Self Care

I’m not a fan of NPR’s Fresh Air. I think I only heard the show’s host Terry Gross once. As a recap of what was a trending story, Adam Driver was being interviewed on the show. The show’s host and producers knew that Adam Driver didn’t like watching his own performances. He stated this on an earlier interview back in 2015 and expressed it in several instances, suggesting it left him unsatisfied, overly critical, or anxious. But despite all of this, Fresh Air decided to play his most recent performance in “Marriage Story” singing, and Driver walked out of the Interview. The story is now making the rounds with a rather displeased picture of Driver accompanying most articles. Come are spinning it as Driver being a demanding method actor type and that he was wrong to walk out of the interview so abruptly.

Psychiatrists are applauding Driver for standing up for his own boundaries and walking out of a situation that he knew was going to give him trouble later on. Normally, I’m not a fan of interviewees walking out of interviews when faced with hard questions but Terry Gross wasn’t really pressing him about anything controversial. They were simply ignoring his request not to be subjected to something which will trigger future anxiety. It benefits no one and they could’ve easily played the clip in question through future edits. He drew a line and they crossed it. He had every right to walk away.

This reminds me of an interview with Billy Bob Thornton as a member of his band, the Boxmasters. The host of the show, the disgraced Jian Ghomeshi, referenced his work as a screenwriter and an actor. Thornton wasn’t pleased with this since they agreed beforehand that his work as an actor wouldn’t be mentioned in the interview since it diminishes what he’s trying to do as a musician. I believe it also sidelines everyone else in the band. This led to Thornton answering nonsensically to Ghomeshi’s questions before scolding him. Now it might seem silly not to mention Billy Bob Thornton’s career in the silver screen, but that just happened to be the line he preferred not to be crossed, and not crossing it wouldn’t do much harm. It’s not like journalistic ethics were being violated if Thornton wasn’t introduced as an actor, much less if Adam Driver wasn’t subjected to watching his own performances.

Now compare both instances to R. Kelly being interviewed and asked about the cases against him. He might have started the interview asking that questions about the case not be asked, but the only reason one would have R. Kelly on an interview would be about those allegations. One would be interested hearing his spin on the allegations or his newest album. Not asking about the allegations would be journalistic malpractice. Just look at any softball interview with Ivanka Trump. She’s often being sold a proponent of business and feminism, but she’s never confronted about the almost blatant hypocrisy of her and her family’s actual actions (and inaction). I believe in most of her adult life, she has never been interviewed by a real journalist.

But back to Driver and him walking away from a situation. The man is an adult. He is an adult who knows what pushes his buttons and what is good for him. If it’s going to give him anxiety or make him lose sleep to subject himself to his own performances, let him walk away. It hurts nobody not to make him watch it. What the host and the producers of Fresh Air did is totally ignore Driver’s boundaries either due to carelessness or worse, to manufacture controversy for clicks. There are better shows on NPR. Go listen to them instead. And be more like Driver, if you can, walk away from stuff that would bother you later on. It’s not so much as being a snowflake. It’s taking care of yourself. Walk away from a bad situation or just avoid it completely. For instance with me, I now avoid drinking heavily. It’s not because I have a problem with alcohol, I just have a problem dealing with drunk people. So I either just stop drinking early or just avoid the situation completely. This can often be difficult in a country like South Korea where people are often helpless against intense societal pressure to drink, but for me, it’s better than stressing over and repeatedly replaying memories in my head the awkward interactions I have with drunk people.

Legal Porn (No, not that.)

 

The New York Post prints a fair share of dumb articles, but three days ago they published a particularly dumb one which touches on something that I just recently watched, Netflix’s examination of the Steven Avery murder case, Making a Murderer. The headline goes: ‘Why Making a Murderer’ is Better than ‘Serial.’ The article, written by Sara Stewart, talks about both investigative pieces like they are entertainment, which to many they are, and she fails to recognize that it’s this same attitude towards both cases that lead to injustices. The cases began in the media, became legal porn, and many people are already too biased to hear any story that would contradict their biases.

Let me quickly counter Ms. Stewart’s five reasons and why they are at the very least moot and at the worst, serves to further harm the justice process.

1. We don’t know anything about the case (Steven Avery’s) already.
-The reason why people watch a documentary is to hopefully learn something new, not to confirm their biases. I’m hoping this was what both producers of Serial and Making a Murderer were trying to achieve. I believe most people know of Bowe Berghdal mostly through conservative talking points. This makes an examination of his case even more necessary.

2. Its (Making a Murderer’s) subject is more sympathetic.
-This is the type of laziness that leads to so much injustice. Ms. Stewart must not have heard of the Duke Lacrosse case. Rich, white students were accused of drugging and gang raping an African-American woman at a party. And from the very beginning, it was painted as an example of the excesses rich white men get away with and even as a hate crime. Nancy Grace filled hours of show condemning the accused. It was great legal porno. Unfortunately, the sympathetic victim turned out to be a liar.

Being swayed by sympathetic victims is one of the greatest traps people fall into. Ms. Stewart describes Steven Avery as being more sympathetic than Bowe Berghdal. But I would argue that it is exactly this sympathetic bias that got Steven Avery into bigger trouble. Isn’t the zeal for justice for Teresa Halbach a perfect example of the Missing White Woman Syndrome? The volunteers combing an area, the media coverage, the aggressive police action, etc.  It’s like whoever murdered Ms. Halbach took Criminology 101. She’s one of the most sympathetic victims of all.

