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Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty ImagesPresident Donald Trump and President of Liberty University Jerry Falwell, Jr. at Liberty Universitys commencement ceremony in Lynchburg, Virginia, May 13, 2017

Two weeks ago, Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, the largest evangelical college in America, posted an Instagram photo of himself on a yacht with his arm around a young woman whose midriff was bare and whose pants were unzipped. This would have been remarkable by itself, but it was all the more so because Falwells midriff was also bare and his pants also unzipped. In his hand, Falwell held a plastic cup of what he described winkingly in his caption as black water.

The aesthetics of the photo would be familiar to anyone whos ever been to a frat party, but they were jarringly out of place for the son of Moral Majority cofounder Jerry Falwell Sr. and a professional evangelical Christian whose public rhetoric is built on a scaffolding of sexual conservatism and an antagonism to physical pleasure more generally.

The backdrop of a yacht represents an entirely different hypocrisy, arguably a more egregious one: the embrace of materialism and the open accumulation of enormous wealth. Falwell, who has a net worth estimated to be more than $100 million, is not formally a prosperity gospel adherent, but he has nonetheless jettisoned those inconvenient parts of Christian theology that preach the virtues of living modestly and using wealth to help the less fortunate.

But for his public, the problem with the photo was the optics of carnal sinthe attractive young woman who was not his wife, the recreational drinking, the unzipped pantsnone of which would be acceptable at Liberty University, where coed dancing is penalized with a demerit. In the moral hierarchy of white evangelical Christianity, carnal sin is the worst, and this thinking drives the social conservatism that allows evangelicals to justify persecuting LGBTQ people, opposing sexual education in schools, distorting the very real problem of sex trafficking to punish sex workers, restricting access to abortion, eliminating contraception from employer-provided healthcare, and prosecuting culture wars against everything from medical marijuana to pop music. Evangelicalisms official morality treats all pleasure as inherently suspect, the more so when those pleasures might belong to women or people of color.

Fortunately for Falwell, evangelicalism has built-in insurance for reputational damage, should a wealthy white man make the mistake of public licentiousness widely shared on the Web: the worst sins make for the best redemption stories. Even better, a fall from grace followed by a period of regret and repentance can be turned into a highly remunerative rehabilitation. That, in fact, has been many a traveling preachers grift from time immemorial.

I grew up hearing such testimonies, personal stories that articulate a life in sin and a coming to Jesus, firsthand. I was raised in the 1980s and 1990s in a family of Southern Baptists who viewed Episcopalians as raging liberals and Catholics, of which we knew precisely two, as an alien species. These were perfectly ordinary sentiments in the rural Alabama town we lived in. My dad was a local lineman for Alabama Power, and my mom worked at my school, first as a janitor and, later, as a lunch lady. Nobody in my family had gone to college.

Besides school and Little League, church was the primary basis of our social existence. As a child and into my early teens, my own religiosity was maybe a tick above average for our community. I went on mission trips to parts of the US that were more economically distressed than my hometown, handed out Chick tracts (named for the publisher and cartoonist Jack Chick) with as much zeal and sincerity as a twelve-year-old could muster, and on one occasion destroyed cassette tapes of my favorite bands (Nirvana, the Dead Kennedys, the Beastie Boys) in a fit of self-righteousness, only to re-buy them weeks later because, well, my faith had its limits.

All the while, I wasto use a word evangelicals like to misapply to any sort of secular educationindoctrinated by teachers, family, church staff, ministry organizations, and other members of the community to view everything I encountered in the world through an evangelical lens. If I went to the mall and lost my friends for a few minutes, I briefly suspected everyone had been raptured away except me, a particular brand of eschatological fantasy that we were taught was perpetually in danger of happening. Even my scandalous moments, which, do-goody overachiever that I was, were few and far between, were colored by the church. My first real kiss, at fourteen, was an epic make-out session on a sidewalk during a mission trip to a suburb of Orlando, with an eighteen-year-old assistant youth pastor named Matt.

I was ten or eleven when I was baptizedor in Southern Baptist parlance, born againand part of this process involved constructing my own redemption narrative: I lived in sin and would be saved by Christ. I recently rediscovered my own handwritten testimony on a visit to my moms house. In a childs rounded, looping handwriting, I had confessed that I used to cheat at games, something I dont remember doing at all. The likely explanation for this is that because sin is such an important prerequisite for redemption, my ten-year-old self had to fabricate one to conform to the required convention (never mind that such a falsification would be sinful itself).

And so I gave my life to Christ one Sunday during a regular church servicethough it was also common for people to do so during revivals, where itinerant preachers and musicians would visit and deliver proselytizing sermons. These evangelical ministers were indeed charismatic, polished from years of practice. They came bearing branded merchandise and a well-honed redemption story that almost invariably included a brush with carnal sin. The standard plot involved a nihilistic pursuit of pleasuregenerally, some combination of money, sex, and drugsas a reaction to spiritual bankruptcy that only endedwhen I hit rock bottom. But Jesus was there to pick me up, repair me with His love, and invest me with self-worth.

