Sanewashing

I had a movie picked out for my Sunday viewing. But Fandango/Vudu didn’t like my password. I reset the password and it rejected what I had just successfully reset it to. And then I learned again resolving something through chat can take a really long time. Though in this case it wasn’t resolved. So to Netflix. I watched Hanna Gadsby’s Gender Agenda. This is a filmed stage show at a location in London. Gadsby was both comedian and host for the show with seven other gender queer standup comics. I hadn’t heard of any of them. Gadsby doesn’t like the term “nonbinary” and would rather be known as a gender surprise. Many men are uptight about protecting women’s sports. They’re afraid that a man would dress as a woman to have access to the perks of women’s sports. What are those perks? Jes Tom transitioned from female to male and also from lesbian to gay. That provided for lots of jokes about gay men contrasting with lesbian women. Chloe Petts is a masculine lesbian, which frequently gives her access to male privilege. She was very good. Asha Ward, is a lesbian. She focused more on drug use than on being lesbian. The audience loved her. I didn’t. Deanne Smith had top surgery and went no further. But they aren’t really nonbinary. Also good. Dahlia Belle is a transgender woman. She was very funny though her jokes were quite blue. Krishna Istha is a transgender man and nonbinary. And good. Alok, is transgender. They talked about how airline baggage weight limits are so unfair to transgender people needing to look fabulous. Overall, seven out of eight is pretty good odds. And with those seven I laughed a lot. This is a good one. I finished the book You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo. This is a science fiction story and the title is the name of a bioship, a spaceship that is grown, not built, and has a brain. How it got that name is not provided, though perhaps it is a whim of the rich person who owned it. Niko used to be a captain in the Holy Hive Mind in which an implanted chip allows her to communicate with her mixed species team telepathically. She got them all out of the Mind and the chip was turned off. They’re still her loyal crew and are very much a family. At the start of the story they’re running a high quality restaurant in a big space station. They need to evacuate and end up on the bioship with a few others, though the destination is not under their control. While in transit Dabry, the head chef teaches the ship how to cook, not just use the replicator. For the most part the story is fun and enjoyable. The part that isn’t is because of the cruelty of the leader of their forced destination. Early on I got the sense that, like many American stories, the ending will be pleasant one. The protagonists will thrive after the major conflict. The better the thriving the better we like the story. We Americans are annoyed when a story does not turn out that way and Hollywood has taken note. I’ve heard many times, and have said myself, that a story was great, but I hated the ending. Niece even says it about Romeo and Juliet. One example of a hated ending is The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason, which I read shortly after it came out in 2003. Another Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Both had such a beautiful story I didn’t want them to end the way they did. Especially with Patchett’s book I wanted her to to come up with a different solution to the problem that was the core of the story. I was a bit surprised with the book Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. I had picked it up during one of my trips to Australia. It didn’t have the expected happy ending. And that got me wondering whether that expectation is an American thing. I also finished the book Our Colors, a graphic novel, by Gengoroh Tagame. I had read and enjoyed both volumes of Tagame’s My Brother’s Husband, so I wanted to read this one too. As was the previous books this one is set on Japan. It focuses on Sora, a sixteen year old boy who knows he is gay and knows he can’t ever tell anyone. Homophobia is stronger in Japan. There is also Nao, a girl his same age who has been his friend since elementary school. Sora is friends with another boy and secretly in love with him, but is afraid that proclaiming his love will disgust the other boy and he’ll lose a friend. Sora also watches the other boys talk of pursuing girls and watches couples hold hands and wishes he could do the same. A bit before summer break Sora encounters Mr. Amamiya and his cafe. The cafe is strange in that it seems to have very few customers, sometimes just Sora and Nao. Mr. Amamiya is gay and has regrets. He vows he will no longer live a closeted life. Through long discussions with the older man Sora begins to understand that being gay does not have to lead to a lonely life in the closet. I enjoyed this one, as I did Tagame’s other books. The story and the artwork are well done. Alas, because it is a graphic novel, it takes only a few days to read and seems over too soon. Last Friday Kos of Daily Kos discussed a term I hadn’t heard before and now I’m hearing a lot. The term is sanewashing, taking someone’s word salad and extracting bits to make the speaker sound more sane. Kos gave an example. The day before the nasty guy gave an economic address. In response to a question the nasty guy gave a long rambling answer that didn’t answer the question, which Kos included in full. It is too long for me to repeat. Then Kos included the sanewashed version given by Michael Gold of the New York Times.

