Innehållsförteckning för Jan-26-15 från The Nation

Controlling the Enemy—Us?
 Are our local police now part of the military? The Nation, in your well-intentioned lead editorial “Why Ferguson Burns” [Dec. 15/22], perpetuates an abuse of language that widens the divide between police and the rest of us: the use of the word “civilian” for people who are not on the police force. Police are public servants, not soldiers—that is, unless they are an occupying force controlling an enemy population. So maybe it is an appropriate word, but it should not be. Every media outlet uses this word for nonpolice, but it perpetuates the notion of police as part of the military. This is not what democracy looks like. Tom Cuddy Austin, Tex.
 * * * As a subscriber to The Nation, I was appalled to read “Why…

Rabbi Leonard Beerman of Los Angeles, who died December 24 at age 93, was a great fighter for social justice and peace over the past sixty-five years. His lifelong commitment to nonviolence, Beerman explained, came out of his experience in 1947 in Jerusalem, when he joined the Haganah fighting for Israeli independence. “Luckily, I was spared” killing anyone, he told the Los Angeles Times. “And when I came back…I became a pacifist because of what I had seen: People transformed to just hating, hating, hating. It is no way for humankind to live.” 
 In 1949, he began working as the first full-time rabbi at Leo Baeck Temple and soon became “one of the most important figures on the social-justice landscape in Los Angeles,” says David Myers, who teaches Jewish…

Joelle Gamble is director of the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network. “I became an economics nerd campaigning against tuition increases at the University of California,” she says. “I became engrossed in the intricacies of state tax policy—everything spiraled from there.” Here, she recommends five books elucidating race’s intersection with economics, accompanying “An Economic Program for #BlackLivesMatter,” on page 18. * * * WHERE WE STAND Class Matters by bell hooks Routledge, 2000 This essay collection draws on hook’s personal experiences instead of relying on purely theoretical arguments about poverty. She is especially critical of economically secure liberals and radicals who, she argues, choose to downplay the importance of class privilege in comparison with race and gender—a criticism that she illustrates with examples from her own years studying and teaching at…

From December 2 to 10, graduate employees at the University of Oregon went on strike for paid parental and medical leave, with more than 650 members of the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF) participating.
 On the eighth day of picketing—with strikers threatening not to grade final exams and shutting down classrooms, campus construction, UPS deliveries and garbage pickup—the administration agreed to set up a graduate assistance fund that will allow employees to take paid leave. 
 The fund will be run by a majority of employees, and union members will have legal protections for binding arbitration if access to the fund is not properly handled.
 Moving forward, the GTFF is working on a state law for paid leave for all working Oregonians, set to hit the legislature’s docket next session.…

President Obama and his new sidekick, incoming Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, are promising something different for 2015—bipartisan cooperation—but what they are really selling is the old politics of “free trade,” which has done so much damage to our country’s shared prosperity. Be forewarned: the mighty propaganda machine of the power elites is cranking up for action. 
 First on the Obama-McConnell agenda is a trade agreement—the Trans-Pacific Partnership—that puts the same stale wine in a fancy new bottle. The TPP is supposed to unite twelve nations (led by the United States) in adopting new global rules that will advance the profit of multinational corporations and international financiers. The rules do this by preventing individual governments (including the United States) from enforcing their own national standards and values.
 The negotiations,…

killing the child said became like drinking water clean or clean enough though one says that one is part of everything there is a conflict there is a resistance involved this for that that life for this a finger to the lips or to the trigger the revolver is vulgar in the boy’s hands decorated with beads the weapon turns over like a word on the tongue bella bellum the war of all against all the beauty of all against all to emerge from emergency form out of force equal to all those bodies bathed in that free water…

The leaflet was meant to highlight the police department’s anger with the mayor of New York. It encouraged officers to fill in their names on a document that read: “I, …, a New York City police officer, want all of my family and brother officers who read this to know in the event of my 
 death” that the mayor and police commissioner should “be denied attendance of any memorial service in my honor as their attendance would only bring disgrace to my memory.”
 That’s how deep the divisions ran.
 Yes, “ran.”
 The leaflet was distributed in 1997. The mayor in question was Rudolph Giuliani, and his critics were rank-and-file members of the powerful Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA). Though the union did not officially sanction that jab at that mayor,…

With this issue, we bid a tearful farewell to two longtime Nation staffers: executive editor Betsy Reed and copy chief Judith Long. Betsy joined the magazine as an editor in 1998, and over the next sixteen years her editorial vision guided The Nation through some of its most tumultuous and challenging, grim and joyous moments. Under her deft guidance, many of The Nation’s best writers produced landmark journalism, from the much-loved columns by Naomi Klein, Katha Pollitt and Eric Alterman, to Jeremy Scahill’s groundbreaking investigations into Blackwater and covert ops, Chris Hayes’s insightful essays about Washington politics and beyond. Her editorial leadership on a slew of widely praised special issues (from the debate over torture to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the more recent “Bloomberg’s Gilded City”) has been…

In June 1963, as the civil-rights struggle leapt to the front of our national conversation, the lawyer and activist Loren Miller published a Nation article titled “Freedom Now—But What Then?” Miller predicted victory, but he also warned that “it would be a mistake to assume that these profound changes will automatically usher in a society that will make full and effective use of these new potentials for social progress. We know better. Once before, almost a hundred years ago, a similar promise lighted up the American scene and was snuffed out after a decade of uncertain flickering.”
 During Reconstruction, Miller wrote, “Everybody hoped for the best; nobody planned for it.” The new civil-rights movement was a chance to correct that mistake: “The walls are tumbling down now and it is…

