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The opening scene of the new season of American Horror Story, appropriately subtitled Cult, is set on US election night, in November of 2016. A diverse group of liberals (including a lesbian couple, an Asian-American couple, and a black woman) watch MSNBC, nervously awaiting the results. Meanwhile, a Cheeto-munching young, white alt-right type, alone on his couch in another home, stares at Fox News.

When the race is called for Donald Trump, the liberals are in shock: I wont believe anything until I hear Rachel Maddow say it, shes the only one I trust, one deadpans.

Meanwhile, the far-right man celebrates by humping his TV to chants of USA, USA.

In February, American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy revealed that the new season of his anthology series on FX would be about the 2016 US presidential election. Since then, Murphy and FX have been cagey about how much, exactly, the show will deal with the contentious election.

After the first three episodes, its clear that the answer is: a lot.

American Horror Story: Cult is perhaps the least subtle political satire ever made, but thats probably the point. In post-Trump America, theres no time for subtlety. The story, as Murphys series often do, becomes progressively more ridiculous. A cult of homicidal people in clown masks wreak havoc across an affluent Michigan suburb. A gerbil explodes in the microwave. The phrase, a lesbian George Zimmerman, is uttered.

But beneath the over-the-top antics and the shows rote home invasion and psychological thriller tropes, is an engaging meditation on fearhow it plays tricks on the mind, how it pits human beings against one another, how it wins elections.

Cult is the only season of the show so far that doesnt feature some kind of supernatural element. All the horror is steeped in real-life fears, ones that have been brought further into the light, for many, since Trump became president of the United States: emboldened racists, attacks on minorities, and the deterioration of human decency.

It doesnt feature Trump or Hillary Clinton as characters, but it might as well. A right-wing man, strengthened by Trumps victory, decides to run for city council on a platform of inciting fear. Played by American Horror Story regular Evan Peters, he answers the question, What if the Joker from Batman was also a white nationalist? His philosophy is that fear is a good thing, that it sets us free, shows us who we really are (or who we yearn to be). Hes unhinged, but also charismatic, and quickly attracts a team of damaged souls as his groupies.

But Cult isnt just a parody of the racist and xenophobic contingent of Americans who have felt emboldened by Trumps victory. The show is also critical of oversensitive, egotistical liberal Americans, ones who might display an exterior of compassion and inclusivity but are part of the problem thats dividing the country further into political cults.

Sarah Paulson, another American Horror Story veteran, plays one half of the shows stereotypical progressive couplelesbians who refuse to allow their young son to give his pet a cisnormative name. Shes a guilt-ridden Jill Stein voter whos deeply triggered by Trumps win and begins to succumb to her various anxieties and phobias (one of which is, of course, a fear of clowns). Go to hell Huffington Post, fuck you Nate Silver, she says, before she starts going crazy.

Her psychologists advice for dealing with the anxiety brought on by Trump is to check out of the world and into your life, but the demonic clown cultboth real and imaginarymakes that difficult. Therapy is tough when The Purge is happening outside of your home every night.

Whats unique about Murphys show, apart from its signature campy style, is its timing. Its not satirizing long-past history, its satirizing this precise moment in time, what Americans are living through right now.

Saturday Night Live and other sketch and talk shows parse and mock the latest news. But unlike American Horror Story, those shows traffic in caricature, skewering politicians, government leaders, and public figures. Murphys show targets the vanities and self-deceptions of the rest of usshowing how were all complicit in the horror that is modern American politics.

The show works best when its doing that: turning the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election into a personal horror story. Cult is not what American Horror Fans might be used to, but its the scariest nightmare Murphy has conjured up yet.

American Horror Story: Cult premieres Sept. 5 on FX.

See the article here:
The new 'American Horror Story' is a disturbing satire of liberal fears in Trump's America - Quartz

Complaints are growing louder that "Black Lives Matter" lawn signs are being vandalized and disappearing from yards around Evanston.

But without video cameras or someone witnessing the crime, both a city alderman and a police commander say lawn sign destruction is difficult to prosecute.

"I asked our problem solving team to make it a priority," said Ald. Tom Suffredin, 6th Ward, who has heard residents in his ward complain of yard sign vandalism and theft. "I take it very seriously."

The hashtag "#BlackLivesMatter" started circulating following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a night watchman at a residential community, in the shooting death of African American teen Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012. It grew into a national movement in 2014, after the fatal shooting of 18-year old Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

Black Lives Matter is now an organization as well as a movement.

