Innehållsförteckning för Dec-01-14 från The Nation

Got It Covered
 Your November 3 cover question, above photos of three appealing faces—“Did a major defense contractor cause brain cancer in these kids?”—sounds like something out of You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx; it’s right up there with classics such as “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?” Meanwhile, the headline on the article is “How Cancer Came to the Acreage,” a more Nation-worthy identifier for Sharon Lerner’s article. This is still more evidence that one can’t judge the quality of a magazine by its cover tease. Don DeMarco Philadelphia
 * * * Block That Vote!
 Although Ari Berman’s “The GOP’s War on Voting” [Nov. 3] makes a good point—that for many Americans, voter disenfranchisement is a huge issue that needs to be resolved—it makes the situation seem worse than…

While many in the mainstream media are occasionally willing to take note of imperfections in America’s democratic practices, virtually none are willing to ask whether the system has simply ceased to function at all. No matter what may be odd or perhaps even unfair in this or that race, goes the argument, the central narrative remains unquestioned: Republican dominance of both houses of Congress represents a rightward turn on the part of the country as a whole—just look at the results.
 But if you look more closely at some of the contradictions underlying those results, then you suddenly have what Ricky Ricardo used to call “some ’splainin’ to do.” How is it that four states that gave victories to Republican Senate candidates also happened to approve ballot initiatives calling for…

In a recent encounter between Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, the two men discussed “white privilege.” O’Reilly maintained that his accomplishments had nothing to do with race and everything to do with hard work. Stewart pointed out that O’Reilly had grown up in Levittown, New York, a planned community to which the federal and local governments transferred tremendous mortgage subsidies and other public benefits—while barring black people from living there—in the post–World War II period. O’Reilly thereby reaped the benefits of a massive, racially exclusive government wealth transfer. As legal scholar Cheryl Harris observed in a 1993 Harvard Law Review article, “the law has established and protected an actual property interest in whiteness”—its value dependent on the full faith and credit placed in it, ephemeral but with…

Bryan McGowan spent twenty-two years in the US Marine Corps, including four tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. When he was stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina from 2005 until 2010, McGowan used same-day registration to register and vote during the state’s early-voting period.
 He relocated to Georgia in 2010 because of his military service and returned to North Carolina in 2014. On the first day of early voting this year, McGowan arrived at his new polling place to update his registration and vote, just as he’d done in the 2008 presidential election. But this time he was turned away. North Carolina had eliminated same-day registration as part of the sweeping voting restrictions enacted by the Republican legislature in the summer of 2013. “All I want to do is cast…

If I were advising the White House now, I would encourage President Obama to take advantage of the time remaining before the new GOP-dominated Congress assumes office to change the subject in a big way. The president should undertake a series of major executive actions on issues that congressional Republicans have failed to act on and seem unlikely ever to pass.
 This cannot be done quietly. Indeed, polarization—including a massive outcry from the wing-nut section of the GOP—can be helpful if the president chooses the right issues. Obama should be very visible, delivering high-profile speeches and coordinating with grassroots activists. 
 Here are a few suggestions: 
 Begin serious immigration reform. In your first press conference after the elections, Mr. President, you said you would take executive action on immigration…

Maybe it was just coincidence that Jenny Holzer’s recent exhibition, “Dust Paintings,” at Cheim & Read in New York City, opened on September 11. That date fell on a Thursday this year, and Thursday nights are always big ones for Chelsea openings. I remember seeing Stephen Shore’s photographs from Israel, the West Bank and Ukraine at 303 Gallery; Matthew Ritchie’s new paintings—wrapped up in a heady, encompassing installation with sculpture, video and a wall drawing—at Andrea Rosen Gallery; and the reconstruction of a 2002 installation by Jason Rhoades at David Zwirner, to name a few. None of them put me in mind of the events that had taken place just three miles south of the gallery district thirteen years ago. Holzer’s new paintings did, dwelling as they do on the…