At the end of the sermon, congregants would be asked if they, too, would like to experience this kind of redemption. And many people did, tearfully but gratefully supplying their own testimonies of sin, emptiness, and regret. Its an effective story because who doesnt want to be rescued from their failures? Who doesnt want an opportunity to be forgiven and start over?

One of the more memorable itinerant evangelicals I heard was Rick Stanley, whose mother had married Elvis Presleys father, Vernon. In his telling, Stanleys experiences with carnal sin and untoward materialism were largely a function of being Elviss stepbrother, and as the sin part of the narrative went, it was certainly more salacious than cheating at games. I even bought a copy of Stanleys self-published memoir, The Touch of Two Kings. As adjacent-to-celebrity testimonies go, it was only outstripped in my memory by the visiting youth pastor who claimed to have almost converted Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor at a backstage party (which even then I assumed was news to Reznor).

I would expect, then, that Falwells fall is unlikely to be permanent. Indeed, Falwell has been forgiven by evangelicals before. Hes bragged about his penis size, and nailing his wife. There was the thing with the pool boy. According to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, there are lots more racy personal photosin clubs, at parties, on yachts. Until the world was forced to gaze at Falwells navel on Instagram, the reaction from the evangelical community was largely a shrug because men are allowed, even expected, to behave this way from time to time.

But judging from the demographic composition of the evangelical redemption circuit, this sort of reputational refashioning is uniquely accessible to white men. Unsurprisingly, there is no big traveling evangelical circuit for reformed female libertines. Men are readily forgiven, in particular, for sins of the flesh, whereas women are uniquely punished for them.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the abortion debate, which is not really about abortion at all. If you take the rights claim about valuing lifea concern that seems rarely to extend to, say, the death penalty, or peoples access to affordable health carethe contradictions becomes clear. An antichoice movement that really valued life, on its own terms of reducing resort to abortion, ought to support two of the things most likely to prevent abortions: sex education and freely available contraception.

They dont, because the point is not to prevent abortion but to police sex. The religious right is invested in sexually controlling women, and one way to do that is to make the consequences for sex outside of marriage for women who do not want children, or who are not ready to have them, so dire and onerous that no one has sex outside of marriage. The message I got in abstinence programs as a teenager was that if I didnt want to run the risk of needing an abortion, I should keep my legs shut until marriage. Teenage boys are generally told to keep their pants on, in these programs, but are not shamed when, inevitably, they dont.

Purity culture thus dictates that sexuality belongs to men, that they are its custodians. Teenage girls do not own their sexuality; their fathers do. (Im grateful that my dad considers my sex life none of his business and always has, so I was never the recipient of a father-daughter purity ring, which, even at the height of my religiosity, I would have found creepy and inappropriate.) Even adult women do not own their sexuality; their husbands do. A Bible verse roughly translated as wives, submit to your husbands is routinely wielded to justify authoritarian marriages where the needs of women are never considered to be on a par with the needs of men.

This willingness to forgive powerful white men and allow them a standard that doesnt apply to others also benefits Donald Trump, who has shamelessly pandered to white evangelicals while garbling their theology and citing Two Corinthians rather than Second Corinthians. Trump supportersand I count some among my relativeshave used redemption theology to argue that Trump, despite what they generously refer to as his flaws, is a vessel for Gods work, simply because he endorses their biases and is willing to pantomime outrage over sins, carnal and otherwise, even as he personally continues to sin with impunity.

Trump also speaks to evangelicals resentments, the sense that they are a persecuted minority. In a pivotal early campaign speech at an evangelical church, a particular line stuck with the audience. I will tell you, he said. Christianity is under tremendous siege, whether we want to talk about it or we dont want to talk about it.

Christianity is, of course, under no such thing. At least, not in America, where it is the majority religion and is so freely practiced that it permeates even parts of the USgovernment offices, public schools, courtroomswhere it ought to be barred by the Constitution. What white evangelicals perceive as under attack is a faux Christianity of manners, very often at odds with a Christianity that espouses justice. The redemption stories peddled by the evangelical right are never about a sinner who repents after a lifetime of exploiting renters as a landlord, after being horribly racist to black people or abusive toward women. The Christianity evangelicals care about disdains vulgarity more than it disdains injustice.

For now, Jerry Falwell Jr. is laying low. To execute the formula correctly, you need a period of contemplation and regret. And after that brief intermission, you can start selling tickets for the redemption tour.

