Innehållsförteckning för December 28, 2020/January 4, 2021 från The Nation

“THE GROWN-UPS ARE BACK IN CHARGE,” ANNOUNCED A RELIEVED FINANCIAL Times editorial board, hailing the early cabinet appointments of President-elect Joe Biden. So far, his picks have all been known quantities: experienced, smart, and competent—no small relief after the madcap chaos of the Trump years. However, they will inherit cascading calamities that require new thinking and dramatic change. And their experience in office is a testament to the failure and follies of the so-called best and brightest. Notably absent is anyone from the Democratic Party’s rising left: advisers to Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, opponents of the war in Iraq, activists from the Black Lives Matter and climate change movements, or advocates of deep structural reforms. Biden doesn’t consider that a problem. Discounting the idea of Sanders or Warren…

DONALD TRUMP WAS SOUNDLY DEFEATED IN his reelection campaign, and at last, Republicans are starting to notice. As I write this column, the states are certifying the results of their elections, despite a mountain of frivolous lawsuits by Trump’s legal team. Republican politicians are, one by one, starting to acknowledge that Joe Biden will be president. Even the head of the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy, decided to end her weeks-long subversion of democracy and begin the transition process. At last, it seems, the nightmare is ending. Though Trump tried to steal the election, he failed. He will be removed from office at noon on January 20, 2021, just as the Constitution requires. We won. But what exactly does that mean? Unfortunately, some people are taking the wrong lesson from…

BLACK VOTES IN THIS COUNTRY ARE WORTH less than white votes. Joe Biden won the Electoral College because Black voters in Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia turned out in significant numbers. But even with overwhelming Black support—94 percent of Detroit voted for Biden!—the outcomes in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were worryingly close. One core problem is the Electoral College. Wyoming, which has just 580,000 residents and is 93 percent white, gets three electors because of its two senators and one representative in the House. By comparison, Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District—which includes Atlanta, has 710,000 residents, and is 58 percent Black—has no dedicated electors or senators and can only occasionally overcome the mostly white and conservative votes from elsewhere in the state. This devaluation of Black votes allows our political…

LAST APRIL, AS COVID-19 DEATHS IN THE UNITED STATES WERE CLIMBING toward their terrifying first peak, a reporter with the right-wing outlet Newsmax raised her hand during a White House press conference. Struggling to conceal a smirk, the reporter, Emerald Robinson, asked Donald Trump a question that was so obviously leading that it might as well have been planted by the president. “US intelligence is saying this week that the coronavirus likely came from a level-four lab in Wuhan,” said Robinson, parroting a conspiracy theory with zero credibility. “There’s also another report that the NIH under the Obama administration in 2015 gave that lab $3.7 million in a grant. Why would the US give a grant like that to China?” “I’ve been hearing about that,” Trump responded. “And we’ve instructed…

“WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL.” even as a fifth-grader, with my hand held over my heart, I knew those emphatic words were an aspiration, not yet an affirmation, in America. Growing up as the child of an incarcerated parent, I had seen injustices it would take years to put words to. Today, after months of community uprisings against police violence and systemic racism, our nation is in a moment of reckoning. Across our country, people from all backgrounds have rallied, protested, and voted for long-overdue change. The people demand that we move with urgency to build a more just America. An America where our policies and our budgets affirm that Black lives matter. This moment has drawn attention to the injustices perpetuated by our legal system—a system quick to…

WAS 2020 THE WORST YEAR YOU CAN REMEMBER OR WHAT? Well, cheer up. Think how much worse you’d feel if Joe Biden had lost. Let’s not let Covid, home schooling by Zoom, Republicans, Amy Coney Barrett, and the weird death-throe flailings of Donald Trump (firing squads—really?) keep us from spreading joy and justice to good people who are trying to light a candle in this naughty world. 1. Georgia Fund. As you know, the Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock campaigns are our last chance to flip the Senate, dethrone Mitch McConnell, and give the Democrats a fighting chance to do good. The best way to help is to build grassroots support and engagement, as Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight has been doing. You can support Fair Fight and 12 other groups…

Hundreds of thousands of people in Poland have protested drastic abortion restrictions in recent months. The movement is called the Women’s Strike, with a red lightning bolt as its symbol. The fight started in 2016, when women bearing black umbrellas rallied against attempts to ban abortion. Polish illustrators have shown their support with art. For more images and an interview with the artist behind the bolt, go to marlenaagency.com/women-strike-in-poland.…

SINCE ARRIVING ON OUR SHORES THIS YEAR, THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC has eroded Americans’ confidence in the ability of the government to perform its most basic functions. This loss of faith in the state has been accompanied by a renewed belief in the voluntary and reciprocal care of others, commonly referred to as mutual aid. Once relegated to pamphlets strewn about folding tables at a Food Not Bombs potluck, celebrations of mutual aid are now everywhere. Even the pages of The New York Times are adorned with endorsements of its transformative political potential, the idea that society might be redesigned bottom-up by such practices of magnanimity. These displays of community care have indeed been vital throughout this time of bleeding. As the lockdowns have ravaged the American economy, existing inequalities have…

