James Dobson was a nasty dude. He liked to beat children and dogs with a belt and to rain misery and punishment on the vulnerable; we know all of this about him because he said as much in public, repeatedly, over a long and rancid public life. He enlisted a whole bunch of Ideology—patriarchy, social conservatism, utterly fake upside-down Christianity—in service of those basic motivations, not only to justify his own appetite for and personal acts of sadism and domination, but to cast punishment and predation as far out into the world as he could manage. He studied psychology and the Bible so that he could borrow their authority and instrumentalize them to do widespread cruelty more effectively. He was oriented to evil, at vast scale, by continual lifelong choice. It was his calling, and he made it his job.
What a guy like James Dobson does, and what James Dobson did for his whole adult life, is offer people—white men primarily, but not exclusively—a rhetorical framework for doing evil and feeling good about it. Stand right here and look exactly there, he said, and psychology says it's OK for you to beat your children, that when they cry for more than two minutes of the beating, it is because they are bad and not because you are hurting them; you should beat them harder for crying until they stop. Stand right here and look exactly there, and tradition says your wife should have no will of her own. Stand right here and look exactly there, and love of country says society should press its boot onto the poor and marginalized and crush them until they die. Didn't you always hate them? Sure you did. Religion says right here that you are right to. He blew softly on a stupid and seething population's resentments, its will to power, its lust to punish those who complicate their desires by having lives of their own, and watched those appetites stick up like the hairs on your arm, or glow like charcoal in a fire. It feels good. He tempts you with the promise that every cruel, fearful, punitive impulse you have aligns with The Way Things Are Supposed To Be, and that it is even your grim duty is to indulge them. In this respect, James Dobson was very much like Satan.
I recently found this quote on social media and quite liked the sentiment:
You can say “all are welcome,” but if wolves and sheep are both welcome then you’re only going to get wolves. The smart sheep will go somewhere else and the naive sheep will be eaten and processed. If you welcome Islamophobes and Muslims then you’ll get Islamophobes. If you welcome Klan members and people of color then you’ll get Klan members. If you welcome nativists and immigrants you’ll get nativists.
Refusing to choose is a choice. It’s a choice in favor of the people who prey on others and who refuse to acknowledge the humanity of those they hate.
The quote didn’t have a source but was attributed to someone named Adam Bates. With the sorry state of Google and glut of people sharing it out of context, it took me a little while to track down the original quote on Facebook; it’s part of a longer post denouncing anti-LGBTQ+ & anti-immigrant sentiments within the libertarian movement.
If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naive version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
“you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to open five city-run grocery stores has grocery industry executives—and other political foes—clutching their pearls. Critics call it a socialist fantasy. But publicly owned grocery stores already exist, serving over a million Americans every day, with prices 25 to 30 percent lower than conventional retail. We need more public grocery stores, not fewer.
The affordability crisis is crushing American families. Grocery prices have spiked 32 percent since 2019, with even sharper increases in meat, frozen foods, and snacks—categories that make up over 50 percent of Americans’ calories and are dominated by a handful of conglomerates. Market concentration has enabled food giants to raise prices, while actual consumption has flatlined since 2019.
Supermarket closures are another major issue. While several grocery chains have expanded, these openings are unevenly distributed, often bypassing the very neighborhoods that have lost supermarkets. In many working-class areas, closures have left residents relying on discount chains and liquor outlets instead. The lack of grocery stores isn’t something that can be fixed by the Robinson-Patman Act, enacted during the New Deal to prevent price discrimination by large retail buyers at the expense of smaller competitors. New York already has one of the least concentrated grocery markets in the country, and trust-busting won’t make new grocery stores open in low-income neighborhoods.
Some of the best visions for the future come from outside the United States. Bulgaria announced plans to roll out 1,500 rural grocery stores, buying local produce and reselling at cost to support both farmers and underserved rural consumers. From South Korea to the European Union, governments are strengthening public and local supply chains.
But we can look even closer to home to find a public grocery success story: the U.S. military.
The Pentagon’s Grocery
Every branch of the military operates its own grocery system, a network known as the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA). With 236 stores worldwide, DeCA is a retail behemoth, generating over $4.6 billion in annual revenue. If it were a private corporation, it would rank among the top 50 chains in the nation. In 2023 alone, U.S. military families, veterans, and other eligible shoppers saved an estimated $1.6 billion on their grocery bills.
“We can look close to home to find a public grocery success story: the U.S. military. If it were a private corporation, it would rank among the top 50 chains in the nation.”