See the original post:
Jerry Falwell Jr. and the Evangelical Redemption Story - The New York Review of Books

WASHINGTON Football has frequently been compared to war, but rarely has that comparison been made as vividly as it was by former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz during a recent Fox News program. When they stormed Normandy, they knew that there were going to be casualties, there was gonna be risk, Holtz said, likening the prospect of playing college football in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic to the Allied invasion of France in 1944.

Even before the coronavirus, football had become a thoroughly politicized sport, too violent for some on the left and too woke for some on the right. But then came the pandemic, and President Trump saw an opportunity. Much as with wearing masks and reopening schools, Trump has turned playing football into yet another battle in the culture wars. Such battles often make reasoned debate difficult, but they do force nearly every American paying attention to choose a side.

And to Trump and his closest supporters, playing college football this fall is tantamount to driving the Germans back from Omaha Beach 76 years ago. Vice President Mike Pence said so himself, more or less, on Twitter. America needs College Football!, he wrote in an Aug. 10 post. He said it was important to our Nation but did not explain why.

College football can seem like an economic juggernaut, but that is more Saturday afternoon perception than anything else. In the Power Five conferences, where the very best teams are concentrated, football teams can generate revenue of between $50 million and $140 million per year, says Smith College sports economist Andrew Zimbalist.

But, he says, virtually all of that goes back into football or other sports, with the overwhelming majority of schools actually losing money on athletics. College sports, in general, is not a money-making proposition, Zimbalist told Yahoo News. It doesnt feed the schools financially.

The University of Michigan, for example, made $127 million from its football team in 2018. Michigan also has $300.4 million of athletics-related debt. Further, since the school has an endowment that stood at $12.4 billion at the end of 2019, the football revenue figure is effectively insignificant, especially since Michigan reaped $500 million from returns on the investments it made on that endowment.

Story continues

Sports, of course, transcends economics, not to mention politics. But even at schools where football is immensely popular, health experts worry that now is not the time to resume play. Dr. Charlotte Baker is an epidemiologist at Virginia Tech, whose Hokies have appeared in 33 bowl games and have spent a total of 304 weeks on the Associated Presss ranking of the nations top 25 teams. I understand that everyone wants football back, Baker told Yahoo News. But wanting is not enough. As a society, we dont have this under control enough.

The coronavirus does appear to spread much more easily in confined spaces, which would seem to argue in favor of a sport played on 57,600-square-foot expanses of open-air field. Outdoors is always safer than indoors, said Lydia Bourouiba, director of the Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory at MIT. But, she said, close interactions even outdoors could pose a risk. Football is rife with such interactions, including huddles, dog piles and rows of linemen facing off mere inches away from each other.

Trump has downplayed such risks, arguing that football players are simply too fit to become sickened by the coronavirus. That argument lacks supporting evidence, but it does have an obvious political advantage. If there are players on the field come October, it will seem as if Trump is defeating the virus. Plus, many of the fans are likely to be potential Trump voters, since college football is one of the nations most Republican sports, along with golf and NASCAR.

Trump had previously tried to turn NASCARs rejection of Confederate iconography into a campaign issue, but that didnt get much traction. College football could be a more potent issue, since it is more directly tied to the reopening of academic institutions.

Trump and Pence have tweeted or spoken about college football many times in the last several weeks. Canceling the football season would be a tragic mistake, Trump believes. He has not deemed the cancellation of womens basketball or mens soccer seasons similarly tragic.

Like millions of sports fans across the nation, President Trump is eager to see college football return this fall, White House spokesperson Judd Deere told Yahoo News in response to questions about why the president was focusing on that sport. The fans want it and the coaches want it, but most importantly, the players want to play, and there are ways to do so safely.

The only problem with the Normandy analogy is that 4,414 Allied troops would die during the fighting on Frances beaches. Nobody is likely to countenance a number anywhere near that high to watch college football this fall, though the total number of fatalities from the pandemic across the nation is already 10 times the toll from Normandy (170,000 Americans have died from COVID-19).

College athletes are exceptionally fit, but fitness is not a guarantee of immunity. A freshman offensive lineman at Indiana recently went through 14 days of hell battling the horrible virus, as his mother put it. There are also the repercussions, about which nobody is yet certain because the coronavirus has not been around long enough for researchers to study it. Doctors worry that the coronavirus could subject athletes to a serious heart condition called myocarditis.

We do not know the long-term effects of this virus on young people, Dr. Ashish Jha, the newly appointed dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said. He is less worried about players on the field than all the other before-and-after activities associated with athletics. Youve got to go change clothes, youve got to go shower afterward, he said.

Bourouiba, the MIT fluid dynamics expert, said that in an ideal world, football players would receive rapid testing providing on-the-spot results on a daily basis. But such testing is not widely available. And some schools appear to be downplaying the role of testing. Florida States athletic director, David Coburn, recently revealed that football players are tested only on a weekly basis. He added that once the season began, players would probably be tested once every two weeks.

