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What is your take?

What is your take?
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David L. Nevins
By David L. NevinsOct 22, 2021
David L. Nevins
David L. Nevins serves as publisher of The Fulcrum. Additionally, Nevins serves as co-founder and Board Chairman of the Bridge Alliance. Nevins brings business acumen, vision and a tireless this-must-and-can-be-done zeal to the burgeoning movement to bridge divides to transform the political process. As a business leader, Nevins excels at building bridges between people and organizations from the right, left and center for civilized conversation and then action. He co-founded the Bridge Alliance because, as he says, “No matter how well managed and how well funded anyone organization is, significant political reform will not happen without an alliance to further collaborative interactions. Together we can and will raise the collective impact of all.” He is a member of the Aspen Institute Society of Fellows, with a focus on the Aspen Rodel Fellowship in Public Leadership, he established and continues to work with The Nevins Democracy Leaders program at Penn State University. Nevins graduated with honors in economics from Penn State in 1969 and received an M.B.A. in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971.
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Today, The Fulcrum continues its biweekly feature "What is Your Take?" where we ask our readers a question and share various responses.

We look forward to engaging with our readers as we create a dialogue around different topics and issues that are important to all of us.

This week's question is: What actions, if any, would you like to see Congress take on voting reform?

Please share your responses by emailing pop-culture@fulcrum.us.

Below are responses to our previous question:

Last time, we posed the following question:

One of the most popular songs in the Broadway show "Hamilton" is "My Shot." As we strive to help protect and improve democracy in America, what do you see as "Your Shot" to make a difference?

Following are some responses from our readers, edited for clarity, length and style.

· I'm in my 70s and am convinced that my destiny is to fix the Electoral College before my death. I propose that each state implement ranked-choice voting and utilize instant runoff rounds to eliminate all but the top two winners. Then apply the method — proposed by Thomas Jefferson to fill Congress after the first U.S. census — to proportionally allocate Electoral College votes to the top two winners. Anonymous.

· As a longtime League of Women Voters member, I will continue the League's goal of "Making Democracy Work" and actively battling disinformation by informing voters through more civic education (especially in schools) and badgering them to vote. As more voters become disillusioned with politics and government and distrustful of elections, we have our work cut out for us. Mary Ann Moxon.

· At 46 years old, I'm taking "my shot" to save American democracy by leaving a successful career in real estate and starting Veterans for Political Innovation. Our mission is to mobilize veterans to advocate for the most powerful election innovations to make our system less toxic and more competitive.

We strongly believe that the reform community, and veterans across the country, need to unite around the most powerful, achievable political innovation — final-five voting. Once we implement top-four or final-five Instant runoff general elections, in all 50 states, then we can elect leaders who are truly accountable to the majority of their constituents. More choice, through final-five voting equals more power for voters and less outside influence.

Final-five voting incentivizes problem solving and good policy making. Once we start electing more consensus-based candidates and more broadly accountable leaders, we can start truly addressing the myriad policy concerns that are not receiving adequate attention (immigration reform, health care, infrastructure, education, etc.). A bad system will beat a good person every time. Our current political system is built on faux competition and faulty incentives that encourage partisan extremism and gridlock.

That's "my shot"! Eric Bronner

We are more convinced than ever that by engaging our readers through music, theater, poetry, dance and all the arts, The Fulcrum can help us all find our shared humanity despite the sharp elbows of the day-to-day in American life and politics. And by doing so we hope to build upon The Fulcrum's mission of being a place where insiders and outsiders to politics are informed, meet, talk and act to repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives.

David L. Nevins

Co-Publisher, The Fulcrum

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The Life of a Showgirl Bodes Unwell for Popular Feminism

Our post-civil-rights society is rapidly sliding backwards. For an artist to make a claim to any progressive ideology, they require some intersectional legs. Taylor Swift’s newest album, The Life of a Showgirl, disappoints by proudly touting an intentionally ignorant perspective of feminism-as-hero-worship. It is no longer enough for young women to see Swift’s success and imagine it for themselves. While that access is unattainable for most people, the artists who position themselves as thoughtful contributors to public consciousness through their art must be held accountable to their positionality.

