend”. Lyrics: “Hell yeah I’m sick, psychotic deranged/And it’s all over a bitch named Joy Lane.”

This kind of stuff happens all the time. It breaks people and destroys lives. It has become the new normal. Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, quit Twitter last year after a barrage of anti-Semitic messages. Feminist writer Jessica Valenti unplugged from all social media after receiving a rape threat against her five-year-old daughter. Until Reddit finally banned it, there was a discussion group with 150,000 subscribers called “Fat People Hate”. Users would find pictures of overweight people, mostly women, attach mean captions and post them on the target’s Facebook Page.

Other than a complete social media withdrawal, there is no quick and easy answer to this problem. For starters we need to think seriously about our relationship with technology. It has given us so much, but it is quickly evolving beyond our grasp, beyond our ability to shape it in ways that will enhance, rather than denigrate, the quality of our lives. How we and future generations respond to this dilemma will determine whether technology is an instrument that adds value to our civilization, or one that manages to suck all the humanity out of it. If we don’t find a way to control technology, it will end up controlling us. That’s one horror film that should never be made.

BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR AS SEASON 1 OF TRUMP’S REALITY SHOW DRAWS TO A CLOSE

As the 100-day presidential gestation ritual draws to a close, nothing could be finer than a good old shit-kicking bombing in Syria. “Absolutely beautiful,” said MSNBC’s Brian Williams as he watched video of the missile attack. At CNN, Fareed Zakaria fawned over the man who calls his station the headquarters of “fake news”, declaring that those 59 cruise missiles finally made Trump a real president. Had The Donald known that before the election, he could have bombed California, won the popular vote and looked presidential.

The post-inauguration story line, although bizarrely compelling and borderline fantastical, has been mostly horizontal. Trump says crazy stuff that bears no resemblance to reality, signs executive orders in the presence of white men wearing drab suits, tweets up a storm, and then gets up the next day and does it all over again, rinse and repeat. The narrative has been lacking in significant curvature. There is no arc there, no story routing that takes the protagonist from exposition, upward in rising action, then a climax, a descent through falling action and, eventually, resolution. It happens on “House of Cards” all the time. We saw it frequently with former president Obama. He evolved from an inexperienced junior senator who wrestled his party’s nomination away from an entrenched heavyweight, into a progressive visionary with superhero powers, and then, once elected, fell all the way down to mere mortal status, unable to get his agenda past the Republicans. Finally, Obama disengaged from those ashes and moved the country leftward with style and grace. Those are the kinds of arcs that keep contented smiles on the faces of political writers. The ideology is irrelevant; it’s the ebb and flow of the story line that matters.

Alas, Trump is to conventional story telling what reality television is to a dramatic series. Most of the Trump Land characters – especially the star – are marginally interesting, but lack both cohesive motivation and growth potential. The dialogue is less scintillating than what you might overhear in a dentist’s office. The actions of the various players seem almost unrelated to each other. Still, this reality show of a presidency produces some terrific bits.

Nothing from Beckett’s or Ionesco’s best absurdist works could top Trump’s recent chocolate cake scene. In case you missed it, the commander in chief was dining with Chinese President Xi Xinping at Mar a Largo when the missiles hit Syria. It was the dessert course. Trump, in a later retelling to a Fox News reporter, described the offering on the plates of these two world leaders as “the most beautiful piece(s) of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.” He went on, in great detail, like he was doing a Martha Stewart guest shot. Here is Trump telling the story: “I said (to President Xi) we’ve just launched 59 missiles heading to Iraq and I wanted you to know this. And he was eating his cake. And he was silent.” Whoops. The president – ours, not China’s – misspoke. It was Syria he had bombed, not Iraq. But the cake really was chocolate. And beautiful. That much, Trump got right.

So here’s where we are as this presidency’s Hundred Day Clock ticks down: 59 missiles dropped on Syria (not Iraq), the unfortunately named “mother of all bombs” dropped on Afghanistan, and U.S. warships stationed in the Korean Peninsula. Well, make that now headed to the Korean Peninsula. As North Korea paraded its collection of phallic-shaped artillery, teasing the West with its emerging nuclear capabilities, the White House announced it had dispatched warships to the area and was all done with “strategic patience”. (In reality, neither of those words – strategic or patience – has ever had a home in the Trump White House.) Turns out, according to today’s breaking news, that the warships were 3,500 miles from the Korean Peninsula, taking part in exercises with the Australian navy, even though Trump insisted they were right there on North Korea’s heels, as leverage against nuclear chicanery. Another whoops moment.

If you squint hard enough, you can almost see a conventional story arc here. Trump’s inaugural speech painted a picture of a new America First, isolationist administration. Ninety days later, he’s ready to bomb everything except the chocolate cake. His secretary of state, however, insists nothing has changed and that the president is as anti-interventionist as ever.

Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence pulled the format back to reality TV level, sounding very much like a professional wrestler, name-dropping the Syrian and Afghanistan bombings in warning North Korea not to mess with his tag team partner, the Trumper. In the other corner, is that country’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, a NBA fanatic with his own strongman track record that includes the execution of his uncle and extended family. Think how much safer we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis with Kennedy and Khrushchev at the table. The current showdown is so alarming, Russia and China are trying to calm both sides down.

Back in the ‘60s, during my formative years of high school debate, the national subject was nuclear disarmament. I remember arguing that the effectiveness of mutual assured destruction was limited to sane, rational leaders and meant nothing to crazy despots. I can still hear the shrieky, pubescent voice of my opponent in one tournament, all dolled up in his private boys’ school uniform, as he tore into my argument. “Preposterous and speculative,” he insisted. “I demand that the affirmative team point to one modern national leader who would ever be reckless with nuclear power.” Well, smarty pants, it’s taken me 50 years to answer your question. See that orange tinted man shoveling chocolate cake into his mouth? That would be Exhibit A. And that short Korean guy with a bad haircut, holding a Dennis Rodman bobble head doll? Exhibit B.

There is only one thing we can count on right now. This reality show will not end with a rose.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH’S CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE SCANDAL REVISITED

A few days ago in this space I kicked off Holy Week with an expression of dismay over the Catholic Church’s incorrigible ineptitude in dealing with its never-ending child sex abuse scandal. I wrote about being stunned over the Church’s legislative campaign to make it more difficult for people to sue their rapists and molesters.

The subject was out of my wheelhouse. I am neither Catholic nor a theologian. Yet, the concept of the country’s largest Christian denomination serving, in effect, as a pedophile lobby seemed preposterously creepy. The post triggered more reaction than anything I’ve written since the inception of this site. It was read by hundreds throughout the United States and 12 other countries. Thanks to the comments, email and private messages it produced, I know more about this ecclesiastical quagmire than I did a week ago.

Here’s a smattering of what I learned:

• Holy Week is treacherous for many sexual abuse survivors. It ignites memories of torture that defy comprehension. For some, it means reliving a boyhood Good Friday ritual in which they were tied, naked, to large wooden crosses by their parish priests, and then molested. For other survivors, a term that carries more positive energy than “victims,” the week brings back images of when, at 11 or 12, priests sodomized them in a confessional.

• A 48-year-old man, after multiple suicide attempts and several breakdowns, finally came to grips with the reality that, at age 11, his priest repeatedly raped him, always assuring the boy that this was part of God’s plan. The statute of limitations in his state barred him from filing suit.

• A man in his 20s filed a complaint with Church officials detailing the sexual abuse he encountered years earlier by a priest who ran a boys prep school. After a lengthy internal investigation, the Church exonerated the priest. The man killed himself years before other victims came forward and the state lifted the deadline for filing suit.

• The statute of limitations issue is not just about money. For the survivors, it is about truth telling, pulling back the Church’s veil of secrecy that has draped this scandal, to one extent or another, since the beginning.

With apologies for burying the lede, that last bullet point is the most important one. I always believed plaintiff attorneys had their fingers crossed when they told jurors that, “This is not about the money.” These survivors have nothing crossed. The salve for their unimaginable wounds is not a seven-figure damage award. It is total and complete transparency. They want to open up every dark nook and cranny of this scandal and let the light of day shine in.

The civil court process rests on a foundation of discovery, a system requiring litigants to share records, documents and other evidence relevant to the dispute. The Church, I am told, is a masterful record keeper. Filed away in the deep recesses of parish and diocesan offices is the entire, unvarnished story of priestly pedophilia and the bishops’ cover-up. Thanks to the discovery process, a good hunk of that data is now publically available. But a lot more remains under the Church’s lock and key. Civil suits open the lock box. That’s why the Church is lobbying against lifting the statute of limitations.

If you want to see just how vile and entangled this scandal is, click here. It will take you to an amazing data base compiled by a group of Catholic laity under the banner of “Bishop Accountability”. You will find an “abuse tracker”, filled with letters, notes and documents representing more than 50 years of systemic child sexual assault and the Church’s elaborate efforts to keep it all quiet. Most of it came from litigation. Webmaster Kathleen Shaw, a former religion reporter for the Worcester, MA Telegram & Gazette, says she has logged more than 100,000 stories of abuse.

Through court records and crowd sourcing, the site has assembled an astonishing list of pedophile priests. There is a pull-down menu, like you were looking for a Starbucks in a foreign location. It goes by states, then cities. I picked small, remote towns I’d never heard of, only to see as many 15 or 20 priests entered there. There is another database for assignments, showing how abusers were moved from parish to parish by bishops who knew they were sexual predators.

