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BARACK HOOVER OBAMA The Best and the Brightest Blow It Again By Kevin Baker LABOR’S LAST STAND The Corporate Campaign to Kill the Employee Free Choice Act By Ken Silverstein WAIT TILL YOU SEE ME DANCE A story by Deb Olin Unferth Also: Mark Slouka and Paul West ◆

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Editor ROGER D. HODGE Literary Editor BEN METCALF Managing Editor ELLEN ROSENBUSH Senior Editors CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN, LUKE MITCHELL, JENNIFER SZALAI, BILL WASIK National Correspondent LEWIS H. LAPHAM Washington Editor KEN SILVERSTEIN Art Director STACEY D. CLARKSON Associate Editors PAUL FORD, THEODORE ROSS Assistant Editors CHRISTOPHER R. BEHA, CLAIRE Z. GUTIERREZ, RAFIL KROLL-ZAIDI, GEMMA SIEFF, GENEVIEVE V. SMITH, SAM STARK, MOIRA G. WEIGEL Assistant Art Director ALYSSA COPPELMAN Editorial Interns RAFE BARTHOLOMEW, JAMES DUESTERBERG, SAM FELLMAN, ALICE KAREKEZI Art Intern SAM FINN CATE-GUMPERT Contributing Editors BENJAMIN AUSTEN, KEVIN BAKER, JOHN BERGER, TOM BISSELL, CHARIS CONN, MARK EDMUNDSON, BARBARA EHRENREICH, THOMAS FRANK, NICHOLAS FRASER, WILLIAM H. GASS, JACK HITT, EDWARD HOAGLAND, DONOVAN HOHN, SCOTT HORTON, FREDERICK KAUFMAN, GARRET KEIZER, MARK KINGWELL, WYATT MASON, BILL MCKIBBEN, VINCE PASSARO, MATTHEW POWER, FRANCINE PROSE, DAVID QUAMMEN, DAVID SAMUELS, JONATHAN SCHELL, JEFF SHARLET, EARL SHORRIS, JAKE SILVERSTEIN, MARK SLOUKA, REBECCA SOLNIT, MATTHEW STEVENSON, JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN, JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN, TOM WOLFE, THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA JOHN R. MACARTHUR, President and Publisher Vice President and Associate Publisher PETER D. KENDALL Vice President and General Manager LYNN CARLSON Vice President, Circulation SHAWN D. GREEN Vice President, Public Relations KATHY J. PARK Assistant to the Publisher BARBARA ANDREASSON KIM LAU, Senior Accountant EVE BRANT, Office Manager ADRIAN KNEUBUHL, Staff ADVERTISING SALES: (212) 420-5720; FAX: (212) 260-1096 FRANK M. SMITH, Advertising Director ELENA GUZMÁN, Sales Representative/ Book Publishing, Art, and Culture IRENE M. CASTAGLIOLA, Classified Sales Manager/ Rights and Reprints JENNIFER C. ADAMS, Production Director EMILY J. WILCOX, Marketing Manager Sales Representatives Chicago: TAUSTER MEDIA RESOURCES, INC. (630) 858-1558; FAX: (630) 858-1510 Detroit: MAIORANA & PARTNERS, LTD. (248) 546-2222; FAX: (248) 546-0019 Western States: CHRIS LEIGHTON (916) 446-3926; FAX: (916) 446-3563 Direct Response: EMILY WILCOX (212) 420-5772; FAX: (212) 260-1096 Canada: JMB MEDIA INTERNATIONAL (450) 538-2468; FAX: (450) 538-5468

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LETTERS

Thou Shall Kill The vehement evangelism described in Jeff Sharlet’s excellent report on religion in the military [“Jesus Killed Mohammed,” May] is aligned with a broader concern of military commanders that Sharlet never states outright: controlling the troops. Whether the focus of military evangelism is Mohammed or Jesus, both Al Qaeda and the Pentagon are fully aware of the power of religious belief in producing unquestioning killing machines. The jihadist and the Christian soldier both need to believe that even if their human commanders are fallible, their ultimate commander is not. During my three-year hitch with the 101st Airborne Division, I was impressed by two statements from two different noncoms. The first came from my platoon leader, a veteran of Bastogne and Korea, who asked me shortly before my discharge, “How can you go back to being a civilian? You’ll have no one to tell you what to do.” The second was engraved on a plaque displayed on the desk of the company’s first sergeant: “The First Sergeant isn’t always right, but he’s always the First Sergeant.” Meant as a reminder of his authority, it seemed instead to signify unreliability, and was enough to make me question the validity of his orders. Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response. Please address mail to Letters, Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012, or email us at [email protected]. Short letters are more likely to be published, and all letters are subject to editing. Volume precludes individual acknowledgment.

The “fragging” that went on in Vietnam was, to my mind, mutiny with an obvious origin. Richard Meibers Groton, Mass. Jeff Sharlet’s opening tale of how the U.S. military managed to provoke the household guns of an entire Muslim community with the slogan “Jesus Killed Mohammed” was a choice example of how easily American democratic ideals can be tainted by faithinfused nationalism, resulting in childish vandalism and bizarre pranks. This dynamic extends past the conflict described by Sharlet to another religious community that militarized under cultural pressure: American Catholics. The spread of Catholic ROTC military prep academies in the United States (which is not paralleled in Europe) goes back to World War I and was the result of Catholic immigrants (particularly Germans and Italians) attempting to prove their loyalty to their new, largely Protestant homeland. My father attended this kind of Catholic academy during World War II, then went on to teach at several such institutions as a Dominican brother until he was dismissed in the 1970s for voicing his opposition to the Vietnam War. As a child, I found it impossible to reconcile the “Thou shall not kill” tenet of his faith with his lifelong immersion in military prep—particularly since he had never expressed any interest in entering the military himself. During a recent visit home, I found

