Justice: Late, But Not Too Late

Larry Nassar, former doctor to young female athletes, will spend the rest of his life in prison. As she sentenced him to 40 to 175 years in jail, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said, “I just signed your death warrant.”

Nassar may have been the most successful serial abuser of young women in history. Judge Aquilina invited 156 women to testify in her courtroom about their assault by the hands of Nassar, beginning in 1992, 25 years ago. Over and over, he penetrated their vaginas with his fingers or his fist as part of his “therapy”. Some were younger than 10.

Nassar earned his medical degree from Michigan State University and worked there as a sports doctor. He became famous as the doctor for USA Gymnastics for nearly 20 years, which is in charge of the Olympic gymnastics team. His life of crime began to unravel when Nassar was first publicly accused in September 2016 by former gymnast Rachael Denhollander. But his sexual abuse had been reported to authorities many times long before that.

In 1997, Larissa Boyce reported what Nassar was doing to the MSU women’s gymnastics coach, Kathie Klages, and another girl confirmed that she too had been “treated”. Both girls were shamed into silence. A women’s track coach was told in 1999. Athletic trainers were told in 2000. In 2004, clinical psychologist Dr. Gary Stollak was told. That same year, Brianne Randall, 17 years old, told the police in Meridian Township, near the Michigan State campus, that Nassar had touched her vagina and breasts. The police never told MSU.

MSU President Lou Anna Simon was told in 2014 that a police report had been filed against a sports doctor. She let her subordinates handle it and never saw the report. The subordinates included 3 other MSU doctors and the athletic trainer, as well as Dr. William Strampel, dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine, who decided Nassar’s actions were medically appropriate. At least 14 MSU employees were told about Nassar’s actions.

USA Gymnastics paid star gymnast McKayla Maroney over $1 million to keep quiet about Nassar’s abuse. The agreement included a $100,000 fine if she revealed what Nassar had done to her.

The only thing that stopped Nassar’s abuse was the public accusation by Rachael Denhollander last September. She was motivated by a story the month before in the “Indy Star” that USA Gymnastics had a long history of ignoring reports of sexual abuse by coaches.

How do serial abusers manage to continue their criminal activity? One reason is that making such accusations is deeply painful. It is difficult for a teenager to complain about the nature of their treatment by a doctor, especially if he is advertised as a “miracle worker”. At a preliminary hearing, Shannon Smith, one of Nassar’s attorneys, asked Denhollander if she was coming forward for the money. Denhollander explained some of the cost of telling the truth. “My advocacy for sexual assault victims, something I cherished, cost me my church and our closest friends three weeks before I filed my police report. I was left alone and isolated.”

The institutions who protect abusers circle the wagons against accusers. The vice chair of Michigan State’s board of trustees, Joel Ferguson, called victims’ lawyers “folks chasing ambulances” looking for a “payday”. A famous former prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was hired to by MSU investigate, and President Lou Anna Simon claimed in April that MSU was conducting a “thorough internal review”. In December, Fitzgerald exonerated the University by writing that nobody there knew what Nassar was doing. It turns out that Fitzgerald had been hired to defend the University against lawsuits. His team interviewed none of Nassar’s victims.

The lifelong sexual abusers who have made news were all protected by a cone of silence. Penn State administrators looked the other way when they heard about Jerry Sandusky’s abuse of boys. Reporting about Harvey Weinstein detailed the many people in Hollywood who knew about him and did nothing. Now a scandal has erupted in Germany about the star TV director Dieter Wedel, who was allowed to continue his predatory behavior by state-funded television channel Saarlaendischer Rundfunk, which knew about his abuse in the 1980s.

Denhollander wrote,  “The first step toward changing the culture that led to this atrocity is to hold enablers of abuse accountable.” In Nassar’s case, the enablers are renowned institutions.

Some Americans apparently feel that men are under attack. I disagree – men who abuse women are under attack and it’s about time. But there may be a backlash from defenders of the male-dominated status quo, the patriarchal assumptions which allowed unpunished abuse to be so widespread. Trump was put into office because many white men and women feared that a world was crumbling where white male sexual dominance was a fundamental assumption. They didn’t care that he abused women and bragged about it; in fact, many supported him because he so openly violated new standards of correct behavior.

Eventually he too will get what he deserves.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, January 30, 2018

The Greatest Show on Earth

I didn’t expect much more than a bit of diversion from the new film about P.T. Barnum, “The Greatest Showman”. A musical biopic from Hollywood is rarely a source of thoughtful history or powerful emotion. But “Greatest Showman” delivered something unexpected: a morality tale appropriate to 21^st-century America.

Phineas Taylor Barnum’s real life was far more interesting than any movie could portray. He dropped out of school at 15, ran a grocery store at 17, started a weekly newspaper in Danbury, Connecticut, at age 19, and sold lottery tickets. As an adult, besides his famous freak shows and traveling circus, he campaigned against slavery, was elected to the Connecticut legislature after the Civil War, and served as the mayor of Bridgeport.

Barnum’s passion was entertainment. He got rich by exploiting the public desire for sensation, often duping his audiences with fraudulently advertised human and animal curiosities. He displayed the “Feejee mermaid” in his American Museum in New York, the torso and head of a monkey sewn on to the body of a fish. He bought Joice Heth, a slave woman in her 70’s who was blind and paralyzed, and exhibited her as “The Greatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World,” the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington. She died 7 months later, and Barnum set up a public autopsy before 1500 spectators to prove her age, then rejected the results.

