Innehållsförteckning för October 10, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com So Much for This Magazine That dangerous-looking weapon on the cover of the Aug. 29/Sept. 5 issue isn’t too dangerous. It has no magazine. DALLAS SMITH COOKEVILLE, TENN. The Nation Replies So much the better! SARAH LEONARD Senior Editor NEW YORK CITY The Panic Boom After reading Patrick Blanchfield’s “A Weekend in Condition Yellow” [Aug. 29/Sept. 5], I wish I had the op-tion of moving to another country—or planet. The NRA, in my opinion, is a wicked, wicked organization. There was recently a shooting at a hospital near where I live. A patient and nurse were murdered. Now, whenever one visits any of our local hospitals, it’s as bad as going to any airport. The security is intense. Apparently, the solution is more guns. How ridiculous is that? ROBERT…

This summer, as Hillary Clinton clinched her historic nomination as the first female presidential candidate of a major party, welfare reform neared its 20th anniversary. It was her husband who signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, and Hillary Clinton who, in her own telling, helped push it through. The bill was a compromise with Republicans like Newt Gingrich, who insisted on cutting off government benefits for all immigrants and tried (but failed) to include a measure to take children away from unwed teen mothers and place them in orphanages. The Democrats hoped that the bill, shorn of the Republicans’ worst proposals, would push people into jobs and lower the poverty rate. Bill Clinton signed it into law in August 1996. During the economic boom of the late…

David Marcus is The Nation’s newly appointed literary editor. His predecessor, John Palattella, will become editor at large. “We are delighted to have David Marcus, a superb editor, as wise about fiction and pop culture as about politics, philosophy, and history, take over the Books and the Arts section,” says editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel. “John Palattella, who stewarded the section for nearly a decade, cultivated a vibrant space for ideas and astringent criticism about literature, politics, and culture, and I’m excited to see the work he’ll be commissioning from Europe.” “I’m thrilled to be joining The Nation as the magazine’s literary editor,” David says. “With its abolitionist roots and egalitarian commitments, the magazine has been a stalwart of social progress and critical dissent since its founding. This has…

Bernie sanders is still campaigning for the political revolution. he’s protesting withNative Americans against the Dakota Access pipeline, championing the Working Families Party, and hitting the trail for antimonopoly congressional candidate Zephyr Teachout. Sanders continues to draw big crowds and media attention after a presidential run that won more than 12 million votes and injected genuine economic populism into the debate. But he isn’t satisfied. We sat down with Sanders in mid-September, just as he was putting the finishing touches on a book about his campaign that will be published after the election. The Vermont senator was in rare form, ripping into the media for its role in diminishing the political discourse, calling for the reform of the Democratic Party, and celebrating the fact that a new generation considers democratic…

The year 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the black panther party for Self-Defense, an organization that remains largely frozen in the popular narrative portrait of the 1960s as the most fearsome and violent of extremist organizations. These labels have stuck despite an explosion of books, articles, movies, and several documentaries meant to shine a brighter light on its activities. Notwithstanding these efforts, the BPP remains one of the most misunderstood organizations of the 20th century. Founded by Merritt College students Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966, the party at its height boasted some 5,000 members nationally and even an international wing. In the popular retelling of the Panthers’ history, the party’s founders and its national spokesperson, Eldridge Cleaver, as well as the Panthers’ numerous run-ins with…

Say Something Back By Denise Riley. Picador. 78 pp. Paper £9.99. In February 2012, the London Review of Books published “A Part Song,” a long poem by Denise Riley. A feminist philosopher at the University of East Anglia, Riley is also a poet published by Reality Street, associated with the experimental, leftist British Poetry Revival. When “A Part Song” won the Forward Prize for best single poem, The Guardian noted that it was Riley’s first publication in five years. The reason for the silence and the occasion for its breach were the same: the sudden death of her adult son Jacob, of (most probably) cardiomyopathy. A parallel essay was also published in 2012 as a pamphlet by London’s Capsule Editions. “Time Lived, Without Its Flow” is a meditation on the…

1 Sponsor protects maladjusted cop (9) 6 Notable France-Lebanon connection (5) 9 What a child might say in a game after the end of parental restriction (5) 10 Beast is repelled by Cruz covered in plastic (9) 11 Cook follows brave revolutionary word for word (8) 12 Serving as a pig’s clam (6) 14 Womanizer to stop immediately after beginning (4) 15 An orgy of beers and foods? That’s not what life is (3,2,5) 18 Immigrant in East Coast city losing $1,000 to competitor (3,7) 19 Eager to leave with silver coating (4) 22 Support one traveling on water (6) 24 Faceless participant in a democracy captivates part of Capitol—that will tell you how far we’ve come (8) 26 Being a partial explanation of Roman numerals accepted by emcee, oddly…

The mainstream news media, especially television, have been powerful enablers of Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions for most of the 2016 campaign; the question now is whether they’ll treat him any differently between now and Election Day. Perhaps no issue will be more illuminating in this regard than Trump’s attempt to disown his long-standing embrace of the notion that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and therefore cannot legally be president. On September 16, at a purported press conference in Washington, DC, where Trump refused to take questions from reporters, he uttered three sentences on the subject, two of which were lies. The first two sentences recycled false assertions Trump made in the past: that Hillary Clinton was the originator of the so-called “birther” allegation and that it was…

With this issue, The Nation has a new home. From our abode of 18 years on relatively bucolic Irving Place, a block east of Union Square, we’ve moved a mile north and three-quarters of a mile west, to Eighth Avenue just above 36th Street. Here on the 21st floor of a high-rise built in 1926, we not only have a marvelous view of the world as seen from Eighth Avenue—per Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover, we’re quite sure we can see straight across New Jersey to the Pacific—but also, facing south, of a good stretch of Manhattan and, in an imaginative sense, of our own history. For instance, there’s the stately James A. Farley Post Office Building, designed, like the original Penn Station that once stood across from it,…