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a letter he had received in the early 1940s from the headmaster of his former high school, instructing all Catholic boys to approach the draft board with tremendous enthusiasm for the fight at hand, and with a request for placement within a Catholic academy for military training (as opposed to a training assignment elsewhere). The unintended subtext of this letter was that a Catholic ROTC could protect you from the draft: boys who entered the academy also had the option of becoming clergymen. But requesting to be trained at a Catholic academy did not mean you would necessarily be sent to one. How many boys who followed the letter’s instructions found themselves swept onto battlefields sooner than they might have been otherwise? Raised as a “graven idol-worshipping Catholic” in Springfield, Missouri—headquarters of the Assembly of God church mentioned by Sharlet— I can already imagine evangelicals citing this letter as further proof of the need to treat Catholics with mistrust. As Sharlet’s reporting reminds us, suspicion of the Other is eternal. Terre Thaemlitz Kawasaki, Japan

Off-Pissed Theodore Dalrymple’s entertaining look at Britain’s drinking culture [“The Quivering Upper Lip,” Readings, May] makes many fair points, but his argument stumbles at its conclusion. There is no reason to assume, as he does, that the British situation is analogous to that of the United States, and he is strangely ignorant of the intent of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984. It was not, as he implies, a law designed to increase civility in public spaces. It makes use of a clause in federal highway-funding rules to withhold a portion of said funds from states that don’t “voluntarily” raise their drinking age, and its link to highways is not accidental: the intent was to reduce drunk-driving accidents, and that’s all. In contrast, many of the Mediterranean countries Dalrymple considers paragons of civility have a drinking age below that of Britain. By Dalrymple’s logic, the Spanish

should have been terrorizing their British guests, not vice-versa. Kramer O’Neill Brooklyn

Echolalia Joshua Cohen’s review of several works by and about John Zorn [“Last Man Standing,” Reviews, May] is appropriately polymathic, yet his prefatory history of music is curiously garbled, as though funneled through an intellectual wah-wah pedal. As Cohen sees it, traditional tonality gave rise to atonality (Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system). Next came such pop genres as “hard rock,” “glam rock,” “punk,” and “postpunk,” defined by critics without regard to tonality—a shift in emphasis that supposedly supplanted “the ancient technical systems of music.” But this timeline, in addition to eliding blues, R&B, and folk influences, conflates the creation of music with its criticism. Musicians have always dealt with tonal systems of one sort or another. (Cohen ignores, inter alia, preequal temperament tuning systems as well as Asian and modern EuroAmerican efforts to split the octave into something other than twelve half-steps or seven-note scales.) Even thrash and glam rockers, whether or not they are conscious of the theory behind their musical decisions, work with notes and chords that can be notated and located on the instrument’s fretboard, fingerholes, or keyboard—and that are therefore defined by acoustics. Music critics sometimes choose to focus on a performer’s technique— tonality, timbre, decisions about tempo—and other times reference more ineffable qualities, such as sensibility and self-presentation. An appropriately synoptic timeline of music would take into account these differing concerns to create something less linear and more three-dimensional—a series of interwoven strands rather than Cohen’s flat oversimplification. None of this takes away from Zorn’s fascinating project of melding and mixing; instead, it points to the ambition and complexity of his endeavor. Andrew S. Mine Chicago

LETTERS

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NOTEBOOK Fat and scant of breath By Paul West

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nly the other day, I had the ravaging exposure of five or six women in pursuit of my most numinous weapon: my penis, which they were intent on rescuing from the mishandling of a certain colleague of theirs, who had managed to make the creature live inside-out. My penis had fallen afoul of the device, known as the Foley catheter, and known to thousands as the last twist of the knife. The trouble essentially was that I remain uncircumcised. Perhaps these barbaric women were eager to see me suffer the “cut.” Or they wanted to fold my foreskin back where it belonged, parallel to my penis: enclosed, ready for duty. The beefy hand of some nameless doctor had mangled it out of shape. The whole mess was finally corrected by a Dr. Sanjeev Vohra, who with a goodly dose of panting and heaving made it obey reason, or as he put it, “As God intended it should be.” I shall forever be grateful for this blissful outcome. A hearty, headlong man much after my own type, he and I discussed literature in the intervals of urology. We also discussed cricket. In my rage at having been confined yet again by Foley and his devilish works, I had gone to the john in the dark, thus leaving behind me all manner of restraints intended to bind me into place and stop me from wandering about (which I adore to do). Into the abyssal dark of the toilet I stepped, crouched, and performed, Paul West is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, memoir, criticism, and verse. His memoir “Cadets” appeared in the January 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

then felt something on my right. A Foley? Yes. In a burst of reckless passion I tore it out, freeing it to catapult all over in a shower of gratified passion, leaving behind several floors’ worth of blackened blood and minute ordure. The Foley destroyer had struck again. This habit of mine, resulting in the destruction of one or two Foleys a year, stems from a hatred of being boxed in. Other minor hindrances suffer the same fate, from the delicate tracery imposed on someone who is supposed to ring for the toilet facilities to be opened up to the nameless, glutinous mess that prevents you from speaking; the savage ropes that make a prisoner of your arms, to prevent you from scratching; and the cordlike toilet pull that does not work except to bring apostles running to see what you have been up to this time. The background to all was bewildering and potentially lethal. I had woken on Tuesday, January 27, 2009, unable to breathe normally, gasping for air in fact, and once standing erect had swiftly gotten worse. My wife, Diane, ever vigilant, summoned the 911 crash-cart or ambulance, which arrived with commendable speed. Seconds later, I was into curative sleep and en route to the hospital, but on the way my blood pressure declined from V-tach, and into oblivion, which lasted until afternoon on the next day. Diane remembers my unseeing eyes and my pallor. I’d had a close brush with death, of which I could remember nothing at all. Apparently, some seventeen doctors and clinicians decided I was not to go into the good night awaiting me, piled every appliance into me