In October 2014, Nation columnist Eric Alterman sat down with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio in his City Hall office. Open and affable, de Blasio spent the hourlong interview reflecting on his whirlwind first year as mayor, his earliest political influences, the meaning of the word “progressive,” and why he sees no contradiction between movement politics and holding elected office. The interview has been edited and condensed for publication. * * * Eric Alterman: Have you ever given any thought to why you are so focused on the issue of economic inequality? Obviously, it’s an enormous problem, but few, if any, politicians have made it as central a focus as you have.
 Bill de Blasio: Like most things, I think it’s profoundly personal. My parents had me late—they were…

Lila By Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 272 pp. $26. “Gilead was the kind of town where dogs slept in the road for the sun and the warmth that lingered after the sun was gone, and the few cars that there were had to stop and honk until the dogs decided to get up and let them pass by. They’d go limping off to the side, lamed by the comfort they’d had to give up, and then they’d settle down again right where they were before. It really wasn’t much of a town.”
 This is the setting for Robinson’s Iowa trilogy, three novels that span a century of our history. Gilead (2004), Home (2008) and Lila, Robinson’s new book, center on the lives of two ministers—John Ames and Robert…

As usual, Yogi Berra put it best: “Nobody goes there anymore,” he said of a once-popular restaurant. “It’s too crowded.” These days, it’s easy to feel that way about Picasso. For half a century, he bestrode the landscape of modern art like a Colossus, but that half-century ended half a century ago, well before his death, in the era when Minimalism, Pop art, Fluxus and the like were working (not necessarily with success) to cut the tense, taut cord that tied modernist painting to a longer, deeper tradition. Today, artists are more likely to claim a lineage from Marcel Duchamp or, if they’re trying to keep the former tradition in play, to see its main line running through Henri Matisse. Picasso, though he is still the popular byword for “famous…

In 1971, shortly after exposing widespread, even systemic corruption amounting to millions of dollars in bribes and illegitimate relationships between the New York Police Department and criminals citywide, I was shot point-blank by a dealer during a buy-and-bust drug operation. My backup team failed to call 911, but an elderly Latino tenant did, saving my life. I was awarded the Medal of Honor by the NYPD—not for exposing corruption, but for being shot while engaging a drug dealer. 
 To this day, many officers believe I gave the department a black eye. I’ve been vilified for speaking out about corruption and the excessive use of force, for holding my colleagues accountable and for reminding them of their mission: first and foremost, to protect and serve the community. 
 Decades later,…

Project Censored, the media research, literacy and education organization established in 1976, is honoring Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen for his articles on the crisis involving Ukraine and Russia, as well as the mainstream media’s hypocrisy in its coverage of the conflict. Cohen’s article “Distorting Russia: How the American Media Misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine” appeared in The Nation’s March 3, 2014, issue and will be included in the collection Censored 2015: Inspiring We the People.…

Mario Cuomo, who died on New Year’s Day, gave a great speech at the 1984 Democratic convention—perhaps, as some claim, one of the greatest speeches in American history. Directly addressing Ronald Reagan’s sunny depictions of morning in America, he thundered: “There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces you don’t see, in the places you don’t visit in your shining city…. This nation is more a ‘Tale of Two Cities’ than it is just a ‘Shining City on a Hill.’” If you want to know how far to the right we’ve moved since 1984, just compare Cuomo’s broad, magnanimous agenda—in which he attacked Reagan’s support for nun-murdering Latin American regimes and the bloated military budget and decried, at considerable length, persistent poverty without ever blaming it on poor people themselves—with…

We are in the midst of a movement to upend white supremacy. Thousands of people across the country, acting in response to the unpunished killings of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, Michael Brown and so many more unarmed black people who have lost their lives to police or vigilante violence, have taken to the streets to proclaim that “black lives matter.” While this is a powerful proclamation all its own, it can now be strengthened by a vision of what it will take to make those lives matter in America. 
 In 1966, along with A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and other organizers and scholars, Martin Luther King Jr. released the now all-but-forgotten Freedom Budget for All Americans, which included full employment, universal healthcare and…

On October 17, 2014, Marilynne Robinson and the staff of The Nation had a conversation about her work, including her new novel, Lila. An audio recording of the conversations can be found at TheNation.com/robinson-interview. What follows is an edited transcript of portions of the conversation:
 * * * TN: While reading your new novel, Lila, the other novel of yours that I kept thinking of was not Gilead, its narrative predecessor, but your first novel, Housekeeping, because its two main female characters, Ruthie and Sylvie (Ruthie’s aunt), are drifters whose hardscrabble lives seem to anticipate those of Lila and her guardian, Doll. Were you having a conversation with yourself about Sylvie and Ruthie while you were writing Lila?
 MR: I have found that when you write a novel, a character…

I had meant to end the year discussing the uncanny beauty of drone photography and the lost vision of utopia, but that will have to wait. Given its remit, this column could scarcely neglect the kerfuffle over The Interview and, almost as important, over freedom itself.
 The story as of this writing: Seth Rogen, who has grown wealthy indeed as the earthly representative for Judd Apatow’s trillion-dollar synthesis of the buddy movie and the rom-com, concocts a comedy wherein he and James Franco are bumbling newsdudes who score an interview with North Korean head of state Kim Jong-un. Tasked by the CIA to assassinate him, the duo are rather simply parties to his death, in a manner that analysts have suggested is comedic in a technical sense but not funny.…