Thats not enough, Baker of Virginia Tech said of Florida States plan. A lot of things can happen in two weeks. Thats really not that great of an idea.

Some coaches recognize that not only could college football contribute to the viruss continued spread across the United States, their own players could be at risk for little-understood health effects like myocarditis. Id hate to be responsible for that, said Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens, who has been praised for making the sport safer by helping to create remote-control tackling dummies that reduce practice injuries.

Dartmouth Is the Blueprint for NFL Success in 2020. Yes, Dartmouth, read the headline of an Aug. 5 article in the Wall Street Journal. Except there wont be a football season at Dartmouth, or at any of the seven other Ivy League schools: The storied athletic conference became the first in the nation to cancel its football season on July 8. In fact, there will be no sports at all in the Ivies until January.

It was devastating, Teevens told Yahoo News. He offered that there might be a spring season, but he did not sound especially hopeful. And though he has been a leader in preventing injuries, the pandemic has stumped him much as it has stumped pretty much everyone else.

Theres just no easy answers, Teevens conceded. Few would disagree.

Nowhere is that more true than across the South and the Sun Belt, where the coronavirus has been killing hundreds of people per day for months on end. Those are the very states where football is most likely to return, and where that return is bound to make an already bad situation even worse. You're asking a hot spot state to continue having hot spot status, Baker said.

Some governors insist on college football regardless, a mentality that Florida State professor Diane Roberts has compared to Confederate bravado. As with the faltering reopening of the nations public schools, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has closely followed Trumps guidance on the pandemic, has led the charge. And like the president, DeSantis has depicted the 2020 college football season as essential to the nations civic health.

At the end of the day, this is a season that these student-athletes will not be able to get back, DeSantis recently told conservative commentator Clay Travis, who has repeatedly tried to downplay the effects of the pandemic. He not only wants players back on the field but fans back in stadiums like Florida States Bobby Bowden Field, which can seat 80,000 people. There will be fans at Bowden Field, confirmed DeSantis spokesman Fred Piccolo Jr. to Yahoo News. Perhaps not filling stadiums but yes, he wrote in an email.

The public health expert Jha believes that even if schools allowed only 10 percent capacity at stadiums, fans would still congregate to drink, shout, cheer and heckle in close proximity. These are not piano concertos that they are watching, he said. And because fans often travel long distances to attend games, the parking lots (usually home to tailgating parties) could become potent transmission vectors.

I wouldnt go to a football game this fall in most parts of the country, Jha said. In his estimation, only the Northeast, which used restrictive lockdown measures to bring the coronavirus to heel, could host college football games this fall. Other parts of the country may be more eager, but they are also less prepared. Its too risky, Jha told Yahoo News. I wouldnt do it.

That isnt likely to please Trump, who wants to see full stadiums across the Midwest, Southwest and South, where both football and Trump are enormously popular.

Already, however, some of the countrys major conferences are following the lead of the Ivy League. Both the Pac-12, whose members are on the West Coast, and the Big Ten, whose members include Midwestern powerhouses like Ohio State and Penn State, have canceled the fall season. Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren specifically cited myocarditis as a reason for his decision. Any time you're talking about the heart of anyone, but especially a young person, you have to be concerned, he told ESPN.

Those concerns havent kept fans from venting, though it isnt the athletes or athletic directors they are upset at. Ive heard more anger directed at the president than I thought, an ESPN college football radio host told the New York Times earlier this month.

As with virtually every aspect of the pandemic, different parts of the country have interpreted the same epidemiological developments like the recent findings about myocarditis in different ways. That confusion has been exacerbated by overlapping authorities between the federal government and individual states. In the case of college football, there is also the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, and conferences like the Big Ten, which stretches from New Jersey to Nebraska.

The NCAA has said it would be dangerous to proceed with a college football season. Carlos del Rio, an Emory University epidemiologist advising the NCAA on the coronavirus, compared the situation to something rather less heroic than the Normandy invasion. I feel like the Titanic, he said last week. We have hit the iceberg and were trying to make decisions of what time should we have the band play.

Some conferences are proceeding in any case, with the Southeastern Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference leading the way. An official at the SEC said it was implementing testing and other protocols to keep players safe. Still, he cautioned that the situation could change, especially since the coronavirus continues to sicken thousands daily in SEC states like Georgia and Florida. The official added that Trumps tweets dont carry much weight with commissioner Greg Sankey. That cant influence our decision, the official said.

Trump may not have any direct influence on conferences or schools, but he can exert pressure on governors, who are heavily reliant on the federal government during a time of national crisis. Those governors, in turn, set budgetary priorities for state university systems. That creates incentives for schools to follow the presidents directive.

That may explain why DeSantis visited Florida State last week, where he sat at a table with its president, John Thrasher, who is also the former head of the states GOP. Also at the table was athletic director Coburn, the football coach and two players from the team.