The first order of business for the new GOP majorities in both houses of Congress is to dismantle as much of President Obama’s agenda as possible—starting with climate change. This is not mere speculation: the first two items prospective Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell cited to reporters the day after the elections were authorization of the Keystone XL pipeline and rollback of the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently announced but not yet implemented rules on carbon dioxide emissions. Then, reacting to Obama’s November 11 announcement of a genuinely historic climate accord with China—for the first time, China agreed to an absolute limit on its emissions (by 2030), while the United States pledged to accelerate its own reductions through 2025—McConnell attacked the deal as an “unrealistic” job killer.
 Such polluter-friendly priorities come…

Science-fiction writers have compared the Internet to big and transcendent things. To William Gibson, it was a “consensual hallucination”; to Cory Doctorow, a “nervous system.” But they have nothing on American politicians, who, in an effort to enlighten or perhaps befuddle the public, have produced a challenging series of metaphors.
 In 2006, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) spoke in opposition to net neutrality legislation. In audibly frustrated testimony, he complained about congestion online. “An Internet [sic] was sent by my staff at ten o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially…. Again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck—it’s a series of tubes.”
 Stevens’s analogy,…

House Republicans will have more seats than at any time since 1946, when the GOP, as The Nation wrote in an editorial, “won control of Congress not because the country longed for Republicanism—whatever that might be—but because in almost every state in the country a vote for the G.O.P. was the only way in which a hazy discontent could be expressed.”
 In “Toward a New Beginning,” Nation editor Freda Kirchwey argued: “we can trace as if on a military map the retreat of the machine Democrats from advance positions which had become politically exposed into comfortable rearguard posts, sheltered behind the euphemistic camouflage of ‘bi-partisanship.’” Kirchwey continued: “Let us not fool ourselves in this hour of appraisal…. Neither the reorientation of ideas demanded by the period we face nor the…

Come January, Republicans will control the Senate and thus the entire Congress. This new alignment is going to be hugely problematic for progressive governance—perhaps for governance, period. Here’s a nonexhaustive catalog of the trouble that lies ahead.
 Staffing the executive and judicial branches. For much of Obama’s presidency, Senate Republicans stymied dozens of presidential appointments, reflexively blocking nominees, often without bothering to offer any actual objections. Harry Reid implemented filibuster reform one year ago, and nominations have been handled more quickly. But with Republicans in charge, expect them to grind to a halt once again. 
 Republicans understand that failing to staff the executive and judicial branches (especially the latter) is a great way to slow down Obama’s agenda and affect the trajectory of US jurisprudence long after he leaves…

This past August, as the outcry grew over the killing of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, the hacktivist collective Anonymous took up the cause. On August 14, an Anonymous member posted a YouTube video calling for a “National Day of Rage” to protest the shooting. A computerized voice warbled over an ominous Carl Orff–ripoff score: “We call upon the citizens of the United States to collectively gather in support for those who are suffering in Ferguson.” News sites heralded the heroic arrival of Anonymous. Initially, few of these reports noted that the exact time, date and locations of Anonymous’s National Day of Rage corresponded with a previously planned protest, the National Moment of Silence, spearheaded by black feminist blogger…

Noon ictus cooling the veranda’s fretwork the child sits after his harp boning burlesque in the bower, his slit of gulls nerves silenced into hydrangea. Violet and roan, the bridal sun is opening and closing a window, filling a clay pot of coins with coins; candle jars, a crystal globe, cut milk boxes with horn petals snapping their iceberg-Golgotha crackle. The loneliness is terrible, the ice is near,v says the hasp-lipped devil, casting beatitudes at the castor-oiled pimps in Parliament, Pray for them, joyfully, their amazing death! Light seethes bulging like pipes blown with napalm from his big golden eyes turning the afternoon ten degrees backwards, then through palm fronds’ teething the bridled air, sprigs of goat hair fall.…

