Innehållsförteckning för December 16, 2013 från The Nation

Eric and Goliath
 We were barraged with letters and web comments about two pieces that ran in our November 4 issue: one was Eric Alterman’s column, titled “The ‘I Hate Israel’ Handbook,” in which he attacks Max Blumenthal’s book Goliath. The other was Blumenthal’s “Israel Cranks Up the Right-Wing PR Machine,” an excerpt from Goliath. A debate between the two authors migrated to our website (see TheNation.com/blog/176861/eric-alterman-replies-max-blumenthals-letter and TheNation.com/article/176802/response-eric-alterman). —The editors 
 _________________________ Eric Alterman’s review of Goliath says more about Alterman’s views than about the book. And if this is the best that liberal Zionism has to offer, then Zionism—not to mention the Palestinians—is in deeper trouble than I had imagined.
 I am troubled by The Nation’s need to present “two sides of the story.” Having Alterman do his…

Despite strong objections from President Hamid Karzai, the United States insists that Afghanistan must sign, as written, a Bilateral Security Agreement that sets the framework for another decade of US occupation of that war-torn nation. According to the terms of the proposed accord, the United States will be able to maintain up to nine military bases, along with 8,000–12,000 troops (and a smaller contingent of European and other forces), through 2024. Over Afghan opposition, the agreement states that US troops will not be subject to Afghan law for criminal acts—even war crimes. Among the sensible points raised at the eleventh hour by Karzai: that US forces be prohibited from conducting night raids of Afghan homes and that Washington start peace talks between Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Taliban.
 A gathering of…

The debate over US foreign policy is always a curious phenomenon. In recent times, Barack Obama appears to have succeeded in achieving two extremely significant foreign policy goals: securing an agreement for the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons stock and agreeing with Iran to begin the process of preventing its acquisition of a nuclear weapon. Both goals are unarguably consistent not only with US national interests but also with those of peace and humanity overall. Both were achieved at virtually no cost in blood or treasure. And yet both were roundly criticized in the mainstream media as examples of appeasement and/or capitulation.
 Part of the explanation for this lies in the fact that US foreign policy debates are usually little more than domestic policy debates conducted by other means. (Hence…

They’re curiously phrased, those expressions of sympathy by Miami Dolphins players who have lined up to defend left guard Richie Incognito’s violent behavior toward his teammate, offensive lineman Jonathan Martin. Incognito achieved particular notoriety recently for directing a hefty wet stream of racialized epithets at Martin. (“Hey, wassup, you half-[n-word] piece of [expletive]…[I’m going to] slap your real mother across the face…. I’ll kill you!”) This bullying was so relentless that Martin decided to resign from the NFL. 
 Despite Incognito’s extensive history of brutality (he was elected “dirtiest player” in the league), a significant number of black and white teammates have rallied around him as an “honorary” black man, incapable of racism. Incognito, it has been proffered, had merely “messed” with Martin as one would a “little brother.” Martin,…

An unexpected blizzard roars out of the night sky to whiten the land and sink the margin between highway and field under a deepening slough of snow. Peering from the motel window at first light, I think, “We’re not going anywhere.” I’m traveling with a colonel from the Pentagon whose job it is to canvass the country and visit loyal but perhaps disheartened Americans who want to raise money and start organizations to “support our troops.” He checks them out, pats them on the back, looks into their funding, tries to get them more and offers words of encouragement about the importance of their mission. He gives the same talk everywhere, like a presidential candidate, in a tight-lipped, fast-paced monotone with an urgent edge to it that warns listeners not…

Ai Weiwei’s sculpture Wenchuan Steel Rebar (2008–12), has a bluntly descriptive title and a restrained lyrical form, and includes an allusion that places the viewer at a remove from both. The work amounts to a polemic against appearances. I encountered it in the traveling exhibition “Ai Weiwei: 
According to What?”, which recently closed at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. (It is about to open at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, December 4–March 16, and will conclude its tour at the Brooklyn Museum, April 18–August 10.) What I saw was a mass of rebar—the steel rods used to reinforce concrete and masonry—gathered into a perfect rectangle of about twenty by forty feet, amounting to some forty tons of metal. The thousands upon thousands of rods are as rigid…

