Innehållsförteckning för Sep-28-15 - 10/5/2015 från The Nation

@thenation.com Life in the Major League In his review of Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout [“Shelf Life,” August 17/24], Jesse McCarthy includes me among a group of writers in “perpetual search of an audience.” Just because most of my books and theater have been ignored by the New York media—including The Nation, which hasn’t reviewed a book of mine since the early 1980s—doesn’t mean that I lack a wide audience. The New York media view black literature in terms of one-at-a-time tokens, which conveys the impression that black talent is rare. It’s common. This is a form of literary neocolonialism, where dangerous natives are separated from those who are more accommodating. I’ve seen tokens come and go. As a result of my novel Japanese by Spring, written in three languages,…

Ada Colau, the first woman mayor of Barcelona, has just marked her first two months in office. Previously an activist, she’s the founder of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH). In this interview, Colau talks about the challenges of leading one of Spain’s most celebrated cities during the current democratic revolution. This interview has been translated from Spanish and edited and condensed. — Elia Gran EG: What have you done since taking office? AC: When we arrived, we had an emergency plan ready—obvious things like guaranteeing food for children at risk. We also started a conversation with the banks and SAREB [the private entity created to assist in the cleanup of Spain’s financial sector] to recover homes. EG: In Madrid, there are already actions being taken against Blackstone…

Francis and Clare: The Complete Works Translated by Regis J. Armstrong Paulist Press, 1988 This essay collection brings together the complete works of two of Catholicism’s greatest proponents of virtuous poverty. Francis of Assisi, from whom the present pope took his name, brought renewal to the medieval church by stressing the wisdom of poverty over that of wealth. His friend Clare, who founded the women’s order of Franciscans (subsequently called the Poor Clares), fiercely defended that vision. She insisted that her sisters should govern themselves and reminded them: “The Lord often reveals what is best to the lesser [among us].” Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth by John A. Ryan 1916 In the ongoing labor strife before the New Deal, Minnesota-born Monsignor Ryan was…

WHEN I TOLD FRIENDS and colleagues that I was writing a book about the legacy of Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy, many made mention of Christopher Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger. But I saw my purpose as antithetical to Hitchens’s polemic, which is a good example of what the great historian Charles Beard, in 1936, dismissed as the “devil theory of war”—placing the blame for militarism on a single, isolable cause: a “wicked man.” To really understand the sources of conflict, Beard argued, you had to look at the big picture, to consider the way “war is our own work,” emerging out of “the total military and economic situation.” In making the case that Kissinger should be tried—and convicted—for war crimes, Hitchens didn’t look at the big picture. Instead, he…

OVER A DECADE AGO, WHILE WORKING for an ad agency in Islamabad, I met a re-cently divorced young woman. She’d grown up in the United States but, when it was time to marry, had submitted to her parents’ wishes and returned to Pakistan. Soon after the wedding, she discovered that something was amiss: The marriage could not be consummated because her husband was gay. It would be four years before she was allowed to drop the pretense of wedded life and ask for a divorce. In traditional societies, marriage is a fraught prospect. It is more than simply the union of two individuals: For the political elite, it’s an influence multiplier; for the economic elite, it’s a corporate merger; and for the have-nots, it’s a bid to have. The personal,…

All over Europe and the Mediterranean world, barriers are being breached: the natural and man-made barriers used by nation-states to shut out unwanted travelers; the barriers of fear and grief that keep people from fleeing war or poverty until they have no choice; the barriers of indifference that enable the rest of us to get on with our lives as if those men, women, and children were no concern of ours. More than 380,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean this year in search of safety, two-thirds of them landing in Greece; at least 2,850 have drowned or are missing at sea. Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, and others walk for days in the heat, sleep rough on docks or station platforms or by the side of the road, are tear-gassed and beaten…

