Innehållsförteckning för Feb-10-14 från The Nation

Of Czars and Samovars
 Victor Navasky’s obituary for André Schiffrin [Jan. 6/13] says that in the late 1950s, Schiffrin was in a group that stood on the Yale library steps in togas declaiming funny things. “The only line I remember was Andre’s,” says Navasky. “‘The peasants may be penniless, but the czar is Nicolas.’” Very nice, but the line was not Schriffin’s. In the mid-1950s, I belonged to a Jewish youth group. We sang “Shootin’ With Rasputin” in a comic Russian accent:
 An intimate friend of the Czar was I A personal friend of the great Nikolai We practically slept in the same double bed It was I at the foot and he at the head
 Chorus: Shootin’ with Rasputin Ate farina with Czarina Blintzes with the princes and the…

How we adore the whistleblowers of the past! Daniel Ellsberg is now a national treasure and walking civics lesson for leaking the Pentagon Papers—the State Department even screens a documentary about him abroad as an advertisement for the American way. And behold the glowing coverage The New York Times has given the antiwar activists who in 1971 broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, stole nearly 1,000 documents, and exposed the bureau’s illegal and rampant political spying. The Times portrayed the FBI burglars as exemplary citizens. 
 But the whistleblowers of the present are another matter—and always have been. At the height of the Pentagon Papers uproar, Ellsberg never enjoyed as much popular support as
Lt. William Calley, a Vietnam war criminal later pardoned by President Nixon. White House aide…

We’ve long known that, in general, the parts of the country most obsessed by family values are also the most beset by family breakdown. Crimson-red Southern states like Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas have the highest rates of divorce, while the liberal, decadent Northeast has the lowest. People have tried to explain this phenomenon in a number of ways. Some conservatives argue that the Northeast has low divorce rates only because it has low marriage rates, too. Others suggest that it’s all about class—in addition to being conservative, the South is poor, and poverty is linked to family dysfunction. “It’s a puzzling paradox,” says Jennifer Glass, a sociologist at the University of Texas. “These are places where you would expect the reverence for marriage and social disapproval for divorce to keep…

Last spring, The Nation launched its biweekly student movement dispatch. Each dispatch hosts first-person updates on student and youth organizing in the United States. Below is just one of our “Fifteen Millennial Movements to Watch This Spring.” Visit TheNation.com/students for more.
 CCSF on Trial: As one of the largest community colleges in the nation, the City College of San Francisco is an affordable pathway to higher education for working-class people. In July, it received notice that the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges wanted to close the institution. 
 CCSF’s Student Labor Action Project began organizing to keep CCSF accredited, and in January a judge ruled that the commission couldn’t revoke accreditation until a trial is held. The campaign will continue until CCSF’s future is secured.
—Shanell Williams…

John Carlos was part of the most radical political moment in Olympic history. After winning the bronze medal in the 200-meter dash at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, he and gold medalist Tommie Smith raisedz their black-gloved fists in an emphatic show of support for civil and human rights. For choosing to make a political statement on the Olympic stage, Carlos paid the price: he was ostracized and slandered for decades by the world of Olympic sports. It is difficult to think of a more appropriate person to discuss what athletes will be risking now by speaking out at the Sochi Games. 
 Dave Zirin: Billie Jean King said in September that she wanted to see someone do a “John Carlos moment” at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. How does it…

Remember that publicity shot from the Usual Suspects with Kevin Spacey in the lineup? The photo above is an update, snapped late last year in the boardroom of the International Olympic Committee, in a marble palace on the banks of Lake Geneva. This lineup has thirteen men, most past middle age, in business suits and ties, and two women—the big cheeses expecting the best seats in Sochi. Dead center is the new IOC president, Germany’s Thomas Bach. We’ll come back to him, but for now, know that Bach, 60, was a protégé of Horst Dassler, the German businessman who bribed more sports officials than most of us ever heard of. Dassler’s family owned Adidas and a marketing company that laid out $100 million in kickbacks to acquire TV and marketing…

I once had this girlfriend who was an artist. We used to go to galleries and see shows together. Sometimes when she looked at a piece she would say, “Oh, that’s something I did in art school.” After a while it dawned on me that a lot of what she dismissed as student exercises—gambits she figured she’d outgrown—were things I liked. I started to think that she had inadvertently taught me, if not a definition of good art, then at least a kind of rule of thumb for identifying it in the field: if you make art in ways that other artists would have considered disposable exercises—Wittgensteinian ladders to be tossed aside once ascended—then you are getting somewhere with your art.
 Later, I came to realize that I shouldn’t have…

