Innehållsförteckning för September 2-9, 2013 från The Nation

Big Brother: Watching, Listening and… Washington, D.C. We enjoyed the excellent insights in your “The End of Privacy” issue [July 8/15]. But before packing up all our data for Big Brother, how about a little resistance? The Electronic Privacy Information Center has petitioned NSA director Keith Alexander for a public rule-making on the agency’s decision to do domestic surveillance. This is the kind of change in agency activity that triggers the public comment process required by the Administrative Procedure Act. We will be renewing our petition weekly. To sign on, go to epic.org/NSApetition or #NSApetition. MARC ROTENBERG, president KHALIAH BARNES, counsel, Electronic Privacy Information Center _________________________ Mercer Island, Wash. Thank you, thank you, thank you for Jonathan Schell’s unequivocal condemnation of the government’s invasion of our privacy and its complete…

“Putin signs anti-gay legislation into law.” —news reports It’s possible a skier’d have to pray, As he zoomed down the steepest slope one day, That he did not, by accident, display A manner that those eager to obey The laws that under Putin now hold sway Might video as evidence, then say This shows with certainty that he is gay, Illegally, and must be sent away To some gay gulag, where he will decay In dungeons like the cages of Bombay. And meanwhile Putin leads the cheers: “Let’s hear it! Let’s celebrate that grand Olympic spirit!”…

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took
the podium on August 28, 1963, the Department of Justice was watching. Fearing that someone might hijack the microphone to make inflammatory statements, the Kennedy DOJ came up with a plan to silence the speaker, just in case. In such an eventuality, an official was seated next to the sound system, holding a recording of Mahalia Jackson singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” which he planned to play to placate the crowd. 
 Half a century after the March on Washington and the famous “I Have a Dream” speech, the event has been neatly folded into America’s patriotic mythology. Relatively few people know or recall that the Kennedy administration tried to get organizers to call it off; that the FBI tried…

The old saw that a picture is worth a thousand words may still be true, but it always takes at least a few words to unlock the meaning, to let the picture tell its story. And a different word will make for a different story, a divergent meaning. Artists have been worrying for a long time about the peculiar relationship between pictures and their captions, between showing and saying, and because the relationship is always in flux, the worrying isn’t likely to stop.
 The American artist Lorna Simpson has been exploring this quandary since the beginning of her career, and an early piece like Twenty Questions (A Sampler), from 1986, is typical. Four seemingly identical black-and-white photographs—tondos rather than rectangles—show the back of the head of a young black woman…

Pacific Rim offers a somewhat messy allegory. In the East, a monstrous alien power is rising in the form of kaiju, or alien sea monsters. Humans counter with jaegers, robotic war machines. The final jaegers seem to represent various capitalist modes of production: Fordist, Soviet, post-Fordist and an Australian one I didn’t get. Spoiler: the somewhat forlorn old-model American jaeger, with a little international cooperation, ends up saving the world.
 Mainly, however, the film consists of slugfests between ponderous titans thigh-deep in the Pacific Ocean. Puny people look on apprehensively, adjuncts so unnecessary to the action that it remains unclear why they are there at all. What are the stakes again? Right, the fate of humankind. Still, as in Alien vs. Predator, it is appealing enough to watch great beasts…

When New York City Democrats head to the polls on September 10 to choose their party’s nominee for mayor, they will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rewrite the narrative of their city. After twelve years, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose mix of technocratic efficiency and top-down urbanism has come to define the city, is leaving office. For voters, this means a new opening to debate some of the most critical 
issues of the day, from policing to economic development to hurricane recovery. More fundamentally, it also means a chance to revisit the meaning of the city itself, to ask: What kind of city do we want New York to be? A city for the few, or a city for the many?
 Among this year’s Democratic contenders, several have made thoughtful…

They carried signs that demanded “Voting Rights,” “Jobs for All” and “Decent Housing.” They protested the vigilante killing of an unarmed black teenager in the South and his killer’s acquittal. They denounced racial profiling in the country’s largest city. 
 This isn’t 1963 but 2013, when so many of the issues that gave rise to the March on Washington fifty years ago remain unfulfilled or under siege today. That’s why, on August 24, a broad coalition of civil rights organizations, unions, progressive groups and Democratic Party leaders will rally at the Lincoln Memorial and proceed to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the march and dramatize the contemporary fight. (President Obama will participate in a separate event commemorating the official anniversary on August 28.)…

