Innehållsförteckning för October 26, 2015 från The Nation

Papal Buzzkill Thank you, Katha Pollitt, for challenging the media lovefest for Pope Francis, and also for challenging the pass that even progressive journalists have given him and the Catholic Church [“The Pope’s Blind Spot,” Sept. 28/Oct. 5]. Have we forgotten that this pope leads an institution that excludes half of the world from its formal leadership? Or that this same institution is responsible for the death of a Hindu woman in an Irish-Catholic hospital because of its refusal, on religious grounds, to perform an emergency termination of her pregnancy, which would have saved her life? Have we forgotten that this pope and his institution oppose condom use to prevent HIV/AIDS? That this pope and his institution are opposed not just to abortion but to virtually all forms of contraception…

I am thinking of the price list leaked from the ISIS Sex Slave Market that included women and girls on the same list as cattle. ISIS needed to impose price controls, as they were worried about a downturn in their market. Forty- to 50-year-old women were priced at $41, 30-to 40-year-olds at $62, 20- to 30-year-olds at $82, and 1-to 9-year-old children at $165. Women over 50 weren’t even listed. They had no market value. They were discarded like milk cartons with past-sale-date markers. But they weren’t simply abandoned in some smelly dung heap of trash. First, they were probably tortured, raped, beheaded, thrown onto a pile of rotting corpses. I am thinking of a 1-year-old child’s body for sale and what it would be like for a hefty, sex-deprived,…

If you think fetal-tissue research is wrong and should be banned, would you refuse to use any therapies that may come out of it? I thought not. I’ve posed this question to abortion opponents before, but so far, no one has said, Yes, Katha, I would rather let Alzheimer’s turn my brain into cottage cheese and ketchup than benefit from this diabolical practice. If I get Parkinson’s, HIV, breast cancer, diabetes, or the flu; if I go blind from macular degeneration; if I have a miscarriage, so be it. Treatments for those conditions are still being developed, but surprise! If you have been vaccinated for polio, mumps, measles, chicken pox, hepatitis, or rabies, it may be too late for you to stand your ethical ground: You have already benefited from…

In recent months, another wave of gun violence has swept across the United States. On October 1, in Roseburg, Oregon, a man with a history of mental illness and a small arsenal, legally acquired, opened fire at Umpqua Community College, killing nine people. In June, Dylann Roof laid siege to a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in the hopes of igniting a race war. He shouldn’t have owned the weapons he used to kill nine parishioners, but a loophole in the federal background-check system allowed him to make the purchase. This was followed in late July by another spree shooting, this time inside a movie theater in Louisiana. In August, a disgruntled former employee of a Virginia television station murdered a reporter and a cameraman live on the air.…

LF: How would you describe what you do? BR: I try to find creative ways to put ideas out to make the ground fertile for organizers. LF: Your family were organizers. BR: My father joined the NAACP when he was 12, in the ’50s. He was part of the organizing efforts that led to some of the first sit-ins in North Carolina. Then CORE moved him to San Francisco, and he joined SDS and the Progressive Labor Party. He was involved in the San Francisco State strike, where he met my mother. What I remember of their organizing days was parties: They’d be sitting around talking, and then it would turn into people dancing and playing cards. So I had a different view of organizing; it meant the local neighborhood.…

In this issue, Jon Baskin reviews Purity by Jonathan Franzen, whose last novel, Freedom (2010), landed him on the cover of Time with the bizarrely un-articled epithet “Great American Novelist.” Franzen fans or no, Nation readers might be interested to learn that the very concept of the “great American novel”— or GAN, as another Nation contributor, Henry James, abbreviated it—was first proposed and named in these very pages, in an 1868 essay by John William De Forest, a Union Army veteran and early realist writer, who doubted whether it was even pos “The obstacles are immense,” De Forest noted. “Ask a portrait-painter if he can make a good likeness of a baby, and he will tell you that the features are not sufficiently marked nor the expression sufficiently personal. Is…

IN LATE AUGUST, THE GANG ON MSNBC’S MORNING JOE WAS DISCUSSING A Quinnipiac University poll that asked voters for the first word they associated with various presidential candidates. The top word for Hillary Clinton was “liar”; for Donald Trump, “arrogant”; for Jeb Bush, “Bush.” After everyone had riffed on just how bad the word “Bush” is, the show’s conservative co-host and alpha dog, Joe Scarborough, complained that he’s been the subject of this sort of poll question, too. “What were some of the worst [responses]?” co-host Mika Brzezinski asked. “‘He works for MSNBC,’” replied Scarborough, who has long felt trapped in liberal-media hell. “That’s always the worst… Not anymore, though, ’cause things have changed,” he added, brightening up. “Thank you, Andy.” That’s Andy Lack, the NBC News and MSNBC chairman…