THIS SPRING, GRAPHIC IMAGES OF A WHITE police officer digging his knee into George Floyd’s neck served as a catalyst to renew the mass social movement against police violence and racism that has come to be known as Black Lives Matter. After the highly publicized police killings of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks, protests continued into the summer and fall. These protests have been large in size and radical in their demands. Just a few years ago, in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo., modest calls to reform the police and implement federal consent decrees seemed almost revolutionary to many Americans and were the primary aim of many marching in the streets. Today, calls to defund the police have become the central demand. For so…

LAST MAY, THE WRITER TARA ISABELLA BURTON PUBLISHED a piece in the New York Times Sunday Review about a nascent faith community. A growing number of spiritually hungry young Americans, she wrote, were “finding solace in a decidedly anti-modern vision of faith”—attending Latin Mass, belting out Gregorian chants, even wearing veils to church. Some of them, including the author, had begun to call themselves “Weird Christians.” Burton described the alluring aspects of traditional liturgy, from its intrinsic beauty to its historical role in providing succor throughout the ages. She wrote of the power of religious aesthetics—of grand ecclesiastical architecture, pungent incense, and haunting melodies—and reported that for some young Christians, their faith was wedded to progressive political commitments. Christianity, they insisted, could be “a bulwark against the worst of modernity,”…

THE WORLD MOURNS DIEGO MARADONA, THE soccer god and revolutionary from Argentina whose play inspired all manner of poetry and prose. The best description of Maradona’s abilities came from Eduardo Galeano, who wrote of Maradona in his book Soccer in Sun and Shadow: No one can predict the devilish tricks this inventor of surprises will dream up for the simple joy of throwing the computers off track, tricks he never repeats. He’s not quick, more like a short-legged bull, but he carries the ball sewn to his foot and he’s got eyes all over his body…. In the frigid soccer of the end of this century, which detests defeat and forbids all fun, that man was one of the few who proved that fantasy can be efficient. That Maradona died…

This list of intelligence reports was obtained through a request filed by The Nation under the Florida Sunshine Law, the state’s open records statute. It was produced by the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange, one of 80 such entities—called fusion centers—all over the country. (We’re suing another Florida agency for similar records that were withheld.) Fusion centers were established after 9/11 to facilitate the sharing of counter terrorism intelligence among federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies and private sector partners. But the centers have been criticized for blurring the boundaries of the various jurisdictions. As the ACLU wrote, “The lack of proper legal limits on the new fusion centers not only threatens to undermine fundamental American values, but also threatens to turn them into wasteful and misdirected bureaucracies that, like…

30-40M Number of Americans at risk of losing their homes after December 31, when the federal moratorium on evictions expires 52% Share of adults living with their parents in July of this year—the highest level since the Great Depression 51% US renters who spent 30 percent or more of their income on housing costs from 2017 to 2019 43% Black renters who spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent—nearly double the share of white households that do 20 Number of families in Los Angeles forcibly removed from publicly owned homes they reclaimed, the night before Thanksgiving 52% Lowest-income US renter households that have lost wages since the March Covid shutdown, compared with 41 percent of all households…

My friend called and said that sex saved him. He made me listento streets in the Philippines waking up in rain, panes and trees repeating a low note of C—Chorister, cage, a choir capturesthe cadenza of falling cardamoms, then a quartz of quietude. So eventually, it was the Q—Queer, he said, the parched skinof the quarryman, whom he loved briefly for an afternoon. For so long, we’ve mistaken the Q for C, weeping, he then reciteda passage of Śūrangama Sūtra, an odd, phonetic transcription from the Tang Dynasty. The power, he insisted, is in the sonance,not in its meaning, its attachment. This persistent, desperate, loud howl of August is but the insects’ thirst for matingand survival. The naked nearness of a swimming pool pulses in blue, so artificial it seems…

No Great Mystery Re “Fallujah’s Children” by Laura Gottesdiener [November 16/23]: Iraq has been in a state of never-ending war since 1990 (or 1980, if one includes the Iran-Iraq War), suffering from all the attending, well-documented dire consequences, including a seriously degraded, toxic environment. There are books and articles too numerous to mention on this topic, including Barry Sanders’s The Green Zone (2009). In The Great War for Civilisation (2005), Robert Fisk wrote, “There was one final scourge to be visited upon the Iraqi people, however, a foul cocktail in which both our gunfire and our sanctions played an intimate, horrific role, one that would contaminate Iraqis for years to come, perhaps for generations…. It manifested itself in abscesses, in massive tumours, in gangrene, internal bleeding and child mastectomies and…