The model is simple and effective. Commissaries are not profit centers; they are cost centers. By law, they operate on a cost-plus model, selling goods at what they pay for them, plus a 5 percent surcharge that covers the cost of store construction and modernization. DeCA leverages the immense, centralized buying power of the entire Department of Defense to negotiate rock-bottom prices from suppliers.
Furthermore, commissary workers are federal employees, often unionized, with stable pay and benefits. This removes labor costs from the individual stores’ balance sheets and ensures that the mission of providing affordable food isn’t compromised by the downward pressure on wages that defines the private retail industry. The result is a system that delivers low prices and high-quality service and is immensely popular with service members, demonstrating that a government-run, nonprofit grocery model can thrive at scale.
Scale for Victory
Skeptics will say it won’t work outside the military, pointing to small attempts like one in Baldwin, Florida, where a municipal grocery closed last year, or Chicago’s stalled plans, or other failed public-private partnerships. The scorn these failures attract is both wrong and right.
Public grocery stores add to food security, offering something that food banks can’t: dignity, choice, and control over food supply chains. They can anchor broader food justice efforts, creating demand for values-based purchasing that prioritizes worker dignity, environmental sustainability, and racial equity. (Mamdani’s commitment to minimum wage increases and safety nets are of a piece with public grocery policy.)
Critics are right, however, to note that grocery is a business of scale. Public groceries can succeed, but only with the scale and operational sophistication of proven models. Half-measures will inevitably fail.
Existing—and Successful—Models
There are clear models for operating a public grocery store: Combine the military commissary’s cost-plus pricing (and free delivery) with Costco’s warehouse efficiency and Aldi’s limited assortment strategy.
Stock no more than 1,500 carefully selected products instead of 30,000. Buy in massive volumes. Employ union workers as municipal employees, removing labor costs from individual store budgets.
And make it joyful and dignified to work and shop there.
“Public grocery stores add to food security, offering something that food banks can’t: dignity, choice, and control over food supply chains.”
There are already foundations on which to build. New York City’s Good Food Purchasing Program, for example, requires school food vendors to meet standards for nutrition, environmental impact, and fair labor. Such values-based procurement was inspired by private sector supply chain standards, which brought premium quality products to consumers. The Good Food Purchasing Program shows we can do this without the steep prices.
Why stop at lunch trays? Public grocery stores could bring high standards full circle, creating demand for ethical producers who are locked out of centralized supermarket, dollar store, or discounter supply chains, while offering best-in-market prices to consumers.
Public grocery stores could be the first step to scaling up and anchoring vertically integrated public food systems. Municipal processing and manufacturing could aggregate demand for local, sustainably grown products as the basis for shelf-stable goods—soups, frozen meals, snacks—normally dominated by a handful of conglomerates. This would lower the risk for values-based farmers while making good food the most affordable option, not the most expensive.
Starting up such an operation won’t be cheap, but doing it successfully will save New Yorkers hundreds of millions of dollars off their grocery bills every year. Our calculations, exclusive to Civil Eats and unpublished elsewhere, show that operating five full-service stores across all New York’s boroughs would require at least $20 million per year each, assuming good union labor rates and free rent.
Those costs can drop a little if a Costco-like warehouse model is adopted; however, the expense of running 20 such stores (and keeping them medium size) is north of $400 million per year.
That’s a small investment in addressing hunger in a city as big as New York, which already purchases more than $300 million worth of food for vital city programs. Other public services that New Yorkers benefit from require even higher funding.
For example, the New York City police department budget is over $10 billion a year. Our public grocery estimate is less than 4 percent of that. The fire department budget is over $2.6 billion and the department of sanitation’s is $2 billion. The city’s budget adds up to more than $112 billion a year. So, while $400 million is a substantial sum, it would be a rounding error, 0.36 percent of the annual budget.
“There are clear models for operating a public grocery store: Combine the military commissary’s cost-plus pricing (and free delivery) with Costco’s warehouse efficiency and Aldi’s limited assortment strategy.”
Much of this budget would cover the overhead expenses and profit margins that customers typically pay for in the form of high retail prices, but New Yorkers will keep this money in their pockets. The budget also leaves plenty of room for growth if the concept is embraced by New Yorkers. There’s reason to think that stores with low prices and high ethics would work in the Big Apple. And if they can make it there, they can make it anywhere.
The idea is certainly being taken seriously by grocery sector labor unions. Faye Guenther, president of United Food and Commercial Workers 3000, argues that giant companies like Krogers and Albertsons are closing stores and “transforming themselves into companies that are more focused on collecting and selling customer data than they are on selling food.”
