Innholdsfortegnelse for June 3, 2013 i The Nation

Mental Illness: Lighter and Darker
 Brooklyn, N.Y.
 Miriam Markowitz, in “Madness in the Method” [April 22], on the TV series Homeland, speaks with false authority about mental illness and risks perpetuating dangerous stereotypes. She positions herself as an informed liberal who cares about past fights for civil rights and religious and sexual freedoms, but then she writes, “Profoundly different from race, sexual orientation, gender or creed, the stigma surrounding mental illness contains a dark unknown that is real rather than socially constructed. Some (and by no means all) mental disorders, no matter how much light they may generate, contain voids darker than a terrorist’s hidey-hole. Manic flights, voices, paranoia, suicide—these are not just the outside pressures of a treacherous social landscape. They are contained within the self, and the traditional…

THE HUMAN COST OF DC GRIDLOCK: 
As the Senate Judiciary Committee considers some 300 amendments challenging the nearly 900-page immigration bill crafted by the Gang of Eight, the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants may continue full force. Advocates are renewing their call on President Obama to issue an executive order suspending deportations of people who would gain status in the bill’s final version later this year.
 The detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants often gets lost in the numbers rather than highlighted as individual stories—and some advocates say that’s part of the problem. Pablo Alvarado, who heads the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), says that when immigration is debated at the Capitol, it gets divorced from what’s happening to communities on the ground. “Suspended deportations would ground the…

In 2008, I was one of the young feminist whippersnappers who voted for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries—or as many of my older counterparts called me at the time, a traitor. I didn’t believe there was (as Jen Moseley, my then-colleague at Feministing, put it) a “vagina litmus test.” I wanted to vote for the most feminist candidate, regardless of gender. 
 Next time around, though, I’m voting for a woman. Not because I believe that the female Democratic candidate (and I think we all have a good idea who that will be) is guaranteed to be the most feminist, but because I’m just too fed up to do anything else. I’ve made a full transition from youthful idealism to jaded orneriness, and my vote will…

The tumulus—I thought it was a hill at first (trees grow out of one in Sulm)— entered into. It was a clear day, bright, the grass bounded by its hedgerows too green all around and down, the fields’ squares troubled only by the Boyne that just about makes an island of this place snaking through. Sunbeams don’t snake, at least not visibly, though 5,000 years have worked at the Earth’s orbit. Still the light goes in, into the mound through holes one to a side that tunnel towards each other but don’t meet, the sun arriving on time every year unless it’s cloudy.        But to do what? Wake the corpse.…

Evangelical Catholicism Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church. By George Weigel. Basic. 291 pp. $27.99. Tutored by a fierce little platoon of tireless, ambitious and well-connected neoconservative intellectuals, many of the most influential Catholic hierarchs in the United States did everything in their power to obstruct Barack Obama’s first-term agenda. Fevered opposition to Obama was evident at the bishops’ annual meeting in Baltimore, one week after the 2008 election, when one bishop after another warned, often in apocalyptic terms, of the grave danger that the new president posed to the nation and to the sanctity of life. First among the bishops’ fears was that Obama would shepherd into law the Freedom of Choice Act, securing the right to abortion by statute and eliminating state and federal restrictions on the procedure.
…

Caricature, as Victor Navasky points out in his engaging and essential account of the subject, The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power (Knopf; $27.95), is derived from the Italian verb caricare, which means to charge or load “a vessel or weapon.” Navasky knows well of what he writes. In February 1984, in his sixth year as the editor of this magazine, he chose to publish a nearly full-page caricature by David Levine of Henry Kissinger having his way with the world, and Navasky absorbed the brunt of its repercussions. Twenty-six Nation staffers published a letter to the editor condemning the image as sexist and contrary to the values of “a progressive magazine.” Christopher Hitchens—whose column about Kissinger’s latest dark deeds in Central America, now in service of…

Almost forty years ago, in the shadow of the Watergate scandal, Americans were shocked to discover that the
Internal Revenue Service maintained a “master list” of people and organizations it targeted for special scrutiny—a list dominated, The New York Times reported at the time, “by liberals, radicals, antiwar activists and blacks.” Senator Frank Church’s intelligence committee investigation would eventually determine that the IRS had been used during different administrations against both the left and the right. It urged sweeping reforms to address the fact that “men entrusted with power, even those aware of its dangers, tend, particularly when pressured, to slight liberty.” 
 Now there are new allegations of political manipulation, amid revelations that the IRS clumsily targeted for 
stricter scrutiny groups that included the words “tea party” and “patriot” in…

When I was a kid, my family loved watching science fiction films and television shows. Some of them, from Star Trek to Soylent Green, featured a multiracial band of humans, plus various sentient life forms. But in other features—let’s say the awesomely campy Logan’s Run—
everyone (or nearly) in the future was white. My family
suspended disbelief for the duration of the movie. Then,
depending on our mood, we either laughed at or lamented the idea that anyone thought the future would be monochrome, except for the pantsuits.
 Today I feel like I’m watching that movie all over again. This time, it’s called The Future of Journalism, and we can’t afford to suspend our disbelief. CNN recently published a promotional graphic saying, “Allow Us To Reintroduce Ourselves.” It featured thirteen on-air personalities. No…

