Indholdsfortegnelse for May-25-15 i The Nation

@thenation.com Stormy Weather I am writing in response to Eric Alterman’s column “Days of Crazy” [May 4]. I was a youthful member/ advocate of the Students for a Democratic Society during that period, from 1969 to 1971. I was never a part and never a supporter of the Weatherman faction of SDS. In fact, I argued against tactics that could cause human harm. The split that created Weatherman was largely about the appropriateness of violence and the acceptability of collateral damage (harm to humans) from actions against the war machine. But let us look back. US interference in Vietnam goes back to Eisenhower’s blocking free elections in 1958 because it was clear that Ho Chi Minh would win. This was followed by an ever-escalating war by the US government against…

As a former board member of PEN and a believer in its mission—to defend writers’ freedom of expression in the United States and around the world—I was pleased to accept the organization’s invitation to be a table host this year. And then, as the world knows, six writers, eventually supported by more than 100 other PEN worthies (not including, among others, Salman Rushdie, Art Spiegelman, and our own Katha Pollitt; see page 8), announced that they would boycott the dinner to protest PEN’s decision to give the first PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo, the Paris-based satirical journal whose editors had been murdered only months before for doing what they did, which was deploying satire (mostly visual) to attack the powers that be.…

On April 20, a Cook County judge dismissed all charges against Chicago police officer Dante Servin, who shot and killed a 22-year-old black woman, Rekia Boyd, in 2012. Servin, who was off-duty at the time, fired an unregistered handgun into a dark alley out of fear, he says. Boyd and her friends—all unarmed—had been walking in the opposite direction when one of the cop’s bullets hit her. Activists held a rally outside the Chicago courthouse following the verdict, in solidarity with Boyd’s family. Black Youth Project 100 has launched a petition calling for Servin to be fired and, in collaboration with Ferguson Action and Black Lives Matter, is calling for a National Day of Action to End State Violence Against Black Women and Girls. TheNation.com/Students…

Many of the ambiguities that David Nasaw describes as marking the end of World War II in Europe—70 years ago this week—were already evident in The Nation’s May 12, 1945, issue. The first sentence sounded a note of triumph: “This is the day for which free men of all nations in the world have longed and prayed and given up their lives. Fascism as a system of power and terror is dead. The black night is over.” But The Nation also admitted to a certain “foreboding”: “If we have overwhelmed Nazism we have yet to eradicate the evil in our civilization from which it issued as a plague.” Indeed, a few pages later, I.F. Stone reported on the “Anti-Russian Undertow” at the conference to establish the United Nations. “It is…

ON A TUESDAY AFTERNOON IN LATE OCTOBER 2014, SIX PEOPLE AT DIFFERENT churches in Arizona, Illinois, Oregon, and Colorado dialed in to a conference call. All of them were undocumented and had imminent orders of deportation to Mexico, El Salvador, or Guatemala. Three lived in Arizona—ground zero for the deportation of migrants caught up in what critics say is a dragnet of militarized border policing, racial profiling by law enforcement, and a punitive immigration system. The Arizona callers were Rosa Robles Loreto, a former accountant’s assistant who had been working as a house cleaner; Francisco Cordova, a burly, middle-aged construction worker; and Luis Lopez-Acabal, a slight, soft-spoken asylum applicant and young father of an autistic child. “I hope we are putting pressure on Obama,” says Lopez-Acabal, who in early September…

“Deepening” is the suggestive word that economists use to describe a developing country’s increasing involvement with international finance. As more transactions take place between borrowers and lenders, as more mediating institutions are formed, more financial instruments introduced, and more laws and regulations devised, something intricate and integrated emerges across national borders: the deepening of the mighty “financial markets” that dictate government policies and decide the fate of populations. With innumerable connecting threads forming a complex, near-organic unity, this spectral entity is at once extraordinarily sensitive and extraordinarily stable. The slightest external stimulus is registered, its effects transmitted rapidly throughout the system—but as with all complex organisms, a homeostatic process swiftly restores equilibrium. Deep-enough markets are impossible for individuals to dominate or disrupt; there are simply too many controls, shock absorbers,…

“Good news,” said the doctor, “it’s a demon.” I asked for its name: was it No One? Was it Superego? He said it wasn’t those but he couldn’t guess the name. “Who knows,” he said, “It mightn’t even be a demon. It’s what we call a ‘diagnosis by elimination.’” Explaining he couldn’t operate, the doctor said let’s go ahead and medicate the hell out of it, make it sleepy. I named him “Demon” after his identity. I put him to sleep twice a day, one short one long; three times a week he did sport; he grew to six foot two; I said he was good; I went to the door of his room and left food.…

ACROSS 1 She once wrote up drivers, or the author, with Word help (5,4) 6 Poke around company with twin (5) 9 Every other element in niece’s day is lacking (5) 10 Film director, ragin’, gets in the way? (9) 11 Coming to, and feeling pain again? (8) 12 In Europe, capital “A”s? (6) 14 Herb to reveal a secret on the radio (4) 15 Someone who’s probably about to retire with a firecracker? (4,6) 18 Dysfunctional person to luxuriate, and so forth, beside stormy sea (6,4) 19 Big show of affection at the end of squabble (4) 22 Give a prosecutor weapons and a bunch of ships (6) 24 A mixed stucco outside facade of Institute of Sound (8) 26 Edges away from accident and snarl in square, for…

since 1865 Allen Bullock became an unwitting star of the Baltimore riots. In a photo splashed across the front page of The Baltimore Sun, the 18-year-old stood on the hood of a cop car, smashing the windshield with an orange cone. It was a striking portrait of the youthful rage that has forced everyone from President Obama to Geraldo Rivera to belatedly notice West Baltimore’s pain. Bullock’s well-meaning parents urged him to turn himself in to the police. “We wanted Allen to do the right thing,” his mother told The Guardian. That sentiment plunged the family into a trick bag of morality that black people routinely encounter when they brush up against the criminal-justice system. For smashing that window, Bullock is being held on $500,000 bail and faces a sentence…

