The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 36: Fear and the NRA, and a Hymn for Orlando

Episode Date: June 24, 2016

In this episode, a gun blogger critiques the N.R.A., and a Presbyterian minister rewrites old hymns for new crises. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

the conversation with someone when they have that revelation. It begins making the show pretty huge. How does this work as a national story? From one world trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. What is this? Oh, wake up. It's a gun. That's the answer. All right? Now, how does this work? It works.

by putting a magazine in here, which I'm not going to do. Mike Weiser is a gun guy. That's not my description, it's his. Mike the gun guy is the name of his blog. Weiser joined the NRA when he was just 11 years old, and he later worked in his uncle's gun business, building revolvers. He sold guns wholesale to law enforcement, and eventually he opened up a retail shop of his own.

He's a certified firearms instructor, and New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos took his course. recently while he was reporting a story on the gun industry. Your response is, stop, I've got a gun, or stop, I'll shoot. You're letting him know that he's now entering. He's moving from burglary to aggravated assault. Evan found out that Mike Weiser has a pretty unusual position. He's pro-gun, pro-gun rights, but if you read what he writes about the NRA,

you think, I'd watch my back if I were this guy. Weiser is scathing about the organization and has, how it works to create a climate of fear. You know, as a typical kid in the 50s, I had three hobbies, which was toy soldiers, toy guns, and toy trains. Did you grow up hunting? Were you in a place? No, I did hunt a lot.

I have hunted a lot over the years, but I grew up actually in the middle of Washington, D.C. And as a matter of fact, when I grew up in Washington, which was in the 50s, that's when I joined the NRA when I was 11 years old, because I was a member of a rifle team, an NRA-sponsored rifle team, that we shot in the rifle range in my brother's junior high school, McFarland Junior High School. And I would take the gun home Fridays in a little sack, walk home for a mile, clean it, play with it, bring it back Monday. And this is the middle of Washington, D.C., and that was not unusual for the way which people thought and dealt with guns back in those days. You now live outside Springfield, Massachusetts, home of Smith and Weston.

It's really sort of in the center of the gun world in America. How big of an industry are we talking about? How many people are? It's actually a very tiny industry. I mean, there are five companies that together, if you go in any gun shop, these five companies are maybe six companies. 80% of the guns that are in these shops are made by these six companies. Smith & Wesson has, I don't know, 1,800 employees, Ruger maybe a couple of thousand. You know, ditto Remington.

These are small companies. The contrast between the size of the industry in terms of the dollar. dollar amounts as opposed to the public concern about the industry is extraordinary. There's no other industry like that. How do we then understand the fact that when we talk about the gun industry in America, often we associated in the same breath with things like big oil and big tobacco, these vast industrial and political enterprises? So how is it that, in fact, this tiny industry, as you put it, has accumulated such a large political profile?

Largely because of one thing and one thing only, and that's the mass shootings. The mass shootings. Tell me more what you mean. This year, okay, roughly 200 people a day will be seriously injured because somebody pointed a gun at them and pulled the trigger. And this has been going on with this level of violence since the mid-80s. But because it's, for the most part, focused on inner city areas, it's not the kind of thing that gets into the paper because we always think of the inner city as being a place of crime. So what else is new? So it's not the fact that you have this kind of daily in-and-out shootings. It's more when something that really newsworthy occurs, and that's obviously when you get a mass shooting.

You joined the NRA when you were 11 years old. Is it a different organization today than it was back then? When I joined the NRA, the organization overwhelmingly focused on sports shooting and hunting. And that's why most people own guns. I mean, in 1955, three-quarters, maybe almost 80% of all the guns that Americans owned were long guns, shotguns, and rifles. And they were owned because the population was overwhelmingly still either rural or it was farming. And the NRA reflected that. What they really began doing in the mid-80s was shift people's attention towards the whole issue of crime, urban crime.

In the history of guns in America, the Rodney King verdict and the riots that followed are important. Tell us the story of what happened. Rodney King was arrested and then severely beaten up by a group of LAPD. The beating was actually caught. somebody was filming it. Three or four of the cops were charged with assault, and the jury came back with a not guilty verdict. And the day that that verdict was announced by that evening,

there were whole sections of downtown L.A. that were up in flames. And there had been riots after Martin Luther King had been shot, too. But in the 1960s, you didn't have video. But I remember sitting in front of my TV set. And there was a camera, a news camera, in a helicopter, and a car pulled up at an intersection, and three or four African-American young men pulled this white driver out of the car and began punching him in the middle of the street. And the helicopter with the camera was up there broadcasting it live.

