Innholdsfortegnelse for March 4, 2013 i The Nation

Is It Time to Ditch the Word ‘Choice’?
 Denver
 Katha Pollitt weighs rhetorical strategies in the fight for abortion rights: is the language of “choice” still effective? On the next page, Patricia J. Williams quotes Senator George Hoar, in 1871, that people must “be as much desirous of preserving the liberties of others as their own.” [“Subject to Debate” and “Diary of a Mad Law Professor,” Feb. 4]. If people want to judge others re abortion, they fail to “preserve the liberties of others.” To awaken people to the importance of abortion rights, create a poster that says “Who should make YOUR reproductive choices?” above that grim photo of the nine Supreme Court justices. “Choice” is still effective language. 
 KATHY BENSON
 _________________________ Pittsburgh
 Forty years after Roe v. Wade,…

DEFEND THE POST OFFICE: The austerity agenda does not begin or end with Paul Ryan’s threats to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. It extends in every direction: from assaults on food stamps to education cuts to the squeezing of transportation funds. And the current front line of the austerity agenda is the attack on the post office, a vital public service that is older than the country itself.
 On February 6, the US Postal Service announced that Saturday first-class mail delivery will be eliminated this August—
the latest and deepest in a series of cuts 
that threaten to undermine the service to the point where it will be ripe for bartering off to private delivery corporations.
 “USPS executives cannot save the Postal Service by tearing it apart,” says American Postal Workers…

On a warm spring afternoon at American colleges, the intoxicating aroma of surely medicinal marijuana will be floating like a soft caress in the breeze, and hard-working students will be stocking up on amphetamine cocktails to sharpen their overstressed young minds for the coming exams.
 On a warm spring afternoon at the nation’s poorer public schools, children (and I mean children) will endure a daily police presence, including drug-sniffing dogs, full-body pat-downs, searches of backpacks and lockers, stops in the hallways—all in the name of searching for contraband. 
 Drugs are ubiquitous in this country, and yet we know that some people have the privilege of doctor-prescribed intoxication, while others are thrown into dungeons for seeking the same relief. We know that the war on drugs is heavily inflected with…

Hillary Clinton stood at a podium at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and began her speech, one of the last she would make as secretary of state. Wearing rectangular-framed glasses, pale pink lipstick and tapered heels, she looked out on a crowd of foreign-policy wonks, lawyers and journalists. She directed some of her remarks to members of the media—“the pundits,” as she calls them, who see women’s issues as “a bit soft”—and wondered aloud, imitating those selfsame pundits, “What about the hard stuff?”
 “Well, that is a false choice,” she continued, explaining the need for an American foreign policy that encompasses so-called soft issues, like the advancement of women, economic development and energy diplomacy, as well as the usual “hard power” concerns. At various times during her speech,…

Give Me Everything You Have On Being Stalked By James Lasdun. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 218 pp. $25. One night more than twenty years ago, I was followed on my way home by a drunk who wanted to get into a fight. A block from my house, he started throwing punches. I yelled, in a Texas accent that I didn’t know I still had. He broke my glasses. And then, to my surprise, I punched him back. He ran off, and when I got home, I was happy to find a little of his blood on one of my knuckles. 
 Over the next few days, I told the story to anyone who would listen. I expected sympathy, which many offered. But to my chagrin, quite a few listeners suggested…

With his declaration “Let’s be clear: deficit reduction alone is not an economic plan,” President Obama opened his fourth State of the Union address by taking a stand in the great debate between austerity and growth. And he did so with a clarity that has the potential to define his second term. “A growing economy that creates good middle-class jobs—that must be the North Star that guides our efforts,” the president announced. “Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions as a nation: How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills they need to get those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?” Obama acknowledged the budget-cutting demands of Representative Paul Ryan…

Imagine that Russian President Vladimir Putin had used remote-controlled drones armed with missiles to kill thousands of “enemies” (and plenty of civilians) throughout Asia and Eastern Europe. Imagine, further, that Putin refused to acknowledge any of the killings and simply asserted in general terms that he had the right to kill anyone he secretly determined was a leader of the Chechen rebels or “associated forces,” even if they posed no immediate threat of attack on Russia. How would the State Department treat such a practice in its annual reports on human rights compliance? Conveniently, the State Department’s country reports leave out the United States. Otherwise, it might have to pass judgment on President Obama’s use of drones to kill thousands of our
”enemies,” and lots of civilians, many of them far…

