Month: May 2019

Chernobyl. HBO. Monday, May 6, 9 p.m.

In the sepulchral darkness underneath the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, where poisoned water from the wrecked water-cooling tanks swirls madly to and fro and radioactive steam has burned out the lights, three technicians wade through the basement. They’ve volunteered to manually open water pipes that may—may—keep the plant’s reactor from a complete meltdown, but they can barely see where they’re going amid the superheated detritus of the nuclear core. When the killer radiation burns out the last of their flashlights, the darkness turns total and suffocating, broken only by the sound of their Geiger counters, rising from a clickety-clack to a hellish roar.

That scene from HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries is more terrifying than anything I’ve seen in a horror movie in decades. Or maybe not, because Chernobyl really is a horror movie: not just about errant technology, but also a maleficent portrait of an ideology that denies the existence of error.

As scary as the scene in the waters under the reactor is, the signature moment in Chernobyl may be a meeting among Communist Party bosses in the hours immediately after the explosion. One of the bureaucrats expresses doubt about the official insistence that radiation from the shattered plant is contained, even though outside, firemen and medical workers are writhing in their own blood and vomit. A senior apparatchik glares him down.

“Our faith in Soviet socialism will always be rewarded,” says the party elder. “Have faith, comrades.” It is not a suggestion.

The explosion of the Chernobyl reactor on April 26, 1986, was the start of one of the greatest man-made calamities in the history of the planet. The explosion of the reactor spewed so much radioactive fallout that more than a thousand square miles of the former Soviet Union remains abandoned to this day.

Somewhere between 4,000 and 93,000 people, depending on whose estimate you accept, died as a result of Chernobyl. (Except in the official annals of Soviet doublespeak, where the death toll is just 31.) Some Russian leaders—among them Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president—say the casualty list should include the Soviet Union itself, which within five years had vanished from the planet.

Producer and screenwriter Craig Mazin’s remarkable script doesn’t go quite that far in terms of either chronology or political implication. But it’s a chillingly powerful mosaic of the catastrophe, from its technical origins in pathological Soviet secrecy to the exorbitant toll it continued to exact on innocent people all over the country long after the reactor was contained.

That mosaic is assembled from the interlocking stories of about a dozen (mostly real; many doomed) characters, ranging from techs to physicists, firemen to soldiers. The backbone of the narrative is the tale of nuclear engineer Valery Legaslov (Jared Harris, The Crown) and deputy prime minister Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard, River), an unlikely duo paired as investigators in the first hours after the explosion.

Legaslov is already skeptical about the official line that things in Chernobyl are under control; Shcherbina, like most senior party officials, believes the company line. “I prefer my opinion to yours,” he sneers to Legaslov, who retorts: “I’m a nuclear physicist. Before your present position, you worked in a show factory.”

Surprisingly, they wind up working well together, and Shcherbina swings around to become an effective advocate within the party for drastic action to mute the effects of the reactor.

By the time they learn that some Soviet scientists were aware of the defect that caused the Chernobyl explosion but were silenced by the government Shcherbina isn’t even surprised, just worried that the increasingly unhinged Legaslov will get them jailed or shot. “That went surprisingly well,” he tells Legaslov after one confrontation with party bosses. “You came off like a naive idiot. Naive idiots are not a threat.”

Legaslov, Shcherbina, and another physicist, Ula Khomyuk (a composite character played by Emily Watson, Angela’s Ashes) are heroic in their defiance of the Soviet government’s willful blindness.

But Mazin’s script finds courage in his other story threads, too: firefighters who charge on to the surface of the reactor even though their shoes are melting; a wife of a victim of radiation poisoning, committing slow-motion suicide by refusing to leave him to die alone.

There’s a group of coal miners who know their mission—they’ve been ordered to tunnel into the reactor to help clean it up—will have a lethal conclusion but press on anyway. When they’re not stripped naked to wield their shovels in the fierce underground heat, they’re cracking mordant anti-communist jokes:

“What’s as big as a house, burns 20 meters of fuel every hour, puts out a shitload of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces? A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces.”