It is "working for the validity of Black life," according to the organization's website.

"When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state," the website reads.

Suffredin said he listens when residents tell him how they feel following the affront to their personal property.

The alderman also noted that the vandalism hasn't been restricted to the Black Lives Matter signs. Before the November 2016 presidential election, one resident found his Trump candidate yard sign had been set on fire.

The Black Lives Matter yard signs began popping up in Chicago area about the same time as the protests that followed the Ferguson shooting, supporters said.

At Lake Street Church in Evanston, member Betsy Wilson said she started putting them out in 2015. About 12 signs went missing that first summer, she said.

But she continued to replace them, and said only one has been stolen so far this summer.

At first "they were disappearing every week or so," Smith said.

But some Evanston residents say the vandalism and theft appear to be getting personal.

Evanston/Skokie School Dist. 65 school board member and 8th Ward resident Anya Wiley Tanyavutti said a woman she didn't recognize "violently hit and stomped" on her Black Lives Matter sign in broad daylight.

The vandalism occurred shortly after her family had gathered in the lawn nearby, she said.

"We tried to catch up with her to ask why she did it. She ran," Tanyavutti said.

Another neighbor snapped photos of the suspect, Tanyavutti said, but she has not been identified.

"It seems unusual that it would be one person" responsible for all of the sign vandalism, Tanyavutti said. "A lot of people are concerned."

Evanston police Commander Joseph Dugan confirmed Tanyavutti's account.

Yard signs are common targets for vandalism, he said, and many Evanston residents display Black Lives Matter signs in their yards. But he said the damage and thefts are not being reported at a higher-than-usual rate.

"Driving around, there's a lot of support for that cause around town," Dugan said, as well as a few yard signs displayed for other causes right now. That could make the Black Lives Matter signs more attractive targets for vandals.

In Skokie, just over the northwest border with Evanston, resident Corrie Wallace, 44, said she put out her first Black Lives Matter sign about a year ago. She soon started walking outside to find it "laying face down," she said. The same thing happened to the sign in her parents' yard nearby.

Then last fall, Wallace said she received an anonymous letter saying that "Black Lives Matter is anti-Israel," and asking her to change it to read "Black Lives Count."

She didn't, and instead called the police before adding a sign that reads "Hate Has No Home Here," as well as another sign describing her values of tolerance and inclusivity.

Last month, she said she woke up to find the Black Lives Matter sign was stolen. A couple weeks ago, the Hate Has No Home Here sign was gone, too.

"It's beyond frustrating," Wallace said. "It's the principle that you shouldn't touch other people's stuff."

The situation is especially hurtful, Wallace said, as her parents, an interracial couple, moved to the Evanston/Skokie area from Mississippi because they felt it was a place where their marriage would be accepted.

"Whoever is doing this, I think it's very intentional," Wallace said. "The hatred that's associated with black people is real."

gbookwalter@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @GenevieveBook

See more here:
Evanston residents condemn theft, vandalism of 'Black Lives Matter' signs - Chicago Tribune

When George Zimmerman went on trial four years ago for the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, the Sanford (Florida) Police Department senta request to the states attorney asking whether his death would be determined a justifiable homicide. Under Floridas stand your ground laws, such a designation would allow Zimmerman to claim his killing of Martin occurred in self-defense and he did so, successfully.

By the time the jury delivered a not guilty verdict for Zimmerman in 2013, self-defense had become an increasingly common rationalization for homicide cases in the U.S.as stand your ground laws proliferated state-by-state. In Florida,therateof justifiable homiciderose200%from 2005, when stand your ground went into effect, to 2013.

A new report by the Marshall Project published this month,which examines FBI data about 400,000 civilian homicides,finds that cases are far more likely to be determined justifiable homicides when the killer is white and the victim is black. In fact, while justifiable homicides only constituted 2% of all cases, that percentage swelled to 17%when the cases involved a white civilian killing a black civilian. According to the authors of the Marshall Project report:

The vast majority of killings of whites are committed by other whites, contrary to some folk wisdom, and the overwhelming majority of killings of blacks is by other blacks. But killings of black males by white people are labeled justifiable more than eight times as often as others. This racial disparity has persisted for decades and is hard to explain based solely on the circumstances reported by the police data.