“The times in which Marxist socialism was a heresy to be stamped out with fire and sword are indeed over for the Catholic Church,” wrote Elisabeth Mann Borgese, daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann, in The Nation in January 1963. Headlined “The Church Embraces the Future,” her report detailed Pope John XXIII’s efforts to liberalize the church with the Second Vatican Council. “Turning [its] back on medievalism,” Mann Borgese wrote, “opens new possibilities of coming to terms with science and progress.” John XXIII died a few months later and was succeeded by Pope Paul VI, who continued the reforms. “A new style of papacy is being created, a new frontier is being opened,” Mann Borgese wrote a year later. “A closed, static, medieval organization cannot live in an open, dynamic,…

“Reverse racism,” a term popularized by right-wing politicians and white college applicants new to rejection, entered the vernacular during a period of intense division within the civil-rights movement. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization was formed in 1965, in a county in Alabama wracked by racist violence. Frustrated by the less-aggressive tactics of groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the LCFO struck out on its own to secure an “all-black government” in the county. Hosea Williams, a member of the SCLC and longtime MLK confidant, accused the LCFO of reverse racism and questioned whether its supporters “planned to treat white folks like the white folks treated them?” The LCFO was short-lived, but it laid the groundwork for the Black Panther Party’s rise. As black nationalists fought oppression “by any means…

You are two oranges shy of sangria You chumpchange in a clackdish You the flensed soldier, egg-runny on the inside You frogging deadline after deadline You caught in a Swiss chokehold You feeding the duckboards of Venice You the expert on television newswar You at maximum voice You the squaw above dead deerling You the clarion-call of the id You the barbaros of Juarez You who want to wake up forever You on page 65 in bubblegum PVC You yelling at the meathook You yet to make your wheelspin mark You clapping at family stones You who would rather be scalped standing You as screw of the week You eiderhanded as a spider You in the stocks and wanting it more You salted for planet jellyfish You among the angels…

Recent revelations that, during her tenure as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton maintained a private e-mail server separate from the State Department’s official one raise a question that transcends the current debate over whether she compromised national security: Was the former secretary’s decision exceptional, or did it reflect what had been (and conceivably remains) the practice of senior White House and intelligence- agency officials to preclude, or at least minimize, the exposure of controversial, even illegal policy decisions? Clinton’s reliance on a private e-mail account ensured that, because her communications were not logged into the State Department’s records system, she alone could determine which of them would be destroyed and which would be saved. A further issue involves the inadvertent discovery of her actions—that is, as the by-product of Congress’s…

Were it not for Trumpmania, we might be using this endless election season to discuss the fact that economic inequality has finally risen to the top of the list of most Americans’ concerns. In a recent ABC/Washington Post poll, 68 percent agreed that we live in a country whose economic system favors the rich rather than the rest of us. (About half of Republicans agreed with this too.) In another poll, fully 83 percent called the nation’s wealth gap a problem, with a majority terming it “a major problem.” Meanwhile, Gallup has seen a steady majority in the number who respond positively to its 30-year inquiry: “Do you think our government should or should not redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich?” And the Pew Research Center recently found…

It was flying from the back of a souped-up pickup truck: the largest Confederate flag that I have ever seen, big as a bedspread. Across the center of the Battle Flag was emblazoned the image of a gigantic black assault rifle; across the bottom was written a challenge: Come and take me. I watched the truck proceed down the freeway like a perverse Mardi Gras float; it emerged from the peripheral field on my left side, whipped past, then continued down the highway and away, through the mountain pass beyond and into the V-shaped cleft of the horizon. This happened in August, a busy month for racial conversation: the March on Washington, Hurricane Katrina, Michael Brown’s death. This also happened within days of Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s apparent attempt to Willie Horton–ize…

A FEW WEEKS BEFORE THE RELEASE THIS SUMMER OF laudato si’, Pope Francis’s manifesto on ecology and poverty, I had a chance to see the pontiff, speck-size, in Rome. He is the first Third World pope, but the Old World church was very much in evidence. At an outdoor papal Mass, it seemed as if hundreds of variously costumed men stood between Francis and the nearest woman, their outfits representing dozens, if not hundreds, of medieval societies that refuse to go away. It was hard to know whether the pope at the center was in charge of it all or imprisoned inside. What G.K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead” is alive and well, even in the fast times of Pope Francis—a system in which the mere fact of…