Innehållsförteckning för October 28, 2013 från The Nation

Stop the Rot! I’m sure John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney are correct about the threat to democracy posed by money [“Dollarocracy,” Sept. 30]. But I have grown weary and apathetic reading about the powerful rich and how they are buying America. Most Americans, like me, feel more and more helpless in the face of monied power. Tell us how to fight for democracy! (And don’t say, Go out and vote. We do that.) Until you can give me a solution, no more articles on democracy sliding into decay. VIRGINIA S. ANDERSON Ellijay, Ga. _________________________ Run Over on the Runway Elizabeth Cline, in “Fashion Models Are Workers Too” [Sept. 30], says, “After failing to get the attention or support of traditional labor unions, [Sara] Ziff decided to form her own…

Let’s be blunt. Barack Obama is still in denial about the sorry state of the economy, and so are both parties in the stalemated Congress. The government is consumed by wrong arguments about the wrong crisis, while the Federal Reserve keeps pointing out discreetly that the economy is still sick. Prosperity is not just around the corner. 
 Obama has a way to break out of this mess. Instead of wrangling with know-nothing Republicans over how to cut spending and make things worse, the president should make his “grand bargain” with the Federal Reserve. Together, they can develop an aggressive agenda to stimulate job creation and create the new demand the stagnant economy needs. The president’s explicit support would give the Fed the political cover it needs to use its…

In 1956, segregationist Southern Democrats outlined a policy of massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered the desegregation of public schools. Today, the Republican Party, particularly in the South, is following a similar path of massive resistance to Obamacare. 
 According to The New York Times, twenty-six states—all but three controlled by the GOP—have declined the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, denying health insurance coverage to
8 million people. While many factors have driven the shutdown, a leading cause is that the GOP is whiter, more Southern and more conservative than ever—combined with its huge structural advantage when it comes to the makeup of Congress. “As Congress has become more polarized along party lines,” writes Charlie Cook, “it’s become more racially polarized, too. In 2000, House Republicans represented 59…

One morning in mid-July, I drove north
out of Houston at the crack of dawn, three hours up Highway 59 into the cleaner air and dense, piney woods of deep East Texas. It was Sunday, and I was on my way to church. 
 I’d been up that way before: my father was born and raised in northeast Texas—in fact, my whole family is from Texas—and I’m no stranger to Bible Belt Christianity. But I’d never been to a church like the one where I was headed that morning: the small, progressive Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, which meets in an unassuming building on the edge of town.
 Austin Heights was formed as a breakaway congregation in the charged atmosphere of 1968, when its founders could no longer accept the…

Karl Marx A Nineteenth-Century Life. By Jonathan Sperber. Liveright. 648 pp. $35. Trier, the small town in southwest Germany where Karl Marx was born in 1818, is a former Roman capital still littered with ruins, in a Catholic part of the Rhineland known mostly for its wine. When Mary Shelley passed through in 1840, she was exhausted by the long carriage ride over bad roads, horrified by the miserable peasants she saw along the way, and frustrated that there was no steamship on the winding Moselle River to take her to the Rhine. How could such a backward, remote place have shaped an author of The Communist Manifesto? The way Jonathan Sperber answers this question in the first chapter of Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life illustrates and vindicates the historical…

Although the presidential library is now as natural a part of our national trove of civic rituals and commemorations as the Pledge of Allegiance, it is, like the pledge, a fairly new one. The first presidential library was FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York. Based on his own sketches, it opened in 1941, one year before the pledge was adopted by Congress, not long after the completion of the Lincoln Memorial and while the Jefferson was under construction.
 The Roosevelt library established a series of precedents that have endured. First, the president himself is, in effect, the author of his own memorial. Second, the project is built with private funds and then conveyed to the care of the National Archives. Third, every president gets one. Fourth, the president initially curates…

@GeorgeZornick: If you enjoy ostentatious hypocrisy punctuated by bizarre and violent events, you really missed a great week in DC.
 @LilianaSegura: The life & death of Herman Wallace is an injustice I cannot wrap my mind around. Wish I could think of him as free now. His life was stolen.
 @MychalSmith: 
It’s not even a “handout” they’re upset about. They’re mad people are going to be *buying* insurance.
 @AuraBogado: It’s estimated nearly 3,500 people have been deported since the shutdown began three days ago. When do those deportations get shut down?
 @KatrinaNation: Did I just see that de Blasio is leading by 50% in NYC mayoral race? Hope, progress and humane politics alive in my beloved city.
 @JessicaValenti: Potential GOP slogans: “Idle uteri are the devil’s playground!” “Put your uterus…

Jonathan Lethem is the author of eight novels, including Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics
Circle award for fiction. His new novel,
Dissident Gardens, involves three generations of left-wing activists, from Communist Party members in Queens in the 1950s to leftist hippies in the East Village in the ’60s to the Occupiers of Zuccotti Park in our own time. I spoke with him by phone in mid-September. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. —Jon Wiener
 Jon Wiener: The star of your book is Rose Zimmer, the “Red Queen of Sunnyside” in the 1950s—you also call her “the Last Communist,” in capital letters. Where did you get Rose?
 Jonathan Lethem: The mystery I was trying to explore was my grandmother’s political dark matter. As a kid, by the…

