Innholdsfortegnelse for March 11-18, 2013 i The Nation

‘Stripping Down and Lighting Up’ San Francisco Steve Wasserman has taken liberties with history and with my book, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power [“Exit Stage Left,” Oct. 29, 2012]. Wasserman, a former Berkeley radical, opens his essay with an anecdote from 1969. He’d spent the day “battling cops” trying to quell a protest at UC Berkeley, and that evening attended the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now, a performance meant to shock with its outré references to pot and sex. Some in the audience disrupted the show by stripping down and lighting up (though Wasserman demurely doesn’t say if he joined in). “Bedazzled as we were by the spectacle of our own high ideals and the intoxications of making history,” he writes, “we perhaps might…

In Chicago, Black History Month is a time when some of us reflect on one of our poorest-kept secrets, an ongoing injustice born of brutal, systemic racism, which has spread over a generation and whose stain is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city. 
 Forty years ago, a rookie Chicago police detective named Jon Burge tortured Anthony Holmes using electric shock and suffocation, causing him to crawl on the floor in pain. Lacing this torture with racial epithets, Burge initiated a pattern of dehumanizing abuse that would terrorize at least 120 African- American men, their families and the black community for the next twenty years. This pattern was marked not only by its uniquely brutal tactics, but also by its overtly racist motivation. Burge referred to his notorious…

The least controversial lines in President Obama’s State of the Union address should have been his assertions that “deficit reduction alone is not an economic plan” and that “we can’t just cut our way to prosperity.” Common sense, right? Wrong—if you’re getting your economic analysis from the GOP, more than a few Democrats and much of the media. Even Obama, in the same speech, paid homage to the safety-net-shredding strategies of the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission. As Paul Krugman reminds us, “Inside the Beltway Simpson and Bowles have become sacred figures. But the people doing that elevation are the same people who told us that Paul Ryan was the answer to our fiscal prayers.”
 Who does that elevating? Meet the Campaign to Fix the Debt, the billionaire-funded project that uses Alan…

Dror Moreh’s film The Gatekeepers—one of five nominated for an Academy Award in the documentary feature category—is a brilliant, deeply disturbing portrait of the post-1967 Israeli occupation. This year’s strong field of nominees also includes 5 Broken Cameras, another film about the occupation, directed by Palestinian Emad Burnat with Israeli Guy Davidi. 
 It’s hard to imagine two more stylistically and thematically distinct films. Burnat’s is a highly personal account of the struggle of his West Bank village, Bil’in, against Israel’s separation wall, and the accompanying army and settler destruction of its olive groves. Burnat interweaves scenes of domestic life with those of Bil’in’s weekly protests; the fact that five of his cameras were broken by the army in the course of filming is a testament both to his seemingly…

Sometime around 1912, painting changed. Artists from Moscow to Westport, by way of Munich and Paris, began making abstract works. “Observers spoke of the exhilaration and terror of leaping into unknown territory,” Leah Dickerman writes in the catalog for “Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art,” the monumental exhibition she has curated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, on view through April 15. This saut dans le vide, she notes, was “accompanied by a shower of celebratory manifestos, lectures, and criticism, a flood of words flung forth perhaps in compensation for their makers’ worry about how the meaning of these pictures might be established.” It also brought a deluge of labels: “pure painting,” “nonobjective painting” and many more, with “abstraction” being merely the…

The laws of physics and chemistry don’t grade on a curve; neither should anyone who cares about the fast-approaching catastrophe of runaway climate change. Yes, President Obama managed to say the C-word, more than once, in his State of the Union address. He connected the dots between greenhouse gas emissions and the horrors of Superstorm Sandy and last summer’s record-breaking heat and drought (drought that has worsened this winter in much of the Farm Belt). And after making what he surely knew was a fruitless plea that Congress pass legislation to limit US greenhouse gas emissions, Obama affirmed that he will take action if Congress doesn’t.
 This constitutes unmistakable progress from a president who has been all but AWOL from the climate fight for most of his presidency. But unmistakable…

OUR FRIEND AND ALLY, DON SHAFFER: When I first came to The Nation in 1978, the last guy I thought I’d be interested in meeting was our Aetna life insurance representative, whose name was Don Shaffer. Then I met his wife, Doris, who had volunteered to help put together a dinner in honor of longtime Nation editor Carey McWilliams. She was a dynamo and a pleasure to work with: dedicated, efficient and committed to The Nation. I decided if she could put up with this Shaffer guy, he must be something more than my condescending image of an insurance salesman. 
 But even before I met him, I discovered that Don was involved with a slew of organizations that were at the cutting edge of peace, civil rights and civil…