and upon me, and successfully brought me round without knowing exactly why. My lungs were full of fatal stuff anyway, but some questioned the heart as well. It was on the next day, feeling almost chipper, that I had the Foley encounter followed by the penis caper. I was still aware of little beyond the need “to go,” but I recognized in the ministrations of the nurses attending me the tender do-no-harm of their credo. Sure, they had to clean up after the night visitor, but that was to come afterward. The main thing was to see that I was all right, which they did with inexhaustible patience, especially Melissa. It was the same with my maltreated penis: gentle fingering with all the precise aplomb of a supersurgeon. I had never been so scrupulously treated in my life. And I thought, betimes, of Kirk Douglas, who in the putrid movie Cast a Giant Shadow declares, “I was circumcised without my permission.” Unlucky he. Thus a rough sketch emerged: oblivion, Foley encounter, penis rectifier. What would come next? That old swimmer’s-high experience, the one I felt usually after two hours of swimming? It was a beautiful interval during which all was right with the world and I was glad to be in it. I had come through again, or so I hoped. I leaned back on my air supply and said a brief orison. What followed this was a week in the hospital: cramped beds, cords to pull for nurses’ attention, constant interruptions for replacement drugs, egg breakfasts, and milk, milk, milk. Not bad, but a kind of wolfish

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demeanor to some of the younger nurses, the less educated, of course. I nominate Bonny, my supernurse. How she finds time to keep up with her reading while always hastening from pillar to post, I won’t ever know. I’ve neglected so far to incorporate into this account the words said on this or that occasion. Some of them were significant, as when the young clergyman, whose duty was to do this favor, asked the already tearful Diane what had been my instructions for resuscitation. Try everything, she resourcefully answered, everything. When that failed, she said it again to a doctor, on whom it worked, preventing her from gazing for the last time at the sightless eyes and the green pallor peculiar to those who have been chopped off, not exactly in their prime but too soon to “go.” I afterward complimented her on saying, “Try everything,” only to hear her saying, “It wasn’t enough.” By God, it was. Who does this kind of thing better than you? We are not responsible, any of us, for our funeral orations. Since then, the phrase has slipped into our daily vocabulary, honorably recharged and pronounced with abstract relief: one of the phrases to savor ever afterward in lieu of something quintessentially blank. A visiting friend, eager to do something for the nurses, brought with her one day some leftover pharmaceuticals. Look what happened when she proffered them. she: Here they are. nurse: Thanks. she: Please wipe your hands. nurse: Maybe I should wipe the pen I am using as well. Said with an extraordinary amount of huff, and reminding me of an old phrase: Be wary of Greeks bearing gifts. You cannot win them all over, even with gifts, this light militia of the local air. But this was a mild one as reproofs go. More important was the authentic cry from the heart about Diane and myself, just back from the jaws of death. This nurse wrote, “She is condescending and insistent, especially about using the hand-sanitizer. Two of the most doting people of all time.” Oy vey. You cannot please everybody, even your obsequies are set in stone, like this nurse’s notes. There was an-

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other nurse hell-bent on delivering little self-serving formulas (“I know my job even if others don’t”), but she isn’t worth rebuking, not in the mainstream of buxom lasses who could not do enough to please. Slowly, I emerged from my cocoon, resuming my baritone voice and responding to questions, as best I could, about coming back to life after being lost for two days. I felt singularly well, but I had missed all the frantic efforts to save me, apart from one photo depicting me in extremis, a cloud of prosthetic paraphernalia amid which I hung like last year’s laundry. “I was that bad?” I asked Diane. “And then some. You were out.” “How come I feel so well then?” “Inspired propaedeutics.” “The best.” I took my offered benison to heart, and promised not to do it again. Vain promise, though. We have little enough control of our bodies at the best of times.

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next was wheeled down long, funereal corridors to the CAT-scan machi ne, hea r tened by bei ng swathed in voluptuous wrap, which I was allowed to keep for the journey back. I knew this machine well, its creaks and juggles. The keeper of the CAT was an old familiar, and he recognized me as well, from months ago. Did he remember everyone, or was this part of his bonhomie chatter? Back from the CAT, I soon was destined for another machine—an elaborate contraption menacingly called a chemical stress test, which an assistant prepped me for by listing the various things that could go wrong. Like vomiting up one’s lunch, like feeling scalded or scorched, like tremors, passing out, or the bone-ache, but not forgetting the overall stink of rotten fish. He was an expert, rolling out his pattern of horrors like a pro, skipping nothing, backed up by his repetitious litany of “If you ever feel it’s too much . . .” Who on earth, confronted with such miserable bounty, could feel so much. Get on with the vomit part, and get ready for the next abomination. “Some, however,” he pointed out, “feel nothing untoward.” I thanked him for the delicacy of his phrasing (how many of them still used “untoward”?), which introduced an aroma