50,000 Highest estimated number of women to have been raped during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s 64,000 Highest estimated number of internally displaced women in Sierra Leone who suffered sexual violence at the hands of armed combatants 40 Average number of women raped daily in South Kivu due to armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo 4 Special Forces soldiers at Fort Bragg who killed their wives within a six-week period in 2002; three had recently returned from duty in Afghanistan “It is now more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier in a modern conflict.” —Maj. Gen. Patrick Cammaert, Royal Netherlands Marines and UN force commander, 2008…

During the latest Republican debate, Carly Fiorina lied about having seen grisly footage of a fetus being kept alive by Planned Parenthood in order to harvest its brain tissue. This footage does not exist, nor does the procedure. What does exist is fetal-tissue research, now under attack by Republicans, but fundamental to saving lives. Based on pre-vaccine averages, we can say that millions of lives have been saved: WORLDWIDE: 1.6 MILLION deaths prevented each year by the measles vaccine 550,000 cases of permanent paralysis or death prevented each year by the polio vaccine IN THE UNITED STATES: 400,000 deaths prevented each year by the hepatitis-B vaccine 3.9 MILLION deaths prevented each year, on average, by the varicella (chicken pox and shingles) vaccine 160,000 deaths prevented each year, on average, by…

Manchester, New Hampshire “THERE IS NO SECRET FORMULA TO WINNING IN NEW Hampshire,” says Julia Barnes. “Volunteers recruited plus tactics equals the win number.” A native of Hollis, a town about 25 miles south of here, Barnes is the state director for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. By “tactics,” she means boots on the ground: the slow, unglamorous, persistent work of contacting likely primary voters and identifying Sanders supporters—and then making sure all of them actually vote. By “volunteers,” she means people like Elizabeth Ropp. “I watched Bernie filibuster against tax cuts for the wealthy, and I really hoped that someday he’d run for president,” Ropp tells me. A community acupuncturist in Manchester—“We provide affordable acupuncture on a sliding-fee scale”— Ropp, with her husband, hosted the first Sanders house party in…

M Train By Patti Smith. Knopf. 253 pages. $25. A girl grows up in a working-class family in New Jersey, the eldest of four children. Her mother is a waitress, her father works nights. The girl collects things, pebbles, marbles, charms—things that speak to her because of where she found them. She reads a lot of books. At the Philadelphia bus depot, she finds a book called Illuminations, which she pockets because she was attracted to the author’s face. Why was a copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations waiting for her at the bus depot? In 1967, when she drops out of college and moves to Brooklyn, she meets a beautiful boy. Like her, he feels destined to be an artist. But while she draws a little, writes a little, occasionally…

The Narrows is strips of yellow and jade, Verrazano Bridge silver, horizontal lines, here; and here, someone alone, afraid, crying, sad, sunken eyes, emaciated body; and, here, the speed of a slap, the strain under the skin; and this murky and absurdly massive figure bent over double under an unknown burden; and this bandaged wound, smudged contours, body and mind breached; and I thought this, waking early, looking out, the too magnificent to be described unclouded sky, night still in the west, the eastern horizon crimson, melting into blue, light’s solid pact being forged without apotheosis, Governors Island lashed by waves, where the two rivers meet. Who talks like that? I talk like that. Blinding point of light in which everything converges, everything is revealed. Dense constellations of abject suffering,…

ACROSS 1 Clip each part of a bag (barely open)—attire for a guide (9) 6 A fool in a hurry (4) 10 Examining plunder that holds ruler agog at first (7,2) 11 Willow is more pink after losing its top (5) 12 Native American is bashful with Frank, we hear (8) 13 Pass the crackers, please (6) 15 Child’s spoken instruction to the janitor? (6) 17 Stores freestyle poem and retro tune (7) 19 Dostoevsky conceals one of the three-letter 32 that appear in the diagram—there are nine others (3) 20 First lady protects corrupt clan in Chinatown, for instance (7) 22 Liverpool letter about a piece of software put in a microwave…(6) 25 …is bigoted, sending the leader to the back (6) 26 Pair of gullible fellows getting into…