These survivors do not want to be forgotten. They want their pain to make a difference, and that can’t happen if this full story, in all of its awful terror, is not made public. I got the sense that this is a tough time for them. This issue was front burner stuff for so long. There were Sixty Minutes pieces, magazine covers, an academy award winning film. We’d go to dinner parties and shake our heads over this tragic abuse. Then the story fades. But their pain does not.

I mean no disrespect to Catholicism and the spiritual nourishment it has given to millions, but there is no escaping this basic truth: the powerful men who run this institution are responsible for the largest and most pervasive moral organizational failure in recent history. They turned their collective back on massive child sexual abuse by their agents. Then they tried to cover it up. Now they wield their power to cut off the rights of those abused to file suit. It is a moral outrage larger than Enron, Arthur Anderson, Dalkon Shield or Ford Pinto. Those were organizations in business to make money that knowingly hurt people for the sake of profits. The Roman Catholic Church, in business to deliver God’s love, knowingly hurt its own followers for the sake of protecting the power of the men in charge. Only through pure artifice and audacity do these moral charlatans now ask state legislatures to protect them from their sins. They deserve the sternest rebuke possible.

LONG OVERDUE IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: JUSTICE FOR VICTIMS OF ITS PRIESTS

I am told there is a special perch in hell for anyone who speaks ill of the country’s largest Christian denomination on the eve of Holy Week. It’s a risk I am willing to take, because I’ve really had it with corporate Catholicism and its relentless and unforgiving campaign against the victims of pedophile priests. This is a tragedy of gigantic proportions that keeps finding new ways of inflicting pain on those whose suffering is beyond comprehension.

In the beginning, there was the cover up. The Catholic hierarchy was well aware that many of its priests were molesting and raping children. For years, the Church did everything possible to keep the sexual attacks quiet, moving its collared pedophiles from parish to parish when things got hot, letting them start from scratch with a new crop of unsuspecting altar boys.

That routine began to slowly fail in the 1980s when, one by one, victims of the Church’s atrocity stepped out of the shadows with stories the bishops could no longer silence. According to informed estimates, 17,651 American children were sodomized by their parish priest, a number that keeps growing as people now in their 50s and 60s finally come to grips with the pain they’ve silently carried for decades.

Until a few days ago, I figured this story had ended, except for the healing. I hadn’t thought much about it since I saw “Spotlight”, the 2015 film based on the Boston Globe’s stellar coverage of this nightmarish scandal. Then I came across a local news item about the Maryland Legislature finally passing a bill to extend the statute of limitations on filing child molestation suits. It was an intriguing piece. A legislator had tried unsuccessfully for years to change the law so that adults had more time to sue over childhood sexual assaults. The old law banned such litigation after the victim’s 25th birthday. The rationale for the change seemed solid: abused children bury the pain and trauma for decades. By the time they are ready to deal with it, the filing deadline has passed. The bill’s sponsor should know. C.T. Wilson, a Democrat from Charles, MD, was repeatedly raped by his adoptive father between the ages of 8 and 16.

As I read the story, I couldn’t figure out what the controversy was about. The bill struck me as one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie issues that should have unanimous support. Yet, until this year, the measure couldn’t even get a committee hearing. Ten inches into the story, the mystery was solved: “Wilson’s bill had been strongly opposed by the Catholic Church.” It passed this time with the Church’s blessing, only after Wilson amended it so that it would not apply to prior victims. The new law extends the age limit for filing child molestation suits from 25 to 38 only for those going forward. The Church managed to block all of its past victims from filing suit.

Christians will spend this coming week celebrating the resurrection of their savior, the original advocate for restorative justice, a preacher who told his followers to be peacemakers and reconcilers in order to transform brokenness and effect healing. Meanwhile, Catholic leaders are expending political capital to deny victims of its despicable sexual assault debacle access to the only forum that offers even a modicum of healing. Like it did in the beginning, and has ever since, the Roman Catholic Church has been anything but Christ-like when it comes to the thousands of children raped and assaulted by its priests.

That’s not to say that the Church hasn’t paid a price for its sins. According to one estimate, the scandal has cost U.S. Catholics nearly $4 billion. Bankruptcy has been declared in 13 dioceses. Some of the largest losses came in states that lifted, at least temporarily, the statute of limitations on sexual assault suits. That’s why the Church is trying to block further litigation by spending millions of dollars on legislative lobbying in heavily Catholic states like New York and Pennsylvania. From a business standpoint, it is easy to understand the desire to stop the bleeding. Clearly, barricading the courthouse door in order to turn off the spigot of compensatory and punitive damages helps the Church’s bottom line. But for a religious organization in the business of absolution, the strategy is far more Machiavellian than Christian.

