Indholdsfortegnelse for Aug-17-15 - 8/24/2015 i The Nation

Bad Weather I am 94 and have been a subscriber for more than 50 years. I hope I’ll be a subscriber for many more. I’ve disagreed with your writers, correspondents, supporters, and critics before. Never angrily. However, I have just read Rick Perlstein’s review of Days of Rage [“Ignorant Good Will,” July 6/13]. I think he intended to send it to the National Review, not The Nation. The National Review is where it belongs. Need I say more? EUGENE BARON OAK PARK, MICH. It is confounding at a time when the US government is conducting drone terrorist operations overseas, and many black Americans are systematically murdered by the police, that two of your writers—Eric Alterman [“Days of Crazy,” May 4] and Rick Perlstein, who both wrote about Bryan Burrough’s Days…

How contemptuous this all is, what an enormous humiliation to a society of free people. We may ask those who speak of this corrupt and corrupting system as a kind of speech that mustn’t be tampered with, if to privilege the free speech of corporations with vast treasuries on those grounds is not undeniably to squelch the speech of others who don’t have the same resources. Or if, in fact, this huge application of money to the political process that so depreciates the power of the individual voter is not a de facto poll tax, with the expected minorities, Afro-American, Hispanic, joined in their disfranchisement by the white citizenry…. To effect a true and thoroughgoing reform…would amount to a kind of revolution of our national political behavior; it would bring…

John Nichols writes in this issue that Scott Walker is “the most politically savvy and comfortably cynical contender for the presidency since Richard Nixon.” For those who may have forgotten what Nixon was like (or are too young to know in the first place), The Nation’s archives are a good place to start for a quick, if depressing, refresher. Here’s journalist Gene Marine, in 1956, when Nixon was vice president: “It is no accident that his popularity— which is real and not to be underestimated— is strongest where the popularity of the soap opera is strongest. There, in that cardboard world, heroes are young, good-looking; they wear neat suits and open smiles, and speak in perfectly chosen clichés.” Or this April 1973 editorial, after Nixon finally admitted there had been…

ACROSS 1 Prepare cured eel’s head to lose weight (6) 4 Give a hearing to a scrappy Native American (6) 10 Doc [that’s what it says here] is involved in any hip replacement (9) 11 Lead soprano role in a Puccini opera about an ape (5) 12 Rumba dancing in Myanmar (5) 13 Bend down if I’d sounded dopey (9) 14 Happy drummer loses head, takes an excessive amount of drugs, and trips out when eating pie filling (2,4,7) 18 Grumpy, brusque, and embarrassed about Arizona city (5-8) 24 Alien I find deft and bashful (9) 25 Small dog with one large student (5) 27 Excuse tabloid bait, ignoring the odds (5) 28 Consequently, a set of letters associated with 6 days of penitence makes you sleepy (9) 29 Appreciate…

At this point, little more than a week before the first GOP presidential smash-up, one must take a certain pity on the 15 candidates vying to overtake the race’s undisputed front-runner, New York real-estate tycoon and reality-TV star Donald Trump. Armed with a fortune somewhere between $3 billion and $10 billion, depending on whom you believe, and a cunning ability to seize the limelight, Trump has climbed to the top of a very crowded heap. He leads his nearest rival, Jeb Bush, by several points in the national polls and comes in first and second in New Hampshire and Iowa, respectively. While his campaign outwardly lacks the appearance of a traditional effort, Trump has used his wealth to quietly buy up high-profile Republican staffers in early primary states, creating what…

It’s a common-sense notion that society’s wealth shouldn’t be governed by ghosts. “Our Creator made the earth for the use of the living and not of the dead,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. (Also: “One generation of men cannot foreclose or burthen its use to another.”) But in our new age of inequality—the top 10 percent now own nearly 80 percent of all wealth—old concerns about wealth and inheritance are coming back from the dead. Americans have, historically, had a simple approach to dealing with wealth after its holder dies: You can do whatever you want with your property, but not for very long. Rich people can disinherit children. They can put extreme conditions on how their successors can inherit, like requiring marriage. They can build monuments to themselves or give everything…