[She?] pale curtain fire behind it scent of split rock [She] as wind slendered in grass [She] soft path down which [Unknown refrain] Roughened blue [of eyes, of waters?] Steel [of her voice, of weather?]… Apple [her skin? its white cliffs/sting?] the cricket [cricket] climbing All this! [O She!] [Unknown refrain] Sea so blue [a handful, blue] Those glass lips say I shouldn’t say this her blouse slips dawn [or down] Sound [verb] with wide-eyed hands [Unknown refrain] She throws [we throw?] live flowers on fire they [flowers or limbs?] blend smooth as flames Though high stars circling will [how long how long?] pick our bones clean [Unknown refrain]…

@KatrinaNation
Congratulations to 
@jeremyscahill for Oscar nomination
for powerful 
@DirtyWars doc.
c@jeremyscahill
Our whole team is thinking of the Afghans, Yemenis, Somalis & others who let us into their homes to tell their stories.
 @EmilySDouglas
My desk is covered in marked-up drafts of essays by great feminists about the state of feminism. Sometimes I realize I am living the dream.
 @JuddLegum
MONDAY: West Virginia residents told that their water is safe to drink. NOW: CDC says water is unsafe for pregnant women.
 @chrislhayes
We called Freedom Industries to clarify just who, exactly, the president of their company is: “We are going to decline to comment.”
 @AriBerman
Rep. John Conyers, co-sponsor of VRA amendment bill, first entered Congress in 1965, year #VRA was passed.
…

Gary Shteyngart wrote the award-winning novels The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story. Now he's written a memoir called Little Failure. This interview has been edited and condensed. —Jon Wiener
 JW: You spent your first seven years in the Soviet Union—what was your 7-year-old understanding of communism, of Lenin himself?
 GS: Let’s start with Lenin. One of the biggest statues of Lenin was in Leningrad right outside our window. I loved Lenin so much that I would wake up every morning and hug his pedestal. When I was 5, I wrote a book called Lenin and His Magical Goose, in which Lenin and a talking goose conquer Finland and make it a socialist country. I very much wanted to become a soldier in the Red Army,…

Five years ago, on January 22, 2009, a newly inaugurated President Obama promised to "return the US to the moral high ground" by signing a series of executive orders. One ordered the closing of Guantánamo and the shuttering of secret CIA prisons; another prohibited torture and "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the CIA.
 Years later, many have highlighted the unfulfilled pledge to close Guantánamo, which the Obama administration has repeatedly blamed on Congress. But few have noted the failed promise to end torture. While the days of waterboarding are over, Obama's own Justice Department has continued to subject people facing terrorism-related charges in this country to prolonged pretrial solitary confinement and sensory deprivation—conditions that have been condemned by the international community as torture. (For more on terror prosecutions and the erosion…

In an August 1935 editorial, The Nation endorsed the ultimately unsuccessful movement to boycott the following year’s Berlin Olympics, arguing that it “would constitute a reproof which would echo throughout the world and even penetrate the sound-proofed barricade of the Nazi censorship.”
 “The simple truth is that, despite official protestations, sport is no more free in Germany than are speech and political activity. Interested groups of Americans should bend every effort to draw our teams out of the games. A boycott of the Olympics would touch the Nazi government in two very tender spots—its prestige and its pocket-book.”
 Nation columnist Heywood Broun urged that another venue—“some place where there was no trace of anti-Semitism whatsoever”—be found to host the games, but that the United States would have to count itself…

Sochi
 The Sochi Olympics are already infamous for being the most expensive in history. But corruption-inflated construction contracts aside, there is also a huge environmental and human cost to building the Games from scratch, at breakneck speed. It can’t be calculated in a single figure, but it’s found in places like the Sochi-area village of Uch-Dere, where smoke from underground fires pours out of a sprawling construction waste dump polluting the neighboring river; in the village of Akhshtyr, where limestone quarrying has dried up the wells and covered residents’ fruit in dust; and in the village of Vesyoloye, where construction waste dumping triggered a landslide that ruined homes. The activists who try to fight these abuses have been harassed, jailed and, in the case of at least one environmentalist, looking…

As a former Olympic athlete, I can tell you from experience that the Olympic Games have much more in common with The Hunger Games than anyone would want to admit.
 I connect with the inhumanity of The Hunger Games because I’ve been there, as a luge competitor at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. No, I didn’t get sucked into the depths of an artificial lake, like the character played by Jennifer Lawrence. But I did get sucked into the rafters of an artificially manufactured tube of glare ice, only to come crashing down in the second run of my Olympic moment.
 The grandeur of the opening ceremonies of The Hunger Games is designed to mask the cruelty of the competition itself. The Olympic opening ceremonies serve a similar…