Peter Carey (b. 1943) is an Australian-born, New York–based writer known for his novels, including True History of the Kelly Gang. Teju Cole (b. 1975) is a Brooklyn-based writer and photographer, best known for his PEN/Hemingway Award–winning novel Open City. Rachel Kushner (b. 1968) is a Los Angeles–based novelist and essayist, best known for The Flamethrowers. Michael Ondaatje (b. 1943) is a Sri Lankan–born, Toronto-based poet, novelist, and playwright, known for novels including The English Patient and The Cat’s Table. Francine Prose (b. 1947) is a New York–based novelist and former president of the PEN American Center, known for her novels A Changed Man and Blue Angel and her book Reading Like a Writer. Taiye Selasi (b. 1979) is a London-born, New York–based writer and photographer, best known for her…

When PEN decided to award the first PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the group surely thought it was honoring bravery in defense of free speech. This was a magazine that kept publishing after its offices were firebombed by Islamists in 2011, and kept publishing after nine staffers were murdered by Islamists in January. Compare that to, say, Yale University Press, which dropped the illustrations for Jytte Klausen’s book about the Danish Muhammad cartoons after the book’s first printing, or Random House, which canceled publication of Sherry Jones’s The Jewel of Medina, a novel about Muhammad’s wife Aisha. Both publishers cited fears of violence. Those fears were not irrational: The home of the publisher who picked up Jones’s novel…

THE NATION has been going strong for 150 years, an embar-rassing portion of which I have witnessed firsthand. I hesitate to confess the exact number of years, but I am proud to admit that I have left a gift to the Nation in my will. It was an easy decision to make, and not difficult to arrange. I encourage you to join my wife, Annie, and me in doing the same. Please consider leaving a gift to the Nation in your will or through your retirement plan. You don’t need me to tell you that the independent, unfettered voice of the Nation remains as necessary as ever, but I will anyway. Help us keep it that way. Help ensure a home for dissent and dissenters who will challenge the conventional…

Mourn the poem or porn locked inside or fried, the white scrambled pre-word, impulses so electric they’re post-, just the paths, the pulse. The embarrassment of backup forgotten, Alzheimer put on like a coat you paid a lot for, months owed to a machine. Here— take this, my life in numbered bundles. Don’t forget. Such blackness arrives always sudden and sad but peaceful, not even an accident this time. And you, half-brained, mea culpa the air where the data hadn’t risen to cloud height, so suitable for burial, disremembered, dismembered.…

Bernie Sanders is running a very different campaign for the presidency than Americans have come to expect from Democratic contenders. The first sign of that came when Sanders appeared on ABC’s This Week the Sunday after he announced his candidacy. The Vermont senator had just explained his democratic socialism by reminding host George Stephanopoulos that in the social-democratic countries of Scandinavia, “by and large, government works for ordinary people in the middle class rather than, as is the case right now in our country, for the billionaire class.” “I can hear the Republican attack ad right now,” Stephanopoulos interrupted: “‘He wants America to look more like Scandinavia.’ ” “That’s right,” Sanders replied without blinking. “What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong when [they] have more income and wealth equality? What’s wrong…

In early May and early August, we will celebrate the 70th anniversary of VE and VJ Days. Images of jubilant crowds in Times Square, joyous faces wreathed with smiles, banners proclaiming victory, the sailor leaning forward and the nurse bending back for a passionate kiss, will all be exhibited for us to admire. And we will, viewing them, share the celebrants’ joy. But we should also remember those in Europe for whom the horrors of war did not vanish with the end of organized hostilities: the millions left homeless, stateless, destitute, near starvation; the numberless, often anonymous victims of rape, their bodies the spoils of war, occupation, and revenge; the troops returning to devastated villages, cities of rubble, and families torn apart. In Germany alone, at war’s end, there were…

1 Number of terror-related convictions that have come out of the 192,499 national-security letters issued between 2003 and 2006 51 Number of the 11,129 requests for sneak-and-peek warrants in 2013 that were used for terrorism investigations (0.5 percent) 7 Court challenges made to the practice of issuing national-security letters 2 Number of House Judiciary Committee members who recently voted against a reformed Patriot Act “I would say the best part of the Obama administration would be…the NSA being enhanced.” Likely GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush…

UNDER BANNERS PROCLAIMING “HEALTHY planet & Good Jobs,” thousands of trade unionists from 75 local and national unions, highly visible in their red, blue, green, and white union uniforms, joined the People’s Climate March (PCM) in New York City last September—a quantum leap from labor’s previous participation in climate actions. At the labor rally before the march, AFSCME District Council 37 executive director Henry Garrido recalled that during Superstorm Sandy in 2012, “Our workers were at the forefront manning shelters, evacuating people, preparing hospital beds, and rescuing people every day.” But Sandy was just a warning shot. “Labor must stand for more than working conditions,” Garrido continued. “We must stand for more than contracts. We must stand for environmental justice—otherwise, we will become irrelevant.” The issue of climate change, he…