And that broadcast, and the subsequent broadcasts, were seen in every household in America. And what effect did it have on gun sales? The next day you couldn't get into a gun shop to buy a gun because they were all sold out. Did the impact of that, the idea behind that surge in gun sales, in effect that was prompted by that racial anxiety and the vision of crime in the city, did that continue or was it a short-term phenomenon? It wasn't, the actual sales weren't. It was the whole notion of using a gun or keeping a gun to protect yourself. That's what continued and grew in terms of the dialogue, in terms of the culture. That's when state-level NRA organizations began pushing for concealed carry.

That's when a group of right-wing lawyers first began planning a case that would eventually get to the court, which it did in 2008. So it wasn't so much that the gun sales continued at a high level, but it was more that the whole kind of culture of the industry and the whole discussion about guns changed and continued. If we want to get a window into how the NRA talks about crime and the fear of crime, it might be useful to listen to a clip from Wayne LaPierre, the NRA. Tragedy introduced us to the heroes of Sam Bernardino's police department. But tragedy is routine in their city where politicians slash their budget and cut their ranks. Now violent gangs waged bloody turf wars every night.

They have all the guns they want, but law-abiding California citizens live in fear. Their governor says he serves them, while he releases 2,300 convicted murderers back to the same streets they terrorize. The elites lecture about compassion. But if there was even an inkling that these killers would head for Beverly Hills or Berkeley, they die behind bars. The elites and their families will always be protected. It's the law-abiding average Californians who face nightfall alone with their faith and what's left of their guns. I'm the National Rifle Association of America, and I'm freedom's safest place. Mike, we hear in that a whole range of different kinds of artifacts of this moment, different kinds of threats, presumably to people's safety.

Can you explain what it is that's going on there? What would inspire that message? And what does the NRA hope people will get from it? There's no reality to any of this. Okay. What there is is a consistent attempt to marshal support on a basis of fear on one hand and patriotism on the other. How much do people believe it and how much do they say this is nonsense? Here's the problem.

You know, I mean, I sold guns to over nine or 10,000 people in my gun shop, okay? And I can tell you when they walked in and they bought the gun, they walked in to buy the gun, they walked in to buy the gun. gun because they wanted to buy a gun. You're not buying something that you need, okay? It's something to buy, okay? And nobody wants to admit that they just spent 500 bucks on something that they didn't need. So they'll just throw out whatever is in their head. And whatever is in their head is usually what they heard from somebody else.

Oh, I need a gun for self-defense. But the bottom line is the number of people who really ultimately use a gun in self-defense. is a very, very tiny fraction of the number of people who own and number of people who buy guns. And as far as the idea of the, you know, the patriotic side, I mean, you can use a patriotic argument for really anything. I mean, when was the last time you went to the Super Bowl and at the end of the halftime show didn't see the Blue Angels fly overhead? Now, that's not an appeal to patriotism. Of course it is. What does it have to do with the Super Bowl?

Nothing. So if we want to understand what sells guns, it seems that these days, and gun companies these days are setting records, in fact. What are the factors that actually have contributed to this profitable period? There's only one thing, which spikes gun sales. And this has been historically true since as long as I've been in the gun business, which is 50 years. And that's the fear that you won't be able to get a gun. The fear that you won't be able to get a gun. Correct.

And that fear, of course, has been only. ongoing over the whole Obama administration. But hold on, because in the same period that Obama's been in the White House, the laws on guns have in fact been relaxed in a whole variety of ways in various states, allowing, making it easier, for instance, to be able to get a concealed carry permit. So how is it that if the laws are in fact getting more relaxed? Do you think that there's any relationship between the marketing slogans and the marketing campaigns of the gun industry and fact? I mean, are we in the same conversation here? Listen, you know, in my town, in my town, which has the most deliciously clean drinking water that you can imagine, you should see people who line up and buy bottled water. Okay.

There's no relationship. So when you listen to Wayne Lepier talking about the things that he's afraid of in America, you hear over and over again that. this emphasis on fear that one should be afraid, that one has to be afraid, and that one has to protect themselves against these things. You know, it's not, I need to interrupt you right there. You said, listen to Wayne Pier, what he's afraid of. No, it's not what he's afraid of. It's what the public opinion surveys tell him people are afraid of.

Both Pew and Gallup, but I take Pugh to be a little more scientific, a little not much, are astonished to discover that as the rate of violent crime continues to go down, the percentage of people that they survey who say that violent crime is going up gross. But the fact is that the ability to create, you know, in the public mind, a reality that may not really match the facts happens all the time and not just in the gun world. One of the things that we heard in that clip is that Wayne LaPier talked about, quote, what's left of our guns, which is sort of a surprising thing to say. We have 310 million guns in America, never had more.