Granted, tort law is not a perfect venue for closure. But, thanks to the Church’s earlier choices, it is the only place offering Catholic molestation victims a shot at justice. In the early 1980s, when the tip of the scandalous iceberg was first noticed, a group of priests, led by Dominican Father Thomas Doyle, drafted a manual for dealing with the problem. It called for immediate ministering to the victims, paying for their therapy and counseling, rooting out the offending priests and the bishops who covered for them, all as a way of saying this should never happen again. Their proposal was rejected by the U.S. Conference of Bishops. The Church thought it would be better off taking its chances with the courts and confidential settlement agreements. Billions of dollars later, it learned how foolish that decision was. As Fr. Doyle told the National Catholic Reporter, “The civil law arena has been the only path whereby victims and survivors could pursue justice with hope of success because the courts and the American legal world represent a power that cannot be controlled or compromised by the institutional church.”

Thousands of broken men and women, sexually assaulted by priests during their childhood, have carried their tortuous psychic and emotional wounds into old age. The courts are their only chance of being heard and at least partially healed. That could cost the Church another billion, a heavy cross to bear. Then again, it is worth noting, particularly during Holy Week, bearing a heavy cross is not foreign territory to Christians.

LET’S BUILD A WALL AROUND NORTH CAROLINA TO PROTECT THE REST OF US

True to my stereotypical Minnesota-Scandinavian roots, I’m a pretty laid back guy. I don’t spend much time wallowing in anger. But North Carolina is really pissing me off. (Stop now, sports trolls; I’m not talking about the Final Four). This is about the Final One Hundred and Seventy, the idiots who make up the state’s general assembly. Wait, my math is wrong. Make it 171 Tar Heel bozos, 170 in the general assembly, and the poorest excuse for a “reform” governor since the likes of George Wallace and Lester Maddox.

There are, to be sure, some kind, intelligent, even wonderful people in North Carolina. They just don’t get elected to public office. The result is a disastrous déjà vu of barbarically fascist legislation and a human rights record that rivals Syria’s.

Just a year ago, then-Governor Pat McCrory courageously ventured out on a political limb in order to strip away the dignity and basic rights of LGBT people. The general assembly passed, and a smiling governor signed, what came to be known as the Bathroom Bill. The law’s original intent was to make transgender folks use a public restroom based on their birth certificates. That meant, for example, that a 35-year-old buxom woman with long flowing blond hair, in a clinging dress and stiletto heels, must hobble into a men’s room if she was identified as a male at birth. Stunned commentators at the time envisioned a genitalia monitor for every stall. But the law was even more abhorrent. Fully transitioned lady and man parts didn’t matter; toilet venue was based solely on whether the M or F box was checked at birth.

Of course, North Carolina lawmakers never think small when it comes to obnoxiousness. Disgusted with renegade liberals on the Charlotte City Council, and their audacity to pass an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identification, the legislation expanded to retroactively revoke the authority of cities to ban discrimination. It was much more than a bathroom bill. It was a mandate to discriminate against lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people.

The rest of the world reacted in horror, spurring economic boycotts by corporations, entertainers and athletic groups. According to one estimate, good old North Carolina homophobia and transphobia were on track to cost the state $3.7 billion over a span of 12 years. That quickly translated into political problems. Most of the state’s voters could have lived with the discrimination, but they had no hankering to pay that kind of money for it. McCrory, the Republican governor who championed the law, was defeated in November by Democrat Roy Cooper, who promised to get the measure repealed.

In a hyper-technical sense, Cooper, and a new session of the state’s general assembly, pulled off that repeal last week. And then simultaneously replaced it with an equally atrocious law. Up against a NCAA deadline to either dump the law or face a continued boycott, the state’s lawmakers pulled a quick sleight of hand by ditching one bad law and adopting another. As a result, there is now a moratorium on any anti-discrimination protections for LGBT folks through 2020. The new law prohibits cities and counties from banning such discrimination.

Governor Cooper, the Democrat elected on the promise of cleaning this mess up, sheepishly issued this baffling understatement: the “compromise was not a perfect deal or my preferred solution.” No shit, Sherlock. He runs for governor as a savior for human rights and then signs a bill banning them for more than three years. That’s no compromise. It’s a complete capitulation to right wing nut jobs who want it all: an end to the boycotts and continued discrimination.

It obviously never occurred to the governor that he was bargaining from a position of strength. He didn’t win the election because of his opponent’s anti-gay-and-trans views. He won because the state got hit hard economically over the legislation. The NBA pulled its all-star game out of Charlotte. The NCAA canceled games and threatened to withhold years of events from the state. Numerous corporations pulled back on plans to build or expand in North Carolina. Hundreds of entertainers refused to perform there, including: Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, Cyndi Lauper, Maroon 5 and Itzhak Perlman. This was a fight, brilliantly guided by the Human Rights Campaign, that cost North Carolina hundreds of millions of dollars and greatly diminished the quality of North Carolina life.

A governor committed to human rights for all would have vetoed the sham repeal and, if overridden, let the boycott continue. Obviously, the majority of assembly members need to feel more heat before they can see the wisdom in doing the right thing. Hopefully, the NCAA, the NBA and other corporate and entertainment forces will continue to stay clear of this state until that happens.