Story of a Death Foretold The Coup Against Salvador Allende, September 11, 1973. By Oscar Guardiola-Rivera. Bloomsbury. 472 pp. $30. On September 11, 2006, I stood outside the National Stadium in Santiago among about 250 people, old and young, tying flowers onto fence bars to honor the many Chileans who had died during the first days of the 1973 military coup. Inti-Illimani anthems I knew from the old days of Chile Solidarity groups wafted through the air: “The people! United! Will never be defeated!” Although this was apparently the first time in years that the Socialist and Communist parties had commemorated the anniversary together, it still wasn’t much of a crowd. But then a voice, rich and warm, rang out from the loudspeakers, talking about justice, courage and love. It…

Somewhere in Russia, Edward Snowden is smiling.On January 17, about eight months after Snowden’s initial disclosures of National Security Agency spying run amok, President Obama gave a major speech in which he acknowledged the risks to privacy the NSA’s activities pose and announced changes designed to limit those risks. The changes do not go nearly far enough, so Snowden’s smile may be tempered. But none of these changes would have happened had it not been for the leaks. 
 So long as the NSA programs remained secret, Obama maintained them, the federal courts blessed them and Congress authorized them (albeit unwittingly for most members). Now that the programs have been exposed, Obama has promised to rein them in, the courts have begun to question their constitutionality and Congress is considering…

New figures reported by radio station KPCC show that nearly half of Los Angeles public school libraries have no trained staff to run them, and 87 percent of school libraries lack a credentialed librarian.
 These figures come on the heels of the district’s decision to double down on its investment in iPads—the district has set aside another $115 million to expand an iPad initiative that has already cost $1 billion. 
 Los Angeles isn’t alone in slashing its school libraries. In states from Oregon to New York, when money gets tight, school libraries are usually on the list of early eliminations.
 —Julianne Hing Colorlines.com
…

“Suddenly the whole world is talking about income inequality, leading us off in unhelpful directions,” writes New York Times pundit David Brooks. The primary problem, he adds, is that “What we call ‘inequality’ is caused by two different constellations of problems. At the top end, there is the growing wealth of the top 5 percent of workers.... At the bottom end, there is a growing class of people stuck on the margins, generation after generation.” According to Brooks, “If you have a primitive zero-sum mentality then you assume growing affluence for the rich must somehow be causing the immobility of the poor.” I would not call David Brooks’s arguments “primitive”—“evasive” and “deceptive” would be more like it. 
 For starters, if the top 1 percent of Americans enjoyed 95 percent…

It says something about the skittish levels of repression and fear in Russia that nail polish could provoke an international crisis. But that’s what happened at the IAAF World Championships in Moscow last August, when Swedish high jumper Emma Green Tregaro and her teammate, sprinter Moa Hjelmer, were pressured by their nation’s officials to remove the rainbow decorations that adorned their fingernails or risk being sent home. Their nails were meant to be a subtle protest against recent legislation in Russia aimed at criminalizing and marginalizing the LGBT community.
 “I couldn’t imagine how big and how much it would mean to people. So I’m so glad that I did it,” said Green Tregaro. “Of course I’ve got some ugly messages too, and that makes it even more worth it.”
 The…

On December 29, as many Russians were traveling for the upcoming New Year’s holiday, a suicide bomber blew up the entrance to the train station in the southern city of Volgograd, followed by another suicide bombing on a trolley bus less than twenty-four hours later. The explosions, which came on the heels of a bus bombing there in October that killed six, left thirty-four people dead and raised doubts about the security of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, 400 miles south of Volgograd and next door to Russia’s volatile North Caucasus region. In a video published in January, two men claiming affiliation with an Islamic terrorist group in the North Caucasus took credit for the Volgograd attacks and threatened further attacks at the Sochi Games. Gregory Shvedov, editor of the…

Despite the long history of lgbti athletes in the Olympic Games, only now, in the run-up to Sochi, has their right to compete as proudly and publicly out been at the forefront of the Olympic conversation. For that, we can thank the Russian government, whose vicious attacks on gay people have steered the 2014 Winter Olympics on a collision course with the LGBTI community and the movement for gay liberation.
 Social justice campaigns have affected the Olympics for decades. Examples include the push for gender equality, which started at the Olympics a century ago, during the women’s suffrage movement. John Carlos and Tommie Smith used the medal podium at the 1968 Mexico City Games to raise their black-gloved fists in protest against racism in the United States, and South Africa…

The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye. By Jeremy Dauber. Schocken. 448 pp. $28.95. Wonder of Wonders A Cultural History of “Fiddler on the Roof.” By Alisa Solomon. Metropolitan. 433 pp. $32. Deciphering the cultural significance of the writings of Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) is akin to opening a set of Russian nesting dolls: inside one set of meanings invariably lies another. The puzzle begins with the author’s name. Meaning both “How do you do?” and “Peace be unto you” in Yiddish, Sholem Aleichem was the pen name adopted by Sholem Rabinovich, the scion of a Ukrainian merchant. Fluent in Russian and Hebrew, he would leave his mark as a leader of the fin de siècle Yiddish literary revival. He married into…