What is he talking about? What sort of message is he trying to say? What he's trying to do, and this has been a very successful message, okay, is the idea that, you know, they play it both ways. They want guns to be a mainstream, ordinary thing that everybody accepts. And yet at the same time, they want all the gun owners to think that they're this persecuted minority. And the moment that you can make people think that they're a persecuted minority, you can really rev them up. So that's what that part of that clip was about was to remind the gun owners that they are in peril and they are vulnerable because the elites, the policymakers, whatever you want to call them, don't like guns. And if they turn their backs for one second, they're going to take them away. We're going to play another clip here, which is from an NRA video series called Defending Our America.

New Orleans is a perfect example of how fast law enforcement was overrun and how fast they turned to their primal instincts because New Orleans PD had a huge chunk of officers that just said, I'm done, I'm going home with my family because I can't do this. And when you have an environment where law enforcement can't effectively enforce the law, the predators are going to start to take over and they'll move in and take over an area faster than anybody. can even comprehend.

Well, what I'm interested in, if you look back over the history of the NRA, oftentimes natural disasters or any kind of disruption in social order, if you want to call it that, becomes an opportunity to reach out to people. And you've seen this in Florida, for instance, after a hurricane, the hurricane was invoked as a reason to pass the stand-your-ground law, which, as we know, removed the requirement to retreat, gave people greater latitude. to use a gun. Also increase the homicide rate, but that's okay.

Mike, what do you think the effect is on people of hearing messages like that? Do you think they believe it? You know, remember that the NRA is kind of like everybody else these days. You're on the internet. You've got to stay on all the time. You have to have a new message every day or it gets stale. I don't think people listen that closely. I'm sure there's a segment of the population that's going to go by that freeze-dried food from the Glembeck show.

But, you know, I can tell you that whenever there was around the town where my gun shop is, whenever there was a word that there was going to be a big storm coming in, a really bad one, where, you know, there's going to be disruption of basic services. What everybody did was run to the supermarket and buy food. I didn't notice them coming into the gun shop to buy an extra gun. We're going to play one other clip here, which is from the NRA's video series called Freedom's Safest Place. I told us of Iran and every terrorist you enabled. Listen up. You might have met our fresh-faced flower child president and his wheat-need Ivy League friends. But you haven't met America. You haven't met

the heartland where the people will defend this nation with their bloody, callous bare hands. That's what it takes. You haven't met the steel workers and the hard rock miners or the swamp folks and Cajun country who can wrestle a full-grown gator out of the water. You haven't met the farmers, the cowboys, the loggers, and the truck drivers. You don't know the mountain men who live off the land or the brave cops who fight the good fight in the urban war zones? No, you've never met America. And you ought to pray you never do.

I'm the National Rifle Association of America, and I'm the freedom's safest place. Welcome to Grand Ole Opry. Mike, what do you make of that? It's pure entertainment. Is that how it's intended, do you think? Two-thirds of all guns are owned by the residents of 13 Confederate states, three border states, and rural parts of four Midwestern states. Okay? That's gun culture.

So when you play Charlie Daniels, you are... You're playing to that culture. And, you know, go to an NRA show. And that's who's walking around. He's right. That's not where the Ivy League, what did he call? That's not where they are. Fresh-faced flower child.

No, exactly. And, you know, this country has always been much more a regional than a national country. And the regionalism involved in guns is very, very intense and hasn't really changed. Do you think there is secondary effects of marketing on the basis of fear, of promoting fear and, frankly, a kind of hatred when it comes to our culture or to any culture? I mean, what is the effect? I think, unfortunately, that that is what may emerge out of this, you know, the very recent coincidence of fear and this whole immigration thing. Because what is really coming out, you know, what's really being pumped up in the immigration is fear of people who are unlike us. And to the extent that Muslims are much more unlike us, so it's claimed, it's not true, but so it's claimed.

And that, unfortunately, then flows right back to the whole notion of, well, I'm afraid I better have a gun. Over the years, you have seen that the NRA has placed a greater emphasis on the role of fear, on the effects of fear, and frankly, on the opportunities presented by fear. Has that changed the way you look at the NRA? Oh, yeah, definitely. You know, if the NRA would be supporting guns on a basis of what I believe they should be used for by civilians, which is shooting sports and hunting, they'd get no argument for me. I have never seen, and I'm very serious about this, I have never seen one piece of credible research which shows or even remotely shows that walking around with a gun protects you from crime or protects you from anything else. And I'm not going to get into an argument because somebody comes up with an anecdote here and an anecdote there.

Either we have research or we don't. And the research, and I've seen it and I've read all of it, the research simply does not. support the point of view that armed citizens are doing anything to make our community safe. If anything, to the contrary, and as far as I'm concerned, you don't sell a consumer product that creates risk. We can't talk about guns today without talking about mass shootings. We are, after all, talking just a few days after a massacre in Orlando, Florida, of the largest mass shooting in American history.

