Innholdsfortegnelse for May 17/24, 2021 i The Nation

WHITE SUPREMACY NEVER STOPS. IT NEVER TAKES A DAY OFF. ITS FORCES NEVER quit the field of battle, even after a defeat. White supremacy doesn’t retreat; it retrenches. On April 20, a Minneapolis jury found former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd. The verdict came after months of nationwide protests and a three-week trial that was carried live on cable news. Chauvin’s conviction was the absolute minimum form of justice for Floyd’s family, but even that conviction was too much for some white nationalists. Hours after the verdict, white supremacist spokesperson Tucker Carlson went on television and suggested that the jury convicted Chauvin only because they were intimidated by the threat of “rioting” and property damage. Then he had a meltdown, which devolved into maniacal laughter, when…

I AM NOT WORRIED ABOUT WHAT MITCH MCCONNELL will do should Republicans take back the Senate in 2022. I am not worried about what Republicans will do should they retake all of government in 2024. I am not worried, because I already know the answer: When Republicans have power again, they will do “the worst.” I don’t waste a lot of time or mental energy contemplating the worst, because history has shown that I am simply not creative enough to imagine what evil Republicans will come up with next. No matter where I think the bottom is, Republicans will always find a new one. Unfortunately, many centrist and moderate Democrats seem paralyzed by the fear of what Republicans will do if they take back the Senate or the White House.…

President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan seeks to revitalize manufacturing and decarbonize the atmosphere. But one of its most vital elements is how it would transform the care economy. The state has always shaped how care is provided, but in this country the sector has been malformed since its creation. Biden’s proposal, following decades of work by activists and academics, would establish new preschools, build day cares, and fund the care of the elderly and disabled, but it also goes beyond that: It would fundamentally restructure care work in America. Throughout the 19th century, the government played a central role in defining care work. Land grants supported settler families, and states opened poorhouses for the elderly. But two developments in particular created the foundation of contemporary care policy. First, in…

AS A LONG-SHOT 2020 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATEA, Andrew Yang offered an entertaining diversion from the grimly serious business of defeating Donald Trump. Yang’s “MATH” hats, unabashedly nerdy followers, and uncanny ability to bring any social problem—from systemic racism to the crisis in health care—back to his panacea of a universal basic income mattered less than his entrepreneurial enthusiasm, PowerPoint persona, and air of business acumen. But if his current poll numbers hold, Yang might actually become the next mayor of New York City—and that would be a catastrophe. New York has already had a rich dilettante as mayor. And Mike Bloomberg, for all his abundant faults, was an actual businessman who built and ran an actual corporation. The biggest organization Yang has ever run is his presidential campaign—which won him zero…

IN ASSUME NOTHING, TANYA SELVARATNAM’S MEMOIR OF intimate partner violence during her relationship with former New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman—published just one day before the first public report of sexual misconduct by Governor Andrew Cuomo—she agonizes over the fact that there’s no “proof” of her abuse. Weighing whether to go public, Selvaratnam grapples with the daunting reality that it will be just her word against his, noting Catharine MacKinnon’s observation that in rape trials, it typically takes three to four women to counter one man’s testimony, rendering each, “for credibility purposes, one-fourth of a person.” Indeed, when she ultimately decides to tell her story to The New Yorker, she’s buttressed by three other women with nearly identical experiences. On May 7, 2018, the story went live online just before…

41.5% Union election campaigns in which US employers were charged with violating federal law 29.3% Union election campaigns in which employers were charged with illegally disciplining workers for supporting a union $340M Amount spent by US employers each year on antiunion consultants $8B Amount lost to wage theft each year by 2.4 million US workers 4x How much more likely a noncitizen Latina is to experience minimum wage violations than a white male citizen 13.2% How much more a unionized worker earns, on average, than a nonunionized peer —Chalay Chalermkraivuth…

WHEN I WAS IN MY EARLY 20S, I GOT AN E-MAIL FROM BARBARA Epstein, the cofounder of The New York Review of Books, asking me to write about a series of novels by Larry McMurtry. I don’t remember how Barbara knew of my existence. And I don’t know what qualifications I had for this work—besides being, like nearly 30 million other people, from Texas. But it was my dream to write for the Review, and I was determined to do my very best. Excitement turned to terror when I realized that The Berrybender Narratives were—how can I put this?—awful. They featured a family of daffy English aristocrats on the loose in the wild, wild West, raided by Indians, ravaged by buffalo, bedazzled by blizzards. The books were so corny that…

