Innehållsförteckning för March 21, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com Beware the Clintons Michelle Alexander powerfully explains why black people should be wary of Bill and Hillary Clinton [“Black Lives Shattered,” Feb. 29]. Here are a few more reasons: • Both Clintons still support the death penalty, which disproportionately affects people of color. • Hundreds, if not thousands, of Haitians fled their homeland during the Clinton administration. They were either sent back to Haiti or inhumanely detained at Guantánamo. (Cuban refugees during the same period entered the United States easily.) • United Nations troops already in Rwanda might have prevented or lessened the horrendous genocide by shutting down hate-radio stations and confiscating major caches of machetes. The Clinton administration stymied such an intervention; 800,000 black people died. • When opposition arose to the nomination of distinguished lawyer Lani Guinier…

When The New Republic was founded in 1914, The Nation was already almost 50 years old—and just emerging from its own near-death experience. Though started by radical abolitionists, The Nation had over several decades become the house organ of American conservatism, which left plenty of room for a brash, energetic weekly devoted to the ideals of the Progressive Era—and the imperial ambitions of Theodore Roosevelt. On another occasion, we might be tempted to talk about the different ways our two publications responded to the conflict between ideals and ambitions. Or even to rehash the story of how, under attack by Red-baiters in 1949, the two magazines nearly merged—and why we’re glad they didn’t. Right now, though, we’d rather welcome the acquisition of The New Republic by Win McCormack, a longtime…

Óscar Martínez writes for ElFaro.net, the first online newspaper in Latin America. In 2008, he won the Fernando Benítez National Cultural Journalism Award in Mexico, and in 2009, he was awarded the Human Rights Prize at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University in El Salvador. “Our Bottomless Well,” his article in this issue, is adapted from his new book, A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America. The book gathers several pieces of his recent investigative reporting, in which he rides along with cops, gangsters, and informants, uncovering the roots of Central America’s pervasive violence. Verso’s English-language translation contains a special message from Martínez to his readers here. He notes that many of Central America’s notorious gangs started in the United States, with immigrants who’d fled the…

In The Nation’s centenary issue, novelist John Oliver Killens wrote about being a black writer in Hollywood and attacked the film industry’s racist attitudes toward African Americans in general. “Hollywood is Fake-town, the great city of make-believe,” Killens wrote. “Here are the true head-shrinkers and brainwashers of America.” Hollywood, he continued, “has been responsible for the glorification of the South, past and present, and for creating the image of black inferiority…. The men of Fake-town have brainwashed America and the entire world with the brush of “I accuse Hollywood of being the most anti-Negro influence in this nation in the 20th century…. Hollywood makes great pretensions of doing controversial movies. But the great debate in America today is Negro freedom. This is the fundamental controversy. How does the Negro artist…

Dale Maharidge, a journalism professor at Columbia University, was a newspaperman for 15 years. He’s the author of 10 books, including Someplace Like America: Tales From the New Great Depression. ARTHUR MILLER’S CLASSIC 1949 PULITZER PRIZE–WINNING play Death of a Salesman opens with musical direction: “A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon. The curtain rises.” The play follows Willy Loman, past 60, as his grasp on life crumbles amid job troubles. When, at the end of Act II, he reaches his beaten-down end, the melody soars again, this time a requiem. “Only the music of the flute,” writes Miller, “is left on the darkening stage….” I heard this flute’s dirge throughout last summer and fall, as…

Super Tuesday was always going to be tough for Bernie Sanders. Devised and promoted by the Democratic Leadership Council as a counter to the party’s progressive tendencies, the “SEC Primary” took the nomination battle through a raft of large Southern states where Hillary Clinton was heavily favored. As expected, she had a very good night, stacking up big wins in Texas, Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Arkansas, and squeaking out a victory in Massachusetts. But Clinton was not just going for a very good night: She was going for a sweep that would marginalize Bernie Sanders’s insurgent candidacy and drive him out of the race. The Clinton campaign made an aggressive final push to win those states where Sanders was competitive, even trying to close the gap in his home…