And I wonder whether, in fact, this will have a meaningful effect on our discussion of guns in America, or will it become just another name, another place on the list? We have had two major gun control pieces of the legislation at the federal level. 1968, Gun Control Act of 68, which set up the whole regulatory environment, and then, of course, 1994 with Brady. Both of those laws happened with liberal Democrats who were Southerners in the White House and Democratic control of Congress. We did not have that after Sandy Hook. Without that kind of constellation, I don't see a gun bill passing. But if you had that kind of constellation. Then absolutely.

Oh, there's no question about it. I mean, if the doomsday scenarios that are being painted, about Trump's candidacy hold true. And if he not only goes down the tubes, but brings a lot of Republicans with him, then you could possibly have that kind of a constellation back in power in Washington. And I'm for sure there'd be a gun bill. Mike, thank you very, very much for talking with us. My pleasure. Anytime.

Mike Weiser, a former gun dealer, safety instructor, and author of six books on guns. He blogs as Mike the Gun Guy on Huffington. Post. You can read Evan Osnos' article Making a Killing at New Yorker.com. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. That's a brand new hymn called To a Place of Celebration. It was written in response to the mass shooting in Orlando just days after we woke up to the news of that tragedy. And it was performed here last Sunday by the Rutgers Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. Now, the tune is an old one, and the words, though, are by Carolyn Gillette.

She's the pastor of Limestone Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, Delaware. Carolyn is prolific. She's written about 250 hymns that have been sung in churches all around the world. She's carved out a particular niche talking about current events right as they happen, sometimes mass killings and disasters that I think would test the faith of any believer. The New Yorkers Josh Rothman visited Carolyn Gillette with her husband. and co-pastor Bruce Gillette at their church not long ago. So I was thinking maybe you could tell us the story of how you came to write hymns.

How did you get started? Back in 1998, I was at a conference in central Pennsylvania, and the teacher in the class was talking about psalms that had been set to music. And in the course of this class, he started talking about a time when the Ten Commandments had been set to a popular hymn tune. So I started doodling a little bit and wrote my own version of it. And after I wrote it, Bruce thought that looks pretty good. And he shared it with some people online.

And one pastor asked if she could use it at the Vacation Bible School for their church the next week. And they had the children singing at Vacation Bible School. And that got me started. Since then, Carolyn has written hundreds of hymns on an incredibly diverse array of subjects. And if you go to her website, you'll find hymns about adoption, climate change, homelessness, gay rights, even the joys of going to the beach. She's using melodies from traditional hymns, but she's rewriting the words to address today's world. And so that means that the hymns are easy to sing.

They're familiar, but they're also now addressing current events, and they're not always uplifting. A lot of times they're expressing complex emotions, sadness, frustration, grief, fear, anxiety about the future. She's really trying to bring the real world into church. Well, a lot of the songs that we sing in church are praise worship songs. We're praising God, glorifying God for who God is. We're thanking God, praising God. One interesting thing about a lot of music that's written today is that it's written to be very positive and upbeat and full of praise. And that's great. And we need to praise God in that way. But I think there's also a place in the church for lament, for singing those songs of sadness, the grief that comes from the depths

of our hearts about things that make us very sad when we look around and see all the violence and the injustice around us. I think a lot of the hymns that people have responded to that have written have been hymns that are prayers for people who have been in disasters and in catastrophes. And it's to the point that sometimes people know me by those hymns. And they say, oh, you're the one who writes the songs about disasters. You always have a great song for a disaster. I got to know Carolyn Gillette when I sung one of her hymns at a church service. I was fascinated by it because it's a new hymn and you don't often sing hymns with new words.

And eventually I learned from talking to experts that Carolyn Gillette is one of the leading hymnodists working today. Like what's the process for writing a hymn? What's the first step that you take? Give me a kind of hymn. Which kind are you talking about? Like when you wrote, we read the hymn about refugees, for example, that you wrote? One of several. God, how can we comprehend, I think, is the one line. Yeah, God, how can we comprehend?

That one I started writing when I was watching the news. You know, those news clips they have where they just show lines and lines of refugees walking through desert places, carrying their belongings on their backs. I thought about how numb we get to those pictures sometimes. We see them, but we don't really comprehend them. We don't really understand at all what those folks are experiencing in their lives. We struggle to survive. You gave each one gifts and goals.

