Innehållsförteckning för Sep-15-14 från The Nation

Who Wants Pot to Be Illegal?
 Well, of course Big Pharma is against pot: if it were legal to grow one’s own medicine in one’s backyard—a medicine that is more effective than many painkillers, muscle relaxants and anxiety reducers and has fewer side effects—nobody would buy Big Pharma’s high-priced merchandise [Lee Fang, “The Anti-Pot Lobby’s Big Bankroll,” July 21/28]! Davids64
 * * * I live in Colorado, where marijuana sales are legal. Our crime rate is down, we have collected over $10 million in taxes, and we have freed the police to concentrate on real crime. Plus pot is safer than any other legal drug out there. Mike
 * * * “One try and it can ruin your life,” says the man who will ruin your life if he catches…

Chris Brown, the mayor of Hawthorne, California, responded to the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by proposing that his own city’s police be required to wear video cameras. 
 “I am simply not willing to gamble with a single life, or the wrongful accusation of upstanding officers,” Brown wrote in a letter last Friday, Time reported.
 In 2013, a researcher found that the adoption of body-mounted cameras by the police in Rialto, California, resulted in a 50 percent reduction in use-of-force incidents.
 —Julianne Hing
 Colorlines.com…

The protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed teen Michael Brown were Barack Obama’s fault. 
 This is not a claim about law enforcement’s continued militarization under his administration. The federal government has been engaged in arming local police with the weapons of war for more than a decade. Further, the White House must be credited with announcing a decision to review the distribution of army surplus to local police forces and to consider limiting it in the future. 
 This is also not a claim about the president’s decision to remain ensconced on the golf courses of Martha’s Vineyard as unrest exploded in Missouri’s streets. The optics of a vacationing president set against the breathtaking images of local police bearing down on American citizens with…

On July 13, 2013, George Zimmerman was found not guilty in the murder of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American 17-year-old walking home from a 7-Eleven. What The Washington Post and other media outlets had dubbed “the trial of the century” was over, with a deeply unsettling verdict. In the fifteen months between Trayvon’s death and the beginning of the trial, people across the country had taken to the streets, as well as to newspapers, television and social media, to decry the disregard for young black lives in America. For them—for us—this verdict was confirmation.
 A group of 100 black activists, ranging in age from 18 to 35, had gathered in Chicago that same weekend. They had come together at the invitation of Cathy J. Cohen, a professor of political science…

On a Saturday morning in mid-July, about seventy-five recent high school graduates and college underclassmen—all young black men—crowded into the Laney College student center in downtown Oakland, California. Some were accompanied by parents, mostly their mothers. Some wore red button-up shirts and black ties that marked them as members of the Striving Black Brothers Coalition, a group that provides mentorship to young African-American men attending a nearby community college. One wore a letterman-style jacket issued by another college-prep program geared toward black youth. Embroidered on the back was a question: What if the prince dared to be king?
 The princes in question had been convened by the College Bound Brotherhood, an organization that connects black boys and young men in the Bay Area to scholarships and peer support. They spent…

What first comes to mind when I think of Jeff Koons isn’t his art—not even his most memorable works, such as the stainless steel Rabbit of 1986 or the vast, flowery Puppy of 1992—but rather a cameo he had in a movie. In Gus Van Sant’s 2008 biopic Milk, Koons briefly graced the big screen in the role of Art Agnos, the progressive politician (and future mayor of San Francisco) who defeated Harvey Milk in the 1976 Democratic primary for a position in the California State Assembly. After a debate, Agnos offers his opponent a bit of advice: relentless criticism of the status quo isn’t enough to win the public over. Unless you can offer constructive programs to improve people’s lives, you’re just a downer, Agnos says: “You gotta to…

Ferguson, Missouri. Sanford, Florida. Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Oakland. Chicago. Staten Island. The grim roster of cities where police or vigilante violence has resulted in the death of an African-American just keeps growing. The streets of Ferguson have quieted now, after roiling for
eleven days with the anguish of protesters demanding justice for Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old who was shot by a police officer on August 9 after being stopped for walking in the street. The police, fortified by a Pentagon program that provides surplus military equipment to civilian law enforcement—with no training requirements and little oversight—responded with riot gear, tear gas and rubber bullets. (President Obama has ordered a review of the program, but any attempt to curb it will be met with resistance.)
 Yet it’s not only the deaths…

Robert Sherrill, who wrote at least 130 signed articles for this magazine, died on
August 19 at age 89. This former college English teacher, amateur painter and poet was a passionate purist in his prose, his populist politics, and his expectations of others and himself. I first got to know Bob by serving as his sometime editor at The New York Times Magazine. (Conflict-of-interest alert: at a critical moment, he sent James Storrow Jr., The Nation’s then-owner/publisher, a billet-doux telling him he’d be a fool not to hire me, so I owe him.) Sherrill’s advice to me when I became editor of this magazine in 1978: “If you ever publish anything in The Nation that could appear in The New York Times Magazine, you are not doing your job.”) 
 Sherrill,…

On August 1, the University of Illinois revoked Palestinian-American scholar Steven Salaita’s appointment to its American Indian Studies program. The decision was in response to tweets that Salaita had posted blasting Israel’s assault on Gaza, which were deemed “uncivil.”
 Salaita was set to join UIUC as a tenured associate professor in August. His appointment was rescinded by Chancellor Phyllis Wise, who said of the decision: “We cannot and will not tolerate…words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them.”
 Academics, students and activist groups have mobilized to demand Salaita’s reinstatement, mounting an online petition as well as an e-mail campaign directed at Chancellor Wise. At press time, the petition had gathered more than 16,000 signatures.
—Ahmad Hamdan…