Were here to say, from the state of Florida, we want you guys to play, said DeSantis, who played baseball at Yale. He appeared to say, much like Trump, that it was more dangerous to leave college athletes to their own devices. The environment that sports provides at a place like Florida State is a safer environment for these kids than what they would have if they didnt have access to this environment, the governor, who is 41, argued.

His spokesman, Piccolo, later told Yahoo News that Florida was justified in urging college football at its state universities. NASCAR, the PGA tour, the NBA, the NHL and many more sports organizations have figured out a way to do it, he said, though those are all professional leagues that can sequester players in a way that a university cannot.

No one is forcing anyone to play or to go to the stadium to watch, Piccolo said. Those who want to play and those who want to watch should be able to.

But even players who do want to play appear to be running into problems. Two days after DeSantiss press conference, Florida State wide receiver Warren Thompson posted an open letter on Twitter. The lies from our leaders have backed myself into corner putting my overall well being in jeopardy, the letter said. The neglect to respond to this issue is very concerning.

Thompsons letter was reportedly occasioned by revelations that a player who had contracted the coronavirus had been allowed to take part in team activities even after testing positive.

Thompson has since apologized for questioning his teams commitment to safety, and the school is moving forward with its football season as if those concerns had never been raised. Florida States first game is against Georgia Tech on Sept. 12.

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:

The rest is here:
Why Trump and the Republicans have turned college football into a new 'Normandy' - Yahoo News

Netflix is catching some serious flak on social media today around their upcoming original film Cuties most of which likely could have been avoided.

Cuties, a film from French-Senegalese director Mamouna Doucour, made its debut in January at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Decider was there in Park City for the screening, and our Senior Film Reporter Anna Menta filed a review of Cuties, calling it a coming-of-age film that will speak volumes to anyone who has lived through the agonizingly confusing time that is girlhood.

Earlier this week, Netflix announced the premiere date of Cuties (September 9) and released the trailer for the film, which immediately set off a firestorm of criticism from hordes of angry keyboard warriors most of whom, we assume, have yet to actually see the movie who found some fresh ammunition for the culture wars. The first part of the problem arose from the language that Netflix used to describe the film on their official movie page, as well as YouTube. That language read:

Amy, 11, becomes fascinated with a twerking dance crew. Hoping to join them, she starts to explore her femininity, defying her familys traditions.

Ever since Miley Cyrus set the world aflame in 2013 by bringing the twerking dance craze into the mainstream putting cultural appropriation directly into the crosshairs of the outrage economy on both sides of the political spectrum the word twerking has been a loaded term. Combining that term with the precocious age of the films primary protagonist, an 11-year-old girl, left the rabid (and scarily thriving) QAnon community foaming at the mouth; it was the cultural equivalent of throwing red meat to Joe Exotics menagerie of underfed tigers. The movies TV-MA rating further incited Twitter users to accuse Netflix of making child porn, of being run by a bunch of pedophiles, and much worse. (We dont even want to imagine whats being said on Parlor.)

Presumably realizing that they were under fire, Netflix tried to compensate by quietly changing the films description to something more sanguine:

Amy, 11 years old, tries to escape family dysfunction by joining a free-spirited dance clique named Cuties, as they build their self confidence through dance.

This, as you might guess, only exacerbated the issue. A Netflix spokesperson told Metro.co.uk that the language had been changed because this was not an accurate representation of the film so the image and description has been updated, but now this very vocal faction of Twitter jockeys again, we should say, have almost definitely NOT SEEN THE MOVIE now had evidence of a cover-up.

Making matters even worse, Netflixs official YouTube channel currently has BOTH descriptions of the movie still lingering on their Cuties trailer page.

Making matters even WORSE, somehow, the official page for Cuties on Netflix is accompanied by a More Like This section powered by Netflixs world-famous algorithm:

Yikes. Seeing the inclusion of 365 dni in this section, a movie Decider described as the closest thing to porn on Netflix, does NOT help Netflixs case, either.

Nor does the films poster. On the left is the poster being used to promote the film for American audiences, and on the right is the French poster:

Double yikes on the spooky Sparkle Motion vibes that the American version is radiating. Netflix was forced to issue an apology earlier today for the poster you see on the left, which they have now pulled, telling Deadline that Were deeply sorry for the inappropriate artwork that we used for Cuties. It was not OK, nor was it representative of this French film which premiered at Sundance. Weve now updated the pictures and description.

This is not the first time that Netflix has skirted controversy when it comes to movies that sexualize underage characters and participants. Their Italian dramatic series Baby revolves around teen prostitutes and was denounced by the the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) for allegedly promoting underage sex trafficking, and their 2018 Belgian film Girl drew ire for its inclusion of a full frontal nude scene featuring a 15-year-old.