This is what it is like in Donald Trump’s America where the federal government leaves human rights up to the states. Protection from discrimination should not be legislated by zip code. But that is exactly what is happening as a result of Trump putting state’s rights above human rights. Just this year, legislators in 16 states have filed two dozen bills to scale back legal protections for transgender people. Nonsense has a way of spreading, making the continued boycott even more essential.

North Carolina lawmakers are not apt to see the error of their ways without pressure. After all, this is the only state in the country with a law that prohibits cotton growers from using elephants to plow their fields. Of course, the state was fine with purchased black people doing the same thing, and even fought a war to keep those slaves in the cotton fields. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of elephants’ rights, but humans need them too.

TRUMP’S REAL ART OF THE DEAL: DON’T NEGOTIATE, BLOVIATE

One of the biggest boasts behind last fall’s election died suddenly last week. Now buried in the Republican Graveyard of Wishful Thinking is the congenitally defective assertion that Donald Trump is a master negotiator.

“There’s going to be health insurance for everybody,” the new president declared in January, insisting it will cost far less than it does now. Asked how Trump could be so confident of those claims, his resident sycophant, Sean Spicer, had a quick-but-ludicrous answer: “He knows how to negotiate great deals.”

Nothing is ever final in Washington, but hopefully the Republican healthcare debacle of 2017 has forever put an end to the utter foolishness that Donald Trump is a world class negotiator. The guy huffed and puffed his way through real estate sales, insulting, assaulting or suing anyone who got in his way. That’s not a skillset that translates into effective leadership on the world stage.

Yet, there is this lingering myth, a distorted caricature, of what an effective negotiator looks like, and the composite, unfortunately, bears a strong resemblance to guys like Trump: a loud, brash, boorish, bullying slug who pounds the table while lobbing loud threats and insults. The archetype represents an archaic bargaining style that was occasionally effective in limited circumstances involving one-shot transactions and no ongoing relationship. It has absolutely no application to resolving conflict with Congress or foreign leaders.

Here, thanks to Politico’s reporting, is all you have to know to conclude that President Donald J. Trump is a terrible negotiator: In a last ditch effort to change the minds of conservative House Republicans, Trump The Closer summoned the 30-some members of the Freedom Caucus to the Cabinet Room of the White House.

Although these folks had been a thorn in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s side, they liked Trump and were excited about the opportunity to get the president to make some changes in the healthcare bill in exchange for their support. They thought they could deal with him. After all, he knew how to negotiate. So they laid out their problems and sent some clear signals about what needed to be changed and why it mattered to them. And here is what the master negotiator told them: “Forget about the little shit. Let’s focus on the big picture here.” The “big picture”, Trump told them, was that the bill’s failure could imperil his reelection chances in 2020. Self-absorption might have served The Donald well in his mogul life, but it’s one of the worst traits a negotiator can bring to the table.

I don’t profess to be an expert on legislative negotiations but, over a career of more than 30 years, I helped bargain hundreds of contracts in the news industry. In order to get a deal, I had to know everything I could about the little shit. I wallowed in the little shit because somewhere in all that excrement was a key that would unlock the door to settlement. Obviously, I had to know what was important to our side, but I also needed to know management’s issues and what it needed in an agreement. That was the only route to a resolution that would have value for both sides.

Most negotiations are long and drawn out. Arguments are repeated ad nauseam, and it often appears that agreement will never be reached. There are, however, rare moments when the parties tire of the conflict and really want a deal. A good negotiator knows how to recognize those moments and seize them. Trump had that opportunity in the meeting with the Freedom Caucus and he totally blew it. Not only that, he blew it for the worst reason imaginable: he didn’t understand any of the issues. He acknowledged he was “not up on everything” in the bill. Hardly the mark of a master negotiator.

In his much touted book, “The Art of the Deal”, Trump offers this pearl of wisdom on his style of conflict resolution: “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.” If he doesn’t get what he wants, he says he walks away and gets it someplace else. That might work for building casinos and hotels, but it’s a recipe for disaster in government. Trump views a negotiation as a zero-sum transaction, one that produces a winner and a loser. Virtually all of the academic literature on effective dispute resolution rejects that approach (here, here and here). Effective negotiating in an ongoing relationship – which is to say 95% of all negotiations – means doing the very things Trump disdains. For example: show respect for the other side; never lie; forget about an “amazing” deal so you can focus on getting one that works for all sides; try to overcome mistrust; find a way to let everyone win a little; and help your adversary save face if they back down on an issue.

Obviously, those of us appalled at the prospect of 24 million Americans losing health insurance, can find easy solace in the president’s incompetence as a negotiator. Sadly, the feeling won’t last long. If this guy can’t find common ground with members of his own party, what happens when he takes on Iran, North Korea, China , or other hot spots? With a bag of tricks consisting of aiming high, pushing and walking out when you don’t get your way, don’t count on world peace anytime soon.

