Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2024 i The Nation

AFTER YEARS OF GRANDSTANDING, HOUSE REPUBLICANS have initiated impeachment proceedings against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, accusing him of fomenting a “crisis” at the border. Meanwhile, members of the Freedom Caucus are threatening a government shutdown unless new immigration enforcement measures are added to the general spending bill. The GOP’s goal is to turn the 2024 election into a referendum on the Biden administration’s handling of immigration, framed by the notion of a crisis that has spilled beyond the southern border and into cities across the country. Democrats, too, have bought into the crisis framing. Mayors of blue cities have blamed municipal budget cuts on efforts to provide housing to asylum seekers. These leaders have generally reserved their ire for Texas Governor Greg Abbott—who since 2022 has bused migrants from…

CALL IT THE “BUTT-HEAD CONGRESS”—OR THE “BEAVIS” one, if you prefer more decorous phrasing. The 118th Congress—which closed out its first session in typical fashion, by giving itself an extended deadline to get something done and proceeding to blow right by it—has perfected the art of lethargic shit-talking memorialized in Mike Judge’s 1990s MTV franchise. The end of 2023 saw the House of Representatives passing a mere 27 pieces of legislation—the lowest such output in nearly a century. The main achievement of the GOP House conference was its historic vote to vacate the speakership of Kevin McCarthy for the grave offense of working with Democrats to forestall a looming government shutdown. Predictably, the government-hating Freedom Caucus wing of McCarthy’s fractious majority could not abide the idea of the House getting…

Washington insiders do not approve of Rashida Tlaib. Since her election in 2018 as the first Palestinian American woman and one of the first two Muslim women to serve in the House, the Michigan Democrat has faced rebukes, condemnations, and censure. She’s been accused of everything from sympathizing with terrorists to antisemitism, mostly by Republicans but sometimes by members of her own party. Even the White House has targeted her. Yet outside D.C., and especially in her diverse Detroit-area district, Tlaib is known as a thoughtful and responsive representative with a long history of working across the lines of race, ethnicity, and religious difference. In the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing Israeli assault on Gaza, the condemnatory rhetoric has ramped up. But so,…

THE FORECAST FOR ABORTION RIGHTS IN 2024 IS dire. Despite important ballot initiatives in the past two years that have successfully enshrined abortion rights in several states’ constitutions, a new “Jane Crow” has emerged. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned the legal right to abortion in June 2022, 21 states have imposed abortion bans, including 14 states that banned abortions outright and two others that have imposed restrictions at various points in pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest. With this chilling array of bans now in full force, it’s become abundantly clear that outlawing abortion threatens a range of constitutional freedoms, human rights, and civil liberties. In October, 34-year-old Ohio resident Brittany Watts was charged with a felony following her miscarriage.…

THE YEAR 2023 WAS AT ONCE OVERWHELMING AND AGONIZINGLY predictable. The Middle East blew up. The war in Ukraine wore on. Donald Trump, despite 91 indictments, retained his claim on the soul of the Republican Party and barreled toward a 2024 rematch with Joe Biden, whose approval ratings remained in the doldrums. Republicans in Congress couldn’t get their act together, while Republicans in the states gave master classes in cruelty on issues ranging from abortion rights to immigration. So what is there to cheer? A lot. Labor’s on a winning streak, congressional progressives are writing fresh narratives on foreign and domestic policy, and a new generation of activists has, in pursuit of a cease-fire in Gaza, transformed the debate about US relations with Israel and Palestine. This year’s Nation Honor…

FOR ASIAN AMERICANS, AMONG WHOM I COUNT MYSELF, THE QUESTION of Palestine holds great relevance. And for writers, among whom I also count myself, the question of when to speak our conscience has always mattered. I want to address Israel’s war on Gaza and how it raises issues of self-defense, inclusion, and solidarity that have great meaning for anyone who has been classified as an “other” and for anyone who has sought to write through that otherness. This includes Asian American, Palestinian, Israeli, and Jewish writers—all of whom have grappled with what it means to be the monstrous other. Asian Americans were once called “Orientals,” a term we rejected partly because we heeded Edward Said’s argument in his classic book Orientalism that the Oriental is an object and an opportunity…