In May 1943, James B. Conant, the president of Harvard University, published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly titled “Wanted: American Radicals.” Conant was on the lookout for “a group of modern radicals in the American tradition,” whose ideas would encompass Thoreau and Whitman, Emerson and Marx, and who would be “lusty in wielding the axe against the root of inherited privilege” so as to prevent the growth of “a caste system.” His proposal? The imposition of “really effective inheritance and gift taxes and the breaking up of trust funds and estates.” Conant, whose essay infuriated Harvard’s well-heeled trustees, was hardly a radical himself; he was, and would always remain, a man of the establishment. But in those days, college and university presidents did not limit their activities to fundraising,…

“The Civil War and American Art,” the current exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, marks the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. After it closes in late April, the show will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for most of the rest of 2013. To complement the show, the Smithsonian has published, in conjunction with Yale University Press, a beautiful companion volume that includes many images not on display in the galleries and several chapters of commentary. The exhibit and book are an occasion not only to showcase some fascinating art, but also to clear up the misconceptions that many Americans still hold about the period. Unfortunately, both squander that opportunity.
 Unlike, say, Emanuel Leutze’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts exactly what…

I have been spending some time reading Steven Soderbergh’s filmography, which apparently has come to an end with his new thriller, Side Effects. The “apparently” may require some emphasis, considering that Soderbergh is a habitual violator of the line between fiction and 
reality. Nevertheless, if we provisionally take him at his word, a major American filmmaker has just quit. This might not be quite as big a deal as Philip Roth’s retirement, but Soderbergh is only 50.
 That he would become major was not always obvious, despite an initial success that was brilliant to the point of being disastrous. In early 1989, with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh inadvertently transformed the Sundance Film Festival from a retreat for regional do-gooders into a frenzied auction pit, while giving Harvey Weinstein and…

February 18 was Yoko Ono’s eightieth birthday—a day to celebrate her art, music and activism. She’s done more in the last year than most of us do in a decade: campaigned against fracking and honored Julian Assange; mounted a major retrospective of her art in London last summer at the prestigious Serpentine Gallery, and another, bigger one in Frankfurt this February at the celebrated Schirn Kunsthalle; and made music with the Plastic Ono Band. The anti-fracking campaign has been her biggest political undertaking in several years. First there were the billboards and full-page ads in The New York Times (and also The Nation): “Imagine There’s No Fracking…,” addressed to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and signed “Yoko and Sean” (her son, Sean Lennon).
 But the anti-fracking campaign involves a lot…

During the election season, Barack Obama frequently gave voice to his hope that once the Republicans found themselves trounced in two consecutive presidential elections, their “fever” might just break. So instead of toadying to the crazies in the base of their party (the ones who are always threatening to run primary opponents against any party member who admits that the world is round or whatever), Republicans would finally come around and admit that the job of a legislator is to accept reality for what it is and begin from there. Had this happened, it would have lifted a terrific burden from the mainstream media, since today, the remaining conventions of objective journalism—together with the social pressure on the people who practice it—demand that “both sides” be blamed for the breakdown…

Just over a year ago, in January 2012, Texas Governor Rick Perry marked a gruesome milestone: with 239 executions under his belt, he had officially overseen half of all executions carried out in that state since the reinstatement of the death penalty. Since then, Texas has killed fourteen inmates, solidifying Perry’s position as the governor who has presided over the most executions in history. To date, 492 prisoners have been put to death since the state’s death chamber roared back to life in 1982. By the time this issue of The Nation hits newsstands, the number will likely be 493.
 Amid so much state-sanctioned killing there is scant official acknowledgment that the state’s capital punishment system is fraught with problems. As the body count rises, nagging evidence points to the…

On a Farther Shore The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson. By William Souder. Crown. 496 pp. $30. In 1858, the Victorian poet and critic Edmund Gosse was a 9-year-old child. That spring and summer, he and his father spent their days collecting marine specimens in the tidal pools on the Cornwall seashore. Of this time and place, Gosse later wrote:
 These words were written in 1907. Half a century later, the American marine biologist and nature writer Rachel Carson was saying much the same thing about the even further desecration of nature, for which she too held the human race (in the twentieth century, more than in any other) responsible. Now, another half-century on, we read the fiftieth-anniversary edition of 
Silent Spring, Carson’s great brief for nature’s prosecution of…