Innehållsförteckning för Jan-27-14 från The Nation

Don’t Follow the Money
 I commend Richmond, California, Green Party Mayor Gayle McLaughlin for her dead-on description of what our two-party system is up to: “One party is moving us into a brick wall at 100 mph. The other is moving us there at 50 mph” [“Q&A,” Dec. 9, 2013]. I stopped voting for Democrats when Bill Clinton hit the scene. It’s time we stopped electing corporate Democrats, thus “losing by winning” over and over. Vote against the money! 
 NORMAN MICHAEL HARMAN Harpers Ferry, W.V. 
 _________________________ A Nation Memory
 Over fifty years ago, my grandfather Hy Janov introduced me to The Nation. When I
visited him on weekends, he would invariably ask me to sit by him on the couch so he could read an excerpt from an article.…

We do it every day. We sign, we click, we “agree.” We enter into boilerplate contracts that strip-mine our rights as consumers. We are shackled to contract terms without knowing it, sometimes by merely alighting on a website with a visible hyperlink to “terms of use,” or by buying a ticket to an event. 
 From our cellphone and cable packages to our mortgages, insurance policies, student and payday loans, credit cards, bank accounts, travel tickets, software, rental cars and much more, corporations routinely seize our bargaining power and critical rights without our informed consent. Want to give away the right to use your image in a commercial endorsement? Want to gag yourself from complaining about bad service or a defective product? Want to allow a corporate wrongdoer to physically…

America is suffering from a severe lack of affordable housing. In cities, the crisis is the worst it has been since the end of World War II; 
according to the research of Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond, evictions are taking a major toll on the lives of the urban poor. Take Milwaukee: Desmond found that the most recent move for one in seven black residents was an eviction or other involuntary relocation; among Hispanics, that ratio rose to one in four. No database exists to track evictions nationwide, but Milwaukee’s numbers likely highlight an underreported national trend.
 —Carla Murphy Colorlines.com…

In August 1919, The Nation published “The Centennial of Herman Melville,” the work of a young Columbia University lecturer named Raymond Weaver. Commissioned by his English department colleague (and literary editor of The Nation), Carl Van Doren—who had for years recommended to students an old and obscure genre-bending novel about whaling—it was the first piece that Weaver, the so-called “father of Melville criticism,” ever wrote about the author, who quickly became his Ahab-like obsession. Two years later, Weaver’s Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, the first biography, sparked the “Melville revival,” which secured for the long-forgotten writer a place in the American canon.
 Moby-Dick was “an amazing masterpiece,” Weaver wrote in his article. It “reads like a great opium dream” and “contains some of the most finished comedy in the language.”…

This past june, the Russian Parliament passed
an anti-gay law that came as a surprise to much of the rest of the world. The statute, an amendment to the country’s Code of Administrative Offenses, bans “propaganda” regarding “nontraditional sexual relations among minors.” (In earlier versions of the bill, it was simply referred to as “homosexual propaganda.”) The bill’s language is so vague that it could include just about any kind of gay rights advocacy, from newspaper editorials and advertisements to public information campaigns and demonstrations. Among the penalties: fines of up to 5,000 rubles for an individual and 1 million rubles for a media organization or other legal entity. (A few days later, a bill banning the adoption of Russian children by same-sex couples in countries that recognize gay marriage was…

Emily Dickinson Archive edickinson.org The Gorgeous Nothings Edited by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin. New Directions/Christine Burgin. 255 pp. $39.95. “There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away,” wrote Emily Dickinson, who had thousands of books at her fingertips in the Dickinson family library yet never published a book in her lifetime. Her ascension to literature’s frigate class came posthumously, after her sister Lavinia discovered her handwritten, hand-sewn fascicles in a drawer, along with scraps of verse composed on envelopes and recipe cards. These were sifted and corrected, reconstituted and standardized by a variety of editors, including Susan Dickinson, the wife of her brother Austin, and Mabel Loomis Todd, his mistress, who aspired, with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to give Victorians a readable Emily Dickinson in…

Drunk as a persimmon on the wine of Cana or myself, I couldn’t tell— the old pain and the old dream mingled and seasickness threw kisses in shapes upon the wall like shells upon the shore outside the conch- shaped hall in whose pearled hum I danced as if my feet were small and free of gravity as sea lice. When above the palms, horns, drums and silks I heard a creature high in moss- tangled eucalyptus cry for milk— a creature not my own, yet still my milk let down. I looked up and it locked me in a stare, half-child, half-marsupial, that transfixed me on the scallop of the terraced white hotel it squatted on until sure that I had seen it dove back into the lagoon like…