Mazin’s script treats the Soviet state with a scalding, contemptuous rage not seen in Hollywood productions since the early days of the Cold War. After decades of systematic starvation, forced relocations and bloody purges, ordinary citizens are so cynical about their government that they assume the order to evacuate the diseased farmland around Chernobyl is just one more mindless act of repression.

Yet their fear of the West is real enough as well. More than once, in the moments after the explosion, somebody asks: “The Americans?” Chernobyl the TV show is a painful reminder that Chernobyl the cataclysm could have been inflicted thousands of times around the world, not accidentally but on purpose. And the surreal scenes of Soviet conscripts fitting themselves with lead diapers to protect their testicles from radiation as they roamed the vast quarantined area with rifles, shooting abandoned, contaminated family pets, could have happened here, too, the world ending with a bang and a whimper.

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Facebook announced yesterday that it was permanently banning Louis Farrahkhan, Alex Jones, Infowars, Milo Yiannopoulis, Paul Nehlen, Laura Loomer, and Paul Joseph Watson from Facebook and its sister service, Instagram. Each of these accounts, the company says, violated Facebook’s community standards governing “Dangerous Individuals and Organziations.” Among other things, these

do not allow any organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence, from having a presence on Facebook. This includes organizations or individuals involved in the following:

• Terrorist activity

• Organized hate

• Mass or serial murder

• Human trafficking

• Organized violence or criminal activity

We also remove content that expresses support or praise for groups, leaders, or individuals involved in these activities.

Yesterday’s action was partly intended to combat a “loophole” that allowed Infowars and Jones, who had already been banned by the service, to keep appearing on it. Unofficial fan pages widely shared material from Infowars and Jones. As Wired explains, Facebook plans to stop them with a tool

usually reserved for terrorist organizations and self-proclaimed hate groups. The company says that users will be prohibited from sharing Infowars videos, radio clips, articles, and other content from the site unless they are explicitly condemning the material. Fan pages or groups that reshare Infowars content in a sincere or appreciative manner won’t be permitted.

As a private platform, Facebook is completely within its legal rights to ban whomever it chooses for pretty much whatever reason it wants. But whether it’s wise to start banning awful, stupid expression that falls short of true threats and other illegal activity is a very different matter. I’d argue that it’s not, as it feeds into the tendency to try suppress beliefs that one considers contemptible, dangerous, or evil. Those are not sharply delimited categories, and the tendency will be for more and more material to be seen as worthy of being policed, regulated, and eliminated. That is what’s happening on many college campuses, and the results are not encouraging for a society that believes in freedom of expression.

The better solution for social media platforms is to give users robust tools to filter and control content, and to foster an online culture that that is broadly tolerant of diverse viewpoints and conducive to new forms of media literacy. The promise of social media platforms, which are distinct from more traditional forms of publishing or distribution (such as an edited outlet such as Reason.com), are that they allow individuals not just to express ourselves almost effortlessly but to tailor our feeds to infinitely individualized tastes. We are losing some of the utopian potential of the internet every time a new clampdown on content or process takes place.

Facebook’s action comes a broader context in which support for free expression is slipping on both governmental and private fronts. In the wake of the Christchurch mosque shooting in March, for instance, the New Zealand government banned not only certain types of guns but possession of the manifesto written by alleged shooter Brenton Tarrant and footage of his killing spree (which was livestreamed briefly on Facebook before being taken down). A 22-year-old man has been arrested for distributing video of the shooting and faces up to 14 years in jail. Even more worrying, writes Jack Shafer at Politico, New Zealand’s five top media outlets have voluntarily agreed to censor their coverage of Tarrant’s trial.

The news organizations vow to limit coverage of statements “that actively champion white supremacist or terrorist ideology,” avoid quoting the accused killer’s “manifesto,” and suppress any “message, imagery, symbols” or hand signs like a Nazi salute made by the accused or his supporters in support of white supremacy. “Where the inclusion of such signals in any images is unavoidable, the relevant parts of the image shall be pixelated,” the guidelines add.