The weather in this room is eel-black,a gel-like ointment. It is a cream-like substancethe exact texture of death. It lives, like a dream, inside the body. I have tried but I cannotget it out. I am showing you the history of lifethrough a series of unrelated gestures. You can talk to the dead just like you talk to the living. There is a blonde field and dark riverthat seams along the edge of its forest. A fracturing, television-like static. Glitter and beads, animal, mineral.Memory as a form of matter. I have an accident every five yearsand one year it won’t be accident.…

TYPE THE WORDS “MID-CENTURY MODERN” OR “DANISH Modern” into the search bar on Facebook Marketplace, and you’re just as likely to see a fat floral sofa as you are a sleek credenza. A search for “MCM” on Craigslist in the New York City area returns listings for, among other things, a lamp whose base is composed of chrome-plated spheres; a set of two oak chairs with square backs; and a painting most likely made by someone at a class where they were drinking wine as they wielded their brush. We all know what actual mid-century modern furniture looks like: expanses of teak, tables resting on hairpin legs, brass hardware, and natural finishes, as well as wool upholstery in shades of olive, ocher, and orange. The items for sale online are…

I AM ON THE RECORD AS ANTI-PANIC ABOUT THE LIKELY REMATCH BETWEEN the born-again progressive, President Joe Biden, and the twice-impeached former guy facing 91 felony counts, Donald Trump. Democrats hankering for a Biden alternative at this late date are hankering for a Democratic civil war, and most have wisely stopped fanning those flames. So now we’re all sliding together into 2024, knowing it’s (almost certainly) Biden and Kamala Harris versus Trump and some Republican masochist. Just the way I wanted it. So why am I so anxious about this year? In 2023, Trump finally faced charges for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. There were many points when justice rang like a gleaming bell, and I thought we were easing out of this nightmare. But I don’t think…

WHY DOES THE UNITED STATES FAIL TO PROVIDE its citizens with the basic security—from affordable healthcare to a secure retirement—that other advanced nations enjoy? Why do we suffer from the highest levels of poverty in the industrialized world? Pundits offer many explanations: the antidemocratic institutions built into the Constitution and congressional practice, the absence of a strong labor party, the blight of racial division, and more. But we can see one central cause at work right now. Whenever a majority coalition for fundamental domestic reform begins to crystallize, wars and imperial adventures shatter it, interring the prospects of progressive reform at home. In the period after World War II, for example, the GI Bill helped kick-start the broad middle class (sadly, excluding most Black veterans) and demonstrated the continuing strength…

YEHUDA BIADGA, A 24-YEAR-OLD ISRAELI OF ETHIOPIAN descent, was suffering from combat-induced PTSD—which had curtailed his military service two years earlier—when he was gunned down by Israeli police in January 2019. In June of that year, Solomon Tekah, an 18-year-old Ethiopian Israeli, was shot dead by an off-duty police officer. A 2020 New York Times article reported on “Israel’s festering police brutality problem,” noting that “lethal force, while rare, is wielded almost exclusively against Arabs and other minorities.” With the killings of Biadga and Tekah, Israeli police snuffed out the lives of two young Black men in just six months. After both shootings, Ethiopian Jews took to the streets by the thousands, just as they had after two earlier instances of police misconduct against their community. The protesters decried not…