@lsarsour We want a NYPD that keeps ALL New Yorkers safe, treats ALL people w/ dignity and respect regardless of race, faith, sexual orientation, etc.
 @jennpozner Way to kick off inauguration, @TishJames! “We live in a gilded age of inequality...” Glad NYC has you.
 @mychalsmith Working on piece about de Blasio’s New York. Send stories of being attacked by violent communist street gangs to mychal-
denzelsmith@gmail
 @KathaPollitt You need to get out of the house @nytdavidbrooks—where pot is crime, poor, black, brown people are arrested, go to jail, lose custody of kids.
 @reprodocs 
New study from
@Guttmacher: More State Abortion Restrictions Were Enacted in 2011–2013 Than in Entire Previous Decade. 
 @adamhudson5 It’s been 5 years since Oscar Grant was killed at Fruitvale Station by a BART cop.
…

Three days before he was sworn in as New York City’s 109th mayor, Bill de Blasio announced he would drop the city’s appeal of Judge Shira Scheindlin’s ruling finding the NYPD’s aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics unconstitutional.
 That was good news for New Yorkers. Nearly
90 percent of the 4.4 million people the police stopped for questioning between 2004 and 2012 had done nothing wrong, according to evidence presented at a nonjury trial Scheindlin conducted last spring. 
 But the announcement leaves in limbo a devastating ruling by a federal appeals court panel, which removed Scheindlin as the judge presiding over challenges to the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policing since 1999. The removal order was a crushing blow to Scheindlin’s professional standing and sent a chilling message to other judges: tread carefully when handling cases…

In response to the United Students Against Sweatshops “End Deathtraps” campaign, four American universities have agreed to require that brands producing their apparel sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh.
 Launched in response to the horrific working conditions, frequent fires and building collapses in Bangladesh, the accord is a legally binding contract that aims to make the country’s garment factories safe and humane.
 Following vigils, teach-ins and protests by the University of Pennsylvania’s Student Labor Action Project, UPenn became the first school to agree to students’ demands on December 5. New York University, Temple and Duke soon followed.
 On its website, USAS says it “won’t stop until every university in the country does the same!”…

Herman Melville didn’t know that the West African slaves who inspired him to write his other, half-forgotten masterpiece, Benito Cereno, were Muslim. And when I first learned that they were, I didn’t think it more than a curiosity. I was, after all, planning to use the true incident behind the Melville story to open onto a larger history of freedom and slavery during the Age of Revolution, to which Islam seemed incidental. 
 But the more research I did, the more the importance of Islam revealed itself—and not just to the historical events Melville fictionalized. No one knows how many Muslims were among the 12.5 million Africans brought in chains across the Atlantic. Some scholars estimate as many as 10 percent. For centuries, they served as something like the New…

A great metropolis holds its breath. Denounced during the campaign for his radical past, the newly elected mayor is quickly embraced by the mainstream press, who now search his every gesture for signs of moderation—and make much play of his ethnically diverse family. Liberals and progressives, who still have trouble believing that one of their own actually won, remain torn between celebration and the fear of an imminent—some say inevitable—betrayal. Meanwhile, the city’s poor and desperate, who voted for the new mayor in overwhelming numbers, wonder whether a campaign that promised so much will make any difference to their lives. 
 This was New York City on January 1, 1934, when Fiorello La Guardia, a half-Italian, half-Jewish Republican who fought for labor unions, defended the rights of immigrants and opposed…

In looking over the year-end lists, it is hard not to reflect back on the ’90s. Enthusiasts of refined taste will recall the decade for modern rock (né alt-rock) or hip-hop’s second golden age or perhaps the slow, intractable rise of electronic dance music. For all of that, the span from 1989 to 2001 was given over to another music entirely. The fall of the Evil Empire and the seeming economic restoration that followed provided the context and the tonality. This was America’s belle epoque, the false summer’s gold disguising a deepening autumn that had begun around 1973. The music was teenpop, named as much for its consumers as purveyors. By any measure, it stood over those dappled days like no single genre has ever dominated an era. We were…

