Innholdsfortegnelse for February 18, 2013 i The Nation

The Morgen Freiheit
 Wynnewood, Pa.
 I appreciate Eric Alterman’s column “Putting Stories Into the World” [Jan. 21]. But let me make a small but meaningful correction about the Morgen Freiheit, which I read from the mid-1960s, when I was not yet a teenager, until its last issue in the ’80s. Everything Alterman wrote was true about the pre-1956 Freiheit. The Daily Worker lost 90 percent of its readership when the truth of Stalin’s atrocities became known in 1956 but it didn’t change its position. Not the Freiheit, whose editors were shocked and horrified. It stated that its ideals of socialism and justice would remain the same despite its misplaced faith in the Soviet Union. Its work for a better America and for Yiddish culture in America would not change. The…

JANE W. SHARPLES, 1951–2013: We pause to raise a glass to our comrade Jane, The Nation’s production director from 1980 to 2004, who died too young on January 22 after a life of raising hell and doing good. Jane will be remembered for her mane of flaming red hair, her ever-present cigarette, her free-flowing Anglo-Saxon (“I’m the paid bitch around here”), her heart as big as a whale, her love of booze and her worship of the beach—brought into the office with the desktop she built, a glass-topped beachcomber’s delight filled with sand, shells and sea glass. A Connecticut Yankee whose forebears stepped off the Mayflower in 1620 (a fact she cared not a fig for), Jane was proud to proclaim zero interest in politics, her descent from a long…

American political history is usually told as the story of what political elites say and do. The twists and turns, advances and setbacks, wars, disasters and recoveries, are said to be the work of the founders, or of the presidents, or of the courts, or of the influence of a handful of great people who somehow emerge from the mass. 
 But this history can also be told as the story of the great protest movements that periodically well up from the bottom of American society and the impact these movements have on American institutions. There would be no founders to memorialize without the Revolutionary-era mobs who provided the foot soldiers to fight the British; no films about the quandaries of Abe Lincoln during the Civil War without the abolitionists…

Fifty-five percent of women (including 96 percent of African-American women and 67 percent of single women) voted for President Barack Obama this past November. Even if the president’s record on drones, detentions and deportations gave progressives pause, when it came to women’s rights, the GOP’s burning cross on the women’s movement’s metaphorical lawn certainly cast a distinguishing light. It wasn’t hard for the president and his party to play up the contrast between themselves and the party of fetal rights, forced pregnancy and “legitimate rape.”
 Now, as President Obama’s second term begins, every 
women’s group seems to have a to-do list for the 113th Congress. As the American Association of University Women puts it: “President Obama should pay attention to women’s priorities, especially since women’s votes decided the 2012 election.”
…

Der Briefwechsel von Thomas Bernhard, Siegfried Unseld Edited by Raimund Fellinger, Martin Huber and Julia Ketterer. Suhrkamp. 869 pp. Paper €39.80. A writer sends a letter to his publisher: “there are times when one suddenly hovers in the air over a dreadful abyss and is being watched by countless people who constantly clap and cheer and make one almost go deaf with their (perfidious) admiration, but not a single one of them stretches out a net into which one can fall—literally in the last moment—without unavoidably becoming a comical, if also pitiable, certainly ridiculous corpse among men.” The writer was Thomas Bernhard, about whom his fellow Austrian, the Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, once remarked, “No one can get past this dead giant.” The publisher was Siegfried Unseld, who had secured…

There’s a new smog hanging over Greek cities this winter: an acrid cloud of wood smoke that burns the back of the throat. Forests—always endangered—are being logged by profiteers
 and pensioners alike to feed the fires of thousands who can’t afford heating oil. Already high because of laws protecting Greece’s two refining companies, the price of oil has been pushed up even further by a tax hike, part of the latest wave of austerity measures mandated by Greece’s lenders. With unemployment creeping toward 30 percent (twice that among the young), many are having to choose between
heating and eating. 
 Beneath the smoke, the political temperature is rising. Relieved at the arrival of a new tranche of funds from the EU and IMF (most of which will go to the banks…

I didn’t flinch watching Zero Dark Thirty. Usually at suspense films I squirm and grasp at the arm of the seat, the thigh of my companion. Anyone who has ever sat beside me at such films can expect muffled little shrieks and a hand, finally, drawn up like a blindfold.
 “I can’t watch.”
 “It’s only a movie.”
 Not if it’s art; as the old poet understood, I readily suspend disbelief for a visionary or even skillful artist.
 Zero Dark Thirty is the work of neither. It functions less as art than as a snuff film. Its torture sequences, and the photographs or videos of nameless prisoners that reappear throughout the film’s long lead-up, stoke the viewer for the climactic killing that everyone knows is coming. They do not excuse or…