This election season has been bruising and divisive, but it has had the one advantage of clarifying for Muslims that we are conditional citizens. We must constantly prove our allegiance by showing gratitude to America, muting criticism of the government and its foreign policy, and denouncing any Muslim, anywhere in the world, who takes it upon himself to commit an act of violence. If we fail to abide by these rules, our loyalty is called into question. July’s Democratic National Convention provided a clear example of what I mean by “conditional citizenship.” On the final night of the convention, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, a Muslim couple from Virginia, took to the stage to speak about their son Humayun, an Army captain who was killed in the Iraq War in 2004.…

A VOTE FOR THE GREENS IS A WASTED VOTE If the last three presidential elections are any guide, 75 to 90 percent of those who say that they’re planning to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in November won’t follow through. Yes, there are some dedicated Green voters, but much of the party’s support is an expression of contempt for the Democrats that evaporates in the voting booth. I’m a registered independent and a supporter of the Working Families Party, and my disdain for the Greens springs from my own experience with the party. I agree with much of the Greens’ platform, but when I went to Green Party meetings, I found a wildly disorganized, mostly white group that was riven with infighting, strategically inept, and organized around a…

On the evening of January 21, 1987, the CIA’s deputy director for covert operations, Clair George, sent a secure pouch to the State Department filled with “top secret” intelligence cables from the agency’s station in Chile. The reports contained details from “extremely sensitive informants” on “the cover up directed by General Pinochet” of the September 21, 1976, assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 25-year-old colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in Washington, dc: The documents were intended to help the State Department prepare a debriefing of Armando Fernández Larios, one of the officers of the Chilean secret police, or DINA, who had been sent to Washington to conduct surveillance on Letelier before his assassination, and who now wanted to confess and come to the United States. The CIA cables were…

A sea of thousands of Native Americans from over 200 indigenous nations has descended onto the Great Plains to stand at the forefront of a new but familiar battle against fossil fuels. Led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (Hunkpapa Lakota Nation), these nations are fighting against the 1,172-mile Dakota Access pipeline, which would transport oil from the Bakken oil fields to pipelines in Illinois, and is set to come within a half-mile of the Standing Rock reservation, threatening its water supply. The fight is calling into question yet again the logic of fossil fuels and bringing to the fore age-old questions that this country prefers to forget: those of Native American sovereignty, self-determination, and treaty rights. COMMENT The broken treaties fought over in the past are the same being…

This is a column for all you leftists, liberals, progressives, feminists, Democrats—whatever you call yourselves—who are feeling passive, underwhelmed, downhearted, or paralyzed about the upcoming election. All right, you say, you’ll hold your nose and vote for Hillary Clinton, but you haven’t been knocking yourself out like you did for Barack Obama in 2008 or even 2012. “This election is getting really scary, yet I do not feel motivated to get active,” wrote one friend when I sent out a call for comments about enthusiasm, or the lack thereof. There are a lot of you out there. Maybe you’re still mourning Hillary’s victory over Bernie Sanders. (Bernie has gotten over it and urges you to support her.) Maybe you’ve been assuming Trump will lose, so you can afford to relax…

In the fall of 1932, Nation editor Oswald Garrison Villard introduced a new column, “The Pot and the Kettle,” about that year’s presidential campaign. “Never in my experience has there been so little enthusiasm for either candidate,” he wrote. “Everybody is voting against somebody or something.” Given such paltry choices—“The man who votes for either Hoover or Roosevelt is the one who is throwing away his vote”—Villard endorsed the Socialist candidate, Norman Thomas: “To protest against intolerable evils when they arise is the chief reason why we have the ballot. To use it in this way is not to be impractical and visionary, but in the best sense patriotic. Certainly no one can deny that we shall not take a step toward any new order with either Mr. Hoover or…

Letelier called repression and the free market “two sides of the same coin” in Chile. Naomi Klein is the author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine. In august 1976, the nation published an essay that rocked the US political establishment, both for what it said and for who was saying it. “The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile: Economic ‘Freedom’s’ Awful Toll” (excerpted on page 20) was written by Orlando Letelier, the former right-hand man of Chilean President Salvador Allende. Earlier in the decade, Allende had appointed Letelier to a series of top-level positions in his democratically elected socialist government: ambassador to the United States (where he negotiated the terms of nationalization for several US-owned firms operating in Chile), minister of foreign affairs, and, finally, minister of defense. Then, on…

Orlando Letelier was a Chilean patriot. Today, many Americans—and probably many Nation readers—have problems with the very notion of patriotism. How can progressives be proud of this country’s repeated military interventions, endless wars, police brutality, gross racial inequity, overflowing prisons, vast income disparities, or the 30,000-plus people killed by guns in a single year? The best most can do is to feel patriotism for a United States that could be, that was meant to be—the one we fight for. Orlando also possessed the characteristics of the romantic hero, a genre now extinct, or nearly. Not movie-star handsome, but dashing and charismatic nonetheless. He had been through arrest, a series of concentration camps, severe torture, prison on Dawson Island, and finally exile from his beloved country—and yet he retained his enthusiasm,…

ben lerner is the author of three volumes of poetry and a professor in the MFA program at Brooklyn College. He is also a recent recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant. Poetry has been good to him, yet judging from his two novels, Lerner refuses to return the favor. Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), which borrows its title from a poem by John Ashbery, is the story of an American poet who puts myriad diversions between his desk and the long poem that he has gone to Spain to complete. The narrator of Lerner’s second novel, 10:04 (2014), is a poet who has left poetry behind and is working on a second novel. In his most recent book, the slim critical study The Hatred of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux;…