Innholdsfortegnelse for March 25, 2013 i The Nation

Adrienne Rich: Fact Check Brooklyn, N.Y. I have always been a huge admirer of Ange Mlinko’s poetry and her shrewd criticism. But I must part ways with her opinions in her review of Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems, “Diagram This” [Feb. 18]. Mlinko uses swaths of my essay to buttress her point that Rich is no longer relevant to a younger generation of poets because that generation favors indeterminacy as opposed to Rich’s poetry of conviction. I’m afraid that Mlinko greatly misread my essay, which is in fact a celebration of Rich. Mlinko quotes me as follows: I “had a period when I reacted against her in college…. It was a reaction against white bourgeois feminists who assumed their plight was universal.” Mlinko does not include my rebuttal to my younger,…

SCOTUS, SPYING AND SECRECY: In a radical assault on the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled on February 26 that clients of the American Civil Liberties Union—including The Nation and Nation contributors Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges—could not challenge the sweeping surveillance law known as the FISA Amendments Act. Congress passed the law in 2008, in the wake of revelations that the National Security Agency had conducted surveillance of Americans’ international phone calls and e-mails without judicial review. In a decision that sounds like it was drawn straight from Kafka, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the 5–4 majority, threw out the challenge because the plaintiffs (who also include Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA, the PEN American Center and the Service Employees International Union) couldn’t prove they had actually been…

This is a personal story, and it’s hard to tell because nobody knows how it will end. I first went to Afghanistan in 2002, where I volunteered with two small nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) staffed by Afghan women: widows, university students, teachers. I’ve gone back to Afghanistan to work with those women almost every year—except for part of 2010 and 2011, when I embedded with the US military instead, to learn more about its “mission” in the country. The military was so out of touch with the actual Afghanistan that I may as well have been on the moon. 
 I went back to Kabul again in January, eleven years after first meeting my Afghan colleagues, and more than a year since I had last seen them. I thought I would…

In Minnesota, the shot across the bow took the form of a letter that arrived on February 19. “We are writing to urge you to take both immediate and long-term action,” it began, addressed to the CEOs of Target, US Bancorp and Wells Fargo Minnesota. Signed by representatives from community, labor and faith-based organizations, the letter spelled out a list of ten demands, ranging from writing down mortgages and ceasing to exploit tax loopholes to using responsible contractors and adopting fair hiring practices. The companies, two of which—Target and US Bancorp (the parent company of US Bank)—are headquartered in Minneapolis, had five days to begin adopting such measures. If they failed to act by February 24, they were told, the groups would be “forced to rely on the tools our…

Louis Agassiz Creator of American Science. By Christoph Irmscher. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 434 pp. $35. During the 1906 earthquake in California, a statue of the scientist Louis Agassiz fell from its perch, plunging the marble head of the Swiss-born naturalist straight into the ground and leaving his feet sticking up in the air. That seems to be where Agassiz still rests: head in the sand, feet in the air, something of a laughingstock. And as Christoph Irmscher points out in his new biography, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science, most people today don’t know who Agassiz is—or if they do, they “tend to think of [him] as a misguided, opportunistic bigot.” Irmscher, a professor of English at Indiana University, is the author of an excellent study of American science writing,…

Anyone losing sleep over Bob Woodward’s relationship with the White House can finally rest easy. The éminence grise of access journalism has made his peace with the Obama administration. After a spat with economic adviser Gene Sperling over an op-ed he was writing about the sequester, Woodward received an apologetic e-mail from Sperling, who said “as a friend” he thought Woodward would “regret” his comments. Woodward took to the airwaves, casting it as a veiled threat. But by Sunday, order was restored: Sperling called him a “legend” on ABC’s This Week. “I’m going to invite him over to my house,” Woodward said on Face the Nation, adding magnanimously, “Hopefully, he’ll bring others from the White House, or maybe the president himself.”
 If there are indignities to be suffered from running…

The Republicans are openly introspective about why they failed to regain the presidency and the
Senate. It is time for the same kind of rigorous self-analysis by the Democrats, who floated through their failure to regain control of the House without apparent dismay. Their failure to dislodge Speaker John Boehner and majority leader Eric Cantor assures that President Obama and congressional Democrats will get very little done for the next two years. 
 In the last Congress, Democrats were up against the cruelest, most extremist, most corporate-controlled Republican Party in history—a party far too extreme for the likes of Senator Robert Taft or Ronald Reagan. Last fall, the House Democratic Caucus issued a list of sixty outrageous Republican votes. If these bills had not been blocked in the Senate, the legislation…