After his speech, Donald Trump was asked how he might address rising child care costs. In a jumbled answer, he said he would prioritize legislation on the issue but offered no specifics and insisted that his other economic policies, including tariffs, would “take care” of child care. “As much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.”

Saying the nasty guy gave “a jumbled answer” and not explaining what that means or what that says about his mental state? Sheesh. Also, the nasty guy said, in all that jumble, nothing about “prioritize legislation.” Said Kos:

Gold went out of his way to make Trump’s aside about tariffs sound semi-coherent, as opposed to the nonsensical pivot it really was. Or, to put it another way, Gold made it sound as if Trump gives a damn about child care when it’s clear from his answer here—as well as his current policy platform and his priorities during his administration—that he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about it.

Alas, the NYT is not the only media company doing this. On Monday Meteor Blades of Kos quoted some recent articles. Jon Alsop at the Columbia Journalism Review discussed sanewashing.

As applied to Trump, the idea is that major mainstream news outlets are routinely taking his incoherent, highly abnormal rants—be they on social media or at in-person events—and selectively quoting from them to emphasize lines that, in isolation, might sound coherent or normal, thus giving a misleading impression of the whole for people who didn’t read or watch the entire thing. ... If the word “sanewashing” is not new, neither is the idea that the media is masking Trump’s incoherence.

Blades quoted Jake Lahut, also of CJR who said that the decline of local news is a problem for campaigns. Elissa Slotkin, Michigan candidate for the US Senate, campaigned through northern Michigan. The crowd was decent, but there were no newspeople from the local television stations or the major paper of the area, the Traverse City Record-Eagle. There was a person from a public radio affiliate, the nonprofit startup Michigan Advance, and a New York journalist. And Blades quoted Jay Rosen, author of the 1999 book What Are Journalists For?, wrote in the Economist back in 2010:

My own view is that journalists should describe the world in a way that helps us participate in political life. That is what they are "for". But too often they position us as savvy analysts of a scene we are encouraged to view from a certain distance, as if we were spectators to our own democracy, or clever manipulators of our fellow citizens.

Rosen advocates for the “Citizen’s Agenda” in which the citizens, and not the politicians, party, or media, determine what topics the candidates should be talking about. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted John Stoehr of The Editorial Board discussing sanewashing:

I would say most of my students understood this. Others, however, were not prepared. They were not even willing to accept as theirs the responsibility of communicating. Some would even grow visibly upset at realizing I would not do the work for them. It was, after all, a shock. I was sometimes the first adult to hold them accountable not only for what they said, but for what they didn’t say. If they wanted to reach the highest standard, they had to take responsibility for themselves.

Then Stoehr quoted Parker Malloy of The New Republic:

This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former — and potentially future — president.

In the comments is a tweet from Ian Sams quoting an article in Huffpost.

“Here, presented for the first time, is an exhaustive list of the previous GOP presidents, vice presidents and nominees to these posts who have publicly said they will be voting for Trump in November: 1. Sarah Palin. That’s it. That’s the whole list.”

Way down in the comments is a tweet by Odee showing a cartoon by Mark Parisi. It shows a teacher getting a banned books list and using it as the year’s reading list. In an article published in the Texas Tribune and posted on Kos Nic Garcia wrote about something that has appeared in several news sources and alluded to in the comment about Republicans not voting for the nasty guy. Yes, one is Dick Cheney, VP under Bush II, frequently seen an instigator of the Iraq war, and sometimes called Darth Cheney, has said he will vote for Harris. His daughter Liz Cheney, co-chair of the Jan 6 Investigation Committee and whose presence there was a big reason why Wyoming did not return her to the House soon after, has also endorsed Harris. Clay Bennett tweeted a cartoon of the front page of a newspaper that has a big headline, “Dick Cheney to vote for Kamala Harris.” Headlines on related articles are, “Hell freezes over,” and “Pig flies.” Yeah, there was a debate last night. I heard a little bit of the nasty guy saying something about his daddy left him no inheritance and he earned billions through his own wonderful talent before I was able to switch to some music. I haven’t yet read the commentary on Kos about the debate. If I find anything of interest (beyond “Harris won”) I’ll include it in a future post.