Innehållsförteckning för Jan-12-15 från The Nation

Torch-Eyed Elephant Stampede!
 Included among the insightful postmortems on the “GOP Stampede” [Dec. 1/8], we progressives can’t overlook the role that a corporate-owned and -operated press plays in our political dysfunction. When media coverage fixates on personalities—the more outrageous and emotionally fraught, the greater the spotlight—the right cheers. When the press favors simplistic sound bites over in-depth coverage of complex ideas, the right cheers louder. Barbara Allen Kenney Santa Fe
 * * * The recent midterm elections were a sad day for democracy in America. It demonstrated that the way to win elections is not to put forth superior ideas, but to deploy a manipulative strategy. The Republicans who were swept to victory offered no ideas for governing. They won by simply trashing Obama. The grand strategy of the Republicans…

As other news organizations sink around it, The New York Times stands even taller among its (few) remaining peers for its commitment not only to tenacious investigative journalism but also to civic responsibility. Nowhere is the Times’s value more evident than in its coverage of the shocking conditions at New York’s Rikers Island jail, where a culture of brutality and violent sadism recently led the federal government to join a class-action suit to put an end to it. It’s no exaggeration to say that without the Times, these hellish conditions could have continued indefinitely, and that this is only one of many areas of journalism where the Times now dwarfs its competition. (This remains the case despite the recent cuts and buyouts that will deprive the paper of the…

As I write, news comes that a man with a long psychiatric history has driven his car into several groups of pedestrians in Dijon, France, declaring himself to be “acting for the children of Palestine.” While the French prime minister mentioned “the ravages of propaganda on fragile minds,” no one has blamed the children of Palestine. 
 In the United States, news was still fresh that Ismaaiyl Brinsley, also a man with a history of untreated mental disease, shot his ex-girlfriend in the stomach, then took a bus to New York and executed two police officers, declaring himself to be acting on behalf of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Here, however, there were torrents of blame. Patrick Lynch, head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, announced that Mayor Bill de Blasio…

On Passover, Jews are commanded to diminish our joy in celebrating the end of slavery by pouring out a drop of wine for each of the Ten Plagues inflicted on the Egyptians. For those of us who live by our pens, the death of any magazine is sad news, and for a magazine with The New Republic’s history and claims to intellectual seriousness, even more so. 
 But having dipped my finger over the difficulties currently besetting TNR, perhaps I can explain why I don’t share the general dismay—and why I think the whole argument, to borrow Leon Wieseltier’s phrase, suffers from “an excessively heroic conception” of what TNR has ever amounted to. 
 At its birth in 1914, The New Republic, as an organ of Theodore Roosevelt’s late-blooming Progressivism,…

Liberalism The Life of an Idea By Edmund Fawcett. Princeton. 468 pp. $35. Histories of the idea of liberalism usually begin in the seventeenth century with the philosopher taken to be its patron saint, John Locke. In the aftermath of the wars of religion, the story goes, liberals waged a battle against the arbitrary powers of the church and absolutist monarchies. Philosophers began to promote the cardinal liberal virtues of toleration, private property and individualism. The Lockean vision of liberal society was one based on consent. Free individuals would accept a social contract in order to protect their natural rights to life, liberty and property. After centuries of struggle with less enlightened doctrines, this vision was institutionalized in the governments and constitutions of many Western (and now non-Western) societies. In…

Shock, horror, grief: that’s the gamut of emotions most New Yorkers felt when they heard how Ismaaiyl Brins­ley, a troubled, itinerant 28-year-old most recently from Georgia, had come to our city to fire four bullets into the police car occupied by officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, killing both on December 20. And that’s what most leaders expressed as well, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, who conveyed his condolences to the bereaved families and called the murders an “attack on all of us.” Gwen Carr, who lost her son Eric Garner after a New York City policeman put him in a chokehold last July, said, “We are going in peace, and anyone who’s standing with us, we want you to not use Eric Garner’s name for violence,…

Last month, the Notre Dame women’s basketball team took to the court wearing shirts that read “I Can’t Breathe,” a reference to Eric Garner’s last words.
 “A few of us talked about it, and we thought wearing these shirts for the game would be a cool way to show our support and give our condolences,” forward Taya Reimer said. The team’s coach, Muffet McGraw, spoke out in support, and she and her staff wore black in solidarity.
 UC Berkeley’s women’s basketball team also protested, wearing shirts with the name of a black person killed either by police or by lynching on the front, and the words “Black lives matter” and “We are Cal” on the back.
 “I’m not sure I’ve ever been more proud of these players,” coach Lindsay Gottlieb…

