Innehållsförteckning för Mar-16-15 från The Nation

@thenation.com Black Lives More Than Matter Thank you for continuing to focus on the effects of racism and the impunity with which police and armed citizens kill African-Americans. However, there is a point that hasn’t attracted much attention: when our society discards or destroys black lives, whether through denial of voting rights, the school-to-jail pipeline, outright murder or the bias of the “justice” system that convicts, imprisons and executes blacks in numbers out of proportion to their percentage of the population; when “we” discard those black lives, we deprive our society of their intelligence, talent, skills, creativity, generosity, capacity for love—and genius. Our society needs all of those good qualities. Discarding them is not just criminal; it is incredibly foolish. LINDA SLEFFEL COLUMBUS, OHIO Sharing Is Creepy What we see…

Of the many enduring lessons of the Vietnam War, none, perhaps, is more relevant today than avoiding what Yale historian Paul Kennedy termed “imperial overstretch”—or an excessive reliance on military force to protect a far-flung and often unruly web of alliances and commitments. For many who observed or fought in that war, America’s defeat was due less to the flawed strategies of US generals than to the overextension of American power in a place of questionable strategic significance and with minimal support at home. For a time, it appeared that US policy-makers were determined to avert more Vietnam-like fiascos; but now, as in the George W. Bush era, Washington seems headed toward another foolhardy increase in military activism abroad. February marks the fiftieth anniversary of the entry of main-force US…

Americans owe $1 trillion in student debt. But what if you decided to not write your check this month? A small group of people have chosen to do just that. The debt strike, which launched on February 23 as part of the Debt Collective campaign, is led by the Corinthian Fifteen, former students at the scandal-ridden, for-profit Corinthian Colleges chain. They’re undertaking financial civil disobedience against the private lending industry, demanding cancellation of federal student debts and voicing dissatisfaction with piecemeal debt relief programs. While fifteen debt resisters will not upend the private loan system or the financial markets it fuels, their defiance aims to expose structural problems driving the financialization of higher education and spark a national conversation about the real value—and true cost—of college. And who pays that…

“I’m always surprised to see what I do,” Jean-Luc Godard admits at the beginning of a talk delivered, nearly four decades ago, at Concordia University in Montreal. Could the single most influential filmmaker of his generation, who is still a provocateur at age 84, possibly be as baffled as we? Surprised or not, Godard has never been unwilling to explain his ideas, which are, after all, the subject of his deeply idiosyncratic films. In April 1978, the filmmaker took a pedagogical turn, embarking on a series of screenings in which his own work would be projected in the context of various classic movies and historical events, such as the Algerian War or May ’68. These screenings were followed by improvised, at times wildly free-associational, talks with the audience that Godard…

Presidential campaigns start earlier and earlier—but depressingly seem to get emptier and emptier. Already the credulous media have coronated Hillary Clinton as the inevitable Democratic Party nominee. On the Republican side, contenders seem to be tripping over one another, with a baker’s dozen or more considering a run. Nonetheless, in the wake of Mitt Romney’s aborted exploration, the GOP’s powerful donors seem to be aligning around former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the son and brother of former presidents. This all-too-hasty consensus that the American electorate is destined to see another Clinton-versus-Bush general election in 2016 represents all that is wrong with the big-money, big-personality politics that corrodes our democracy. In a post–Citizens United era, name recognition and established donor bases wield even more power to pre-emptively scare off potential challengers.…

#WEAREALLUMASS On February 18, amid growing outrage, the University of Massachusetts announced it would revised its policy banning Iranian graduate students from many of its engineering and science programs. In an announcement released on February 12, the university argued that the policy was necessary to comply with federal law “which excludes citizens of Iran from education in the United States if they plan to focus on nuclear…research in Iran.” Students and faculty raised awareness on social media using the hashtag #WeAreAllUMass and launched an online petition demanding a reversal of the policy. More than 100 people spoke out against the ban at a university forum. Soon after, the administration announced it would reverse course. The Iranian Graduate Student Association welcomed the decision, saying, “This is a clear example of how…

Let’s say you’re a woman who wants to have a handsome man worship your body, desire you intensely, focus on you sexually with incredible skill, and bring you to earthshaking orgasm in about thirty seconds. You never have to exert yourself on his behalf—his satisfaction happens automatically as a byproduct of yours. If porn for women mirrored porn for men, that’s what it would look like. But let’s say, in addition, that you are marinated in a Christianity-inflected culture that inculcates women with sexual shame, insecurity about their looks and lovability and self-worth in general, and tells them in a thousand ways that men are superior, male power is sexy, and suffering is redemptive. Then you might end up with porn for women that looks a lot like Fifty Shades…

In June 2005, near the center of Guatemala City, a munitions depot on a military base caught fire and began to explode. For four deafening hours, projectiles left over from the country’s long internal wars detonated at the rate of thirty shells per minute. Surrounding neighborhoods were left covered in debris and shrouded in dense, toxic smoke. Their residents, accustomed to a military that routinely looked the other way, complained to Guatemala’s Office of Human Rights and asked that explosives at a nearby arms storage facility in the sprawling headquarters of the National Civil Police also be inspected and removed. The office sent over its chief investigator, Edeliberto Cifuentes, the former head of the department of history at San Carlos, Guatemala’s leading university. The police referred to the headquarters as…

ACROSS 1 Certain sign limits (10) 6 Heads of cauliflower (usually fried) found in buffet (4) 10 Ancient 11 moving north (5) 11 Catch rare, off-beat eccentric (9) 12 Where you might see one of the Three Stooges taking six pies in the rear! (6) 13 Hired hand’s choice between parts of a hospital (7) 15 Loud number is playing at the center (5) 16 Gets bigger where goalies are located (9) 19 Undisciplined truant, deficient geek and convicted rebel (3,6) 21 Wave pocketbook, switching from one hand to the other (5) 22 View round gear (7) 25 Something on some office desks is best in a ring (6) 27 Roy G. Biv, et al., with no men returning audio equipment outside (9) 28 Stale and suggestive of obligation? (5)…

15 Points that Hillary Clinton was polling ahead of Barack Obama at this point in the 2008 election cycle 48.5 Points that Clinton is currently polling ahead of Senator Elizabeth Warren in the 2016 election 60% Percentage of Democratic voters who support Clinton’s presidential bid 1/3 Share of million-dollar donors to the Clinton Foundation who are not US citizens “It’s exactly the same as selling an iPhone or a soft drink or a cereal.” A corporate marketing strategist on Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy…

Last year, I thought The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s innovative examination of mass slayings in Indonesia during the 1960s, deserved to win the Oscar for best feature documentary. Instead, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave the award to a film with broader appeal, 20 Feet From Stardom, a review of life as a background singer on pop records. At the time, a friend quipped, “20 Feet From Politics.” This year, however, the academy didn’t shy away from awarding a nakedly political film: Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour, a stunning vérité account of the initial reporting on Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency leak, took home the biggest documentary prize of the year. At a moment when the most powerful nation in the history of the world is going astray,…

Ari Berman reports in this issue on how much has and has not changed in Selma in the half-century since “Bloody Sunday.” In the May 10, 1965, issue of The Nation, George Leonard described the day after Bloody Sunday, when footage of the attack on voting-rights protesters flashed on TVs across the country, as one of those in which “the senses of an entire nation become suddenly sharper, when pain pours in and the resulting outrage turns to action.” Leonard had been watching at home in California: “A few moments passed, measured out in silence, as some of the troopers covered their faces with gas masks. There was a lurching movement on the left side of the screen, a heavy phalanx of troopers charged straight into the column, bowling the…