Noble Savages My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists. By Napoleon A. Chagnon. Simon and Schuster. 531 pp. $32.50. In December 1919, Franz Boas, the German-born academic widely recognized as the father of American anthropology, published a letter in this magazine accusing four of his American colleagues—whom he did not identify—of having used their research positions as cover for engaging in espionage in Central America during the recently concluded war. Ten days later, the governing council of the American Anthropological Association voted 20 to 10 to censure Boas, claiming that his highly public letter was unjustified and in no way represented the AAA’s position. Boas was a founding member and former president of the association, so the censure was doubly humiliating; it essentially forced him to resign…

After Empires European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge From the Global South 1957–1986. By Giuliano Garavini. Oxford. 291 pp. $125. The Poorer Nations A Possible History of the Global South. By Vijay Prashad. Verso. 292 pp. Paper $26.95. From the Ruins of Empire The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. By Pankaj Mishra. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 356 pp. $27. The Impossible Indian Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence. By Faisal Devji. Harvard. 213 pp. $24.95. In the fun-house mirror of the present, the contours of the twentieth century have assumed a strange symmetry. It begins and ends with imperialism. The century opens with the West plundering the Rest, until one Asian nation, Japan, joins the action and becomes an empire itself. In the century’s last decade, the pattern repeats: the forces…

It turns out I was killing the birds. I gave them what they wanted, what they craved: suet packed with seeds, hung swinging on the sycamore with chains. Suet brought the downy, the bellied, brought small clinging birds from the sadness of the woods. It fattened them. It readied them for winter. But with spring came the melting world: too rich, too much weakened their bones. And snapped them.           You were light as a whisper when you lay on me. I ran my fingers over your chest as though I were dressing you in air—the only clothes I would ever want on you. Still, the mockingbird wants it the most, diving at the other birds, driving them away, his gray black white reel of wings—so fierce, I can’t even…

When New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was asked in mid-May about his political bona fides, he replied, “I’m a damn good Republican and a good conservative Republican.” Believe what he says—especially the “conservative” part. 
 Sure, Christie goes out of his way to say nice things about President Obama, who worked closely with the governor to provide immediate and essential support to New Jersey communities battered by Superstorm Sandy. And yes, Christie’s been willing to call out some of the most absurd excesses of his fellow Republicans. But these gestures are about style, not policy. The first-term governor has been meticulous about positioning his fall re-election campaign as a “bipartisan” effort. Christie knows that New Jersey, which gave Obama 58 percent of the vote last November and sends two Democrats…

Recently I was at the State House in Annapolis when Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley made history, erasing a centuries-old practice with the stroke of a pen. On May 2, O’Malley signed a law repealing the death penalty, making it the eighteenth state to abolish capital punishment as well as the sixth state in six years—after New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Illinois and Connecticut.
 Standing with me were two men with a very personal stake in the governor’s actions: Kirk Bloodsworth and Shujaa Graham, both of whom had been exonerated. They are just two of the 142 death row prisoners over the past forty years who have been released because they were innocent: Graham was number twenty, and Bloodsworth was number forty-eight. Along with organizers and lawmakers, many of these…

Speedboat By Renata Adler. New York Review Books. 117 pp. Paper $14. Pitch Dark By Renata Adler. New York Review Books. 154 pp. Paper $14. Last year I saw Einstein on the Beach, Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s unclassifiable Gesamtkunstwerk of an opera, which premiered in 1976 and hadn’t been produced in full since 1992. I was already 
familiar with photos of some of Wilson’s sets—a boy suspended on a platform high above an oncoming train, a grid of figures silhouetted against blazing cogs of light—and had listened to recordings of Glass’s music, but I didn’t know what to expect when the opera was restaged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In its absence, Einstein seemed to have become the stuff of myth for those who had seen it in…

Who needs to be at peace in the world? It helps to be between wars, to die a few times each day to understand your father’s sky, as you take it apart piece by piece and can’t feel anything, can’t feel the tree growing under your feet, the eyes poking night only to find another night to compare it to. Whoever heard of turning pain into hummingbirds or red birds—haven’t we grown? What does it mean to be older? Maybe a house without doors can still survive a storm. Maybe I can’t find the proper way to rebel or damn it, I can’t leave. I want to, but you grow inside of me. And as I watch you, before I know it, I’m too heavy, too full of you to…

Metaphysical Dog By Frank Bidart. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 113 pp. $24. Now and then he calls himself “Frank” and remembers how often he has wanted to die, though he is possessed as well by the will to live. A convinced and dedicated truth-teller, he fears more than anything else the lies even he may be tempted to tell and thereby—unbearable fate—the possibility that he may turn into one of those who routinely lie to themselves. Disdainful of the compromises we make to survive our grief and manias, he yet declares himself an adept at compensation, “well wadded with art he adored and with stupidity and distraction.” Wanting to go on with a life largely consigned to “the proximate and partial,” he craves “the absolute” while acknowledging that the hunger…