Here’s what New York City authorities want you to think about the Ahmed Ferhani case: that after an eight-month-long undercover operation, the New York Police Department caught a dangerous “lone wolf” before he and his partner, Mohamed Mamdouh, could blow up a large Manhattan synagogue, and possibly the Empire State Building. Ahmed—driven by anti-Semitism, they say—was the mastermind behind a plot to terrorize Jews and Christians for the mistreatment of Muslims throughout the world. 
 It’s true that the NYPD has tapes of Ahmed saying reprehensible things about Jews. With an undercover agent, he discussed plans to attack a synagogue—the building, not the occupants, as a grand jury determined in June of 2011. He was caught buying three guns, ammunition and what he believed was a live grenade from another…

One winter’s night in Jerusalem, some thirty-odd years ago, I was waiting in Zion Square for the jitney that would drive me and several other passengers back to Tel Aviv. The way the system worked then, the first six people in line piled into the first jitney to arrive, the next six into the next one, and so on. That night I was the twelfth in line; I’d be the last one in the second jitney. Tired and cold, I had wrapped my arms around my chest and was turning in place to keep my circulation going when I happened to spot a woman with a head full of Farrah Fawcett hair, standing seven or eight people in back of me. The next time I turned, she seemed closer to…

In 2005, when Robert Burley learned of Eastman Kodak’s decision to close its Canadian branch in response to the diminishing demand for celluloid film, he heard the dying breaths not only of a brand, but also of an industry and a medium. His immediate impulse was to document the manufacturing facilities of Kodak and other companies before they were sold or reduced to rubble. He photographed locations personally meaningful to him, as an artist who knew little about the actual dark 
industry—dark both literally, in its production of light-sensitive materials, and figuratively, as a once-profitable industry built on closely guarded patents and secrecy. The project stretched over six years and turned into an international tour, with stops at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York; the Ilford Company, the black-and-white film…

Selma, Alabama 
 On Sunday, March 3, Representative John Lewis locked arms with Luci Baines Johnson and Vice President Joe Biden and marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge here. Forty-eight years earlier, on “Bloody Sunday,” Lewis was badly beaten by Alabama state troopers at the foot of the bridge while attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights. Eight days later, Luci’s father introduced the
Voting Rights Act before a joint session of Congress. “When Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965,” Lewis said, “he helped free and liberate all of us.” 
 At the time of Bloody Sunday, only 393 of the 15,000 black voting-age residents of Selma’s Dallas County were registered to vote. Today Selma has a black mayor, a black…

With the publication of Lean In, a feminist-accented self-help book for college-educated young women with bright prospects, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg provoked such wrath among feminists that some of them couldn’t even wait to read the book before condemning it as a rich woman’s vanity project. Talk about leaning in! She’s been mocked as a Silicon Valley Marie Antoinette. She’s been equated with Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo CEO who scorns feminism and abolished working from home for her employees—never mind that Sandberg embraces feminism, the word and the movement, and devoted three whole chapters to combining work and family life in saner, fairer ways. The trouble is not that women are attacking women, but that they are using sexist tropes. Melissa Gira Grant, for example, chides Sandberg for having “staff…

President Obama earned one of the loudest rounds of applause during his fourth State of the Union address when he declared, “We must all do our part to make sure our God-given rights are protected here at home. That includes one of the most fundamental rights of a democracy: the right to vote.” He then appointed a commission to “fix” the problem of long lines at the polls. That might be a sufficient response to the one specific concern the president has chosen to focus on. But it’s an insufficient response to the structural crisis of American democracy. While Obama assures us that our right to vote is “God-given” and “fundamental,” that right is neither defined in nor guaranteed by the Constitution. 
 “We talk about a right to vote,…

In an essay published in Artforum in 1986 and included ten years later in his book Kant After Duchamp, Thierry de Duve proposed that the ready-made—
Marcel Duchamp’s innovation of treating an everyday, industrially produced item, such as a bottle rack, snow shovel or urinal, as an art object—“ought to be reinterpreted today in connection with painting.” De Duve’s suggestion has been more or less ignored: in theory, if not in practice, painting and the ready-made have pretty much gone their separate ways. But I still think de Duve was onto something.
 Seeing “Inventing Abstraction,” the fascinating exhibition currently at the Museum of Modern Art—in which Duchamp is a signal presence, although not as the proponent of the ready-made [see “Wild Things,” March 11–18, 2013]—has rekindled my interest in de Duve’s…