In the mid-1980s, the people of Valerie Reyes-Jimenez’s Lower Manhattan neighborhood began to disappear. Once a tight-knit Puerto Rican community, it had recently become the site of one of the city’s most infamous drug bazaars. At 20, Valerie had seen a lot, though nothing prepared her for the mysterious illness that took 75 people from her block in just a few years. “One day they were there,” she said, “and the next day they were gone.” Valerie and her friends called this illness “the Monster.” Outside Valerie’s neighborhood, doctors had a different name for what was going on: They called it HIV/AIDS. By this point, the illness that was destroying people’s immune systems was widely recognized as the biggest contagious threat facing the United States, but its effect on communities…

Behind the Beat Ethan Iverson gives us the best sentence I have ever read about my passion: “In jazz, the human is indistinguishable from the music” [“Louis Armstrong’s Last Word,” Nov. 13/20, 2023]. Thank you for his in-depth experience of the Louis Armstrong House Museum. Archives such as Master Armstrong’s appeal to all the senses. I think I even got a little whiff of mildew and dust. STARFLOWER THOMSONJOSHUA TREE, CALIF. Unequal Outrage Haggai Matar’s article “Time to Change Course” [Oct. 30/Nov. 6, 2023] should be required reading for all on either side who are dismayed by the current situation in Palestine. This key sentence ought to appear on giant billboards everywhere: “The terror Israelis feel right now—myself included—is a sliver of what Palestinians have been feeling on a daily…

FOR GENERATIONS, THE VOICES OF Palestinians have been routinely overlooked. When we do turn to them, it is usually to ask them to justify their despair or prove their worthiness as humans—and to teach us the very basics of a generations-long crisis of forced exile and violent displacement. Instead of making Palestinians play out that endless cycle one more time, we wanted to get to the heart of a question that feels more vital, more essential, in our moment. The contributors to this section are Palestinians living in the US, where the war reverberates with terrifying intimacy even though the bloodshed is thousands of miles away. It is also where the need to hear from Palestinians—and to listen to what they have to say—has never been as critical, or as…

TO WRITE ABOUT LOU REED IS TO FIGHT with Lou Reed. It is difficult to say, however, who started what, and there is more than a little evidence that the sourness of rock males and their broadsheets were a somewhat common culprit. It feels inaccurate to blame any single party (even Jann Wenner). In 2018, Hat and Beard Press released My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters With Lou Reed, a collection of 36 tussles that range in character from amicable slap-boxing to tearful negotiations. Sometimes Reed is responding in nasty bad faith when being asked anodyne questions about his Poe adaptation; other times, he’s fielding provocative tabloid nonsense about the “greasers” who “get off” to his music. It’s a bad soup. Howard Sounes, who published The Life of Lou Reed:…

WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PALESTINIANS living in the West Bank and Palestinians living in Israel? Right now the differences between those in Gaza and those in much of the rest of the world are glaring. With the threat of a second Nakba looming, civilians in Gaza are under the constant threat of death as the Israeli bombardment continues to add to the more than 20,000 already killed there. But when it comes to Palestinians in the West Bank, where I live, and those in Israel, in many ways our experiences are similar. As with Palestinians who live in the West Bank, for those who remained within the boundaries of the Israeli state, life has continued to be every bit as complex, grueling, and punishing as it was in the…

“DEADBEAT DADS, RAPPERS, CRACK”—THAT’S WHAT Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), the writer at the center of American Fiction, says his latest novel is about. He’s talking to Arthur (John Ortiz), his confused agent who has just read a passage aloud and stumbled over the clunky ebonics. “I be standing outside in the night,” Arthur clumsily recites. Monk doesn’t typically write this way: His last novel was a retelling of Aeschylus’s The Persians. But reeling from personal tragedies and repeatedly rejected by editors who insist that his work “isn’t Black enough,” he’s decided to indulge the racism of the literary marketplace. He titles his new book My Pafology, loads the story with stereotypes, and writes under an assumed name, Stagg R. Leigh. (The pseudonym invokes the folkloric Black outlaw Stagger Lee,…