Now they flee to stay alive. We heard in seminary that when you're writing a sermon, you should write a sermon with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. And I think it makes sense for him writing too because it's good for people to be able to connect what's going on in the world with their faith. I have to all your earth, till each person lives in peace,

till your world sees each one's worth. I have to say that for me, there's something just tremendously moving about hearing contemporary subjects addressed through a form that's so old. It seems to be making a statement about the world, that there's a continuity between the ancient past, hundreds of years of religious tradition, and the problems that we're facing today. The issues that we're dealing with

are just modern versions of what people have been dealing with for a long time. Love, justice, welcome, reaching out and caring for others, forgiveness. With the old hymn tunes, I can put new words and help people see that there is a connection between the old and the new.

Could you tell the story of the 9-11 hymn and how you wrote that and how it got performed? On the morning of 9-11, 11, we were watching the newscasts with everybody else. Somebody called up from the church office and said, you know, a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers. And we turned on the news like everybody else. And we were just staring at this, watching the news for a long time, just trying to figure out what was going on. And we pretty quickly decided that we were going to have a worship service at church that night for people from the congregation, people from the community who just

needed to come and to pray and to be together. And Bruce suggested I write a hymn for that worship service. And so during the day, between the time in the morning we were first seeing what was happening and that evening when we had the worship service, I wrote the hymn. And I remember writing part of it as I was walking to our children's elementary school. I had a pad and a a pad of paper and a pen in my hand. And I was walking to their school and scribbling notes along the way, trying to get the verses of the hymn just right. They're called to offer prayer for all our leaders to. May they amid such great despair be wise in all they do. Somebody else wrote me a note, and this was even, I think, a couple months later, and said, I've been so depressed and so upset since 9-11.

And I sang your hymn in church, and I took that bulletin home. I put it in my purse, and I've been carrying it around. And whenever I get really anxious or really upset about everything that's been happening in our world, I just pull out the words of your hymn. We grieve for their husband's wives whose grief have. This hymn was performed everywhere, in churches around the country, at funerals for victims and firefighters. It even appeared on the BBC. And that's just an extraordinary fact when you visit Bruce and Carolyn at their church in Delaware, because they are ordinary working pastors.

Actually, hymn writing is just a small part of what Carolyn does. She spends the rest of her time doing what pastors do. She runs a food bank. She teaches Bible study. The day I was there, she spent the moment. morning visiting with an elderly member of the congregation who had fallen during the night. I mean, do you have to get into some space in your mind to write these hymns, or do you live in this space of openness about feelings and closeness to your responses?

I think a lot of times I live in this space. I write what I think and what I feel, and I'm a pastor. And as a pastor, I'm used to thinking about things on an intellectual level, but also an emotional level, hearing the feelings of others. I think I'm trying to find a way to help people express what's going on deepest inside them. I think I'm a poet. I love to write words, and I love to help people find words to sing in church. Now, of course, people don't just want to express feelings of sadness in church. They want to express feelings of hope, and a lot of Carolyn's hymns are hopeful. Many of them are what are called prophetic hymns, their calls for action. So she's written a hymn about voting, for example.

It's called In Times of Great Decision. In times of great decision, be with us, God we pray. Give each of us a vision of Jesus' loving way. When louder words seem endless and other voices sure, remind us of your promise your love and truth endure. I didn't write this saying, you know, vote for a certain candidate because of our faith. But God gives us a vision of the way we should live in this world. These are basic principles, basic principles of faith that many faith traditions have.

Love, charity, loving your neighbor. welcoming the stranger, showing compassion, working for justice, working for peace. These are things that we're called to do as faithful people in the world. And if we're called to live that way, we should be willing to choose leaders who have that same vision. After the shootings in Orlando, I attended a church service where we sang the hymn that Carolyn had written about what had happened there. Like a lot of people, I had spent the days after the shooting, reading about it, thinking about it, talking with friends and friends. family about gun control and gun violence. And I felt, you know, angry about what had happened, sad, obviously. But also, if I'm honest, I was a little cynical, too, about the real possibility

that anything could change. Carolyn's hymn echoes a lot of what's in the newspaper. For example, it talks about how we have to pass new legislation to make guns harder to buy. But it has something more to it than that. There's a line toward the end where, as you're singing, you ask God to renew your dedication to the idea of a world that's just in whole. It's hard to be cynical when you're singing those words with a big group of people, 40 or 50 people who are expressing the same sentiment. And I found that basically singing the hymn made me hopeful again about the possibility that things could be better. The New Yorkers Josh Rothman talking with Carolyn Gillette, a pastor and hymn writer in Delaware. We also heard Carolyn's hymns performed by the choristers of the cathedral,

of the incarnation in Garden City, New York. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Now, you could think of our next story as a kind of parable. And it's about the terrible price of vanity. It's a horror show. There's not enough nail polish in the world to compensate for what I've done. Writer Mary Carr on the torture of high-heeled shoes. That's in a minute. Stick around.