both antique and festal into this doomed arena of blood flow and mishap. “Maybe you’ll be one of those.” He could already sense my revulsion at his hideous machine, tricked-out space vehicle that it seemed. Could they not have designed a Versed that put people out beforehand and awakened them asking when the test would start? As it happened, I felt nothing at all, neither scent nor ripple, neither pain nor excremental overflow. I was one of the chosen, he hummed at me, glad of a freak to bandy words with. I left memorializing those who had suffered, the unlucky survivors of his chemical stress test who had gone on to negotiate greater horrors while this white-faced ghoul with his advanced vocabulary of hurts cringed in the foreground, waiting for the shrieking to stop. Whatever we subject ourselves to, in the interest of something called health, we are destined to come a cropper sooner or later. Some nightmarish oaf, in his pursuit of a more efficient nostrum, is already designing it, full of radioactive strontium or of tiger sparkle. You’ll never get away from it, says the stress machine in the corner, the loitering instrument of pain hunts us all down, and only the strong survive. My experience of yet another stress test was to be absolutely different. I had passed the previous one, extorting from the machine’s owner a tribute to my one blemish, an old scar from way back, not worth recording and maybe an artifact. No more. This one, dobutamine, required the same warning and codes of recognition as before, but, delivered by an M.D., the sermon from the mount as distinguished from the simoom from the half-wit. Nothing “untoward” happened. Nothing to record. The machine ground to a halt. Interrupted in mid-flight. They had canceled the test, for all time, at least until they discovered how to make it behave. They could not deploy the second half, in spite of valiant efforts by Claire Teeter, the lady who knew all things (yet could not make the test 100 percent). So, to the nasal bark of Dr. Brand, announcing that he would not give me the dramatic, enfilading chemical after all. Half the test was perfect, with nothing to report, the other half could not be

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done at all. It was a matter of obtaining the correct angle, which my physiognomy refused to do. I emerged with no test after all, whether or not something unknown was probably blocking my arteries. This left me free to explore the catheter invasion of my blood vessels, which with my history of previous strokes (two), I had been advised not to do. Until science developed a new way of doing things, I would not risk a third stroke, but it was an open question whether or not something was occluding my vasculature. I had almost died of it, and perhaps was scheduled to do likewise at some unknown point.

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stonishingly, I felt good after my brush with the reaper. Nothing felt out of place, nothing obtruded. The specter of the route not taken haunted me as it should have, but not that much. I was already in my second week of successful breathing. No more vainly struggling to catch my breath. And we left it at that, the final decision up to me, until a new invention broke the brink of the sciences, and if I were still around to savor it. I was not the first to be in a quandary, nor the last. The only reason for my being denied a virtual angiogram is that I have a bumpy heart anyway, which ensures its own taboo. So I am denied on all fronts, like a French general in World War II, anxious to do the right thing but barred from it by fate. Each day, several times, Diane asks how’s my breathing, and each time receives the same answer: Perfect up to now. All the same, it was a painful novelty to pass each day thinking it would be my last, and wondering how I would respond to it. Which one of my numerous ailments would catch me out, heart or blood pressure, second stroke or first test? For a few days, I felt like one of the damned, but that soon passed (nothing had happened), giving way to an elation I had not felt since I last swam. It was a feeling of heady delight. I was alive, nobody knew for how long, but I didn’t really care about that. I took an advanced interest in my high spirits. Was it only the relief from swimming each day, a combination of athleticism and joy, or was it something superior? I settled for the

latter, being aware of its spiritual dimension. I was happy, which meant a feeling more like celebration took over from the mild-to-moderate sensation I usually had when renewing my contact with the water. This lasted an hour or so, then ebbed away, only to be renewed the next day. Was it anything to do with swimming at all? I had grown accustomed to thinking that way, but it felt more grand than merely that. Something in these blithe sessions took me beyond water sports: high energy, an almost exciting buoyancy of spirit, the feeling that everything was going well (even if it wasn’t). So I had this exhilaration upon me, much the same as reputed among those about to die. Had I been fooling myself all along with profound misconstruction of an actual morose sensation? The problem, if that, would bear thinking about. Quite naturally an optimist, had I been thinking in the usual way when, at the time, I should have been preoccupied with doldrums? I found it hard to believe, and soon switched to a more optimistic attitude, not far from the original one of triumph. And this applied to my sudden uplift of spirit. With, say, a more decent dose of potassium, I should be even better. The amplified oxygen was doing well by me and so was the Lasix, which helped me pee. All was right with the world, though it behaved like a conundrum, easily misconstrued and deadly to get wrong. In the last analysis (the one you’re bound to get wrong), you can forcefeed your optimism into a simulacrum of common sense until you believe in it. As I do, daily, not willing to justify such recklessness. I’m unwilling to bargain for a third stroke, not until one presents itself, ugly head and all. A brain doctor, surveying the detritus left in my skull after the second stroke, expressed amazement when he heard that I continued writing, as before. From such an amount of damage, and to two separate areas, he expected a gibbering idiot to come out the other end. I am left with an old saw, sounding hollow and vainglorious: Happy days are here again. Or the watch that ■ ends the night, either way.

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“An elegant and intriguing book.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto), June, 1994

In New York Revisited, New York City is a living, breathing character —the streets and skylines are rendered in gorgeous, lyrical detail, and the tenements and skyscrapers crackle with energy. Acclaimed writer Henry James was born in New York, but as a young man he left the United States to live abroad. On his return visit to New York he wrote New York Revisited, which was published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in 1906. This concise book remains today as rich, explicit, and beautiful a description of New York as it was then, and it elucidates both the changes time has wrought, and the myriad ways the City remains a constant. This volume is enhanced with period illustrations and photographs and features an introduction by Lewis H. Lapham, editor emeritus of Harper’s. Handsomely bound with a spectacular illustration of the Flatiron building on the cover, it is a literary treasure. Order today through www.harpers.org/store Published by Franklin Square Press ISBN 1-879957-14-0 Cloth $14.95 FRANKLIN SQUARE PRESS