FOUR YEARS OF COVID-19. A TOTAL OF 1.165 MILLION deaths in the United States. As of December, we were averaging about 1,500 deaths a week from Covid. These numbers may seem abstract to many, but I remember a scientific paper from early in the pandemic that estimated “for every Covid-19 death, approximately nine surviving Americans will lose a grandparent, parent, sibling, spouse, or child”—which means 60,000 Americans were left grieving for the holidays. Public health is about trade-offs between risks and benefits, just like personal health. Think about your own life: We all weigh the pleasure of that second glass of wine or extra slice of cake against the calories we know that pleasure will bring. And I’m not judging here, as I make these same decisions daily. (Give me…

IF YOU LOOK AT IMAGES OF GAZA NOW, INSTEAD OF cities where thousands of people lived, all you’ll see is rubble. The remnants of homes and apartment buildings lie strewn about, mangled beyond recognition. Shops, hospitals, schools, universities, religious buildings, whether ancient or new (it makes little difference now)—all have been reduced to unsalvageable heaps of rock and steel, some bombed beyond recognition, legible now only in the memories of those who knew them. There is a word for when buildings and cities are destroyed as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing: “urbicide.” It is a tactic used to make sure there is nothing left to return to, nothing that can be cherished or latched on to. Its goal is a total colonization of the landscape that erases whatever…

WITH ITS UNCEASING BOMBARDMENT OF OUR homes and neighborhoods—which has killed over 23,000 people, reduced our cities to nothing, and made millions of us internally displaced refugees—Israel has transformed Gaza into a slaughterhouse. And with its continuous targeting of hospitals, bakeries, water wells, solar panels, and markets, Israel is depriving us of all the necessities of life. It is a gruesome attempt to break our spirit and destroy our hope, and it has turned every second of every day into a gamble with death. This is what it takes to get through just one day in Gaza. Each day, my family, along with three other families, goes on a mission to get what we need to make it to the next morning. When someone leaves the house, my mother and…

MARIANNE WILLIAMSON IS SURROUNDED BY HER PEOPLE. THEY cling to her every word. No one pulls a phone out in the middle of her speech. They sit rapt, a few dozen of them, as she paces around in her powder-blue suit, making eye contact with as many individuals as she can. It’s a Saturday afternoon in early September, and Williamson is at Nandi’s Knowledge Cafe in Highland Park, Mich., a 9,000-person town that’s almost completely encircled by Detroit. Though residents here are quick to point out this isn’t Detroit, there are a few similarities: It’s majority-Black and has suffered from a systematic lack of investment. It’s had highways rammed through it and seen factory jobs disappear. Recently, the Highland Park government told the state it could no longer afford to…

IN THE FALL OF 2019, DURING DONALD TRUMP’S FIRST impeachment hearing, a historian of 19th-century America by the name of Heather Cox Richardson began to publish essays summarizing the day’s political news on her Facebook page. Her calm, clear, and matter-of-fact voice offered readers a daily digest that managed to sidestep the shrill hysteria of Twitter and the confusing blow-by-blow of press accounts. As she continued her readings of current events, she discovered that there was a tremendous market for just such an approach Over the dramatic course of 2020 and 2021—from Covid to the election to the events of January 6—Richardson’s straightforward analysis won her a vast readership. She soon began to publish her reports as a Substack newsletter under the title Letters From an American, borrowed from the…

AT 8:45 PM ON NOVEMBER 8, 1923, ADOLF HITLER, THEN 34 and the little-known leader of a tiny, violent extremist group called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, stormed into the crowded main hall of the Burgerbraukeller, a beer hall in the Bavarian state capital of Munich. Standing on a chair, Hitler fired his gun into the ceiling to gain attention. Then he bounded onto the stage at one end of the room and shouted: “The national revolution has broken out. This hall is occupied by 600 heavily armed men. No one is allowed to leave. If there is not immediate silence, I will have a Gatling gun set up in the gallery. The Bavarian government is hereby dismissed. The national government is dismissed. A provisional national government will be…