I'm David Remnick, and you're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Every year in the New Yorker, we publish a special issue focused on technology and innovation. Last month, we did one and it covered developments in education, playground design, artificial limbs, things that may change the world in just two or three years or maybe ten. We also commissioned a section to go along with it about bad inventions. We asked some great writers to tell us about one thing they'd like to see just completely removed from the world, and we called the section Uninvent This. Mary Carr, the author of the best-selling memoir, The Liars Club,

wrote about the torture of high-heeled shoes. By the way, a quick heads up, Mary Carr, even with the occasional bleep, tends to be a little salty, so hide the kids somewhere. My name is Mary Carr. I'm a recovering shoe slut. My life would have been better had the high-heel never been invented. I was one of those women who wore four and five and six inch heels and run a wind sprint at about a seven-minute mile up 9th Avenue to catch a cab.

So I was very comfortable in them, and then I was less comfortable in them, and then I was a lot less comfortable in them. This is a Chloe boot with a four-inch heel. it signifies to the world that at the other end of your foot is I was actually a foot model as a younger woman. I had pretty feet. My toes tapered. I had a ballerina's high arch. It was all these good things.

And now they look like ginger root. It's a harsh up. There's not enough nail polish in the world to compensate for what I've done. No one told me this would happen. Nobody said that if you wore high heel, and your feet hurt, you couldn't just stop wearing high heels and have your feet stop hurting. I'm talking about now when I walk in a sneaker with an orthotic in it after about two miles. Part of my foot goes dead and it burns like in the cartoons where they put the matches between your toes.

I'm like Wiley Coyote getting the hot foot. You know, stilettos were named after daggers. These are my last pair of little open-teens. toe, prodded sandals, about a four, this is probably a four inch heel. And then here are my new clodhoppers. Sneakers, white sneakers, copper-colored sneakers. They're like loads of rye bread on your feet. And the sandals, gladiator sandals, which are very kind of butch and, you know, about as wide as my coffee table. That's what I have to have now. Hmm.

I have sort of mild bunions and a couple of neuromas. They're like stones in your shoe that you can't shake out. Surgery doesn't work. So I sent off all my crucifying shoes, my high heels, to dress for success, where they're going to crucify other women. It was a couple of big boxes, smaller than a Volkswagen, bigger than a dishwasher. A lot of shoes. The heels I gave away. I still shopped for them.

I was in Bergdorf's this weekend in the shoe department, and I spent probably 45 minutes like fondling them. It's like porn for me. In some ways, I think high heels help us to reproduce the species. I think we will go on having sex without them, but there's something sexy about it. I mean, I'm not talking about loose-eyed heels, you know, that are seven-inch high.

But yeah, like a, you know, four-inch heel. They make your legs longer, and they point up. Mary Carr. Her most recent book is called The Art of Memoir. I recently sat down with a woman named Anita Sarkeesian. Sarkeesian is a critic and activist who gained notoriety after she posted a series of videos called Troops versus Women in Video Games.

I watched one of your videos. I've watched many of them, but one of them was about there's no other way to put this, the centrality of the female butt. Yes. In video games. Yeah. And it was, I have to say, is pretty astonishing. Video game designers often choose to put tremendous focus on the butts of certain characters,

while going to almost absurd lengths to avoid calling attention to the butts of others. Third-person games with female protagonists typically display those characters in a way that gives players a full-body view. A classic example of this is the original Tomb Raider games, which are presented from a third-person perspective wherein protagonist Lara Croft's entire body is visible. In these early Tomb Raider games, Lara's butt is typically right in the center of the screen. The videos provide a solid, feminist,

but I have to say, hardly radical critique to video games. And yet, a portion of the gamer community went absolutely nuclear. Anita Sarkeesian became the target of a sustained campaign of hatred. There were threats of violence and even death. There were terrible invasion. of her privacy, and you probably heard of this as GamerGate, which went from being a dust-up in the gaming community

to a huge national news story about the safety of women online, all because Sarkesian dared to point out the obvious, like this business with butts. So you might never have noticed that until I said, hey, look at how many times this happens. And you're like, oh, yeah. Like, I've seen it, but it never stopped to think about how frequently women's butts are on display in video games or other media or whatever it is,

whatever the pattern is, right? So much so that they're dead center in the screen. I mean, there's a strategy for their display, and the male butt is conceived by as many leather raincoats as humanly possible. My favorite way that men's butts are covered is with just a piece of tattered fabric. I'm glad that you have a favorite. It is my favorite. You have to find the humor in a video where you're literally spending hours and hours looking at

video game character's butts. It's your original plan to be an academic and write a 300, 400-page book on these kind of patterns? What was the original plan? It wasn't. I actually went to grad school to get my master's degree because I wanted to teach. And when I started doing feminist frequency, I was like, well, that's what I want to do. I want to do this activism. And this was just the avenue that I made an impact in. And so this is where I'm at. Video games were always a part of what I did because I was always looking at popular culture. And so when I decided to do a new series. A gamer kid? I was, yeah.