From the point of view of the speeding traffic on a palm-lined stretch of highway in Pompano Beach, Florida, the Broward Transitional Center could easily pass for a gated apartment complex. But behind its heavily monitored entry points, the bright pink two-story center confines approximately 600 men and 100 women in immigrant detention—and illustrates what’s at stake in the nation’s immigration battle. While some look to Washington for a grand answer that will solve the plight of the nation’s approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants, others continue to focus on local efforts to stop deportations, like the ones aimed at this detention center. 
 “People there forget that it’s a deportation center,” says Claudio Rojas, adding: “It’s a place that breaks you down through attrition.”
 The 47-year-old undocumented Argentine immigrant should…

In Barack Obama: The Story, biographer David Maraniss writes that the president spent his youth in Hawaii getting stoned on a paved road up Mount Tantalus, where he took “roof hits” in smoke-filled cars with his friends, the Choom Gang. (To “choom” is Hawaiian slang for smoking marijuana.) Obama loved weed so much, Maraniss writes, he thanked his pot dealer, but not his mother, in his high school yearbook.
 Decades later, the Choomer turned president is in a historically unprecedented position when it comes to drug policy in the United States. Marijuana is illegal under the Controlled Substances Act, but two states, Washington and Colorado, voted in November to legalize and regulate its sale and use by adults 21 and older. This conflict with federal law puts all eyes on…

Having risen from the bed, after the ability to stand had been re-established, the gait still adjusting to the shifts of the body’s weight, I found myself in front of the streaked mirror in the hospital room. The halo was dull in that light, almost brushed in appearance. How saintly of me to wear a halo? I wanted a narrator to say: Here, he models the latest headwear, the finest in German engineering. But James Earl Jones was apparently unavailable. The pins buried in my skull looked like a nautical device of some kind. But there were no journeys for me to take, just a bed and a room. My nurse’s name was Zar, short for Lazarus. Of course his name was Lazarus. It fits with the theme of this…

The billionaires peddling austerity have always insisted that they’re in it for the common man. A recent TV ad for Fix the Debt—the well-heeled group demanding that we cut tax rates and Social Security benefits—stars a teacher and a farmer. But Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz did his peers one better: conscripting countless low-wage workers into the austerity army. 
 The day after Christmas, Schultz announced an unconventional effort to “use our company’s scale for good by sending a respectful and optimistic message to our elected officials.” The occasion: “the tremendously important, time-sensitive issue to fix the national debt.” The medium: for a couple of days, DC-area Starbucks “partners” (meaning workers) would write “Come Together” on customers’ cups. “Imagine the power of our partners and hundreds of thousands of customers each…

Now that women will be allowed in combat, can we please have the ERA? One of the biggest arguments against the Equal Rights Amendment was that women would be drafted and sent to the front. Of course, we haven’t had the draft since 1973, although men still have to register for it at age 18. But in the unlikely event that the draft is reinstated tomorrow, it’s not hard to imagine women being included. Since 1982, when the ERA was defeated three states short of ratification, opposition to women in the military has faded. In the wake of the combat announcement, only dinosaurs like George Will still argue that women are too weak and incompetent to kill their fair share of Muslims. Three decades have transformed attitudes: we are way…

“As visionary as Obama is, he is hamstrung by his pragmatism.” So says Michael Marx of the Sierra Club, America’s largest grassroots environmental organization. It is therefore “incumbent on our movement,” Marx continues, to press the president to be more visionary than pragmatic during his second term—above all on climate change, the make-or-break challenge for our civilization.
 One way to push Obama is through “a show of force,” Marx says, by turning out large numbers of people at two big climate demonstrations planned this year in Washington. The rallies, on Pres-
idents’ Day weekend (February 17) and Earth Day (April 22),
will bookend a 100-day Obama Climate and Clean Energy Legacy campaign intended to press the president to show 
much stronger environmental leadership in his second term.
 The Sierra Club is upping…

There is little in the way of good news on the campaign finance front. In 2012, campaigns for every office—from the presidency to the San Jose City Council—cost exponentially more than ever before. It is certainly true that right-wing billionaires like Sheldon Adelson blew fortunes on losing political bets, as did the US Chamber of Commerce and other groups that had hoped to buy elections with unlimited expenditures. But as Public Campaign’s Nick Nyhart notes, “billionaires lost, but big money won.” Republicans backed by Adelson and the Koch brothers got beat by Democratic campaigns and progressive interest groups that came close to—and sometimes matched—Republican and conservative spending. The pay-to-play political process remains cloaked in “dark money” secrecy. Yet even those who complain about the political arms race reject unilateral disarmament.…

Later Poems Selected and New, 1971–2012. By Adrienne Rich. Norton. 530 pp. $39.95. When Adrienne Rich died last March in Santa Cruz, California, of complications from rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 82, the world lost a polarizing poet from a countercultural generation that included Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka, Betty Friedan and William Burroughs. A public intellectual and an icon for the “triply marginalized—as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew” (according to her New York Times obituary), Rich allowed her poetry to serve her ideas on feminism and social justice. As a result, her poems and essays—more than thirty books over six 
decades—reached a broad and passionate audience, far beyond what most poets enjoy, and she was a hero to generations of feminists. She won almost every award…