Traveling along the streets and alleyways of inner-city American neighborhoods, I find commercial signs, graffiti, folk altars and murals that announce why the residents remember their dead, who is worthy of admiration, whom they pray to and the proud achievements of their ancestors. These artifacts, painted or assembled by neighborhood people, represent a shared history of beliefs. They give us glimpses into what the residents of America’s poor minority communities hold as meaningful. 
 Drawing from this urban graphic art since the 1970s, I have created a photo archive of work devoted to Martin Luther King Jr. that I encountered in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and other cities. I did not set out to form a collection. Instead, I found an image and photographed it and then found…

In the mid-1930s, slumped deep in economic depression and faced with ever-worsening news from Europe, Americans turned to self-help with a sharp new thirst. The decade, bookended by the Crash and the War, was a period of seeking, searching and struggling, as is clear from the titles turned bromides like How to Win Friends and Influence People and Life Begins at Forty that still pepper our vocabulary. The decade’s most successful self-help books emphasized the power of the mind and the will to rise above the burden of circumstance. Unable to stabilize the market or the world, readers turned inward and saw themselves anew—as fixable machines, captives of an unbridled will or endlessly renewable resources.
 In his first inaugural address in March 1933—the speech in which he asserted that “the…

A HISTORIC FOOTNOTE: In a landmark ruling on August 12, a federal judge ruled that the New York Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy is unconstitutional and racially discriminatory. In her Floyd v. City of New York decision, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin determined that stop-and-frisk constitutes “a policy of indirect racial profiling,” noting that “blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be subjected to the use of force than whites, despite the fact that whites are more likely to be found with weapons or contraband.”
 Remarkably, in a footnote to her decision, Scheindlin invoked an investigative documentary video published by TheNation.com last year featuring Alvin Cruz, a teenager who recorded himself being stopped in Harlem in 2011. 
 “It appears to be the only known recording of a stop by a…

The sale of The Washington Post has inspired a predictable avalanche of emotion about the end of the good old days of famous families owning great newspapers. The Sulzbergers alone remain, but their newspaper, The New York Times, is sui generis: a global brand that has the kind of readership that advertisers covet and information for which at least a million people will pay hundreds of dollars. With the possible exception of The Wall Street Journal, which has been weakened but not quite ruined by its current owner, Rupert Murdoch, no other American newspaper can imagine itself occupying such territory. The Post may have had such a chance at the beginning of the Internet era, but Donald Graham and his advisers bet wrong—on metropolitan saturation coupled with national and international…

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has a
hard time pronouncing “Jayaraman,” but he’s been getting some practice.
 At a conference of labor researchers this spring, the union leader introduced Saru Jayaraman, co-director and co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), as a “real pioneer.” No wonder he’s impressed. In an industry that, according to the Labor Department, is more than 95 percent unorganized, ROC has been winning money settlements for workers, improving conditions in trendsetting restaurants, and making a policy impact large enough to render one of the nation’s most powerful corporate lobbies visibly nervous.
 Indeed, in calling Jayaraman a pioneer who’s “demanding answers to the questions that need to be asked about the future of workers,” Trumka may have things backward. The truth is, ROC’s not demanding answers so much…

The Closed Commercial State Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society From Rousseau to Fichte. By Isaac Nakhimovsky. Princeton. 203 pp. $35. Not so long ago, English-speaking philosophers treated German philosophy between Kant and Hegel in the manner of media executives flying between New York City and Los Angeles. They knew that there were a lot of people down there, but only the big names at either end were important enough to bother about. Among those who were passed over along the way was Johann Gottlieb Fichte—something that would certainly have astonished the self-confident Fichte himself. 
 More recently, though, there has been a revival of interest in Fichte’s thought. His ambitious account of the structures of the self has been treated more respectfully than it would have been when “consciousness” was…