And what did you play? I played a lot of Nintendo when I was like five. I started playing Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario World, and I was obsessed with my Game Boy, and so that was really my gaming foundation. I played a lot of random PC games. I don't know where they came from. They just sort of showed up, and some of them were super sexist. Like, I don't understand why I was allowed to play them. What were the early ones that were super sexist?

The one that comes to mind is this kind of obscure a game called Vinyl. goddess from Mars. And it was just, she was wearing this tiny, skimpy outfit, and she made, like, erotic noises when she jumped, and, like, her movements were really sexualized. And it gets worse from there, no? Yeah. I mean, gaming has had a huge, long history of being incredibly problematic. But in all seriousness, you're accumulating the evidence of sexism and extreme sexism in these video games. The reaction online could not have been something. you expected. It was extraordinary. Can you describe it? I decided to do the series,

Tropes versus Women in Video Games. We launched a very modest Kickstarter to help fund the series. I was asking for $6,000 for five videos. And when I announced the series to my fan base, I was descended upon by a cyber mob. It was an, it was a organized, concerted effort to destroy me. Everything from death threats and rape threats, misogynist slurs. This is across all of my social media, my email, my website. There were efforts to not successful efforts to knock my website offline. They would send pizzas to addresses that they thought were mine with extra sausage because they think that's funny. Got that. Yeah. They would take efforts to docks me, which is to find and distribute your personal information like your

home address and phone number, social security number, that sort of thing. It went on and on. They sent letters to the IRS and the FBI to investigate me. My email. My, like, literally everywhere that you exist online, imagine having the most horrific, hateful messages sent to you every day through all of those different forms. And you tried to communicate with the executives of Twitter, for example, and they refuse to do anything about it? Well, no. I have been in communication and have done consulting work with most of the major social media

sites. When I first met with Twitter four years ago, I was like, oh, well, they're not going to do anything to today where they actually have a security council and they have symposiums and they bring in experts to consult with them. You know, how fast they're moving and what they're doing is up for debate, but they are making some effort to actually do something about their platform. But as I understand your case in a sense was a pivotal case or one of a number of pivotal cases having to do with the absolutist view, a free speech absolutist view, everything goes, versus a a hate speech view, a kind of American versus European view of speech.

What did it make you feel about, not the emotional question, but how, to what degree this kind of speech should be monitored and controlled on social media? Well, I think that that's, that is bringing up a sort of false dichotomy about what's actually happening, right? And part of the problem is that harassment and like hatred of women is being framed as a free speech issue. Telling someone that you're going to kill them, is not a free speech issue. It certainly is not. That is not protected under free speech.

So, one, the Internet is very confused about what free speech actually is. The other thing is that most of the social media outlets are also proponents of free speech, and they want to make their platforms available for that purpose. And what my work is to say, you need to protect your users because we are being attacked. And what's actually happening is our freedom of speech is being taken away, because they're trying to silence us so that I can. can't speak up about video games. I can't speak up about online harassment, et cetera, et cetera, right? So if we want to talk about freedom of speech, we talk about who's not getting to talk.

I can't help but ask you this, Anita. What was the effect on you as a human being on this? It sounds at the very best exhausting to soft sell it, and it's got to be a lot worse than that. Exhausting is a good word. I am perpetually tired. And it hasn't stopped? No, God, no. It's been four years of nonstop harassment. And I don't, I don't imagine. I don't see that. ending unless I disappeared off the internet completely, which I'm not about to do. Do you feel that you made a positive impact? Do you think despite all the harassment, all the pain endured as a result of that work, that somehow, some way you made an inroad, can you feel

it? Do you sense it? Is it palpable? Yes. I don't think I could continue doing the work if I didn't have that sense. And that's, you know, I'm hedging a little bit when I say that because I think that in a very real way, My story, coupled with many other women's stories of being harassed, for example, really propelled harassment into the main stage, right? It was covered by major outlets. It was covered by the New Yorker. It was on the front page of the New York Times. These are reputable outlets talking about, like, how online harassment is a problem. And so there is a larger conversation, and I don't think that the social media sites would have ever reached out to us to improve their platforms if that hadn't happened.

if there wasn't this critical mass around it. The commitment to your work and the commitment to the themes of your work politically seem unabated. So you're working now on a new series called Ordinary Women, Daring to Defy History, and that's going to come out in the fall. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah. So I'm super excited about this new project. We're looking at – we're taking the stories of five women who have been mostly written out of history in a lot of ways and just retelling their stories to a new audience. You know, one of the problems is that, like, history is written mostly by men, and they kind of write out all of these women.