@michelleinbklyn: I don’t think I’ve ever heard a single feminist complain about supposed “feminist nightmare” Michelle Obama. 
 @mychalsmith: Out here raising money so the right to an abortion doesn’t disappear in the state of Texas #TexasWomenForever
 @gzornick: Congressional Progressive Caucus also calling for a vote on Afghanistan extension. Rep. Barbara Lee on US-Afghan agreement: “outrageous.”
 @skatemurphy: 
Pls let there be a photo of Oprah, Loretta, and Gloria, together with their Medals of Freedom, so I can make it my computer background.
 @chrislhayes: 
Just made a “If you like your diaper, you can keep it” joke to my 2 year old, but pretty sure it went over her head.
 @NaomiAKlein: Has someone done an excellent feminist takedown of the phrase “mama’s boy”? Will someone please? He’s only 17 months…
 letters@thenation.com…

When Machinists union members rallied in Seattle in mid-November to protest Boeing’s demand for wage and pension cuts, the newest municipal official roused the crowd. “We salute the Machinists for having the courage to reject this blatant highway robbery from the executives of Boeing in pursuit of their endless, endless thirst for private profit.” Kshama Sawant, an economics professor and Occupy Seattle activist who had just won a citywide City Council seat, said threats to shift production out of state could be met with an eminent domain move allowing workers to “take over the factories.”
 Condemning private profit and talking up worker control of factories? That sounds kinda socialist. And socialists don’t win elections in the United States, right? Wrong. Sawant is the most recent in a long line of…

Three cheers for the AT&T and Verizon Communications shareholders who are demanding that the telecom giants disclose their participation in government surveillance operations.
 In separate resolutions filed in November, the shareholders requested that the companies release semiannual reports revealing the kind of customer information the companies have shared with the government and how often they have done so. The proposals were drafted under the leadership of the ACLU of Northern California, a shareholder in both telecoms, and include powerhouse investors such as the New York State Common Retirement Fund (NYSCRF) and Trillium Asset Management. Both have feisty histories of activist investing. 
 “Verizon and AT&T are not managing this crisis effectively,” Jonas Kron, Trillium’s director of shareholder advocacy, said in a statement. “Now is the time for these companies to…

The Nation’s first regular column was introduced in 1918 under the headline “In the Driftway.” Some have identified the writer as Carl Van Doren, literary editor from 1919 to 1922, but it is more likely that the “Drifter”—who always wrote of himself in the third person—was a composite of several contributors writing under that name during the column’s seventeen-year run.
 In 1931, the Drifter, describing himself as “usually suspicious a priori of all traditions, hallowed or otherwise,” wrote that it was his “sad duty to report certain misgivings” about President Herbert Hoover’s proclamation for Thanksgiving that year.
 “With the third winter of widespread unemployment nearly upon us, in all its ugliness, want, and distress, Thanksgiving Day has not…a genuine ring. Somehow it sounds ill-suited to the times. The President’s counsel…

Primo Levi The Matter of a Life. By Berel Lang. Yale. 173 pp. $25. When Primo Levi committed suicide in 1987, many thought that he’d killed himself because his wartime imprisonment in Auschwitz had at last made it impossible for him to go on living; many others (this writer among them) believed that if it hadn’t been for Auschwitz, Levi would have killed himself years earlier—that the war, in fact, had lengthened his life because the experience of the concentration camp gave him writing, and it was writing alone that controlled the life-threatening anxiety against which he had struggled from earliest youth. Bearing witness to the historic catastrophe of Nazi Germany allowed (nay, commanded) Levi’s inner agitation to retreat far enough and long enough to let him exercise the talent…