Cold crown of the world. Boreas exhales the breath that’s preserved him all these years, kept the wolverine alive, and the spruce-blue stars keen as crystals of virgin ice clipping the pines on their northern slopes.   Most coverage here is evergreen. It grows in the short day painfully slow, putting down rings, and whatever waxed needles do pitter to the ground lie there still as pickup sticks in the reckoning   between two goes, as if the soft lynx left these miles on long exposure. Bison graze, moss-obsessed. Fresh snow settling confuses them with abandoned dens and boulders. A she-bear, snug in the bed of her own fur,   lies under stone, four pink cubs assuming their forms faster in her womb than the carcasses that nourished them can…

In December, two federal judges reached opposite conclusions on the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s program for collecting and searching data on every phone call made in the United States. The first judge, Richard Leon in Washington, DC, deemed the program likely to be unconstitutional;
 the other, William Pauley of New York, deemed it perfectly lawful. What divided the two was the digital age itself. 
 Judge Pauley concluded that a 1979 analog-era Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland, which allowed the government to collect the phone numbers a person has called over a short period, required him to uphold the NSA program, which collects such phone data on every American’s every phone call, stores them in a massive database for five years, and uses sophisticated computers to search…

On the day before the 2012 presidential election, MSNBC’s Morning Joe program turned to the topic of Republican efforts to suppress voter turnout in Florida. The show’s host, former Florida Congressman Joe Scarborough, who enjoys fifteen hours of airtime a week on liberal MSNBC and is widely considered among the sanest conservative commentators these days, responded to the raising of this topic as follows:
 “I have three words for you: Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi…. Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!… Why do you want to cover up Benghazi? Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!… Benghazi, Benghazi…. So what happened in Benghazi?”
 Viewers learned precious little about Florida’s voter-suppression efforts that morning, but they learned nothing at all about “Benghazi”—which, as Scarborough perhaps surmised, was all Republicans felt they needed to know. The following spring, Public Policy Polling…

One of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first acts after being elected this past November was to reappoint William Bratton as commissioner of New York City’s police department. Bratton’s reputation rests on his work, in New York and Los Angeles, as a proponent of so-called “broken windows” policing. He asserts that aggressively going after very minor offenses—not merely misdemeanors but infractions like littering, sitting on stoops and carrying open beer cans—will bring the overall rate of violent crime down as well. It is this program that has led to the stopping, frisking and general harassing of millions of New Yorkers, the overwhelming majority without probable cause.
 There were 4.4 million stops by the NYPD between 2004 and 2012. Ten percent of those stops were of whites,
84 percent were of blacks and…

“Black slavery,” Toni Morrison wrote in her classic work of criticism, Playing in the Dark, “enriched” America’s “creative possibilities,” resulting in “a playground for the imagination.” Nothing better illustrates this observation than Herman Melville’s haunting Benito Cereno, a tale about a slave ship where nothing was as it seemed. Over the years, Morrison has noted how the deception that Melville masterfully depicted in his story replays itself again and again in the racial spectacles that regularly grip the nation, including Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings and the O.J. Simpson murder trial. I asked Morrison about the first time she read Benito Cereno and if she realized what Melville was up to. Below is her answer. —G.G.
 Since my earliest readings of Moby-Dick, I always sensed Melville’s deliberate misdirections: that…

The Wire is one of the few serial dramas in television history whose viewers thought that watching it earned them a merit badge. HBO’s gripping, dynamic procedural panorama of the cops, drug dealers, stevedores and politicians linked across the grim economy of postindustrial Baltimore has been compared to Shakespeare and Dickens, referenced by Cam’ron, Eminem and Young Jeezy, and theorized by academics as a topic and model of social critique. When Barack Obama called it his favorite television program, he wasn’t just telling the truth, but signaling his cultural literacy and an enlightened stance on various forms of institutional dysfunction. The mayor of Reykjavik, Iceland, distilled his enthusiasm into an edict, declaring that he would cooperate only with politicians who had watched all five seasons of The Wire. The good-for-you…

January: an excellent time to look back on The Past and other late releases of 2013 and look forward to the new year’s films, starting with Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake. There is much to be said for that impressively controlled French thriller, not least that it brings a warm breath of summer into the winter months. Before I get to Guiraudie’s film, though, let’s talk about the problem picture of December 2013, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street.
 Because Scorsese has a mind full of movies, it’s possible to guess what he was thinking about at the end of The Wolf of Wall Street: the last shot in King Vidor’s 1928 The Crowd. Vidor, you may recall, finishes his portrait of a terrifyingly, heartbreakingly ordinary family by…