So we're not getting these stories in history books. Who are the women? We are talking about Murasaki Shkibu, who wrote the first novel, which who thinks about the first novel ever being written. But that was a thing that happened. Ida B. Wells, who was an investigative journalist. Emma Goldman, who was – I don't even know how to describe her because she's just so multifaceted. But she would just, like, committed her life to social justice. Jingxi was a feared pirate leader in the late 18th century, early 19th century in China.

She commanded a fleet of about 60,000 pirates. And then the last one is Ada Lovelace, who was the first computer programmer. So I know it's a work in progress, but we're going to go to a clip from your new video series. When most people think of pirates, they imagine hulking fearsome men with names like Blackbeard or Long John Silver. Although the vast majority of pirates throughout history have been male, one of the most famous and feared pirates who ever lived was Xing Shi, a young Cantonese woman who became the ruler of one of the largest pirate fleets in history and the mastermind behind a floating criminal empire so powerful that even the Chinese military couldn't stop it. So these are not all goody goodies. No, that was...

So Xinxi is nobody's idea of a hero of humanity. Correct. And that was a very intentional choice. So one of the things... A badass at best. Yes. No, she was terrifying. Like, she's it. I mean, she was...

A killer. Absolutely. Absolutely. It was really... So why do you want to... In with the heroes, like Ida be Wells, why do you want to tell the story of a killer? Because you want to... Women could be horrible, too?

Yes. Like, for real. Because, you know, when we talk about representations of women and improving the representations, it's not like making them all heroes and perfect. Like, I don't think... I'm certainly not asking for that. I want to see complex, flawed women who are heroic and villainous and boring and, you know, like we are humans too, and we have all of the range of human traits available.

And so putting Jingxi into this category of women was really important to me because I wanted to show, like, we are multifaceted and we've done great things and horrible things. And why isn't her name up there with like Blackbeard when we talk about pirates? Did examples like this give you, I don't know, psychic support while you were going through this prolonged crisis? That's an interesting question. Maybe to some degree. I don't know of consciously, but there's always this sense of, you know, I'm not alone. You know, like I'm not the only one doing this work.

I'm not the first one to do it. I won't be the last one to do it. The other thing is that, you know, like would I do this again? Yes, absolutely. Not because I like the harassment or I want it, but because it's important work. I think the one thing I would have changed is I would have used a pseudonym. Game critic Anita Sarkeed.

Her new video series is called Ordinary Women, Daring to Defy History. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us today. But by the way, before we go, we've got a helpful suggestion from our friend Jack Handy to make your Fourth of July's celebration a memorable one. And I mean, really memorable. My favorite fireworks by Jack Handy. Viking helmet of death.

Strap helmet on head, light fuse in each. horn. Spark shoot out of horns, followed by colored fireballs, then smoke. Gets attention at parties and bars, but also starts fights. PORNO rocket. First rocket bursts high in the air, spelling out a warning that no one under 18 should look at the next rocket, which explodes into a close-up of throbbing genitalia, the fearless teenager. This firework consists of a life-size teenager made out of cardboard. Teenager is holding up a beer can with one hand and a cherry bomb in the other. Light Teenager. Beer-colored sparks fall from can into teenagers' open mouth. Cherry bomb explodes, blowing off teenager's fingers. Red sparks shoot from finger holes.

Lawnmower of death. This is another of my favorites from the popular of death series of fireworks. Looks like an actual riding lawn mower. Sit on it, light fuse. Powerful rockets propel it around lawn at high speed, shooting out green colored sparks. Treasure chest of gold. When chest is opened, a chemical burn causes the inside to light up with a brightness equal to the surface of the sun. Comes with one pair of cardboard safety glasses. Sparklers for babies. Wire handle is wrapped in terrycloth to help baby's grip. Exploding cockroaches. Open little refrigerator and lifelike cockroaches come swarming out. Each cockroach explodes independently. Super three-stage rocket. Says Super three-stage rocket in large letters on package, but actually only has two

stages. Second stage ends with a sad... Comes with extra rocket. also labeled Super Three Stage, but it's only one stage. The one and only Jack Handy with my favorite fireworks. If he invites you over, think twice. And that's it for real this time. Thanks for joining us on The New Yorker Radio Hour. We'll see you next week. Till then, stay in touch with us on Twitter.

We're at New Yorker Radio. And you can sign up for our newsletter so you don't miss a thing. Do that at new yorker.com slash radio newsletter. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music this week from Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.