3. Its (Making a Murderer’s) subject gives firsthand interviews.
-This is just silliness. Comparing the availability of both subjects in wildly different contexts is just dumb. I suppose Sarah Koenig could’ve just gone to Afghanistan to interview Bowe Berghdal while he escaped. Unfortunately we don’t live in such a fantastically ridiculous world.

4. There’s a wealth of archival footage available.
-Ms. Stewart seems to lament that there’s not enough footage of Bowe Berghdal as opposed to the court footage, local news, and police reports that’s available for Steve Avery’s case. I would argue that Ms. Koenig actually took some restraint in not using the wealth of material slamming Bowe Berghdal and essentially convicting him prior to being tried and his reasons for leaving examined.  But doing so would be extremely lazy and basically going through what everyone has already been exposed to. What Ms. Koenig is doing with the “unpopular” Bowe Berghdal might not be as good as “entertainment,” but entertainment is just one part of what Serial is trying to do. It is also trying to inform its audience.

5. It’s (Making a Murderer’s) literally easier to hear.
-Again with apples and oranges. One is a ten-part documentary which most people can and will binge-watch, while the other is an ongoing radio series. It’s the visual media versus the theater of the mind.

I don’t mean to write an examination of a dumb New York Post article, but my frustration from seeing the story is basically the same thing that frustrates me with many legal stories, and it’s something that I admittedly am quite guilty of as well: treating these cases like legal porn. It’s all drama. The characters are just mere characters, not real life people. People opine on whether Casey Anthony, Jodi Arias, or OJ Simpson are guilty or not, but what often gets lost are the web of people they are connected with. Steven Avery is portrayed as some sort of villain in 1985. No one would have guessed that it would later start a domino effect which lands his nephew in prison.  Bowe Berghdal is talked about simply as a deserter… but his issues regarding the military and how it treats its own troops is forgotten entirely. Lots of people become self-satisfied legal experts just watching legal drama on the sidelines, not realizing that it sometimes feeds into the injustice that is fueled by the media (Hello again, Nancy Grace).

Ms. Stewart writes as if she sees both Serial and Making a Murderer as entertainment pieces, which to most of the public they are, like numbers on a Nielsen ratings scale.  They really shouldn’t be, and we should stop talking about them as if they were. These people’s lives are not being ruined by the justice system simply for our entertainment. I would like to think there is more to them than that.

Time Traveling Via NPR

I’ve been listening to old ‘This American Life’ episodes. Over the weekend, I listened to ones that were broadcast right after the attack on the World Trade Center. Like a time traveler, it’s interesting to hear what people feel at the time especially their attitudes towards the US heading to war. As expected, I was annoyed at experts at the time, people like Rumsfeld, who are selling the war with a calamitous need for justice and assurance that America is going to battle in most well thought-out manner. He couldn’t have been more wrong about everything. It’s amazing that they still allow him on television as an ‘expert’ on anything these days.

What’s most interesting was episode 196, when the events of September 11 are examined through different perspectives. Much like the movie ‘Rashomon,’ stories change drastically depending on whose eyes you’re experiencing them through. Of course, people in the west were scared. They we scared of this nebulous terrorist threat. As a westerner, this was probably my default point of view. The west needed a target. It needed to get back at someone. Saddam Hussein has always been a “bad guy” through most of the 90s. Perhaps getting him would turn the scales back into a place of normalcy.

But then there’s also the Muslim point of view. In the episode, a Palestinian teenager explains about why the September 11 attacks doesn’t benefit the Muslims, but instead benefits the Jews in Israel since it puts the Americans into conflict in the Middle East, much like Pearl Harbor brought America out of isolationism in WWII. This of course is seen as anti-Semitic conspiracy theories from western point of views, and in my opinion, rightfully so. But to some Muslims, especially Palestinians and with the different biases between western and Muslim media skewering regional opinion, this could very well be a plausible explanation for the attacks. Another Muslim point of view is that of a former soldier from Iraq who had to reluctantly fight for Saddam’s army. Not a rabid supporter of Saddam, the man had to explain to his son why the normally pleasant and well-meaning Americans had to violently terrorize their city. Looking back on this now, if he had stayed in the Iraqi army, this man would’ve been out of job and perhaps forced to join ISIS by now.

Lastly, the show also looked at war from the point of view of some soldiers. Despite best preparations, war is hell, and things could turn bloody in any minute. It is always best to approach war with reasoned reluctance than with the zeal and optimism the world had back in 2003, when we were confident at shocking and awing the enemy into submission.

Episode 200 looked at the radio station set up by the CIA to help overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala in 1954, Jacobo Arbenz. It was an interesting examination of the power of radio back in the day and the way propaganda is used both during a conflict and long after, when myths cultivated. What I find most poignant however, is the comment by Prof. Nick Cullather, who says that while the US does have a responsibility to sometimes intervene in foreign countries’ affairs, it is far more difficult to face the magnitude of the task afterwards. It is quite easy to depose a leader compared to the difficulty of finding a suitable replacement. Just look at Guatemala after Arbenz, Syria in 1949, Iran in the 50s, Chile and the junta in the 70s. And now Iraq with the fall of Saddam has the whole Middle East in a quagmire.

Listening to old radio shows and “time travelling” is a nice distraction during my commute. However, I would’ve hoped our leaders had more insight to predict the future. Looking back now, we were all such fools back then. It is amazing that NPR had the courage and prudence to examine issues from different perspectives, especially with the national climate in 2001-2003. Unfortunately, being seen as an organization with liberal biases, I doubt that it or any other organizations like it would have their ideas taken seriously in the mainstream media.