Apricots woolly by the hospital bed,a meal of light. The light fallson my mother’s hands.So much sunlight fallsand does not get upbut its handspick up the dark and go on.Things are heavy becausewe try to carry them.My mother said, “in this lifetime,learn to be alone.” I cutmy hair in the mirror,attempt poems about the breakfast tablewith cereal and figs.Good enough.I pour milk,fallingthrough a shitty apartment,a brief depression. I fall in love,mirrored in satsumas, perfumes and midnight.Not enough. I turn the page but I’m stillreading the novel my mother wrote me.The room with the view.The wide sargasso sea.A pair of hands tends me.Loneliness is an imaginary thing,but so is the entire country.You try. There are ceilingsyou hold uplike heavens.…

I like, winter nights, to find in a heat lampThat beats and fumes, old memoriesRising in the bangingOf church bells through snow spray. Blessed be the bell of libertyThat, ancient, keeps trying to ring,Tossing out his faithful cryLike an old soldier in his bunker On the eve of battle. My soul’s broken,And when I want songs of trouble,It often happens that his voice weakens Like the death rattle of a forgotten manBy a lake of blood, under a pile of the dead,Who dies, without moving, in struggle. (after Baudelaire’s “La Cloche Fêlée”)…

It is a common lament that American society has become polarized. Most commentators consider this to be a harmful development. But for Frances Fox Piven, a distinguished professor emerita of political science and sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and a longtime Nation contributor, polarization is not always negative. She makes the case for what she calls “dissensus politics,” arguing that movements win reforms by exacerbating fault lines in the electorate and compelling politicians to offer concessions in order to keep their coalitions together. ME: Many people have noted how polarized American politics is today. Political commentators suggest that protesters being divisive is counterproductive. You see polarization differently. Can you explain why? FFP: We have to start by realizing that the dynamics of electoral politics and movement politics are very…

IT’S ONE IN THE MORNING AND THE STARS ARE OUT AS HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE SHUFFLE SLOWLY along the wall that marks the US border in the small Mexican city of San Luis Río Colorado. In heavy boots and wide-brimmed straw hats, most everyone here is headed to work in the vegetable fields of Yuma County, Ariz. Bundled against the frigid November air in puffy coats and fleece blankets, they carry thermoses of hot coffee and mini coolers packed with breakfast and lunch, often small, tightly rolled meat burritos. The wait to get through the small port of entry averages two hours and on some days can take as long as four. Every winter, as farms in the northern United States go dormant, Arizona’s agricultural season comes to life. Yuma County,…

EVELYN WAUGH LIKED TO TEASE GRAHAM GREENE BY remarking that it was a good thing God exists, because otherwise Greene would be a Laurel without Hardy. It is a mark in Greene’s favor that he recounts the jibe in a tribute to Waugh written shortly after his friend’s death in 1966. Throughout his life, the fabulously successful Greene was ever ready to pull his own leg, such as when, in 1949, he entered a New Statesman competition by submitting three parodies of his own writing under pseudonyms. One of the entries was judged good enough to merit a guinea of the six-guinea prize. Greene then wrote a letter to the editor owning up to the prank and regretting that he had not won the contest outright, especially as the money…

THE PROTAGONIST OF JHUMPA LAHIRI’S “INTERPRETER OF Maladies,” the title story in her 1999 debut short story collection, is a multilingual tour guide named Mr. Kapasi who speaks, to varying degrees, English, French, Russian, Portuguese, Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, Gujarati, and Italian. One day, he drives a young Indian American couple and their children to visit a temple on the coast of the Bay of Bengal devoted to the Hindu sun god Surya. On the long drive there, he tells in a doctor’s office. The wife, Mrs. Das, notion of a love affair with her, and his them about his other job as an interpreter young woman who had complained of a and understand the words, one N “the gentleman whose birthmark had be-gun to sprout hairs.” He is thrilled by…