The phrase justifiable homicide is one of those oddities of a justice system that seeks to make room for human fallibility in legal classification and language for example, homicides committed by domestic violence victims against their abusers. But these adjustments for the failures of human judgment end up accommodating prejudices and biases that disproportionately benefit nonblack defendants and victimize black victims. It's not just white-on-black self-defense claims, says Jody David Armour, a professor of law at the University of Southern California. It's any self-defense claims that include a black victim, whether the shooter is white, black, Latino, or Asian.

Jody David Armour. Photo courtesy of the University of Southern California.

Armour is the author of Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America, a 1997 book that examined how unconscious racism against black people manifests systemicallyin institutions like the justice system.

The key legal test for determining whether a homicide was justifiable is something called the reasonable person standard, says Armour in cases involving civilians or a police officer. The test asks one simple question: Would a reasonable person in this situation detect an imminent threat by the victim?

The way the law defines 'reasonable' is not 'rational,' says Armour. Reasonable does not mean right. All reasonable means is 'typical.' 'Ordinary.' You're a reasonable person if you're an ordinary person, if you're the average person.

A persons reasonableness insulates them from accountability when their mistakes are determined to fall within the spectrum of typicalhuman behavior and inadequacy. The reasonable person test says you don't condemn somebody who's just expressed ordinary human frailty in whatever they've done, says Armour. But human failure is not always natural or predetermined its often influenced by the social environments in which we are raised.

The problem with the typical is reasonable approach, which is the one we use in a court, is that it would let off the hook a lot of, for example, Germans in Nazi Germany in 1939 or 1940, adds Armour. If they could say, Hey, I was anti-Semitic but it was typical to be anti-Semitic. You can't blame me for being anti-Semitic if most people around me were.

Though Charlottesville made it clear that anti-Semitism is on the rise in America, racism is undeniably a foundational characteristic of contemporary American society, embedded in the body politic. So it stands to be argued that a reasonable person in the United States is likely a racist one, too.

We know that at an unconscious level, ordinary people harbor negative stereotypes about blacks, says Armour. And among those stereotypes that ordinary people harbor about blacks are that blacks are more violent and crime-prone. That stereotype can operate unconsciously, automatically.

A 1976 study by University of California, Berkeley, professor Birt Duncan exemplifies the ways in which these unconscious beliefs function in real life. Duncan made his subjects of varied races view and evaluate a taped interaction between two people having a discussion about another colleagues job placement. The conversation becomes heated, and one of them gets up to leave, ambiguously bumping the other person on their way out.

When someone black initiated that ambiguous bump, the subjects were much more likely to interpret the bump as hostile or violent. When someone white initiated the same bump, the subject was much more likely to interpret it as merely horseplay or dramatized, says Armour. This pattern of judgment was the same whether the subject was black or white. These findings reveal how ordinary Americans have been socialized to read aggression into the behaviors and movements of black people behaviors that would otherwise be read as nonthreatening when performed by a white people.

If 'reasonable' means 'typical,' then the question becomes, 'Does a typical person in America consider race, consider blackness, when they're assessing the dangerousness of an ambiguous or suspicious person? asks Armour. And the tragic truth is, study after study shows and we know it if we just consult our own intuition that ordinary people in America, ordinary people do consider race when they're assessing someone's dangerousness.

This is why, for example, black men frequently observe white women clutching their purses a little tighter when they walk past them on the street. Its a psychological tic that reporter Frederick H. Lowe explored in an article for the Chicago Reader called the The Clutch of Fear, calling it a form of racist signaling. In it, he interviewed psychiatrist Carl Bell, who said:"It's a nonverbal kinetic that wears at a black man's self-esteem. A white woman sees a black man and she instantly stereotypes him as someone who plans to rape and rob her.

There is a mental tax for these kinds of interactions, levied mostly against black men. This type of projection depletes a black man's energy because he constantly thinks about it, said Bell. It limits his mobility. And it impinges on his life, because he's constantly kept off guard, preventing him from focusing on other issues."

And in places where guns are easily accessible, its not just a black persons energy or mental health that is threatened its their very life, as demonstrated in the case of Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman, an ordinary person, harboring many of the same prejudices that the white women in The Clutch of Fear cling to, determined that Martins behaviors were hostileand that Martin, a 17-year-old boy, posed an imminent threat to his life. Zimmermans possession of a gun allowed him to act on that split-second judgment with violence, taking Martins life.

But in the eyes of the law, Zimmermans killing was consideredjustifiable because his perceptions matched those of an ordinary jury. This legal applicationempties the word of its meaning what becomes clear is that in at least one case of justifiable homicide, justicewas not dispensed.