Although African-Americans have made unprecedented progress in terms of politics, business and access to elite institutions, other developments suggest that something else is going on. Voting rights are being curtailed, communities are deteriorating, and incarcerations for minor and even fabricated criminal charges are on the rise. Most troubling is the news of cold-blooded murders committed against them in the public square, too often with impunity.
 It sounds as though I’m describing our current landscape, but in fact this is an apt description of the late nineteenth century, when African-Americans occupied political offices, accumulated wealth and held administrative positions that would not have been dreamed of a generation before. But this was also the era of the literacy test, congealing segregation and the convict-lease system, which provided the black labor forfeited…

I prepared the text below for remarks to the annual US-Russia Forum in Washington, DC, held in the Hart Senate Office Building (though not under official auspices) on June 16. Obliged to abridge my text to the time allocated to speakers, I have restored the deletions here and spelled out a number of my impromptu comments. In addition, I refer to a few subsequent developments to illustrate some of my themes.—S.F.C.
 * * * We meet today during the worst and
potentially most dangerous American-Russian confrontation in many decades, probably since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The Ukrainian civil war, precipitated by the unlawful change of government in Kiev in February, is already growing into a proxy US-Russian war. The seemingly unthinkable is becoming imaginable: an actual war between NATO,…

The Island of Knowledge The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning. By Marcelo Gleiser. Basic. 335 pp. $29.99. Whether or not scientists are from Mars and humanists from Venus, the “two cultures” debate about the arts and sciences has never been down to earth. For decades we’ve endured schematic sparring between straw men: humanists claim that scientists are reductive, scientists find humanists reactionary. (A recent bout between the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker and the literary critic Leon Wieseltier in the pages of The New Republic ran true to form.) Marcelo Gleiser, a physicist with strong ties to the humanities, is alarmed by the hubristic stance of his discipline and the backlash it is liable to provoke. He has written The Island of Knowledge as “a much needed self-analysis…

When Zephyr Teachout announced that she would challenge New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo in the September 9 Democratic primary, many observers shrugged off her campaign as an election-season lark. Cuomo had the money, the connections, the power of incumbency and the famous family name, a combination insiders said was unbeatable. Teachout gave voice to the progressive populist sentiment that is growing across the country—but without the money or party infrastructure to back her up, it was hard to see how she could break through.
 But circumstances—some of her own creation, many resulting from Cuomo’s missteps and misdeeds—have conspired to create what The New York Times calls a “Teachout Moment.” A savvy, trust-busting progressive, Teachout has injected some much-needed debate into the election, earning endorsements from the Public Employees Federation…

During what was so euphemistically labeled the “unrest” in Ferguson, Missouri, The Washington Post interviewed Barbara Arnwine, a civil-rights attorney who, as a teenager, witnessed the 1965 riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles. “We’re in a time warp,” Arnwine told the Post. “Watts was bad, but this is the worst thing I’ve seen.”
 In an August 1965 editorial about Watts, The Nation’s editor, Carey McWilliams—a longtime California watcher—wrote that “a feverish search for scapegoats is now under way…. Predictably the forthcoming investigation ordered by Governor [Pat] Brown will stress the same tiresome cliches: police brutality, inadequate leadership, The Heat, slum conditions. All the while the truth about Watts is right there in front of people, in plain boldface type, for all to read; so simple that it is…

Christian monasticism began in earnest in
the fourth century CE, just after Constantine made Jesus Christ the official god of Rome. No longer persecuted, believers who craved a holiness less compromised by empire fled to the desert and set up communes. These monastics came to wield power in their own right, putting on display a more strenuous, radical faith. Their successors became Europe’s chief scholars and inventors and also served as guardians for the technology of writing. 
 Early this year, the ancient caves of Matera, Italy, became home to an experiment: an unMonastery, the first of its kind. For the dozen or so unMonks living there, plus the hundreds following their progress online, it carried the quixotic hope of an underemployed generation regaining control of the technology that increasingly commodifies…

In the first campaign I ran as a young organizer, I worked with fifty homeless families, the vast majority of them African-American, who were trying to escape a slumlike welfare hotel in San Francisco for subsidized permanent housing. Several weeks in, I was scoping out the hotel owner’s neighborhood for an action with a 19-year-old campaign member named Aaron, which meant long hours sitting in my car. After we exchanged life stories, Aaron asked me, “What are you doing here with us? You’re supposed to be with them.” 
 By “them,” he meant his Indian immigrant landlords, who had a lucrative deal housing families in vermin-infested rooms with broken toilets and no refrigerators for months at a time. I finally said something about how angry injustice made me. And I…

A faint murmur wafted toward the entrance of “Art Spiegelman’s Co-Mix: A Retrospective” at the Jewish Museum in New York City. Barely audible and wholly indecipherable at first, it grew louder as one moved through the first few galleries and could begin to discern a human voice. Then, at the center of the show, amid scores of preliminary sketches, research materials and finished panels from Spiegelman’s masterpiece Maus, one discovered its source: excerpts of the interviews that the artist recorded with his father, Vladek, beginning in 1972, in which Vladek recounts his experience surviving in Nazi-occupied Poland and in Auschwitz—the basis of his son’s celebrated two-volume graphic memoir, published in book form in 1986 and 1991. 
 Encountering Vladek’s voice was shocking. In part that’s because, as with any retrospective,…