We’re proud to announce that The Nation has been given the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s 2015 Maggie Award for Excellence in Media. The Maggie Awards recognize journalists and publications that deepen the public’s understanding of reproductive rights in particular and women’s rights in general—something The Nation has been doing for 150 years. The Nation supported women’s suffrage as early as 1866—one year after its founding—and played a crucial role as a forum for conversations about feminism in the 1920s, exploring the evolving attitudes toward monogamy, extramarital affairs, child-rearing, and what we now call sexual politics. Under Freda Kirchwey from 1937 to 1955, The Nation was also the first national weekly magazine to be edited by a woman. In the 1950s, The Nation began to question state prohibitions on abortion,…

SCOTT KEVIN WALKER, FRESH from a free-spending yet folksy campaign in which he carried his lunch in a brown paper bag and promised to create 250,000 jobs, delivered his first inaugural address as governor of Wisconsin on January 3, 2011. “I stand before you not as the governor of one party or another, or the governor of one part of the state or another,” he declared. “Today, I stand before you as the governor for all of the people in the state of Wisconsin.” Days later, Walker traveled from Madison, the state capital, to Beloit, a working-class town battered by plant closings. But he wasn’t reaching out to laid-off workers or confirming his commitment to a city that hadn’t voted for him. He was meeting with Diane Hendricks, the billionaire…

COMMENT E.L. Doctorow, who died on July 21 at the age of 84, was not only a personal pal; he was a supporter of, investor in, and contributor to this magazine and, as the world knows, a gifted, original, and über-relevant novelist. I first met Edgar in the late 1960s, when he was editor in chief of Dial Press, where his authors included James Baldwin and Norman Mailer. At the time, I was editing and publishing Monocle, a small journal of political satire. We had an idea for a book that became Report From Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. Its premise was that the US government had commissioned a special study group to plan the transition from a war economy to a peace economy—but the group,…

ON NOVEMBER 7, 2000, WILLIE STEEN, A NAVY VET who had served in the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm, went to cast his ballot for president at the St. Francis Episcopal Church in Tampa, Florida. He brought his 10-year-old son, Willie Jr., to the polls for the first time. They waited a half hour to reach a poll worker. When Steen gave the poll worker his name, she searched a list of registered voters in the precinct and told him, “You can’t vote. You’re a convicted felon.” “You must be mistaken,” a shocked Steen replied. “I’ve never been arrested in my life.” He worked at a hospital, a Tampa orthopedics center, that wouldn’t employ anyone with a felony conviction. The poll worker gave him a number to call at the…

On a snowy morning in February, Violette Verdy walked into a well-lit rehearsal studio seven stories above Broadway. At 81, the former ballerina, best known for her 20-year collaboration with George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet, is a striking woman, petite and vivacious, with eyes the color of stormy seas. (“My mother said they change with the weather,” she told me.) She wore her signature work attire: matching tights, kneelength skirt, and top, all in the same shade of dark blue, and complemented by a pair of bright-red ballet flats. If one looked closely, one might have noticed that her shoes were held in place not by elastics or ribbons, but by matching rubber bands, the kind shelved next to the paper clips at Staples. Verdy displays the…

PAUL BEATTY’S LATEST NOVEL, THE Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $26), recounts the ordeals of a man who tries—and fails—to live up to his father’s, his community’s, and his country’s ideas of what it means to be black in America. But our narrator, nicknamed Sellout, does more than just fail: He threatens, as a certain saying goes, to set the race back 500 years, by landing himself a date before the US Supreme Court for owning a slave named Hominy (who refuses to work) and attempting to reinstate segregation in the deincorporated pastoral ghetto of Dickens in the greater Los Angeles area. Beatty is smarter than most comic writers, and fearless: The Sellout at times seems to be based on a lost Dave Chappelle skit. Yet one fears that Beatty will…