It is hard to find an anti-choicer today who will acknowledge that when abortion was illegal it was a widespread practice. That’s just pro-choice propaganda, we’re told: laws matter—and besides, people were more moral back then. Ha! Considering that in 1800 the American fertility rate was seven children per woman, and by 1900 it was less than four, it is hard to see how else that decline could have happened, given the primitive nature of nineteenth-century birth control and the popularity of sex. In fact, as James Mohr, Leslie Reagan, Linda Gordon and other historians have established, abortion was extremely common in the nineteenth century, especially among married, middle- and upper-class white women, who resorted to abortion when they’d had all the children they could handle or their bodies could…

Everyone knows the United States faces enormous challenges: unemployment, poverty, global warming, environmental decay—to say nothing of whole cities that have essentially been thrown away. We know the economic system is dominated by powerful corporate institutions. And we know the political system is dominated by those same institutions. Elections occur and major fiscal debates ensue, but most of the problems are only marginally affected (and often in ways that increase the burdens).
 The issue is not simply that our situation is worrisome. It is that the nation’s most pressing problems are built into the structure of the system. They are not unique to the current economic slump or the result of partisan bickering, something passing in the night that will go away when we elect forward-looking leaders and pressure them…

Shadow of the gull on the airport wall, lunging as the fuselage vaults above the meadow. Hollow in the cornrow where the hobo slept, then a backhoe filling up the furrow. Misery of clocks in neon glare, whereabouts of warblers and island foxes, an old flame googled from the dead letter office, simple as the still-warm bench at dusk. Typing or sewing, or bringing down a fever through a length of knotted string and a rusted staple gun. Here comes the tattooed witch with her drum while the royals wait by the limousine grinning. Shadow of the gull on the airport wall, shallows in the stairs where we fell and stepped, hollow in the cornrow where the hobo slept, a backhoe filling the furrow.…

The shutdown of the government is a crisis for Americans, who rely not just on the services provided by the affected agencies but on the efficiency of their delivery. When 800,000 federal employees are furloughed, it is not just the immediate damage that is of consequence; over time, the whole
 system begins to fray and weaken. While those furloughed employees will eventually be paid, the abrupt cutoff in pay has a ripple effect in the broader community. At a time when America’s economic recovery is at best uneven, the financial uncertainties brought about by the shutdown have idled not just large federal contractors but small businesses on Main Street. 
 Another crisis is playing out as well, one that must be understood and addressed if this country is to avoid…

We all want to forget something, so we tell stories. It’s easier that way.—The Commoner, Rashomon 
 Fifteen years ago this October 7, in the small hours of the morning, Aaron McKinney swung his .357 Magnum for the final time like a baseball bat into the skull of Matthew Shepard. Shepard was tied low to a post, arms behind his back, in a prairie fringe of Laramie, Wyoming. “That was it. He went out,” McKinney said later. He and his accomplice, Russell Henderson, drove off. The baseball swing had crushed Shepard’s brain stem. He lay bleeding on the ground for eighteen hours, but he was already gone. On October 12, he was officially pronounced dead.
 The murder was so vicious, the aftermath so sensational, that the story first told to…

It’s mind-boggling that Republicans have shut down the government in an attempt to deny affordable healthcare to millions of Americans. 
 But this is not the first campaign to defeat what a Nation writer once called “the last great unfinished piece of welfare legislation envisioned in Roosevelt’s New Deal.” Those efforts have always been marked by massive sums of money and apocalyptic rhetoric. 
 In “Who Fights Health Insurance?” (June 23, 1945), Geraldine Sartain noted that the American Medical Association had taken out ads urging newspaper and magazine editors to “tell the American people what perils await them: that their ‘priceless heritage,’ the private-enterprise system, is endangered; that ‘the sacred relationship between doctor and patient’ is similarly threatened (no mention is made of the millions of our people who have…

I watch from afar the tragedy of Egypt and,
inevitably, I think of Chile. I think of Chile and its coup, and I mourn the dead and I mourn history repeating itself. Yet again the massacres and the soldiers in the streets and the jails filled with tortured bodies. Once again the exiles and the censorship; once again a general with dark sunglasses justifying bloodshed in the name of the fatherland; once more the branding of any opposition as terrorism. 
 And then I remember that Chile is not only a study in sorrow, and tentatively, doubtfully, I perceive a possible way out for the troubled land of Egypt. 
 After all, fifteen years after the September 11, 1973, coup against democratically elected President Salvador Allende, the Chilean people managed to…

Dorothy had it easy. When she at last understood she wanted to go home, all she had to do was click her heels and say the words. But when Sandra Bullock makes up her mind to go home in Alfonso Cuarón’s entirely amazing Gravity, she can’t get there unless she’s willing to somersault through the void, bounce repeatedly off large metal objects, swim through fire, consult technical manuals in Russian and Chinese (languages her character doesn’t read) and, not least, master her death wish. “What now?” she yells at one point, in a tone midway between exasperation and terror, as the latest of her challenges (many of which are razor-sharp) come zooming out of an indifferent cosmos. This is what a medical engineer turned rookie astronaut may expect when she’s…