Barnum’s most famous attraction, whom he called General Tom Thumb, was the dwarf Charles Sherwood Stratton, a distant relative, whom Barnum began displaying at age 5. Stratton was a talented performer, whose performances went beyond the usual display of “human curiosities” to be compared by theater critics with other professional singers and dancers. Barnum and Stratton toured Europe, were presented to Queen Victoria, and thrilled audiences across the US. Stratton became wealthy and bailed Barnum out when he went bankrupt in 1856. He married another little person, Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump, in a highly publicized wedding in 1863, and the couple was received by President Lincoln at the White House.

Barnum sought ever more sensational acts. Although the couple did not produce any children, Barnum acquired a succession of babies wherever they performed. His autobiography, “The Life of P.T. Barnum”, was sub-titled “Golden Rules for Money-Making”.

Presenting complex historical characters is not Hollywood’s strength. Barnum’s contradictory qualities as showman, hoaxer, anti-slavery activist and politician are too much to fit into a big budget spectacle, much less a family-oriented musical.

Film critics did not like “Showman”.  In England, the “Telegraph” called it “insane” and “miserable”. Canada’s “Globe and Mail” said it was “empty, moronic, pandering and utterly forgettable”. These critics were expecting history, but “Showman” delivered instead a spectacle. “Showman” is itself a historical hoax, transforming Barnum into a celebrator of human diversity, who freed his “freaks” from the shackles of popular prejudice. The film’s P.T. Barnum is not a historical character, but a vehicle for a moral message not entirely foreign to the real Barnum’s political ideas.

The sacrifice of historical truth for message is the source of the sub-plot of the white-black love affair between Zac Efron as Barnum’s partner and Zendaya as a trapeze artist. Love conquers all, in this case the racial prejudices of the upper class.

Barnum profited from the presentation of freaks, but also helped to transform his unusual collaborators into respected personalities. His historical efforts to abolish the enslavement of some Americans by other Americans are transformed in the film into a broader “celebration of humanity”. Barnum exhibited Annie Jones Elliot, a bearded girl and later woman, paying her $150 a week, an enormous salary at that time.

When the bearded woman in “Showman”, the biracial singer Keala Settle, belts out “This is Me”, she speaks for all human freaks and curiosities. The song won a Golden Globe and became a hit in countries as diverse as South Korea, Sweden and Australia.

 “When the sharpest words wanna cut me down,

Gonna send a flood, gonna drown them out.

I am brave, I am bruised,

I am who I’m meant to be, this is me.”

That’s a simple message we need in 2018.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, January 23, 2018

Dangerous Words in the White House

It doesn’t bother me that Trump said the word “shithole”. I don’t know if my newspaper will print that word or sanitize it. Many media corporations are shifting their normal rules about what they say or print, because the President’s vulgar words are newsworthy.

“Dirty words”, like the ones George Carlin spelled out in 1972, have one by one been moving inexorably into the popular culture. I’m still always surprised to hear the word “sucks” on TV.

I was even more surprised to see one of the contestants on a prime-time quiz show on German TV, a man named H. P. Baxter, wearing a white T-shirt with big black letters spelling out “Who the FUCK is H.P. Baxxter?” playing on the name of a German musician. Nobody on air seemed to care.

I’ve never liked self-appointed language police. I believe we should all be able to choose our own words to fully express our meanings.

The meaning is what matters. Outraged focus on word choice can obscure the greater significance of meaning. That is happening with Trump’s “salty language”.

What bothers me is Trump’s meaning, when he said he wanted more immigrants from Norway and fewer from Africa. Any white is better than any black immigrant. It is difficult to find a clearer expression of white supremacy than Trump’s words to a gathering of Senators in the Oval Office.

I know some immigrants from Nigeria, Ghana and other black African nations, students I taught at Illinois College and their families. The students were sophisticated, multilingual, well educated and high achievers. They were a delight to have in the classroom. Some have stayed in the US in jobs or graduate school. None of them had lived in “huts”, as Trump characterized Nigerians in a June meeting.

Certainly Trump is not the first racist in the White House. White supremacy was an American principle at the founding and throughout the 19^th century. Even Lincoln, the only President that Trump will grant to have been more presidential than himself, did not believe in the full equality of the races. He said in his debates with Stephen Douglas, “I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”

During the 20^th century, presidential thinking and action have pushed away from racist policy and language, sometimes leading, sometimes following American society’s increasing rejection of white supremacy. The election of Barack Obama could have been a sign that our national government would never again express white supremacist ideology in practice or speech.

But Donald Trump never accepted Obama’s election as legitimate. He led the most public fight to declare Obama an African and unworthy to be President. Racism in the guise of birtherism was Trump’s main political focus as he prepared his presidential campaign. He has never given up this idea.

Maybe Trump’s word choice is too crude for public and official presidential business. There might be two sides to that question. There shouldn’t be any question about advocating white supremacy in the White House.

Every elected representative of the American people, sworn to uphold the Constitution, should reject both Trump’s words and meanings. Of course, Trump denied using the words everybody heard him use. The most conservative Republicans at the Oval Office meeting pretended not to have heard them. Senators Tom Cotton (AR) and David Perdue (GA) said, “We do not recall the president saying these comments specifically.” No other Republicans who were there admitted publicly that Trump said those words, although Sen. Lindsay Graham told a fellow Senator about them.

Pretending that there is nothing to talk about appeases white supremacy at the highest level of government. Supporting such racist talk is a step in the direction of promoting racist policy.

Let’s not move backwards on racial equality, equal justice for all, support for diversity, and welcoming new Americans from all over the world. And let’s get that racist out of the White House.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, January 16, 2018