In the face of this, she told us by email, “We need a public option in the supermarket industry—stores that are focused on providing healthy food in our communities while providing jobs with good wages and benefits. The public sector already has large, efficient food supply chains through municipal education departments and through the U.S. military commissary system, so we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Publicly owned supermarkets should find the right way to piggyback on those systems.”
Beyond a Broken Model
The grocery industry will claim that public groceries hurt small businesses, ignoring the fact that the greatest threat to those businesses is the unchecked proliferation of chains like Dollar General and the predatory pricingpower of giants like Walmart and Aldi. They will call it an inefficient government boondoggle, hoping no one notices the efficiency of the military commissary system.
The truth is that the ground has already shifted. Two-thirds of New York City voters now support the creation of public grocery stores, because anything that helps meet the crisis of affordability is going to be welcome.
They’re not alone. Thirteen states have begun to explore public grocery stores. Communities across the nation are tired of corporate price gouging, empty shelves, and a food system designed to extract maximum wealth rather than nourish them.
The blueprint is clear. With the commissary as a template, take a page from Costco: pile the produce high, staff the floor with union labor, stock the shelves with good food, offer home delivery, and make it as beautiful as the New York Public Library, because the working class deserve nothing but the best.
If the private market cannot or will not deliver affordable, nutritious food to all its citizens—and it has proven that it won’t—then the public sector must.
Terence Stamp in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968)
When Terence Stamp passed away last Sunday at the age of eighty-seven, the Telegraph remarked that he had emerged “as a one-man caricature of the sixties,” working with directors as varied as Ken Loach and Pier Paolo Pasolini and posing with Julie Christie and Jean Shrimpton for photographer David Bailey, the great chronicler of Swinging London. Stamp then disappeared for a few years, returned with a bang in two Superman blockbusters, and kept swerving, playing gangsters and financiers, princes and generals, and Bernadette Bassenger in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994).
“From his first appearance as the eerily beautiful sailor in 1962’s Billy Budd through to his last manifestation as ‘the silver-haired gentleman’ in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho,” writes the Guardian’s Xan Brooks, “Stamp remained a brilliantly, mesmerizingly unknowable presence. He was the seductive dark prince of British cinema, an actor who carried an air of elegant mystery.”
The son of an often absent tugboat stoker, Stamp was raised in East London for the most part by his mother, aunts, and grandmother. They went to the movies when they could afford it, and young Terence became enthralled by Gary Cooper in Beau Geste (1939), and eventually James Dean. He won a scholarship to study at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, and it was while touring with a production of Willis Hall’s Second World War drama The Long and the Short and the Tall that he fell in with Michael Caine.
They became roommates, and when an opportunity to audition for Peter Ustinov came Stamp’s way, Caine, several years older, told him directors didn’t like talky actors. So when he wasn’t speaking his lines, Stamp kept his mouth shut, and something about his enigmatic silent beauty convinced Ustinov that he’d found his Billy Budd.
Stamp “looked into the camera with what one journalist later called his ‘heartbreak blue eyes’ and let his tousled blond hair fall over his forehead whenever his character was provoked—which was often, since he was being accused of murder,” writes Anita Gates in the New York Times. Stamp’s performance scored him an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for Most Promising Male Newcomer.
In William Wyler’s The Collector (1965), Stamp plays an amateur entomologist who abducts a young woman he’s had an eye on for years. “As he carried a bottle of chloroform toward a beautiful art student (Samantha Eggar), those startlingly blue eyes now seemed terrifying,” writes Gates. “In the New York Herald Tribune, the critic Judith Crist called his performance ‘brilliant in its gauge’ of madness.” Both Stamp and Eggar won top acting awards in Cannes.
Stamp was at this point as hot as he’d ever be, teaming up with Monica Vitti in Joseph Losey’s spy spoof Modesty Blaise (1966); with Ken Loach on the television director’s first theatrical feature, Poor Cow (1967); and with cinematographer (and future director) Nicolas Roeg on a grassy hillside sequence in John Schlesinger’s 1967 Thomas Hardy adaptation Far from the Madding Crowd, in which Stamp’s dashing sergeant brandishes his sword, whipping it this way and that to impress Julie Christie’s Bathsheba Everdene.
In Italy, Stamp played a Shakespearean actor losing his mind to alcohol in Toby Dammit, Federico Fellini’s segment in the 1968 horror anthology, Spirits of the Dead. Fellini “was just everything and more,” Stamp told Sam Wigley in Sight and Sound in 2013. “I think he was one of the most wonderful human beings I’ve ever met. There was never a moment wasted with Federico.”
