Innehållsförteckning för Apr-21-14 från The Nation

Calling All Populists!
 I admire The Nation, but now and then it hits me where I live and my gratitude spilleth over. To wit: Jim Hightower’s “Time for a Populist Revival!” [March 24]. Inspired and inspiring! Thank you! Valerie Govig Baltimore I concur with Jim Hightower.At 101 years of age, I have declared myself a candidate for Congress (joenewman101.com) with the primary purpose of bringing to public attention the threat to morality from the far right. Part of my platform is to remind us that in 1787 some of our best minds met and set this goal—dreamed this dream, if you will—that “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the…

I met Jonathan Schell in 2003, just after the war in Iraq had erupted and his book The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People had been published. The latter was prophecy for the former, talking about how all the US firepower had done nothing to break the will of the Vietnamese people, and observing that violence was often not a sign of power but of weakness, and how little it could do to win or even crush hearts and minds, whatever it might do to bodies and places. 
 Largely ignored at the time, when many in the mainstream had thrown themselves into the cult of military power and fantasies of an American-dominated Middle East, Jonathan’s book has nevertheless become a talisman and key text for…

Will Obama help black men—or just lecture them?
 Black males are in the news. For a constituency that is a mere 6 percent of the population, they occupy a position that is unique in its visibility and vulnerability. On any given Sunday, like modern gladiators, they display their athletic prowess before audiences composed largely of wealthy white ticket­holders at basketball and football arenas throughout the country. They are similarly ubiquitous among the talent in the music industry, supplying a steady stream of singers and producers, from Quincy Jones and Berry Gordy to Jay-Z and Pharrell Williams. 
 Yet the quality of life for most black men in America is overwhelmingly negative. Across a broad array of indicators, the social and economic patterns are stark: in almost every aspect of life…

The Bush years were grim for progressives, but they did
offer one small consolation: the hope that if only a smart and decent person could ascend to the White House, our politics could be repaired. Now, after years of destructive austerity and hopeless stalemate, that faith is dead. People on the left will debate where to lay the blame, but few will disagree that our federal institutions seem utterly unequal to the challenges of a country still reeling from economic crisis. 
 Indeed, our national politics are so deformed that it’s hard even to imagine the steps necessary to fix things. Last year, The Boston Globe ran an award-winning series, “Broken City,” about the entropy in Washington. The final piece noted that potential remedies for the country’s problems are met with…

There are some nice old trees in the more established sections of West Park Cemetery in Johannesburg, but the newer reaches of the Jewish section approximate the grasslands that existed before the Witwatersrand was settled. Around my father’s grave, right up against the koppie at the top of the cemetery and with excavations all around us for other new burials, the landscape seemed especially harsh and brittle. Burying the dead here scours you and dries you out, and you are grateful for the Jewish ritual at the end of it that requires you to wash your hands with a two-handled jug—one that you hold with your death-soiled hand and the other with your now-clean one. But West Park also, quite appropriately, makes you think about the earth: the red earth…

Three and a half years ago, after living for more than a quarter-century in a rent-stabilized apartment in a ratty Greenwich Village tenement, my wife and I moved to a condo in downtown Manhattan. Conscientious ’60s veterans, we felt some anxiety about landing in the climes of privilege—honey, property is theft—but we got over it fast. This was cemented shortly after our arrival, when we were asked to weigh in on a pressing matter. At the time our building—formerly offices—was originally converted, it had three separate entrances: one for commercial space on the lower floors, another for rental apartments in the middle, and the last for the condos at the top. The rentals had been fairly quickly made into condos, and the question to be decided was whether the two…

@KatrinaNation
In sadness: Jonathan Schell died last night. He was a cherished colleague, an extraordinary journalist/writer/thinker. @thenation grieves. 
 @LilianaSegura
Heartbroken at the loss of Jonathan Schell. There was not a warmer, wiser presence at @NationInstitute. And he was a true fighter for peace
 @peterrothberg
Jonathan Schell really was as kind as he was brilliant. A truly decent man using all that life gave him to fight for justice and equity. 
 @hamfish
With the passing of Jonathan Schell we have lost the most fervent and ennobling voice for peace in our time. 
 @stevenjhsieh
RIP Jonathan Schell: The Fate of the Earth is the most persuasive case for nuclear disarmament ever written. 
 @chrislhayes
Introducing...David Emanuel Shaw-Hayes. 8 lbs of pure sweetness, born to the best mom on the planet & an awestruck dad. 
…

The East-West confrontation over Ukraine, which led to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea but long predated it, is potentially the worst international crisis in more than fifty years—and the most fateful. A negotiated resolution is possible, but time may be running out. 
 A new Cold War divide is already descending in Europe—not in Berlin but on Russia’s borders. Worse may follow. If NATO forces move toward Poland’s border with Ukraine, as is being called for in Washington and Europe, Moscow is likely to send its forces into eastern Ukraine. The result would be a danger of war comparable to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. 
 Even if the outcome is the nonmilitary “isolation of Russia,” today’s Western mantra, the consequences will be dire. Moscow will not bow but will…