The Women By Hilton Als. Noonday. 145 pp. Paper $16. White Girls By Hilton Als. McSweeney’s. 338 pp. $24. Hilton Als has been a theater critic for The New Yorker since 2002, and maybe a theater critic learns to conceive of life offstage as a performance too, or maybe a man becomes a theater critic because this is how he sees the world. The Women, Als’s first book, published in 1996, is about one particular role—that of the long-suffering, self-sacrificing “Negress”—in the pageant of American life. It is a part played by Als’s mother, by Malcolm X’s mother and by the Warholite Dorothy Dean, but also by the poet Owen Dodson and by James Brown, whose “hair and clothes were as perfect as any Negress’s” that Als had ever seen.…

During his first five years in office, President Obama faced unprecedented obstruction of routine executive and judicial nominations: sixteen executive branch nominees were filibustered, compared with twenty throughout US history.
 Senate majority leader Harry Reid has faced more than 400 filibusters since Democrats took control of the Senate; Lyndon Johnson, as majority leader, faced exactly one.
 The extent and nature of this obstruction was undemocratic: the filibuster allowed the minority party unique power to halt the agenda of an elected president and majority party. George Washington is said to have called the Senate the “cooling saucer of democracy” because of its deliberative structure, but it was never meant to be an icebox.
 On November 21—after years of protest and organization by progressives in and out of Congress—Reid pulled the so-called…

Despite deep reservations from Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the United States is insisting on a bilateral security agreement (BSA) that would compromise Afghan sovereignty and leave US troops in the country for a decade more.
 In Afghanistan, a multiethnic, youth-led group, Afghan Peace Volunteers (APV), is organizing to end the occupation by promoting nonviolent, nonmilitary solutions to conflict. They strongly oppose the BSA.
 “When I saw the details of the BSA, I thought that we might as well call our country Americastan,” one member of APV, Abdulhai, told The Nation. “The people of Afghanistan have not been asked about the bilateral security agreement,” echoed another member, Ali.
 APV is calling on antiwar Americans to demand a withdrawal of the BSA. Call Senate majority leader Harry Reid to ask him to…

The University of California recently imposed pay cuts on its lowest-paid service and patient care workers.
 Workers who 
average $35,000 
a year will see a 
1.5 percent reduction in take-home pay and will spend up to $124,000 more for healthcare in their lifetime. 
 While nearly 700 UC employees receive larger salaries than the US president, 99 percent of the service workers qualify for public assistance.
 Thousands of workers across the state picketed on November 20, and students stood alongside them.
 “Without students there would be no UC system and without the workers the UC system would be unable to operate,” several UC student groups said in a statement. “We believe it is time for the UC to shift its priorities, and to start putting students and workers first.”…

The call from the temp agency comes in late October. I’ve passed the drug test, cleared the background check, sat down for a quick interview—“Can you lift fifty-pound boxes?”—and completed a worksheet of basic math problems. Now there’s a job. A warehouse just outside the city of Ontario, about forty miles east of Los Angeles, needs more bodies to meet the holiday crush. 
 They do work for Walmart, Best Buy, “all sorts of big companies,” says the female voice on the line. Orientation starts at 8:15 am; pay is $9 an hour. “Make sure you’re early.” Before hanging up she repeats the order. “Be early.” 
 On an overcast Tuesday, I pull into the parking lot, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. Looming to my left is a giant rectangle…

We may never cease debating whether pop culture can ever offer ruthless critique—or whether, formed in the crucible of things as they are, pop can think only within the limits of the given world. Perhaps it can grasp something elusive, or disclose utopian impulses shimmering below the gunmetal gray of political realism. But in the end we expect, armed with pessimism of the intellect, that pop’s very forms must be learned from whatever it postures against. Pop is, after all, part of what makes the world work.
 Debt is a kind of pop culture in this sense, an atmospheric condition of modern life for mortgage holders, governments, students, those hustling through the last week of each month on rip-off credit cards worn thinner than nictitating membranes. It has been ascendent…