LOOKING FOR THE REAL MEANING OF IT ALL? CHECK THE PUNCTUATION

Our daily news diet now brings us scintillating reports on the Oxford comma and the meaning of quotation marks. What a delightful spring diversion from a depressingly bleak winter of Trump atrocities. Punctuation has always generated a level of electric excitation and enthusiasm on a par with, say, a convention of actuaries. Aside from small cohorts of passionate grammarians, reveling in the nuances of commas and the elegance of a well-placed ellipsis, most of us have paid little attention to the subject since we left middle school.

That was obviously our mistake, for punctuation is power. Just ask those Maine truck drivers for Oakhurst Dairy who are about to pick up a ton of overtime pay thanks to a comma that wasn’t there. They were the heroes of the Oxford comma story that made headlines these past few days. In case you missed it, check the link if you want to wander into the weeds of sentence structure. Otherwise this abbreviated Cliff note ought to do: The drivers went after four years of unpaid overtime. The company said the they were exempt under state law. The judge ruled them eligible for the time-and-a-half pay on the basis of a missing comma in the statute. Every demeaned English teacher in Maine suddenly had a perfect answer to their students’ question of, “Why do we have the learn this stuff?”.

Even Trump jumped on the punctuation bandwagon this week. When his lie about Obama wiretapping him went up in flames, the president suddenly turned into a strict language constructionist. He noted that he placed quote marks around “wiretapped” in his accusatory tweet. In The Donald’s style book, such punctuation expands the word’s meaning to include any form of surreptitious eavesdropping, from an ear against a door to, as his faithful whisperer Kellyanne Conway suggested, a microwave oven.

If punctuation has the power to turn a wiretap into a microwave, it is nothing to be trifled with. The truth of the matter is that punctuators have forever left their marks on our perpetual search for meaning. For example:

• The use of a comma instead of a dash caused the most expensive typographical error in congressional history. The Tariff Act of 1872 listed specific goods that were to be exempt from the import tax. Congress had intended to place “fruit-plants” on the tax exempt list, but the final version of the law used a comma instead of a dash: “fruit, plants,” instead of “fruit-plants”. As a result, no tax could be collected on fruit or plants of any kind. The loss of revenue amounted to $40 million in today’s dollars.

• A semicolon in the Texas Constitution invalidated an election and ignited a mass revolt. An angry and unstable Reconstructionist governor, obsessed with succession, was defeated by a Democrat in 1873. The legislature had changed the voting from four consecutive days in each county seat to one day in each precinct. That modification was the basis for the Texas Supreme Court to throw out the election. Because of a semicolon’s placement in the constitution’s election language, the justices said the legislature could change the voting venue but not the length of the polling period. Texans were so outraged that they rioted in the streets. The anger lingered for decades and the justices who wrote the decision were forever referred to as the “Semicolon Court.” According to a piece written for the Notre Dame Law Review, Texas lawyers to this day are so ashamed of the “Semicolon Decision” that they refuse to cite it as a legal authority.

• A million dollar comma brought a pair of Canadian communication giants to court. Rogers and Bell Aliant entered into a business contract that was to last five years and for subsequent terms of five years after that, “unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.” Bell tried to end the deal with a one-year notice shortly after the contract was signed. Rogers said the agreement could only be terminated after five years. The initial finding was in favor of Bell, based on the placement of a comma. Through the wonders of bilingualism, however, Rogers won the day. Turns out that the contract was prepared in both English and French and the latter version was missing the comma.

• A missing comma won a not guilty verdict for a Columbus, Ohio woman who left her pickup truck on a city street for more than 24 hours. Andrea Cammelleri, obviously paid attention in her English class. According to the Columbus Dispatch, she told the judge that the ordinance banning daylong parking covers “any motor vehicle camper, trailer, farm implement. . .” The judge agreed that the lack of a comma after “motor vehicle,” necessarily excludes pickup trucks from the ban. Case dismissed.

• Another comma that wasn’t there continues to keep records on police shootings private in Tennessee. The state’s bureau of investigation looked into the fatal shooting of a 19-year-old black man by a white Memphis police officer. The Memphis City Council issued a subpoena for the bureau’s case files. A judge looked at the statutory language dealing with police shootings. It says such records can be released “only in compliance with a subpoena or an order of a court of record.” The ruling? Because the clause is lacking a comma, both the subpoena and the order must come from a court, not a city council or other non-judicial authority. For lack of a comma, the records remain sealed.

In another generation or two, all of this comma and semicolon stuff may go the way of the typewriter and rotary phone. As you read this sentence, academic linguists are busy dissecting tweets, texts and posts. Their early findings? Social media writing is almost punctuation free, except for liberal use of exclamation marks. Imagine a future court trying to interpret legislative intent by counting exclamation points. And issuing a decision that says, simply, “WTF!!!!!!!”.

