psychology dector

Only in this dystopian, Trumpian universe in which we now live could the president vow to preserve one’s 2 nd Amendment rights while attempting to denigrate and destroy freedom of the press guaranteed under the 1 st Amendment.   I am quite sure the irony escapes our new president-elect and his boy wonder, conversion-therapy acolyte Mike Pence.   John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight on HBO, was spot on when he said Americans must be prepared to fight every day in the next four years and not wait until the 2020 election to launch a war to send the barbarian at the gate home permanently to his gaudy tower on 5 th Avenue.   It is time for people to stand up for one another.   Democracy is not about agreeing with one’s neighbors, but the right to voice disagreement without threat of harm or violence from those same neighbors.   Hillary Clinton was right when she said that America is stronger when people stand together in their differences.   There are di...

Looking into the face of bigotry and misogyny Day three in a somber world.   Protesters fill the streets every evening now.   Mostly, the crowds chant and rage and cry in fear and trepidation, but in Portland, Oregon, the police are calling the situation “a riot,” which probably allows them to bring in more hardware of war to force citizens to accept the unacceptable.   The evening newscasters keep apologizing for the signs:   “Fuck Trump!” and “Trump’s Got a Little Dick.”   They warn parents to send their children into another room.   I don’t think the vulgar signs are the problem; it is the fear of “Trump = Hitler,” as another sign put it, that should worry us all and scare our children. Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada), as reported in Mother Jones , said that Trump is “a sexual predator who lost the popular vote.”   According to David Leonhardt of The New York Times, Clinton won the popular vote by a greater margin than Gore, Nixon and Kennedy in t...

One of the voices I’ve missed in this crazy election season is David Carr’s.   He was The New York Times media reporter and author of The Night of the Gun:  A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own.   (Simon & Schuster, 2009).   He would have something to say about the way the media has covered Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and how each candidate has manipulated those same media outlets in return.   It has been quite a feeding frenzy, and Carr would know what to make of it and possibly, how to make sense of it. Working in an academic institution, I am struck by the kind of snobbery those in the ivory tower have for journalists.   Evidently, it is more courageous and intellectual to research and write a paper on some obtuse and disconnected corner of the universe than it is to go out into the desert embedded with American soldiers and report back on the war against ISIS.   When one teacher heard that I called myself a...

If someone were to tell me that a smaller film about journalism and the molestation scandal in the Catholic Church would take home the Best Picture Oscar, I would not have believed it.   Yet, there was Tom McCarthy, writer and director of Spotlight (Anonymous Content / First Look Media / Participant Media, 2015), on stage last night at the end of the lengthy telecast thanking the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for their generosity in awarding the film Oscar’s ultimate honor.   It was truly a moment. Why was it a moment? Well, in a time when newspaper readership is in the dumper, a film about hardworking journalists succeeded in generating a discussion. In a time when our culture is mired in gossip, infotainment and the cult of celebrity with those celebrities having done nothing to earn that status except star in their own sex tapes and reality television shows, real, deeper truth and character won out. In a time when most people accept what they are fed by the...