As a company whose mission is to produce and acquire content for a worldwide audience, these are the kinds of cultural landmines that Netflix will continue to trip on occasionally particularly as they continue to release and market dozens upon dozens of new shows and movies across the globe each month. You dont need to be a cultural anthropology major to understand the complex issues of gender and sexuality that arise as content gets consumed by global audiences with very different value systems and cultural mores, but Netflix certainly did not do themselves any favors with how they have bungled the marketing for this films release thus far.

Cuties will be released on Netflix on September 9, at which point youll be able to judge the way this film treated its subject matter for yourself.

Watch Cuties on Netflix on September 9

See the article here:
Netflix Stepped On A Landmine Of Controversy With Their Botched 'Cuties' Marketing Campaign - Decider

In 1934 the acting U.S. Secretary of Commerce released a 261-page report that would change the world. In it, statistical economist Simon Kuznets laid out the first estimate of what he called National Income and what many of us know today as Gross Domestic Product or GDP. Kuznets developed the metric in response to the Great Depressions unprecedented fall in economic activity. He hoped that it could help future governments assure their citizens of robust economic growth.

When World War II ended in 1945, Western countries turned to GDP as a way to show the superiority of capitalism over communism. Led by the United States, those that remained in the capitalist bloc were told that they would experience prosperity or rising GDP. This soon became the consensus view in Western politics.

Technocratic Democrats, like those that served under President Kennedy, attempted to come up with clever interventionist policies to boost GDP growth. During this period, dissenting free market economists led by Milton Friedman tried to shape a more laissez-faire narrative. They argued that less government intervention would lead to higher GDP growth. This would soon become the dominant economic narrative among Republicans. By the time Reagan was elected president in 1980, Democrats and Republicans had developed different approaches to economic policies. But both parties took it for granted that the goal was higher GDP growth.

In the interim, Western culture changed beyond recognition. Increasingly, the two sides of the political aisle began to clash over just about every issue, from abortion to the traditional family. Democrats and Republicans drifted further and further apart. Issue after issue became politicized as the culture wars heated up and the nation began to split into two groups. But Kuznetss GDP remained a shared metric. Economic growth would hold the nation together.

Recent years have seen criticism of GDP. The left notes that GDP abstracts from income distribution. Many on the left have also said that GDP may be a bad thing, not a good thing, as increasing GDP may lead to rising C02 emissions, which they believe produces climate change. On the right, many have started to notice that the breakdown of the family seems to accompany increasing GDP growth. A society geared toward production and consumption seems to prefer workers and consumers with no family ties and few personal and geographical commitments. Feminism has moved out of the radical fringes and into corporate boardrooms, where women are told to ignore family commitments and lean in.

Some of these critiques have something to them. Nevertheless, for better or for worse, we have centered our societies on commerce for almost a century. When we neglect GDP growth, the disruption is profound. People have been taught, in a sense, to order their lives toward GDP growthtoward production and consumption. When GDP falters, peoples lives go into a tailspin. We can see the results in the opioid epidemic in de-industrialized regions.

But the most striking thing about the lockdown policies enacted this year is the extent to which GDP has been ignored. At the time of writing, the U.S. economy is contracting at a rate not seen since the Great Depression. The result could well make the financial crisis of 2008-09 seem like a minor inconvenience. The lockdown policies appear to be at once destroying and reshaping the economy in profound ways. Extrapolating recent trends forward do not paint a rosy picture. We may be looking at a huge loss in wealth and permanent unemployment for many. Small businesses may become a thing of the past and those lucky enough to have jobs may be at the mercy of monopolies.

Yet as this happens, policymakers, economists, and financiers remain fixated on metrics related to COVID-19. We may be entering an era in which GDP falls by the wayside and no longer has pride of place in the eyes of politicians and technocrats. Now that we have voluntarily destroyed our economies, with almost no resistance from any quarter, there seems to be nothing to prevent politicians and technocrats from coming up with ever-new target metrics that will supposedly help us better society. Given the timbre of the political culture, these are likely to be highly politicized.

Only last year, most of the wacky schemes that entered political debate could be held in check by pointing out that they would massively damage the economys capacity to grow. People should not underestimate how much of a check this appeal to GDP growth placed on public policy. This check and balance now seems to have taken a backseat in the public policy debate. The gloves are off on highly partisan attempts at policy innovation.The lockdowns have reorganized the economy in a way that favors online shopping and the big tech monopolies, and basically destroys the high street and small service businesses. Now that we have allowed policymakers to experiment with such reorganization, it seems likely that they will continue to meddle. Soon we could be seeing our leaders set new cultural targets that massively disrupt normal economic activity. Since the focus on GDP has waned, as people lose their wealth, their jobs, and their livelihoods, policymakers may simply chalk this disruption up to collateral damage in pursuit of the new targets.