TRUMP RULE OF MENTAL HEALTH: IF HE LOOKS, ACTS & GOVERNS CRAZY, HE’S CRAZY

There is an intense and amusing battle raging in the psychiatric community over whether the president is nuts. Specifically the controversy is focused on whether it is ethical for a shrink to declare Donald Trump insane without having examined him. There is a growing plethora of practicing therapists who have publicly diagnosed The Donald as bonkers, albeit in more elegant and clinical prose. And they have all incurred the wrath of the American Psychiatric Association whose rules prohibit members from publicly diagnosing political figures unless they have examined them and obtained their permission to release the findings.

This is known as the “Goldwater Rule”, and it evolved from a controversial psychiatric survey taken during the 1964 presidential campaign between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson. A magazine polled more than 2,000 psychiatrists and a majority said the Republican senator from Arizona lacked the mental stability to be president. After losing the election, Goldwater sued the magazine for libel and won. Years later, the psychiatric association adopted the rule now being invoked, without much success, to keep its members from commenting on Trump’s mental state.

Dr. Allen Frances, a psychiatrist at Duke University School of Medicine and an author of the standard manual on psychiatric disorders, wrote a letter to the New York Times defending the president against the insanity label lobbed at him by some of the doctor’s colleagues. He said the commander in chief lacks the “distress and impairment required to diagnose a mental illness.” Trump might have tweeted the good doctor’s endorsement, if not for the sentence that followed: “Nevertheless,” Frances wrote, “he can and should be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.”

Thankfully, bloggers are not covered by the Goldwater Rule. That means I can go out on a limb and say publicly what most world leaders have to be thinking: President Donald J. Trump is batshit crazy.

Let’s count the ways:

• Turned the Nuclear Codes into a Facebook Moment. Since the start of the arms race, a military attaché, clutching a briefcase that can be used to launch nuclear missiles, has always been in close proximity to the commander in chief. All previous presidents have treated this sobering arrangement with well-deserved discretion. Not The Donald. He invited fellow diners at his Mar-a-Largo resort to pose with the “nuclear football” and its carrier for cute social media fodder.

• Thinks Frederick Douglas is Still Alive. Trump kicked off Black History Month with a lengthy monologue about how the “dishonest media” incorrectly reported that Martin Luther King’s bust had been removed from the Oval Office. Then, trying to think of other black people to mention, he gave a shout out to Douglas, saying the abolitionist who died 122 years ago “is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job.”

• Called for the Destruction of a Court that Ruled Against Him. Trump went to Nashville this week to deliver a carefully scripted speech in support of the Republican health insurance bill. Minutes before taking the stage, the president learned that his second attempt at an anti-immigration order had been blocked by a federal judge. So he jettisoned the insurance pitch and ranted about how he’d like to “break up” the Ninth Circuit.

• He Sees Some Holocausts as Better than Others. Asked what he learned in his first intelligence briefing, Trump said, a “nuclear holocaust would be like no other.”

• Declared Unconditional Love for Himself. In an interview with an ABC reporter, Trump said, “I don’t want to change . . . I can be the most presidential person ever, other than possibly the great Abe Lincoln, but I may not be able to do the job nearly as well if I do that.”

• Repeatedly Sticks his Foot in his Mouth. As his lawyers draft briefs supporting his second travel ban order on the basis that it substantially resolved legal objections in the original document, Trump grabs a microphone and says the new order is “just a watered down version” of the first one.

• Thinks he is the Least Racist Person Ever. Seconds after making that declaration during a news conference, Trump asked a black reporter if she could set up a meeting for him with the Congressional Black Caucus since they must be her friends.

• Comes out of his Own Little World Just Long Enough to Create International Incidents. The Obama-wiretapped-me fantasy now seems destined to have a longer life than the Iraq War. By now, Trump’s belief that the former president electronically surveilled him has been repudiated by every major Republican leader in Congress and the head of the FBI. But being The Donald means never having to say you’re sorry, or wrong. He doubled down this week and suggested that British spies planted the bugs for Obama. The Brits were enraged, but Trump wouldn’t back off, insisting he heard it on Fox News so it must be right. Fox News quickly said there was no truth to the story, but Trump kept right on mumbling about it, and even tried to drag a mystified German Chancellor Angela Merkel into the fracas late last week.

And on and on the list grows. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins noted yesterday, the insanity of the Trump administration can be measured by the fact that the new secretary of the interior rode to work on a horse named Tonto, and nobody paid much attention. Somewhere, in some afterlife, a bemused, and oh-so-very sane, Barry Goldwater is shaking his head and muttering, “And they called me crazy!”