Talking to the Guardian’s Andrew Pulver in 2015, Stamp recalled Pasolini’s pitch for Teorema (1968). “Pasolini told me: ‘A stranger arrives, makes love to everybody, and leaves. This is your part.’ I said: ‘I can do that!’”
Writing about Teorema in 2020, James Quandt notes that “azure-eyed Terence Stamp, with the dark, tousled looks of one of Caravaggio’s more refined ragazzi . . . simply appears, like a force of nature” at the home of a well-to-do Italian family. Pasolini once wrote that Teorema “deals with the arrival of a divine visitor in a bourgeois family,” and Quandt points out that “others have cited the visitor’s ability to seduce and destroy each member of the industrialist’s household in defining the Stamp character as, if not the devil himself, verifiably diabolical.”
After Stamp played Arthur Rimbaud opposite Jean-Claude Brialy’s Paul Verlaine in Nelo Risi’s A Season in Hell (1971), his phone stopped ringing. “It’s a mystery to me,” he told Andrew Pulver. “I was in my prime. When the 1960s ended, I just ended with it. I remember my agent telling me: ‘They are all looking for a young Terence Stamp’ . . . I thought: this can’t be happening now, it’s only just started. The day-to-day thing was awful, and I couldn’t live with it. So I bought a round-the-world ticket and left.”
He traveled through Egypt and then stayed for a few years in India. He simply checked out until a telegram arrived addressed to “Clarence Stamp” with an offer to play the evil General Zod in Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), and he eagerly embraced the opportunity to work with Marlon Brando, who had been cast as the caped hero’s father. The screenplay swelled to more than four hundred pages, so two films went into production in 1977. It’s in Superman II (1980) that Stamp gets to milk his command “Kneel before Zod!” for all that’s in it.
In Stephen Frears’s The Hit (1984), Stamp’s Willie Parker is an erudite thief hiding out in Spain after squealing on his partners ten years before. When the inevitable arrives in the form of killers played by John Hurt and Tim Roth, Willie waxes philosophical and quotes John Donne, and it would all “seem like blatant sophistry, calculated to disarm his listeners, if it weren’t for Stamp’s brilliant, ambiguous performance,” writes Graham Fuller.
Stephan Elliott’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) sent two drag queens (Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce) and Stamp’s character, a transgender woman named Bernadette, on a road trip across the Australian outback, and it became a surprise international hit. Elliott’s screenplay gives Stamp delicious lines like, “I’ll join this conversation on the proviso that we stop bitching about people, talking about wigs, dresses, bust sizes, penises, drugs, night clubs, and bloody Abba!”
Stamp was initially reluctant to take the role. “I thought it was a joke,” he told Sam Wigley, but a friend assured him that “my fear was out of all proportion to the possible consequences.” And “it was only when I got there, and got through the fear, that it became one of the great experiences of my whole career. It was probably the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
For Xan Brooks, “arguably the ultimate Stamp performance” can be found in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999). “Soderbergh cast him as Wilson, an aging career criminal who haunts LA like a ghost. It’s a film that is implicitly about Stamp’s youth and age, beautifully folding the present-day drama in with scenes in Ken Loach’s Poor Cow to show what happened to the golden generation of swinging ’60s London—and by implication, what happens to all of us. Somewhere along the way, wending his way up the coast to Big Sur, Stamp’s knackered criminal stops being a ghost and becomes a kind of living sculpture, a priceless piece of cinema history, returned for one last gig to seduce the world and set it spinning before heading off towards the sunset.”
But not to stay there. Dozens of performances followed, with one of the most memorable being his last. Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho (2021) is “a great film, made by a director who admired him, a cast that felt lucky to work with him, for an audience that cherished getting to see him again,” writes C. Robert Cargill. “Few actors get that kind of swan song.”
“Terence was kind, funny, and endlessly fascinating,” recalls Wright. “I loved discussing music with him (his brother managed the Who, and he’s name-checked in the Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’) or reminiscing about his films, going back to his debut in Billy Budd. He spoke of his last shot in that film, describing a transcendental moment with the camera—a sense of becoming one with the lens . . . I witnessed something similar. The closer the camera moved, the more hypnotic his presence became. In close-up, his unblinking gaze locked in so powerfully that the effect was extraordinary. Terence was a true movie star: the camera loved him, and he loved it right back.”
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