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Grief Is Onstage At The DNC, But It’s Not A Weapon

Grief Is Onstage At The DNC, But It’s Not A Weapon

As in Cleveland last week, the convention stage in Philadelphia has seen more than a handful of speakers describe the death of a family member in painful detail, tying their tragic experience to their political beliefs and choice of candidate.

But there’s a key difference in terms of how these personal tragedies are being used at either major party convention: Grieving Republican speakers used tragedy as justification to personally attack Hillary Clinton, while Democrats have used it to support her policy measures.

On Wednesday evening, for instance, Christine Leinonen—whose son was killed in the Orlando shooting alongside his boyfriend—took the stage to describe her son and call for common-sense gun laws.

“Please, let’s all just get along,” she told the audience through tears. “We’re on this earth for such a short time. Let’s try to get rid of the hatred and the violence, please.”

It was a stark contrast from the scene in Cleveland, where speakers took a note from Gov. Chris Christie and used their personal losses to effectively prosecute Clinton. Patricia Smith, whose son was killed in the Benghazi attacks, spent just as much time speaking about her son as she did “blam[ing] Hillary Clinton personally” for his death.

In a sense, then, there was little difference between Cleveland and Philly: Speakers at both conventions spoke brought audiences to tears while discussing the Democratic nominee—just with radically different reasons for doing so.

After Erica Smegielski described losing her mother in the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, she drew a parallel between the former principal and Clinton.

“What we need is another mother who’s willing to do what’s right, whose bravery can live up in equal measure to my mom’s,” Smegielski said.

Like Leinonen, or former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords—the victim of another deadly shooting—she could have used her tragic experience as a pretext to condemn Donald Trump for his staunch defense of gun rights. (Not to mention, his own political manipulation of recent shootings.)

But rather than focusing on hate, they called for healing, change, and love. Felicia Sanders, who lost her son in the Charleston church shooting, put it best: “Hate destroys those who harbor it. I refuse to let hate destroy me.”

That’s not to say that the DNC has been absent of attacks on Trump—far from it. Major headliners and featured guests alike have targeted Trump for his own lack of policy knowledge, spotty business history, and scapegoating of minorities.

This distinction was arguably most evident during a speech given by the Mothers of the Movement, a group of Black women whose children lost their lives in incidents of police brutality or racially-motivated attacks. The mothers never mentioned Trump (and rarely mentioned Clinton), instead focusing their time onstage to making sure that their children’s stories were told.

“So many of our children are gone but not forgotten,” said Geneva Reed-Veal, the mother of Sandra Bland. “What a blessing to be standing here so that Sandy can still speak.”

Former John McCain advisor Steve Schmidt summarized the Republican convention by calling it the “weaponization of grief.” This week in Philadelphia has certainly featured grief, but none of it has been so weaponized as in Ohio.

 

Photo: Screenshot via YouTube

Entertainment’s Place In Post-Attack Rebuttal

Entertainment’s Place In Post-Attack Rebuttal

By Steven Zeitchik, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Global tragedy strikes these days with a kind of wearying familiarity. The pain is fresh, but our thoughts — as they did after Madrid, London, Mumbai and elsewhere — return to a well-known place.

As the Paris attacks and their aftermath have played out this weekend, once again we stare dazed at the cable news screen, facing questions we never imagined — questions we suspect have no answers, even as the scouring of CNN for motives and details and revelations provides a comforting illusion otherwise.

And once again, those of us immersed in entertainment — as producers, as distributors, as chroniclers, or even just as devotees — are left to ask where it fits in. Cultures have been grappling for centuries with how much space to allow levity in the place of a tragedy. But the relevance and even the defensibility of entertainment has lately been thrust forward as never before. These are new and confusing times, an age when mass civilian murders are common and our individual responses to them, thanks to social media, widely known. The proper reaction remains unclear; the rules of collective grief are still unwritten.

Was going to the movies, for instance, acceptable this past weekend? Was it OK to tweet about a television series or college football game? Was there a palatable way to return to, or justification for embracing, the shows, sports, movies, music and other pursuits that fill our typical weekends?

Was doing some of these things perhaps even an act of noble defiance — the attacks, after all, had taken place in part at a musical performance and seemed intended to strike at the freedom to enjoy life in such a manner — or an act of unsavory and even heartless self-distraction?

Would it be OK to wait 24 hours and then resume such activities? What about 48? Was the very idea of a statute of limitations untoward?

Entertainment companies faced their own dilemmas. Lionsgate weighed how to proceed with a Los Angeles premiere for its new Hunger Games movie on Monday, ultimately deciding to hold the event without a traditional red carpet. Saturday Night Live also scaled down but didn’t step out: It scrapped its usual comedic opening this past weekend in favor of a touching salutation, in English and French, from cast member Cecily Strong, then carried on with the show.

A friend at a Hollywood publication said he was in a quandary over whether to overhaul an upcoming issue to focus on the attack. On the one hand, Paris was all we were thinking about, and it would be insensitive, even inaccurate, to carry on with the coverage of ratings and box office and first-look deals as if we weren’t. On the other hand, the Paris attacks were not fundamentally an entertainment story, and wouldn’t it be tone-deaf to pretend that they were?

And yet through it all, entertainment may have already been playing a role in our processing mechanism. In movie theaters these past few months, films have, in their own oblique way that seem clearer after Friday, already been speaking to the issues underlying the attack, to the perpetrators and the victims, to the dangers posed and the values threatened.

The season has brought the high-wire-walking story The Walk and its spirit of unbridled humanity, whose main character uses ingenuity and showmanship to enhance lives instead of diminishing them, a fitting antidote to what happened in Paris. That said character was French and was walking between New York’s twin towers that themselves would become a target and symbol only underlines the comparison.