This last year was a tough one, with too many setbacks and too many reasons for justified anger. Yet we also saw inspired activism and the renewal of a movement-based politics of protest. There were stalwarts who battled economic inequality and racial injustice, who developed new ideas and new strategies. They deserve recognition—not as the only heroes of 2014, but as examples of what progressives can accomplish even in difficult times, and of what they will accomplish in the years to come. Here, then, is The Nation’s 2014 Honor Roll. 
 * * * Most Valuable Progressive 
 Elizabeth Warren No prominent figure in our politics did more in 2014 to clarify the economic issues that matter and to challenge the failed strategy of compromise with demands that Democrats fight…

It has become a practiced pantomime, and all the players know their parts. Whether it’s the Taliban in Pakistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria or the newly born Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, the recipe for global outrage and attention is simple: it is digital, and it is female. Its production nearly always involves the visible persecution of women: a flogging, a shooting or a mass kidnapping, and the unleashing of the news into the vast and viral depths of the Internet. If the job has been well done, if the aesthetics of neo-medievalism—beards and masks, veils and visible terror—have been duly attended to, the result will be a global outcry.
 Once upon a time, this global outcry was supposed to be a good thing, a precursor to change…

When I wrote about Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice a while ago, on the basis of a first impression at the New York Film Festival, I said that I liked the movie but needed to watch it again to decide how much, and why. Now that the film is in general release, I’ve gone back to it and can say wholeheartedly that you, too, ought to see this picture twice. Inherent Vice is that ambitious, while pretending very convincingly to be a mere genre parody; it has that much to say to our present moment, while enveloping itself in bygone clouds of patchouli and marijuana. Besides, you’ll need the first viewing just to get your bearings. Inherent Vice is also that flagrantly problematic.
 Nothing less could be expected of a…

Pick up the phone, Mr. President! Make the call!” That was Alan Gross’s demand when I visited him in a Havana prison a year ago, expressing his desperation at being seemingly abandoned by the government that had sent him on a secret mission to foster regime change in Cuba. 
 But, unbeknownst to Gross, Obama was already working the phones—communicating with the pope, the Canadian government and Senator Patrick Leahy, among others, in a secret, high-stakes diplomatic effort to not only secure Gross’s freedom but liberate US policy from its Cold War past and finally move relations with Cuba into the modern era. 
 After eighteen months of back-channel diplomacy, on December 16, Obama made “the call” to President Raúl Castro—the first time US and Cuban presidents have spoken by…

In the second week of January 100 years ago—as The Nation prepared to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary and The New Republic entered its third month of publication—this magazine ran an editorial by the young Allan Nevins (later an eminent historian) observing the centennial of The North American Review. Its founding in 1815, Nevins wrote, “marked a blooming of scholarly thought and intellectual curiosity in this country.” The magazine “won an international repute,” but “the changing current of the times”—i.e., the mid-1800s—“left it somewhat stranded…. It tended to become a dry-as-dust publication.”
 The Review closed shop in 1940 after its then-owner was unmasked as a Japanese spy—one crime of which the now-friendless Facebooker of TNR has not yet been accused—and was revived in the 1960s, but without its earlier prestige.
 After…

The crack-up of The New Republic, which celebrated its centennial with a star-studded gala in Washington, DC, just this past November, has unleashed a torrent of commentary. Some have welcomed the ouster of Franklin Foer, the magazine’s editor, and Leon Wieseltier, its longtime literary czar. The mass resignation of more than fifty of its contributing writers and editors (and the subsequent letter of dismay and protest signed by a score of former editors and writers) over the treatment of Foer and Wieseltier and the plans of publisher Chris Hughes to turn it into a “vertically integrated digital media company” have been met, in some quarters, with unabashed glee. To The New Republic’s critics, the new CEO’s injunction to “break shit” was overdue; the magazine was shit and needed to be…

There is a moment near the end of Shantala Shivalingappa’s Shiva Ganga in which the sculptural, antelope-light dancer circles the stage in an uninterrupted chain of small, silvery jumps and skittering steps, arms rising and falling like rolling waves. Her movements are driven forward by the accelerating rhythms of a double-sided mridangam drum and the flickering coloratura of a bamboo flute. Then, as she begins to whirl in place, her hands flutter the edge of her sari, causing it to dance like water in a downpour. She spirals to the floor and spins in the opposite direction, on her knees, long black braid flying. Finally, on a sharp slap of the drum, her upper body collapses forward. Recovering one last time, she turns her head to the side, as if…

—Zunis make shrines on the way to a lake where I emerge  and Miwoks gather me out of pools along the Pacific  the cheetah thirsts for me  and when you sprinkle me on rib eye you have no idea how I balance silence with thunder in crystal  you dream of butterfly hunting in Madagascar  spelunking through caves echoing withdripping stalactites  and you don’t see how I yearn to shimmer anorange aurora against flame  look at me in your hand  in Egypt I scrubbed the bodies of kings and queens  in Pakistan I zigzag upward through twenty-six miles of tunnels before drawing my firstbreath in sunlight  if you heat a kiln to 2380 degrees and scatter me inside  I vaporize and bond with clay  in this unseen moment a…