Perhaps it was time to re-examine our societies tendency to worship the GDP metric. But in doing so we needed to tread carefully, recognizing how successful targeting GDP has been in the past. GDP still needs a prominent seat at the public policy table. This seems unlikely to be the case in future. The lockdown policies have been so all-encompassing that it is not hard to imagine ambitious and nave technocrats cooking up schemes to foist on the public in the coming years. Add to this the destruction of the shared consensus around GDP growth, and what we see emerging is concerning indeed.

John William O'Sullivan writes from Dublin, Ireland.

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The End of the GDP Consensus? | John William O'Sullivan - First Things

Before earning her Ph.D, Dr. Leigh McKagen pondered what her research would look like. A Virginia Tech graduate twice over (in 2006 and 2009), Dr. McKagen was teaching at her alma mater and was mentally working herself into the right state of mind to go for the doctorate. Her problem was settling a subject for her dissertation from the world of culture, politics, history, and ethics.

One evening, after putting their daughter to bed, Dr. McKagens husband invited her to watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with him. This was fortuitous, as she had been considering looking at American Science Fiction as a subject. Before she knew it, the long time science fiction fan had been sucked in by TNG, and soon Voyager, watching two and three shows a day logging every single episode over a year and a half.

She found Picard to be an amazing leader, but it was Janeway who really piqued her interest. She dove headfirst into the world of the U.S.S. Voyager and its adventures in the Delta Quadrant, and how those stories reflected a style of storytelling that can trace its roots from Gullivers Travels to Gunsmoke. Even without knowing it, Janeway and her crew were a part of an imperial saga, told by the Spanish, French, English, and yes, Americans, to justify conquest.

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In between teaching at Virginia Tech, raising her three-year-old, giving birth to a baby boy, and through the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. McKagen wrote her masterpiece, which looks at the cultural significance of Star Trek: Voyager, and how the show and its star, Kate Mulgrew, both pushed the boundaries of what had been done for a female characters in the role of leader within the boundaries of the genre of American Science Fiction.

StarTrek.com: Tell us about your project:

Dr. Leigh McKagen: My dissertation is a case study, essentially, of Star Trek: Voyager, and the various ways that European Imperialism and imperial ideologies and practices are written into the narrative. This happens in a number of ways, including the reliance on castaway and adventure narratives that serve to establish the right of the explorer in the way of American settler colonialism.

I explore the way that Voyager taps into the creation of the domestic space-home against the wilds of the frontier of the Delta Quadrant, as one of the many traditions of American imperialism. That was fundamental in the creation of an American empire and an American nation.

Then I ended the project with an exploration of ways that Voyager offers some moments of exception to these imperial narratives. The way to think about how the genre, Star Trek in particular, and American Science Fiction television more broadly, could move beyond that.

The overarching purpose of moving beyond these narratives is the crisis known as the Anthropocene the Climate Crisis of the 21st Century that was in large part caused by Western imperialism and capitalism. Im seeking a way to use this work as a way to not only diagnose the problem, but also see where change could come, or where change could happen within those dominant, and often unacknowledged narratives.

How did you become interested in using Star Trek for this huge project?

LM: It sort of happened almost by accident. In terms of general interest in the show, and then well speak academically, they are sort of two separate things. I actually did not watch a lot of Star Trek growing up unlike a lot of academics who work with Star Trek. So I think I come at it sort of from the perspective from writing about it, which puts me in an interesting position. I was familiar with it, and I had seen a few episodes. I knew the pop-culture significance of the series, but I hadnt really dug into Star Trek. I was very interested in popular culture as a teaching tool.

I started using a lot of science fiction and fantasy TV in my classes. I would show a Buffy the Vampire [Slayer] episode and we would talk about communication. I used those tools as a way to bridge the gap for my students between the academic stuff that they were reading and their real life.

So when I started thinking about a Ph.D. I sat down and talked with [the director of the academic program], and said I want to write a dissertation on science fiction, on science fiction television. I want to explore how this genre engages with America and American culture. This particular genre of American television engages with the story that we tell ourselves about what it means to be American.

And then my husband, Branden, said Hey, lets start watching Next Generation! I said sure. I had never really sat down and watched from start to finish. It sounded great.

It didnt take long of watching it for me, not only to get hooked as a science fiction fan, and also as someone who was working with the genre from an academic standpoint. My original ideas for the dissertation actually involved talking about and tracking 20 years worth of American television.

But my committee said this was really a big project. They encouraged me to cut it down and to pick just one show to work with. It was hard enough to juggle the 172 Voyager episodes, not to mention the many others.

Through all of this I still was not really sure exactly where I was going to engage with the genre, but I started reading more about imperialism and in particular, ways that imperialism is still a very much present and ongoing formation and player in not only the global order but also in our daily lives in ways that we often dont talk about or dont acknowledge. America has always pushed against the label of being an empire, even though we absolutely always have been, from the early days of settler colonialism.