On the left, prostitution used to be seen as a bad thing: part of the general degradation of the working class, and the subjugation of women, under capitalism. Women who sold sex were victims, forced by circumstances into a painful and humiliating way of life, and socialism would liberate them. Now, selling sex is sex work—just another service job, with good points and bad—and if you suggest that the women who perform it are anything less than free agents, perhaps even “empowered” if they make enough money, you’re just a prude. Today’s villain is not the pimp or the john—it’s second-wave feminists, with their primitive men-are-the-enemy worldview, and “rescuers” like Nicholas Kristof, who presume to know what’s best for women. The hot new left-wing journals are full of this thinking.…

The tents huddled together on the high prairie. For seven months, they had borne deluge, frost and blizzard. In that time, the occupants—more than 1,000 striking coal miners and their families—had also endured the fear and fact of violence. On April 20, 1914, the sun rose at 5:20 am. It was the 209th daybreak over the tent colony at Ludlow, Colorado. And it was also the last. 
 The next twenty-four hours, in which roughly a score of people were killed, would be the bloodiest in the entire sanguinary history of the American labor movement. Immortalized as the Ludlow Massacre, its causes and ramifications have been discussed, disputed and decried for a century. As with the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 or the Haymarket Riot of 1886, it generated martyrs,…

For years I’ve been hearing it said that young artists think art began with Andy Warhol. It’s never been true. But now what I hear is art historians complaining that none of their students want to study anything but contemporary art. Among young art historians, it seems, to delve as far back as the 1960s is to be considered an antiquarian. “They only take my courses because they think they need some ‘background,’” one Renaissance specialist told me. “We have to accept almost anyone who applies saying that they want to study anything before the present, just to give our current faculty something to do.” What a time, when the art historians have less historical consciousness than the artists—and no wonder that the former, these days, show so little interest…

Jonathan Schell, who died of cancer on March 25 at 70, was an extraordinary writer, thinker and colleague. For nearly two decades, we were privileged to publish his eloquent, passionate and forcefully argued essays on behalf of peace, disarmament and nuclear abolition. He also wrote about presidential campaigns, the media and the growing threat to democracy by the national security state after 9/11. 
 The power and persuasiveness of Jonathan’s work came not only from his elegant style, analytic clarity and incisive logic, but also from the enduring belief that there is no idea so compelling as a moral one. On the nuclear crisis, no voice was as clear, no writing as perceptive, as Jonathan’s, going back to his acclaimed 1982 book The Fate of the Earth. In a 1998…

According to a report by the UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, in 2009 New York State had the most racially segregated public schools in the country. The numbers are heavily influenced by New York City—the nation’s largest public school system—where nearly all black and Latino students attend schools in which students of color are the majority. In fact, black students typically attend schools in which fewer than 10 percent of the students are white, even though black students make up 30 percent of the district. The report also found that the dismantling of federal desegregation plans and the proliferation of charter schools have exacerbated racial segregation in New York.
 —Julianne Hing Colorlines.com…

In “The Case Against the War” (March 3, 2003), Jonathan Schell wrote: “A revival of worldwide disarmament negotiations must be the means, the abolition of all weapons of mass destruction the end. That idea has long been in eclipse, and today it lies outside the mainstream of political opinion. Unfortunately, historical reality is no respecter of conventional wisdom and often requires it to change course if calamity is to be avoided. But fortunately it is one element of the genius of democracy—and of US democracy in particular—that encrusted orthodoxy can be challenged and overthrown by popular pressure. The movement against the war in Iraq should also become a movement for something, and that something should be a return to the long-neglected path to abolition of all weapons of mass destruction.…

In late January, President Obama met some
two dozen CEOs at the White House to discuss the plight of the long-term unemployed. Frustrated by the refusal of congressional Republicans to extend unemployment insurance benefits, Obama persuaded several hundred companies to sign a “best practices” hiring pledge promising not to discriminate against those who have been unable to find work for a lengthy period of time.
 Among the executives present was Don Thompson, who made nearly $14 million in 2012 as the CEO of the McDonald’s Corporation, and whose restaurant workers are paid so little that they must rely on $1.2 billion in public assistance each year. Also present was Boeing CEO Jim McNerney, who earned $23.3 million in 2013 while threatening to move his company to a right-to-work state if the…

When we speak of “pop,” we often speak of an instance or, more likely, a set of similar instances that seem to elucidate the character of a given moment (that would be the “circumstance” part). Two examples is a coincidence; three, a zeitgeist.
 What if we ignore instances altogether, at least for the moment? Pop exists, after all, independent of specific cases. It’s the 100-
minute film narratively structured like a suspension bridge, or it’s the three-minute song. The forms can be filled time after time with infinitely varied contents. But the song remains the same: verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. It keeps working. The shape is the pop. 
 Every now and then, however, a new shape materializes, or an old shape suddenly seems able to hold the mercurial soul of…