PRESIDENT NARCISSUS: NOBODY LOVES TRUMP LIKE TRUMP LOVES TRUMP

Donald Trump has inhabited the White House for less than two months, but he is already the most psychoanalyzed president in history. A Google search of “Trump narcissism” turns up 449,000 entries. Here is a quick sampling: “Coping with Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the White House”, “Donald Trump, Narcissist-In-Chief”, “Trump is an Extreme Narcissist, and it Only Gets Worse From Here”. There are scholarly treatises portraying Trump as a posterchild for narcissism. There are letters from psychiatrists suggesting that the president undergo immediate treatment for the personality disorder. There is a ponderous analysis of whether narcissism could lead to impeachment.

Diagnosing a mental disorder is far beyond the reaches of this blog. Yet, there is a piece of this Narcissus stuff that is politically compelling, particularly as it relates to predicting the future of the Trump Administration. It is that aspect of the phenomenon that I want to explore here.

Although narcissism at its extreme is a recognized mental disorder, Sigmund Freud originally used the term to describe a personality type. He saw narcissists as emotionally isolated, very distrustful, poor listeners, lacking in empathy, dependent on adulation of others and likely to react to perceived threats with rage.

However, Freud also noted, according to a paper written in 2000 by the noted psychoanalyst and anthropologist Michael Maccoby, that “people of this type impress others as being ‘personalities.’ They are especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the role of leaders, and to give a fresh stimulus to cultural development or damage the established state of affairs.”

Over the past 20 years, experts like Maccoby, and Sacramento psychologist Mark Ettensohn, have taken a close look at how narcissists perform as leaders. Despite their self-involvement, Ettensohn notes that narcissistic leaders can be very tuned in to what people are thinking or feeling, more so than their non-narcissistic counterparts. “Because narcissists spend so much time trying to manage deeply felt insecurities and trying to read other people for whether or not they’re liked,” Ettensohn said, “they tend to get pretty good at knowing what’s going on inside of others.”

Trump, more than any other player on the national political stage, picked up on the intensity of the dissatisfaction and frustration of a large segment of left-behind working class voters. They became his rally crowds, forming a perfect symbiotic relationship between those who wanted to pound the system to smithereens and the crazy, larger-than-life narcissist who spoke loudly and carried a large sledgehammer. Daniel Bober, a clinical psychiatry professor at Yale University School of Medicine, said narcissistic leaders project far more self-confidence than they have and “people tend to follow them because of that confidence.” Think about it: How many times, before and after the election, did we read comments like this one, from a Wisconsin woman quoted by the Washington Post?: “. . . he’s got this crazy character, he’s very flamboyant and irrational. (We) supported him not because of his character, but because he represented substantial change.”

The professionals who study the dynamics of narcissistic leaders have identified two key causes of their downfall, both well worth keeping in mind as we watch Trump in the days ahead. One of them, identified by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a business psychology professor at London’s University College, is that the seductive charisma of inflated promises burns off when they aren’t fulfilled. Losing the adulation of the masses is as frightening to a narcissist as a crucifix is to a vampire.

That kind of rain has just started to fall on Trump’s parade. The Washington Post reported yesterday that many of his true believers are mortified over his backing of a health care bill that would take away their insurance. It’s a classic breakdown between a narcissist’s grandiose promise and the disappointment of his followers who believed in them. After all, it was just a month ago when his fans cheered the president’s words: “We’re going to have insurance for everybody. (You) can expect to have great health care. Much less expensive and much better.” Earlier this week, Trump threw his support behind the House Republican plan that will leave an estimated 24 million Americans without insurance, including many hard core Trump backers who would lose their Medicaid coverage.

Maccoby, the psychoanalyst and anthropologist who has written extensively about narcissistic leaders, says they can succeed for the long haul only if they have an effective lieutenant by their side, helping them avoid the most destructive behavior. In Trump’s case, that would include taking control of the Twitter account. Maccoby used the late Steve Jobs and Apple as an example. Jobs’ narcissistic style got him fired when he tried to run the company by himself. He later succeeded, Maccoby noted, when he came back and partnered with Tim Cook in operations and Jony Ive in design. Maccoby also said Napoleon fit the narcissistic mold and was functioning quite well until he discharged his close adviser, Talleyrand, leading to Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia since there was no one there to talk him out of it.

If Maccoby’s theory that narcissists can succeed only with the wise guidance of an able assistant, Trump is doomed. After all, Stephen Bannon, his chief strategist and bomb thrower, was writing racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic screeds for a far right wing website before he ended up in the west wing. Nobody else on the White House staff has yet shown any promise at being able to save Trump from Trump. If the psychological experts are right, the drama of the Trump presidency will grow even more dark and dreary in the days to come. As his fans grow disillusioned and withhold their love, the president will respond with more rage, furor and desperation. And there seems to be no adult in sight capable of holding him back. That means only one thing: the ending of this reality show is not likely to be pretty.