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HARPER’S INDEX Percentage change since 1985 in the number of U.S. newspapers with reporters covering Congress : –72 Percentage change since 2003 in the number of newspaper reporters covering state legislatures : –32 Number of front-page Boston Globe stories since 2007 that have been written by journalism students : 12 Months after being shot at a city council meeting last year that a Missouri reporter was laid off : 14 Total number of minutes during President Obama’s first 100 days that network-TV news shows devoted to Afghanistan : 62 Number they devoted to pirates off the Horn of Africa : 104 Percentage of Somalis last winter who thought pirates were “protecting Somalia” : 70 Number of new Justice Department lawyers so far who previously represented the Recording Industry Association of America : 5 Minimum number of “czars” Obama has appointed : 17 Price paid last winter for the foreclosed boyhood home of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke : $83,000 Percentage of Democrats and Republicans, respectively, who approved of Obama’s job performance in April : 93, 30 Percentage of Americans in April who identified themselves as Republican : 27 Percentage who said the same month that “socialism is better than capitalism” : 20 Minimum number of Americans whose health care is paid for by taxes : 83,000,000 Number of U.S. children who attend public boarding schools : 4,040 Number of U.S. senators who have law degrees : 53 Number of the nine members of the Chinese Communist Party’s governing body who were trained as engineers : 8 Estimated percentage change since last year in the number of Chinese factories producing fireworks for the U.S. market : –26 Number of the Founding Fathers who were gay, according to Larry Kramer : 2 Estimated value of the unmined uranium under a 100-acre area in southern Virginia : $7,740,000,000 Number of readings and other events listed so far this year on CowboyPoetry.com : 286 Chances that a top-ten U.S. bestselling book since January has been a book about vampires by Stephenie Meyer : 2 in 5 Percentage of six- to nine-year-old American girls who wear lipstick or lip gloss : 46 Minimum number of Spanish collection agencies whose employees wear costumes in order to shame debtors into paying : 15 Amount that Japan is offering unemployed foreigners of Japanese descent to leave the country : $3,100 Minimum value of governmental bailouts of the global financial industry since 2007, per capita worldwide : $1,250 Amount this represents as a percentage of the median annual income worldwide : 39 Estimated total amount that world financial institutions will write off by 2010, according to the IMF : $4,100,000,000,000 Portion of these bad loans and securities that originated in the United States : 2/3 Percentage of rich Americans who say they have “lost faith in the integrity of financial service institutions” : 64 Percentage who say that they now “shop with coupons fairly regularly” : 65 Percentage of Americans who have made premature withdrawals from their retirement or college savings since 2008 : 27 Amount that Utah plans to raise by levying an $8 “conviction fee” against each person found guilty there : $2,800,000 Number of states that have proposed expansion of their gambling laws, including legalization, this year : 16 Projected percentage growth this year in off-the-books transactions in the United States : 9 Percentage change since 2007 in the average cost of a U.S. wedding : –24 Percentage change since last year in the amount Americans spent on canning and freezing supplies : +29 Chance that an American thinks “the Jews” were moderately or very much to blame for the financial crisis : 1 in 4 Chance he or she thinks they were “a little” to blame : 1 in 7 Number of poppyseed bagels that could be made with Afghanistan’s annual poppy harvest : 357,000,000,000

Figures cited are the latest available as of May 2009. Sources are listed on page 72. “Harper’s Index” is a registered trademark.

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READINGS

[Proposal]

THE IRONIC CLOUD By D. Graham Burnett and Jeff Dolven, from “Irony in the National Defense.” Last winter, Lockheed Martin Corporation approached Princeton University with a request for research initiatives. In April, Burnett, an historian of science, and Dolven, a professor of English, submitted the proposal, the cost of which they estimated to be $750,000; Princeton declined to forward it to Lockheed.

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rony is a powerful and incompletely understood feature of human dynamics. A technique for dissimulation and “secret speech,” irony is considerably more complex than lying and even more dangerous. Ideally suited to mobilization on the shifting terrain of asymmetrical conflict, inherently covert, insidiously plastic, politically potent, irony offers rogue elements a volatile if often overlooked means by which to demoralize opponents and destabilize regimes. And yet while major research resources have for forty years poured into the human sciences from the defense and intelligence community in an effort to gain control over the human capacity to lie (investments that led to the modern polygraph, sodium pentothal–derived truth serums, “brain fingerprinting,” etc.), we have no comparable tradition of sustained, empirical, applied investigation into irony. We know very little about its specific manifestations in foreign cultures; we understand almost nothing about the neurological basis of its expression; we are without

forward-looking strategies for its mastery and mobilization in the interest of national defense. This project—a sustained three-year, threepronged, interdisciplinary investigation, drawing on social scientists, engineers, and neurobiologists—will position Lockheed Martin for field leadership in a crucial new area of strategic and commercial growth. HUMAN TE RRAIN

If we don’t know how irony works and we don’t know how it is used by the enemy, we cannot identify it. As a result, we cannot take appropriate steps to neutralize ironizing threat postures. This fundamental problem is compounded by the enormous diversity of ironic modes in different world cultures and languages. Without the ability to detect and localize irony consistently, intelligence agents and agencies are likely to lose valuable time and resources pursuing chimerical leads and to overlook actionable instances of insolence. The first step toward addressing this situation is a multilingual, collaborative, and collative initiative that will generate an encyclopedic global inventory of ironic modalities and strategies. More than a handbook or field guide, the work product of this effort will take the shape of a vast, searchable, networked database of all known ironies. Making use of a sophisticated analytic markup language, this “Ironic Cloud” will be navigable by means of specific ironic tropes (e.g., litotes, hyperbole, innuendo, etc.), by geographical region or language field (e.g., Iran, North Korea, Mandarin Chinese, Davos, etc.), as well as by specific keywords (e.g., nose,

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[Instructions]

KVETCH-22 From tips on how to avoid mandatory military service in Israel, issued by Target 21, an Israeli antiwar organization. The group’s name is a reference to Profile 21, a code used by the Israel Defense Force to classify people deemed unfit for service because of physical or psychological disabilities. Translated from the Hebrew by Ariel Babinsky.