Vultures are circling American unions. One month after scoring a defensive victory in the November elections, organized labor suffered a once unimaginable body blow: the passage of “right to work” legislation in Michigan, the latest longtime labor stronghold to become the site of a devastating defeat. In January, the federal government announced that private sector unionization has fallen to a new historic low of 6.6 percent, down from more than one-third of the workforce a few generations back.
 The past two years have seen sparks of surprising vitality—from the mass uprising in Wisconsin, to the Chicago teachers’ walkout, to the strike wave now roiling Walmart. But the big picture is bleak: our fastest-growing industries are virtually union-free. Strikes by workers are losing ground to lockouts. Concessionary contracts are rampant. The…

Every few months there’s a headline story about privacy violations committed by a high-profile online company, and the violations usually span the spectrum. Google was recently slapped with two fines: $22.5 million for tracking users of Apple’s 
Safari browser, and $25,000 for impeding an FCC probe into a bizarre episode of alleged wireless data “sniffing.” For some years now, the privacy policies of Facebook have been under investigation in Germany and the United States.
 What’s always missing from these stories is context. Accounts of privacy violations bubble through the news and stir public outrage, which is often followed by a backlash and occasionally a fine. But these stories rarely reveal the porous privacy lines of the digital realm, or whether other types of violations are being committed online, by companies…

Richard Hell apparently called Robert Bresson’s The Devil, Probably (Olive Films; DVD, $24.95) “the most punk movie ever made,” which is an unlikely thing to say about an austere, ascetic cultural indictment issued by an old man. But if punk denotes an attitude of sneering condescension, a principled stance against principled stances, then Hell is on to something. For all its lucidity, The Devil, Probably (1977) is one of Bresson’s most contentious films, so completely despairing that its defenders have registered its malevolence as either evidence of a covert spirituality or as a sick joke. Bresson, whose late works complicate his early canonization as a Transcendentalist, admitted it was his “most ghastly” picture. It is, at any rate, probably the least romantic film ever made about teenage existential malaise.
 The…

In his second inaugural address, President Obama announced that “a decade of war is now ending.” Yet there is a danger that the administration is expanding the “war on terror” in North Africa. In response to recent events in Algeria, Mali and Libya, administration officials have promised to step up Washington’s counterterrorism efforts, including deepening cooperation with Algeria and establishing a drone base in Niger. But before the United States plunges more deeply into the region, American leaders must learn the lessons from earlier Western interventions and ask whether US strategy is itself partly responsible for the spread of Islamist extremist groups. The first lesson is that it is a mistake to assign global or national security significance to movements involved in local power struggles. Just as indigenous national liberation…

If the president can order the killing of
American citizens abroad should he decide they are involved with Al Qaeda, can he assassinate
suspected Al Qaeda–connected US citizens in London or Berlin? What about a suspect’s teenage son, a junior in a Canadian boarding school? If he can drop hellfire missiles on a house in northwestern Pakistan because he believes a terrorist cell is meeting inside, could he blow up a motel in Florida where supposed terrorists are staying and chalk up any dead vacationers as “collateral damage”? Of course not. Pakistan is completely different. Anwar al-Awlaki may have been a US citizen, but he was in Yemen, which is different too. As for his 16-year-old son, killed in Yemen in a drone attack some weeks later along with several other people,…

August 8, 2012, was a special day for Deogratias Niyizonkiza and a red-letter day for the community of Kigutu. Deo, as Niyizonkiza is known to everyone in Burundi, from the president to the adoring villagers of his colline, had been rattling around in an ambulance accompanied by an army commando, a curator, an emergency-room physician, a sociologist, two soldiers with Kalashnikovs and a literature professor (myself). That morning the minister of higher education had asked him to found a research institute, and by evening a national museum was in the works. Such happy developments provide a measure of hope in a country where the medical and educational infrastructures are in shambles. After decades of genocidal war and the colonialism that incited it, Burundi provides ample scope for a visionary reformer…

Last March, after a US soldier methodically shot and killed sixteen Afghan civilians, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta repeated that hoariest of maxims, “War is hell.” The saying is often attributed to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, whose Union troops blazed a path of total destruction from Atlanta to Savannah near the end of the Civil War. But because it conveniently obscures any sense of agency, the notion that war is hell has long provided cover for the most ghastly and gratuitous wartime acts. Responding to one veteran’s outrage over American massacres of South Vietnamese civilians, an army officer replied that it is “indeed unfortunate…that some incidents occur within combat zones.”
 Yes, one can describe as hellish a war in which American soldiers forced a woman into a bunker and buried her…