President Obama’s proposed 2017 defense budget offers a glimpse into his administration’s priorities at a time when, as Michael Klare describes at left, the United States is seeking to bolster its military power to preserve its status as global hegemon. $582.7B Overall proposed Defense Department budget for fiscal year 2017 $71.8B Research and development into new weapon systems $58.8B Overseas contingency operations $19B Modernization of nuclearweapon systems $10.1B Sixty-three F-35 joint strike fighters $7.5B Operation Inherent Resolve, to combat ISIS in Syria and Iraq $5.2B Two nuclear submarines $3.4B The European Reassurance Initiative, which will increase the US military presence on the continent…

More women in government can have, as Katha Pollitt describes at right, a real but hard-to-measure impact on legislation that supports women’s rights. A paper produced at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions suggests that in America, more women in Congress means more female-friendly legislation is proposed, but not necessarily passed. In the United States, female legislators introduce more women’s-rights bills than men. Democratic men in government office are stronger advocates of women’s-rights bills than Republican men or women. Men have higher success rates in getting women’s-rights bills passed than women do, but don’t tend to prioritize them. Issues that women care about most, such as civil rights, labor, health, and education, are typically dismissed in the male-dominated Congress.…

Whether or not we have slid into a “new Cold War,” as claimed by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev at the Munich Security Conference on February 13, we certainly have entered a period of escalating provocations, with China, Russia, the United States, and other major powers testing one another’s resolve through a series of military feints. While usually contained below the level of armed combat, these actions—deployment of bombers or warships in or near a rival’s territory, construction of new military bases in menacing locations, aggressive military maneuvers, and so on—naturally invite countermeasures of an increasingly belligerent sort and so increase the risk of war. COMMENT These provocations are occurring on multiple fronts simultaneously. In Asia, the United States, China, Japan, and other powers are engaged in an escalating contest…

Dear Liza, I left the States many years ago and ended up having a child abroad, as one does. A few years back, after an ill-fated attempt to live in the US with my kid in the middle of a bitter custody battle, I returned to my adopted EU member state to exercise my visitation rights. Though I’d been a working resident alien here for years, the litigation’s aftermath left me without my child and extremely depressed—and thus disinclined to continue to bust ass for the state. Since then, I’ve been on and off the dole—with help from family at home and friends here. Now, I’m happy to report, my kid lives with me again. But I see no fantastic job in my near future, or at least not one…

Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann: Whenever you suggest that more women leaders would be a good thing for women, someone is sure to wheel out these ladies in rebuttal. Point taken: Electing reactionary antifeminist women will not improve life for other women. It may not even improve life for other women politicians: In her 11 years as prime minister, Thatcher had only one woman in her cabinet. It may be true that any woman who wields electoral power dents the stereotype of women as incompetent, weak, and hormone-ruled. Say what you will about Thatcher, she put an end to that nonsense. Still, it’s safe to assume that few feminists would vote for her—or Palin or Bachmann—in order to reap this vague psychological benefit. Nonetheless, when feminists argue that we…

Vivian Gornick’s most recent book is The Odd Woman and the City. It is something of a literary convention that the life of the Famous Writer is carefully documented, while the lives of those around her or him—husbands, wives, friends, lovers—routinely fall into the paperless oblivion reserved for what Diane Johnson so memorably called “lesser lives.” Yet “a lesser life,” as Johnson poignantly stressed, “does not seem lesser to the person who leads one.” Constance Fenimore Woolson was a popular American writer of the late 19th century whose friendship with Henry James has, among James scholars, long qualified hers as a distinctly lesser life. In all the James biographies, Woolson appears as a shadowy presence whose morbid anxieties simply echo those of the Master himself. Now, with the publication of…

ACROSS 1 5 We’re crazy about Virgin Islands magazine (6) 10 A parrot states: “In the Northeast and the West, work!” (5) 11 Consequent note: Muslim ruler meets leader of Tajikistan (9) 12 Create mess following a blockbuster movie and others like it (2,6) 13 Clean inside of cages, courageously (5) 15 Zeus’ wife sports highest rating in Middle Eastern city (7) 18 Terrible seaside illness (7) 19 Proceed clumsily with young lady near university unit (7) 21 Don McLean’s left one ring in dilapidated sofa (7) 23 One hundred four changes in Greek island (5) 24 Uncommunicative cat? (8) 28 Distressed nun wearing ragged mantle for the negation of a sacrament (9) 29 In return, a couple sampling from Gruyère cheese (5) 30 Glutton limiting a German’s work in…