C

omplain about backaches and headaches. These are difficult for the army to validate. It is easier to “play” a character at least partially based on real details. A good way to avoid contradictions in your story to army officials is to provide the least amount of information possible. Give short answers, no more than a single sentence, and parry troublesome questions with a general answer such as, What’s the difference? A depressed person does not speak logically. Speak quietly, so quietly that sometimes it will be difficult for others to hear what you’re saying. From time to time, mumble something unintelligible to yourself instead of directly answering a question. The way you act during the meeting with army psychiatrists is crucial. Opt for a downcast look, and constantly fiddle with your weapon or watch or necklace. If you show up dressed in freshly ironed clothes and well-polished boots and then complain of being clinically depressed, they will know you are pretending. If you show up barefoot, dressed in rags, with a two-monthold beard, they will suspect that you are intentionally exaggerating. A sloppy appearance is the most appropriate for the clinically depressed. Generally, crying is not a fundamental element of clinical depression. You may cry, but yours should be a calm, restrained cry— not hysterical. Avoid an explicit suicidal statement, which can lead to forced hospitalization. Try to imply that you’re only suicidally inclined.

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jet ski, liberal arts, Hermès, night soil, etc.) By means of constantly reweighted nodal linkages, the Ironic Cloud will be to some extent self-organizing in real time and thus capable of signaling large-scale realignments in the “weather” of global irony as well as providing early warnings concerning the irruption of idiosyncratic ironic microclimates in particular locations—potential indications of geopolitical, economic, or cultural hot spots. ADVANCED ACTIVE AND PASSIVE SENSING

This monitory feature of the Ironic Cloud leads to further consideration of the different ways to scan for and detect irony. But this work needs to be done at multiple scales: global, regional, theater, sect, individual, etc. The development of increasingly refined technologies for brain imaging has opened a staggering new world for the investigation of the somatic basis of psychological functioning. Language research has been at the forefront of this work. The time is ripe for a full-scale study of the neurophysiology of irony. What subregions of the brain are metabolically most active in an ironizing subject? What dynamical patterns are revealed by ironic expressions? Can irony be “stimulated” or “suppressed” by chemical or electro-physiological or magneto-inductive means? The answers to these questions will be crucial to the design and testing of ironyscanning equipment. While it is likely that such devices will for some time require relatively high-cost technology, there is reason to hope that biochemical or macrometabolic correlates will be discovered that would allow for inexpensive and portable “Irony Kits” (probably saliva-based, and possibly making use of litmus paper–like tabs) that could be counted on to identify ironic subjects or situations to an adequate first-order level of accuracy. The field value of such systems for military intelligence and domestic surveillance needs no elaboration. DISTRIBUTED ISR AND ATTACK

Admittedly the most speculative dimension of this project is the preliminary investigation into modes of weaponized irony. Superpowerlevel political entities (e.g., Roman Empire, George W. Bush, large corporations, etc.) have tended to look on irony as a “weapon of the weak” and thus adopted a primarily defensive posture in the face of ironic assault. But a historically sensitive consideration of major strategic realignments suggests that many critical inflection points in geopolitics (e.g., Second Punic War, American Revolution, etc.) have involved the tactical redeployment of “guerrilla” techniques and tools by regional

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The Commons, by Erik Benson, was on exhibit this spring at Black & White Gallery, in New York City.

hegemons. There is reason to think that irony, properly concentrated and effectively mobilized, might well become a very powerful armament on the “battlefield of the future,” serving as a nonlethal—or even lethal— sidearm in the hands of human fighters in an information-intensive projection of awesome force. Without further fundamental research into the neurological and psychological basis of irony, it is difficult to say for certain how such systems might work, but the general mechanism is clear enough: irony manifestly involves a sudden and profound “doubling” of the inner life of the human subject. The ironizer no longer maintains an integrated and holistic perspective on the topic at hand but rather experiences something like a small tear in the consciousness, whereby the overt and

covert meanings of a given text or expression are sundered. We do not now know just how far this tear could be opened—and we do not understand what the possible vital consequences might be. Even under the current lay or primitive deployments of irony, we see instances of disorientation, anger, and sometimes even despair. There is thus reason to hope that the irony of the future, suitably tuned, refined, and charged, might be mobilized to “stun” the enemy or possibly kill outright. This would be an extreme form of the sort of “speech act” theorized by the English philosopher (and, significantly, Strategic Intelligence Service officer in MI–6) J. L. Austin. Excitingly, such systems could be understood as the tangible culmination of a 2,500-year humanistic Western project of making words matter.

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[Confession]

OUTLIERS From the “Statement of Nathan F. Leopold, Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb, Made in the Office of the State’s Attorney of Cook County, Criminal Court Building, Chicago, Illinois, June 1, 1924, at 2:50 P.M. (Examination as to Sanity).” On May 21, 1924, Leopold and Loeb, both graduate students in their late teens, kidnapped and murdered fourteenyear-old Robert Franks, a neighbor and distant relative of Loeb’s, in Chicago. The killers disposed of the body in Hammond, Indiana, and sent an anonymous ransom note to Franks’s father. The body was soon discovered, along with Leopold’s eyeglasses, which brought the pair under suspicion. After denying the crime and claiming they had picked up a pair of women that night, Leopold and Loeb confessed in police custody. They pleaded guilty and received sentences of life plus ninety-nine years’ imprisonment after their lawyer, Clarence Darrow, argued that teenagers should not be put to death for executing the ideas of Nietzsche. Loeb was murdered in prison at the age of thirty. Leopold was paroled in 1958, wrote the memoir Life Plus 99 Years, and died of a heart attack in 1971. This document, which records a meeting with doctors and state’s attorneys prior to the pair’s acquiring legal representation, was part of “The Murder That Wouldn’t Die: Leopold & Loeb in Artifact, Fact, and Fiction,” an exhibition curated by Nina Barrett this spring at Northwestern University Library.