Shafer argues that paternalism barely begins to describe what’s going on here:

The Kiwi editors don’t appear to trust their readers and viewers to handle the difficult and disturbing material that’s sure to billow out of the Tarrant trial. They regard New Zealanders as children who must be sheltered from the heinous and despicable lest they become tainted with its influence. That’s essentially the position New Zealand Chief Censor [David] Shanks took when he banned the manifesto in March, saying that documents like it were aimed at a “vulnerable and susceptible” audience and designed to incite them to perform similar crimes. “There is content in [the manifesto] that points to means by which you can conduct other terrorist atrocities…it could be seen as instructional,” Shanks said.

Although the New Zealand media have promised to thoroughly cover the trial, Shafer is right to suspect that reporters will do a particularly good job “from a crouch.” He’s also correct to worry that “the journalistic groupthink encouraged by the pact could result in undercoverage of extremist movements and leave readers unnecessarily vulnerable.”

Something similar is at work with Facebook’s ban. The company seems worried that its users are impressionable people liable to be gulled into believing nonsense. It also probably just doesn’t want to associated with offensive content of all kinds. But nobody should assume that Facebook supports, say, Alex Jones, just because they allow him to use their service, any more than whatever phone service he uses supports him because he makes calls on it.

We live in a moment when the tech giants themselves are explicitly calling for regulation, both to stave off certain forms of government intervention and to lock in current market positions. Politicians as different as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) are threatening to regulate online speech and to end to the internet as we’ve known it by gutting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In Europe, copyright law is being marshaled to stifle the free exchange of ideas and content in order to protect legacy entertainment companies. Massively overhyped fears about the influence of Russian trolls during the 2016 election have given rise to story after story about how stupid Facebook users are, a prelude to empowering the very sort of gatekeepers we supposedly left behind when we migrated en masse into cyberspace in the mid-1990s. An era is passing away, not because of the foulness of online trolls but because of the institutional response they’ve inspired.

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Bernie Sanders had his own TV program from 1986 to 1988, back when the socialist senator was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. The show was called Bernie Speaks, it aired on public access TV, and Politico just had the full run digitized. As Sanders makes his second bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, those digitized episodes have now been posted on the cable access channel’s website, where anyone with an internet connection can explore them.

“Over the past few weeks, I watched them all,” Holly Otterbein writes in Politico. “The production values are so low that they’re sometimes hard to hear and see, which makes them feel more valuable, like an archive of lost secrets.” The topics covered, she reports, “include Plato, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, the ‘immorality’ of the war in Nicaragua, the ‘stupid’ property tax, the effects of the looming nuclear apocalypse on children, Burlington’s waterfront, Burlington’s trash dump, Burlington’s snowplow operation, the ‘incredible increase’ in crime, the close-fisted state Legislature, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer and the reasons that punk rockers wear black.”

Unlike Otterbein, I haven’t watched them all. But I did check out that last one. The episode originally aired in March 1988, and it mostly consists of Sanders playing roving reporter at the Burlington Square Mall. About halfway through the program, he starts talking with a couple of friendly punk-rock kids. He asks them what they don’t like about society. They reply with a collection of complaints, some vague and some highly specific, that—speaking as someone who in March of 1988 was 17 and listening to punk rock and sometimes hanging out in malls—is as good a condensation as you’re ever likely to find of a particular teenage worldview in that particular historical moment. “People are not open-minded enough,” one says. “They think that in order to be stable in society you have to have money, you have to live in a suburb, you have to do the ‘set’ things, such as have so many people over for dinner…a week, or you’re not socially acceptable. You’ve got to dress a certain way to be socially acceptable. And I don’t believe in having to belong to anything to be a person. I can do basically what I want with my appearance, with my attitude, and it doesn’t matter.”

They both identify themselves as anarchists, as 1980s mall-punks were prone to do. But most people’s politics are a mish-mosh, and that’s true here too. One of them says he’d be happy in a communist society with “no freedom of enterprise” as long as there’s still freedom of speech. The other says she’s “kind of an anarchist too, but I don’t believe in total anarchy, because then we’re just gonna kill ourselves.” Sanders plays his Phil Donahue role with aplomb, holding the mic and nodding his head encouragingly.