There is the new release Spotlight, an abuse drama in which truth-seeking journalists push forward and try to do what we all hope to do in the face of cataclysm: find justice, and maybe a little comfort for the afflicted, even as they are tempered by the knowledge their actions will always be insufficient. They press on while Sept. 11 strikes right in the middle of their efforts.

There has been The Martian, which in its own Hollywood escapist way has showed the power of countries and people around the world to band together when life is at stake, differences of nationality and ideology suddenly irrelevant.

There are, of course, literal attempts in Hollywood at understanding militant attacks, as with the upcoming 13 Hours and Patriots’ Day, each about those trying to prevent the murder of innocents. But comprehension also comes more subtly, as with the current Spectre, in which disparate acts of mass murder are chillingly realized to be emanating from a common source.

The movie seeks to fathom what could drive such bloodthirsty nihilism (while also depicting the struggles of democratic governments to contend with it). Like many other examples, Spectre is part of a feedback loop that circles between our brains and our screen, fears of an attack making their way from the first to the second, then coming back to us in a different form once such violence takes place in real life.

The question after attacks like Friday’s is whether to allow entertainment back in. But perhaps that elides the real issue. Perhaps entertainment has been here all along.

When it comes to a post-tragedy pop culture, there are the easy calls to make — the French distributor that decided to pull an upcoming movie in which Paris was under attack, for example. Most choices are harder. There are no answers — certainly no one-size-fits-all answers — on how entertainment can fit in during these shocking after-hours. Personal choices remain that way.

But whatever the response, there may be some comfort is not seeing these activities as separate. Asking the too-soon question may be, in a sense, asking the wrong question. Maybe entertainment shouldn’t be treated as a distinct refuge to which we tentatively crawl back when it is safe to do so and after we sheepishly check to make sure no one is looking. Maybe it’s something that can and should be part of the understanding of the attacks in the first place.

In its purest form, entertainment is built into the process — part of a post-attack rebuttal that allows us to stand up for a life of choice and freedom, sure, but also a way we’ve been understanding the tragedy all along, comprehending those who plot to kill, and the humanity they would seek to destroy.

©2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Shinya Suzuki via Flickr

Volunteers Join Search Of Mudslide Site For Signs Of Life

Volunteers Join Search Of Mudslide Site For Signs Of Life

By Alexa Vaughn, The Seattle Times

DARRINGTON, Washington — They returned to the site of the mudslide Tuesday in search of surviving friends and family — or, at the very least, closure.

They found neither.

Among them were Forrest Thompson, 18, and several friends who were almost arrested Sunday for mounting their own unauthorized rescue operation against law enforcement’s orders. For the would-be rescuers, it was worth the risk for the chance to scour for any sign of life in what is rapidly becoming a death zone.

Tuesday morning, under new standing orders for those desperate to find loved ones, volunteers like Thompson and his group were allowed to search the site, accompanied by firefighters.

Members of Darrington Fire District 24 took 25 of more than 100 people who volunteered to help search Tuesday morning to the site, dividing them into five groups, each supervised by a firefighter. Other volunteers were standing by in case they were needed later, but Darrington Mayor Dan Rankin said the city would not be taking any more volunteers.

Thompson and dozens of other Darrington residents had been returning to the site since Saturday’s mudslide despite the orders of law enforcement. Thompson said he’d been frustrated that local fire and police officials barred so many from helping with the search, but appreciated the search-and-rescue compromise he took advantage of Tuesday.

“Right off the bat they should have had every one of the loggers here in there,” said Thompson, who works with logging companies in town. “Climbing across logs and mud all day is what I do for a living.”

Fire and police officials had earlier barred untrained volunteers, fearing they would need to be rescued themselves while traversing through the ankle-grabbing mud and broken remnants of homes and barns.

But State Patrol spokesman Bob Calkins acknowledged Tuesday that many Darrington residents were well-equipped to aid in the effort because of their work in the local logging industry.

Several volunteers used their dump trucks, tractors, trailers and other equipment to get through wreckage, Calkins said.

“Might be a different story if they were all fishermen and just had fishing poles,” Calkins said. “Frankly, their expertise is highly valued. The community of Darrington is very well-suited to respond to something like this.”

For his part, Thompson said that since Saturday, on unauthorized forays, he’s marked several dead bodies and dug out at least one that authorities later extracted from the scene. He and his friends have recovered family photo albums, jewelry and other sentimental possessions from the debris.

He’s gone through a crushed house owned by the parents of a friend, a Darrington High School class president who graduated with him last year. Thompson, just like almost everyone else in Darrington, knows somebody who is missing in the mud.

On Monday, Thompson’s team rescued a dog with broken legs, found pinned under a tree. The dog is now in a veterinary hospital in Sedro-Woolley.

“There are little air pockets everywhere,” Thompson said. “If a dog can still be alive, so can a person.”

When no survivors were found by late Tuesday afternoon, reporters asked Calkins of the State Patrol whether crews had officially transitioned their mission from rescue to recovery mode. He said they hadn’t.

“That’s a tough leap for this community to make,” he said.

But it’s one that cousins Eric and Nolan Meece, both 19, had to make Tuesday while out in the middle of the debris. A member of their search party, a son, found the body of his father, whom they’d been looking for since Saturday.

Eric Meece said confirming the death and helping recover the body didn’t help bring the group any closure.

“No, not anywhere close,” Eric Meece said. “We’re far away from that.”

Marcus Yam/Seattle Times/MCT