After the release of Midnights (2022), Alex Petridis wrote an excellent article for The Guardian, where he said of the album, “There’s an appealing confidence about this approach, a sense that Swift no longer feels she has to compete on the same terms as her peers.” The Life of a Showgirl dismantles this approach. At the top of the show business world, it feels like Taylor is punching down and rewriting feminism away from a critical lens into a cheap personal narrative.

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Iguanas on the Tombstones: A Poet's Metaphor for Colonialism​
Photo illustration by Yunuen Bonaparte for palabra

Iguanas on the Tombstones: A Poet's Metaphor for Colonialism​

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“It was quite a sight to witness these iguanas sunning themselves on a wall of that cemetery, or slithering from one tomb to the next, or squatting on the tomb of Albizu Campos, or staring up at the bust of José de Diego, with a total lack of comprehension, being iguanas,” Espada told palabra from his home in the western Massachusetts town of Shelburne Falls.

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Does One Battle After Another Speak to Latino Resistance?

After decades of work, Angeleno director P.T. Anderson has scored his highest-grossing film with his recent One Battle After Another. Having opened on the weekend of September 26, the film follows the fanatical, even surrealistic, journey of washed-up revolutionary Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who lives in hiding with his teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), some fifteen years after his militant group, French 75, went underground. When their nemesis Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) resurfaces, Bob and Wila again find themselves running from the law. When Wila goes AWOL, her karate teacher, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), is enlisted to help Bob find his daughter. Although ambitious, edgy, and fun, the political message of the hit film is generally muddled. The immensely talented director did not make a film matching the Leftist rigor of, say, Battleship Potemkin. Nor can the film be grouped among a veritable cavalcade of fictional and non-fictional films produced during the last twenty years that deal with immigrant issues along the U.S.-Mexico Border. Sleep Dealer, El Norte, and Who is Dayani Cristal? are but a few of the stronger offerings of a genre of filmmaking that, for both good and bad, may constitute a true cinematic cottage industry.

Nevertheless, the film leans heavily into Latino culture in terms of themes, setting, and characters. Filmed largely in the U.S.’s Bordertown par excellence—El Paso, Texas—we meet the martial arts teacher Sergio, who describes his work helping migrants cross the border as a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation.” We learn that the fugitive revolutionary, Bob, is known by several aliases, including “The Gringo Coyote.” His savior, Sensei Sergio, explains to him outrightly that he’s “a bad hombre”—cheekily invoking the hurtful bon mots used by then-candidate Donald Trump in a 2016 debate with Hilary Clinton. The epithet is repeated later on in the film when Bob, under police surveillance in the hospital, is tipped off to an exit route by a member of the French 75 disguised as a nurse: “Are you diabetic? You’re a bad hombre, Bob. You know, if you’re a bad hombre, you make sure you take your insulin on a daily basis, right?” All this, plus the fact that the film’s denouement begins with a raid on a Mexican Restaurant in Northern California.

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​Jimmy Kimmel onstage during the 67th GRAMMY Awards

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There are moments in a nation’s cultural life that feel, at first, like passing storms—brief, noisy, and soon forgotten. But every so often, what begins as a squall reveals itself as a warning: a sign that something far bigger is at stake. The initial cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel by Disney, along with the coordinated blackout from network affiliates like Nexstar and Sinclair, is one of those moments. It’s not merely another skirmish in the endless culture wars. Actually, it is a test of whether we, as a society, can distinguish between the discomfort of being challenged and the danger of being silenced.

The irony is rich, almost to the point of being absurd. Here is a late-night comedian, a man whose job is to puncture the pompous and needle the powerful, finding himself at the center of a controversy. A controversy bigger than anything he’d ever lampooned. Satire that, depending on your perspective, was either too pointed or simply pointed in the wrong direction. Yet, that was not the ostensible reason.

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