Share image and top image byKena Betancur/Getty Images.

Link:
The Killings Of Black Men Are More Likely To Be Labelled 'Justifiable' - GOOD Magazine

Talib Kweli has shared "She's My Hero," a song inspired by Bresha Meadows, the teenager who shot and killed her allegedly abusive father in July 2016. Meadows was initially charged with aggravated murder and spent 18 months behind bars. However, public outcry and a sustained activist campaign led to a plea deal with prosecutors.

"The first thing that struck me about Bresha was how much she physically reminded me of my own daughter," Kweli wrote in an open letter posted in the song's Soundcloud description. "I had a similar experience when George Zimmerman killed 17 year old Trayvon Martin, who reminded me of my son. I instantly felt drawn to these children and I felt compelled to dive deeper into their lives.

"Regardless of how you feel about this particular case, whether you feel its a self defence issue, a domestic abuse issue, a mental health issue or all of the above, the take away for me is that we must do a better job of taking care of and protecting our children," he wrote.

Listen to "She's My Hero" below. A GoFundMe is has been established to pay for Bresha Meadows's mental health treatment

Read the rest here:
Listen To She's My Hero, Talib Kweli's New Song About Bresha ... - The FADER

Note: This feature appears in the Wednesday, Aug. 30 newspaper on Page A3.

Each week, the Vinton County Courier is going back into the archives to find interesting and oftentimes humorous newspaper clippings and advertisements of the past.

From the Thursday, Aug. 29, 1957 edition of the McArthur Democrat-Enquirer:

- The Franklin County Historical Society visited Wilkesvilles Ponn Humpback Covered Bridge during its annual summer bus tour. The tour also featured Buckeye Furnace.

- In sports, the McArthur High School Generals football team was coached by Jack Osborne and was set to scrimmage Berne Union.

- The Ohio Division of Juvenile planned to inspect a Vinton County site for a Boys Honor Camp to be a partnership with the Ohio Department of Transportation.

From the Thursday, Aug. 31, 1967 edition of the McArthur Democrat-Enquirer:

- The St. Sylvester Catholic Church in Zaleski celebrated its 100th anniversary. There were 54 families made up the church as parishioners. Leading the church was Father Robert F. Lemon.

- In sports, Don Radcliff, the Voice of the Vikings, returned to broadcast football games on WBEX out of Chillicothe.

From the Wednesday, Aug. 31, 1977 edition of the Vinton County Courier:

- Vinton County schools began offering a breakfast program at a cost of 25 cents.

- McArthur Mayor Robert Dodrill proclaims Sept. 7, 1977 to be George Zimmerman Day. Zimmerman, who still had an active drivers license, turned 100 years old.

- In sports, Vinton County residents Rodney Peoples, Mark Johnston and Storma Peoples competed in the Summer Karate Championships in Columbus.

- Also in sports, the Wilkesville Merchants won the Banquet Softball Tournament. The team was made up of Sis Sherpherd, Sandi Sines, Barb Lambert, Mary Brown, Rae Hicks, Barb Fetty, Kay Woodard, Beth LuAnn Shifflet, Donna Johnston, Lori Ward, Carla Cecil and Robin Eberts. The team was coached by Sam Hicks and John Dailey.

- At the movies: The Cinema Louvee showed Star Wars.

From the Wednesday, Sept. 2, 1987 edition of the Vinton County Courier:

- Donna and Lamar Kruger were recognized for their loyal service to the Vinton County Local School District. Together, they had 52 years of perfect attendance. Lamar began as a bus driver in Allensville in 1952 and later became a custodian. Donna started in 1970 as a custodian.

- In advertising, Snugglers Cove Dairy Hut offered veals for $1.50 at its location on Route 50 in Prattsville.

From the Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2007 edition of The Vinton County Courier:

- Vinton County Middle School officially opened, with Dee Caudill as principal.

- The Convention and Visitors Bureau continued working on the quilt barn project with Farm Friendliness on a barn owned by Bob Rannells on Route 328.

- In sports, the Vikings football team beat Unioto 31-15 to open the season 1-0. The game featured touchdowns by Bobby Mason, Ryan Stewart and Andy Grillo.

- Also in sports, the Vinton County cross country teams competed at the River Valley Early Bird Invitational. Brandon Clark and Abbe Batey were the two top runners.

Read more:
This Week in Vinton County History - Vinton County Courier (registration)