I was very interested in how that started playing out in these narratives that we tell about the present, as science fiction does, but also about the future, which Star Trek, in particular, really tries to engage with.

Why did you focus on Voyager, and not TNG or Deep Space Nine?

LM: In large part, it was a practical decision in picking Voyager, because a lot less people talk about Voyager, which made it seem more manageable for me and also perhaps, more interesting. Everyone wants to talk about The Next Generation because its amazing.

Voyager is often a footnote in somebodys book. Im reading these books about the myth of Star Trek and even ones that were written in the late 90s and early 2000s, there are only two pages on Voyager. I still really dont know why people dont talk about it, but I did, and it was fun.

One of my committee members kept pushing me on [saying] youve got to think about what was going on in the 90s and why Voyager was doing these things and tackling these issues.

It is very important and interesting to look at the time period in which these shows are being made. I think that Deep Space Nine and Voyager really do reflect the deep uncertainty in the 90s, where we the government and the popular narrative was really trying to figure out what was going on. In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and in the wake of the Cold War and the rising Culture Wars, and I hit on this in a couple places trying to figure out what was really going on. To some degree, those shows are a reflection of that.

What were some episodes of Star Trek that got away from the imperialistic narrative?

LM: The Next Generation episode that did this best was Inner Light. Its one of everybodys favorites; it won a Hugo for very good reason and its a phenomenal episode because they lose. Because Picard just lives that life unable to save things; Picard as Kamin, he does not win and they do witness the natural destruction of the planet. Picard has to take that and live with those ideas.

Theres something to be said in studying and exploring those episodes, and Voyager plays with those in a couple of ways. Like Memorial and theres definitely potential there. I think its important to note that and I think that is why I really wanted to keep that last chapter but maybe thats not the point right now. Its important to engage in that, even though its a minor part or an afterthought of the project in some ways it might seem. But to note when something is going well or perhaps differently in completive ways and more could be done with that.

Why is Janeway so important?

LM: Theres a cover of the January 1995 Entertainment Weekly that has Janeway in uniform, which was out right before the series aired as the flagship show of this new network (the UPN). And the tag of the cover of the magazine says boldly going where only men have gone before. And I think that in a lot of ways, that was really important in the 90s. And it continued to be important to me, maybe as a female audience member, but certainly someone who was engaging with the show, even in my 30s, that this is such a male-dominated show up until the 90s.

Entertainment Weekly

While theres a lot of Janeway thats masculine, they at least wanted to engage with that, or straddle that kind of passionate captain in ways that not even Picard isnt quite able to be.

For me, I think that makes Janeway a more interesting study than someone like Picard or Sisko, who was great, and even Archer. Trying to watch through all these series, all the captains were unique in their own way and they have their own battles to fight, which make each series unique. But Janeway was in the position as being the only female captain, but being the only female captain in exile. She cant just go and get new crewmembers when something isnt going her way.

She cant just turn to the Federation for help not that Picard and others could do that either, but sometimes there were problems with communications or what have you. So shes very much the solo figure. [At the same time], shes just such a strong character and always so decisive and really smart. Theres definitely a lot to admire about Janeway.

What does it mean now that Michael Burnham an African American woman is the face of the Star Trek franchise?

LM: Its two fold: I think its amazing that we also had a second in command main character (Burnham) but we also had the captain (Georgiou). The captain and the second in command are both female and not white, and I think that those are great things.

I think that theres some very interesting things happening with Discovery, and I look forward to sitting down and watching that series a lot more carefully, and engaging with it as perhaps a follow-up to the things that were happening in the earlier series. In particular, in Voyager, a female-led show, going where no man has gone before.

What could Star Trek do to change the narrative in science fiction?

LM: Thats someplace that I definitely want to go with my research. The final chapter engages with some of the ways they could have done that. Then I think that if Western Science Fiction, and particularly American Science Fiction will have to move away from the classic western approach and shift to stories like AfroFuturism and other alternatives. Thats ultimately what Id like to see.

Some of the ideas from Ursula K. Le Guin, who was such an amazing science fiction author, and the ideas of thinking about stories that dont have to have a beginning, middle, and end. Where you dont have to triumph over something or return home. What would have happened if the Voyager story ended like it did with Oblivion did in that one episode. It would have been depressing, sure, but substantially more realistic in the long run.

In order to move beyond the hero-journey, which is very imperialistic, we must ditch the hero. If anybody could do it then I think it could be Star Trek and that would have a whole lot of power.

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Eric Pesola (he/him) lives in Virginia with his wife, children, shitzhu, and cats named Archer and Hoshi. The dog is not named after a Trek character. Hes on Twitter as @epesola .

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How Voyager, Janeway, and Star Trek Pushed Science Fiction into Bold New Directions - Star Trek