No doubt there’s more newsworthy stuff in this archive. Mayor Sanders had things to say about everything from the Sandinistas to socialized medicine, from local taxes to housing policy. Historians, journalists, Bernie fans, oppo researchers—there’s something in here for all of them. But in these Friday A/V Club posts we like to zero in on weirdly illuminating little cultural artifacts, and what could be more weirdly illuminating than a future presidential candidate wandering around a shopping center with a microphone? Besides, the mall punks are making me nostalgic. To see them for yourselves, start at the 14:21 mark:

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

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When is a wheelchair-bound inmate with brain cancer not considered terminally ill? When a Justice Department lawyer is evaluating his medical record.

On Wednesday a judge ordered the release of federal inmate Steve Brittner, 55, under the new provisions of the FIRST STEP Act, a criminal justice bill passed late last year. The judge ordered the release over the objections of federal prosecutors, who argued that Brittner, who is suffering from a malignant brain tumor, does not meet the “extraordinary and compelling” reasons to qualify for what’s known as “compassionate release.”

Brittner’s case illustrates both the impact of the new law and the extraordinary hurdles terminally ill inmates and their families still face when trying to squeeze a small amount of mercy out of the federal government.

One provision of the FIRST STEP Act allows federal inmates to take their pleas to a judge if the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) rejects their petitions for compassionate release—a policy that is supposed to afford elderly and terminally ill inmates the opportunity to finish their lives among family and in relative peace.

As Reason reported last year, the petition process for compassionate release has long been arbitrary, inscrutable, and cruel. Justice Department records obtained last year by the criminal justice advocacy group FAMM show that since 2014, at least 81 federal inmates have died while waiting for the government to review their applications.

Brittner was sentenced in 2016 to 48 months in federal prison for distributing methamphetamines. In January 2018, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. By that November, an oncologist listed his prognosis as “poor” and discussed the possibility of ending treatment and beginning end-of-life hospice care. Brittner reported fatigue, weakness, and increasing memory loss. According to court filings, he is increasingly confined to a wheelchair.

Brittner filed two petitions for compassionate release to the BOP, and both times the BOP rejected them on the grounds that his life expectancy exceeded his release date.

A month later, Donald Trump signed the FIRST STEP Act into law. Brittner then filed a motion to a federal judge to review his case under the new provisions. But the Justice Department opposed his motion on several grounds, including that his brain cancer, while deadly, was not spreading, and the median life expectancy for his condition is two to three years.

“Although defendant’s medical records show that he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, those records do not indicate that the tumor has metastasized,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Montana wrote in a response to Brittner’s motion. “Rather, the records show that the tumor has not recurred or progressed since surgery in March 2018.”

The U.S. government was arguing, in essence, that Brittner wasn’t dying fast enough to qualify for compassionate release.

U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen disagreed. She ruled that the Justice Department’s interpretation of the FIRST STEP Act was seriously flawed. A metastatic brain tumor was only one of several examples of conditions that qualify as terminal illnesses, not part of an exclusive list. (She also noted that the overall survival time for those with Brittner’s particular type of brain tumor is closer to one year.)

“It is clear from the nature of his disease and his worsening condition as documented above, that Brittner’s prognosis is grim, his disease is terminal, and the length of his life can be measured most likely in weeks, as opposed to months,” Christensen wrote in her order granting Brittner compassionate release.

“Finally, the Court is convinced that Brittner poses no safety risk to the community,” Christensen continued. “Brittner is in an advanced stage of cancer and is wheelchair bound.”

“This is a very telling case,” says FAMM president Kevin Ring. “On one hand, the First Step Act’s reforms to compassionate release worked as intended and this family prevailed. On the other hand, it blows my mind that the Justice Department and BOP still fought tooth and nail to keep a low-level drug offender who is dying of brain cancer and bound to a wheelchair away from his family for the final weeks of his life. They’ll say they were just doing their jobs, but their job is to do justice.”

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