Innholdsfortegnelse for January 28, 2013 i The Nation

Get the Lead Out
 Sebastopol, Calif.
 In their “It’s the New Economy, Stupid” [Dec. 17], John Cavanagh and Robin Broad make excellent points about the grand possibilities that await the actions of intelligent and informed citizens and caring governments. I agree with all of it. But not enough is said regarding the massive inertia—financial, economic, military and political—that can, with the swipe of a casual paw, clear out all that is in the path of its continuance. Until our endangered planet becomes a significant concern, that inertia will continue, if not increase. To wit, fracking, mentioned in the same issue: one would think that such obviously careless and destructive technology would not even be considered in today’s “green awareness” era. 
 RICHARD SANSOM
 _________________________ Want Mayo on Those Dollars?
 Cornville,…

JUSTICE DELAYED, JUSTICE DENIED: In 
1980, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned the false convictions of the Wilmington Ten, a group of civil rights activists charged with firebombing a white-owned grocery store in North Carolina in 1971. 
But for the next few decades, they remained felons in the eyes of the state—until Governor Beverly Perdue pardoned all ten 
on January 2. The monumental decision came more than forty years after the young organizers were framed for the crime. Four
of them—Jerry Jacobs, Ann Shepard, Connie Tindall and Joe Wright—died waiting for their names to be cleared and their access to educational and job opportunities restored. 
 Their conviction was overturned after three key witnesses admitted in 1977 that prosecutors bribed them to give false testimony against the defendants.…

The day after Barack Obama won the 2008 South Carolina primary, an elderly white woman tendered words of affection to my 11-month-old son. I smiled, but was thinking, Wait until he’s 15, lady, and you’ll be crossing the road to avoid him. There can be few less generous responses to an expression of human kindness.
 For all I knew, she could have been one of the 10 percent of white female Democratic primary voters in the state who backed Obama, some of whom had chanted “Race Doesn’t Matter” at his victory celebrations the night before. And even if she wasn’t, odds don’t justify prejudice; they simply compound it. Nonetheless, through those earlier years of parenting I would often wonder, as the cooing started, how a world so enthralled by this…

John Keats A New Life By Nicholas Roe. Yale. 446 pages. $32.50. John Keats was born in 1795. Orphaned at the age of 14, he was apprenticed by a manipulative guardian to an apothecary, a kind of general medical practitioner. “Always writing poetry,” recalled a fellow apprentice. Though formal training as a surgeon’s assistant followed at Guy’s Hospital—this in the harrowing days before anesthesia—Keats was immersed in London’s literary society by the time he received his medical license. In 1817, at the age of 21, he published his first book, called simply Poems; a second book, Endymion, appeared the following year. Reviews were savage, but Keats dismissed them in a letter to his brother George as “a mere matter of the moment,” adding that “I think I shall be among…

After accepting a mini-bargain that includes tax hikes for Americans making more than $400,000 a year, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell announced: “The tax issue is finished, over, completed.” By shutting down debate on revenues while holding the line on the debt ceiling, McConnell and the GOP hope to turn their defeat in the fiscal cliff fight into a victory for austerity in the debt ceiling and sequester battles ahead. If they prevail, Social Security and Medicare benefits could end up back on the chopping block, and other cuts to government programs could trigger a “lost decade” of American economic decline.
 It is impossible to negotiate with this position; it would be terrific if President Obama took Nancy Pelosi’s advice and simply raised the debt ceiling by invoking the Fourteenth…

During his first term in office in the late 1990s, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was considered the most polarizing leader the country had known. The left refused to forgive him for his part in the incitement that led to Yitzhak Rabin’s 1995 assassination, while the right adored him for leading the opposition to the Oslo Accords. Now approaching his fifth election campaign as head of the Likud party, Netanyahu doesn’t generate that much passion anymore. His fans are less enthusiastic, while his critics have grown tired. More than anything, it seems that a majority of Israelis have simply grown accustomed to him. At a time of regional upheaval and international instability, Netanyahu’s ability to maintain the status quo seems enough to deliver what, according to all indications, should be…