Barack Obama has long been identified as an informed and often ardent supporter of net neutrality, so it is no surprise that his first major initiative after the 2014 elections was to mount a strong defense of a free and open Internet. Unfortunately, his appointees to chair the Federal Communications Commission have failed to deliver on the president’s promise. The current chairman has been busy peddling proposals that could lead to a two-tier Internet, where content from corporate and political elites moves in the fast lane while noncommercial and grassroots communications—and citizens—get stranded in the slow lane. 
 Obama explicitly rejected compromises that might undermine the free flow of information with his November 10 call for the FCC to “implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality.” That’s a…

For the past three months, young people from Californians for Justice organized to support Proposition 47, which sought to reclassify low-level, nonviolent drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, reallocating the money saved to education and drug-treatment programs. (California currently spends about $62,300 per prisoner versus $9,100 per K–12 student.)
 Through phone banks, canvassing and social media, the organizers reached thousands of voters. On November 4, Prop 47 passed by a substantial margin—seventeen points. Officials have already begun resentencing and releasing inmates.
 Now that Prop 47 has passed, black, brown and low-income families have opportunities to lead better lives, bringing us one step closer to the end of institutional racism.
 —Raul Montellano…

When Bernie Sanders gets to griping about the Democratic Party, which happens frequently, he asks, “What does it stand for?” The independent senator argues that, after years of sellouts and compromises on issues ranging from trade policy to banking regulation, and especially after letting campaign donors and consultants define its messaging, the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman has become an ill-defined and distant political machine that most Americans do not relate to or get excited about. His point has always been well-taken, but it was confirmed on November 4. How else can we explain voters who chose Mitch McConnell senators and Elizabeth Warren policies? 
 That’s what happened in Arkansas, where 65 percent of voters expressed their concern about income inequality and poverty by approving a substantial minimum-wage…

The blowout election of 2014 demonstrates that the Democratic Party is utterly out of touch with ordinary people and their adverse circumstances. Working people have known this for some time now, but this year, the president made the disconnection more obvious. Barack Obama kept telling folks to brighten up: the economy is coming back, he said, and prosperity is just around the corner. 
 A party truly connected to the people would never have dared to make such a claim. In the real world of voters, human experience trumps macroeconomics and the slowly declining official unemployment rate. An official at the AFL-CIO culled the following insights from what voters said about themselves on Election Day: 54 percent suffered a decline in household income during the past year. Sixty-three percent feel…

Sting of the Drone By Richard A. Clarke. Thomas Dunne. 294 pp. $25.99. Drone By Mike Maden. Putnam. 419 pp. $26.95. Bloodmoney A Novel of Espionage. By David Ignatius. Norton. 372 pp. $25.95. Murmuration A Festival of Drone Culture. murmurationfestival.tumblr.com I Am the Beggar of the World Landays From Contemporary Afghanistan. Translated by Eliza Griswold. Photographs by Seamus Murphy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 149 pp. $24. Erik Parsons, a colonel in the US Air Force, and his wife, Jennifer, like to talk about Erik’s work commanding drone strikes out of a Nevada Air Force base almost as much as they like to rendezvous in their backyard hot tub with a couple of Heinekens. They talk about little else in Sting of the Drone, the new thriller by Richard Clarke. The…

It’s a basic move in freestyle wrestling: a sudden step forward while dropping to one knee. If you saw a man practicing this action alone, during warm-ups, you’d almost imagine he was sweeping into a low bow before an invisible lord. Watch the same move in a match, and you’ll see it flow into a lunge that knocks the opponent to the mat. For a split second in the choreography of wrestling, aggression can be indistinguishable from submission, violence from courtesy. Stretch that blink of an eye into several years of narrative time—a bit longer than two hours on the screen—and you have the ambiguous tension that drives Foxcatcher.
 Directed by Bennett Miller from a screenplay by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, Foxcatcher is a fictionalized account of the…