ATTORNEY RICHARD CROWE:

Mr. Loeb, do you know the difference between right and wrong? RICHARD LOEB: Yes, sir. CROWE: You think you did the right thing in this particular matter? LOEB: In the Franks case? CROWE: Yes. LOEB: Absolutely not. CROWE: And you know that it is wrong to kidnap a boy? LOEB: Yes, sir. CROWE: What is your idea about the right or wrong of getting a boy and kidnapping him? LOEB: It is wrong, sir. CROWE: You know the consequence of this act, don’t you? LOEB: Yes. CROWE: What was the reason you told other stories as to your movements on that day? LOEB: Well, in the first place, for fear of detection myself, but I think that the main thing running through my mind all through this case, all through the questioning, has been the condition of my folks, and that is especially so because my father is very sick. That has just gone through my mind. I think I have told them now enough afterward.

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CROWE:

Is it the attendant disgrace that accompanies this? LOEB: In relation to my folks. ATTORNEY JOSEPH P. SAVAGE: And you feel remorse for them? LOEB: Yes, sir. SAVAGE: When was the first you felt it? LOEB: I felt sorry about the thing, about the killing of the boy—oh, well, that very night. But then the excitement, the accounts in the paper, the fact that we had gotten away with it and that they did not suspect us, that it was given so much publicity and all that sort of thing, naturally went to the question of not feeling as much remorse as otherwise I think I would have. I think if that thing had not appeared in the papers, if people had not come to me and said, “The fellow who did that was insane,” things like that, I think I would have felt a great deal more remorse. And since I have spent some time alone these last two or three days, it has dwelt on my mind a great deal—not the question of my folks but about me, and the disgrace has not been the only thing I thought of. DR. WILLIAM O. KROHN: Had you any feeling of detracting or giving up the scheme? LOEB: No, sir, I don’t think so. KROHN: You always felt as if you were going to go right through with it? LOEB: Yes, sir. I could tell you the truth, sir. Maybe I had a feeling of that sort. Do you mean that I expressed it or that I felt it? KROHN: No, that you really felt it? LOEB: Yes, I really think that I did. KROHN: Didn’t want to be called a quitter. LOEB: Yes, that’s just it. I have always hated anybody that was a coward. KROHN: You realize now, though, that you had the power to refrain from doing a wrong thing? LOEB: Yes, sir. KROHN: You had the power of will and choice to decide whether you would do it or not? LOEB: Yes, sir. KROHN: There was no feeling on your part of failure to work out a certain scheme or anything else about doing it? LOEB: No, sir. KROHN: You had full control of doing it? LOEB: Yes, sir. DR. HUGH T. PATRICK: I think this question has probably been asked before, but looking back at the very beginning of this thing again more or less vaguely, perhaps, what was your incentive, what did you have in mind to get things started? Perhaps you don’t remember. LOEB: I don’t know. That’s the one thing, you know, when this thing comes up and I feel this way, I feel so sorry, I have asked myself that question a million times: How did I possibly go into that thing, how did I do it?

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“Acid Pollution, Mandoli, Delhi, 2006,” by Sophie Gerrard, whose work was on view this spring at the Photographers’ Gallery, in London.

PATRICK: You cannot trace the original nucleus of

it, can you, Mr. Leopold? NATHAN LEOPOLD, JR.: Yes, sir, I think I can. I think it will be to my disadvantage to do so. But again I have enlisted Mr. Savage’s help, and he tells me to come out and just tell the whole thing. There is no question of being swayed by momentary excitement at all. I am sure, as sure as I can be of anything, that is, as sure as you can read any other man’s state of mind, the thing that prompted Dick to want to do this thing and prompted me to want to do this thing was a sort of pure love of excitement, or the imaginary

love of thrills, doing something different. Possibly, as the doctor here has suggested, the satisfaction and the ego of putting something over, as the vernacular has it. The money consideration only came in afterward, and never was important. The getting of the money was part of our objective, as was also the commission of the crime, but that was not the exact motive. That came afterward. CROWE: You wouldn’t take ten thousand dollars out of my pocket, if I had it? LEOPOLD: It depends whether I thought I could get away with it.

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[Log]

MY SO-CALLED PUTSCH From the diary of Admiral Ozden Ornek, who served for two years as commander of the Turkish navy, beginning in August 2003. The diary has been cited as evidence in the ongoing trial of more than one hundred alleged members of a group called Ergenekon— including journalists, academics, and retired military officers—charged with plotting to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has roots in Islamism, gained power in the fall of 2002. Excerpts from the diary were published in 2007 by the Istanbul weekly Nokta. Its offices were soon after raided by the government, and it ceased publication. Ornek has claimed that the diaries were forged, but an official probe upheld their authenticity. The investigation of Ergenekon was launched in the summer of 2007, after the discovery of weapons caches in various Turkish cities. In April, General Ilker Basbug, who last year became chief of the general staff, denied that there was a conspiracy in the military to undermine democracy in Turkey. Sarikiz means “blonde girl.” Translated from the Turkish by Ayse Sibel Erol. SEPTEMBER 2, 2003