In an exchange of essays on American democracy published in the January 11, 1941, issue of The Nation, a few leading intellectuals of the time explored the question “Who owns the future?” The context: an escalating world war and the rise of fascism and despotism, which had engulfed the world in an ideology that would cost millions of lives. The tension in the debate is one that has existed throughout history: Can we remake the world in a way that generates a future full of opportunities and possibilities for the majority? In one piece, Professor Frederick Schuman, predicting the demise of democracy, posited that Americans were too weak in spirit and shallow in thinking—too “decadent”—to stop the march of what he called “Caesarism.” He argued that “this is not a…

The Islands By Carlos Gamerro. Translated by Ian Barnett. And Other Stories. 548 pp. £10. Una puta mierda By Patricio Pron. El Cuenco de Plata. 128 pp. $74. Malvinas Requiem By Rodolfo Fogwill. Translated by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson. Serpent’s Tail. 154 pp. Paper $14.95. An Open Secret By Carlos Gamerro. Translated by Ian Barnett. Pushkin Press. 284 pp. $13.95. It was like two bald men fighting over a comb, Borges famously declared. In 1982, for seventy-four days, England and Argentina fought over an inhospitable, craggy archipelago in the South Atlantic. The islands were known in England as the Falklands, in Argentina as the Malvinas, and the bloody skirmish between the two nations capped centuries of discord over the territory. 
 Neither country ever formally declared war. Instead, repeated…

Six and a half years ago, I drove out to Lompoc federal penitentiary in the hills outside Santa Barbara to interview Weldon Angelos, a young man who had received the improbable sentence of fifty-five years without parole for selling marijuana, ostensibly while carrying a small pistol in an ankle holster. 
 A rap artist from Salt Lake City and friend to Napoleon and other eminences of the hip-hop world, Angelos had been ensnared by an informant in a series of undercover marijuana purchases that reeked of entrapment. What might have been a two-bit state pot case became a high-stakes federal case. When Angelos—who denied carrying a gun when dealing—refused to enter a guilty plea, the feds played hardball, piling more indictments onto the original charge. In December 2003, more than…

The battle over Barack Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel to be US secretary of defense has many of the elements of a typical episode of insider bloodletting. These happen routinely in every administration whenever powerful interests perceive a threat to their power. Fortunately, this brawl carries with it the potential to explode some foreign policy shibboleths that have imprisoned insider thinking and undermined the nation’s interests and ideals for more than thirty years.
 In almost every respect relevant to the position for which he was nominated, Hagel is remarkably well qualified. A highly decorated Vietnam veteran, he told an interviewer that he could recall promising himself during his time in Vietnam: 
“If I ever get out of all of this, I am going to do everything I can to assure…

Sometimes you can’t help but be sickened by the behavior of certain international organizations helping Haiti recover from the devastating January 2010 earthquake—hit, that is, by a wave of real physical nausea. The other day, I spent an afternoon in the displaced persons camp across from the ruins of St. Anne’s church in downtown Port-au-Prince. The place was awful, as awful as you can imagine squalid emergency living quarters might be—homes consisting of tent, tarp, tin, sheets, plywood, some cardboard—after three years of dust, dirt, sewage, torrential storms and, to top it off, Hurricane Sandy, which killed at least fifty-four people in Haiti. 
 Across the street from the camp, where an estimated 600 families are living, Chérestal Jean-Fougère, a camp leader, showed me the portable toilets that had been…

Quentin Tarantino knows only two forms of cinematic punctuation—scare quotes and exclamation points—and he uses them both nonstop to produce his “irony!” To his detractors, he’s a preening copycat, bombastically frivolous, pedantically vulgar, using the work of older, better filmmakers as his litter box. To his admirers, among whom you may sometimes include me, he’s more like a curiously wired electrical transformer, plugged into a main power source of pop moviemaking.
 The energy he draws comes from the magnitude of cinema—not so much the dimensions of a big screen (an artifact that is becoming obsolete) as the accumulation of sound and light, part junk pile and part treasure trove, that is the vastness of film history. In Tarantino’s best work—which now includes Django Unchained—he exaggerates social conflicts to the point…