In the morning, I paid a visit to Aytaç Yalman, commander of the army. Ibrahim Firtina, commander of the air force, and Sener Eruygur, commander of the military police, joined us. We talked about what actions we should take. I offered to prepare an analysis of the situation and to come up with some recommendations. They accepted my offer. It seems that from this point on, I will have to devote less time to the business of the navy and more to following political developments. SEPTEMBER 22

We decided that if the head of the Grand National Assembly welcomes us to the opening of the assembly on October 1 accompanied by his wife, who wears a head scarf, we won’t attend. We also reached these decisions: —The proposals prepared for persuading AKP to change its course will be presented to Hilmi Ozkök, the chief of the general staff, this week. —If he agrees with us, then we will proceed with our undertaking. —If he does not agree that something should be done, we will say to him, “Either you resign or we will resign.” Everyone says Ozkök, the chief of the general staff, won’t do anything because he thinks like the government. The last thing the nation needs at this point is tension among the military. We

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have to act carefully, and we have to make sure we act in unison by winning over Ozkök. At the end of the meeting, Firtina got up and said, “Let us shake hands.” All four of us placed our hands on top of each other’s and shook hands. This seemed funny to me. SEPTEMBER 26

I worked on the special report till lunch. It is very well prepared. The report sounds a bit like a memorandum for a coup, but we asked Yalman to soften its language. If Ozkök does not agree with it, either he will go or we will go. The way the country is headed is awful. Somebody has to say “stop” to this. Otherwise we will become another Iran. SEPTEMBER 30

Ozkök apparently had several objections to the report. Most important, he does not believe that the government wants a shar’ia state. I said to Yalman, “If the situation goes on like this, my resignation letter is in my briefcase. I can submit it and leave immediately. I don’t care.” OCTOBER 7

A law concerning the religious high schools was proposed in the Grand National Assembly. The government is deliberately acting against the Republic and the principle of secularism. We brought this up with Ozkök at dinner. I told him the law might force us to accept the graduates of religious high schools at the military academies in the future. He said to me, “You’re exaggerating. The religious high schools are just like any other high school, except that they have additional courses on religion.” I could not believe my ears. How can a mind-set developed through a religious training, one used to explaining phenomena by the existence of a grand creator rather than through the logic of cause and effect, adapt to a scientific education? The truth is that this law would mean the fanaticization of the university. Yalman said as much to Ozkök, who was discomfited. His expression changed. He scowled. OCTOBER 8

None of us thinks that Ozkök is a man of courage. We believe that he is trying to buy time for the AKP government by delaying our reaction. He is acting as if he is in a secret agreement with the government. Although he knows that we are losing prestige in the eyes of the public and losing the people’s trust, he is still trying to get along with the government. Even his soft objections to the AKP are pro forma and perhaps scripted. It is as if his mission is to keep us waiting and soften us. Is he the government’s man? Is he a fundamentalist?

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DECEMBER 3

[Transcript]

At a meeting Ozkök gave everybody present an opportunity to speak, starting from the people of lowest rank. At the end, he said, “I thank you. It’s good that everyone is in agreement. I agree with 80 percent of what was said. But there are also points that I don’t agree with. I thank all of you for speaking openly, but I have no intention of issuing a memorandum. This government has to go. We will handle this through democratic means. I believe that there are many things we can do.” I think this was an historic meeting. We relayed the message to Ozkök that we are not in agreement with him. He, for his part, understood that he is alone. He is insisting on resisting despite appearances. But it is too late now. He has gone down a path he can’t retreat from.

WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT

DECEMBER 6

We all became worried when the amendments to the regulations for organizing Koran courses were published. Then we were also disturbed when the AKP proposed the opening of dervish lodges. Yalman said, “I’m very much put out by these, and made a plan for myself. If nothing happens in January, I will resign.” We all objected to this and decided to make a plan of action: —Win over the media. —Contact the university presidents and have the students demonstrate on the streets. —Encourage the unions to do the same. —Hang posters on the streets. —Contact various organizations and support their anti-government statements. —Undertake these actions throughout the whole country. —All of the above was given the code name “Sarikiz.” FEBRUARY 3, 2004

Firtina and Eruygur are pushing for a coup on March 10. Yalman is trying to stop them, saying the time is not yet right. I told him my thoughts: “The public has to be ready for a coup; that is, the public must want it. There have to be newspaper headlines asking, ‘What is the military waiting for? When are they going to take over?’ as there were before the September 12 coup in 1980. Plus, we are now experiencing circumstances not applicable to previous coups. Our economy is broken and is entirely dependent on external sources. If we can’t get credit from the outside, our economy will crash, and people will suffer. We are not ready to take on this responsibility. Another thing: is the military unified? If we have differences, our end will be disastrous.” I said that for all these reasons, we are not yet ready for a coup. But these are not permanent obstacles. We have to follow what is happening in Cyprus. Our greatest strength is the subject of Cyprus.

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From an October 8, 2007, conversation between Peter Etheredge, a white Zimbabwean citrus farmer, and a man who identified himself as the bodyguard of Edna Madzongwe, president of Zimbabwe’s senate. Etheredge’s farm in Chegutu, which was owned by his father and purchased by their family in 1947, contained three farmhouses and a 55,000-tree orange orchard, and generated $4 million of exports annually. It was seized by the government of Zimbabwe as part of a land-redistribution program initiated by President Robert Mugabe in the 1990s. In June 2008, the Etheredges were forcibly evicted, and their possessions were looted by a mob. Last November, a tribunal of the fifteen-nation Southern African Development Community trade bloc ruled that by seizing the farms of the Etheredges and other white farmers without compensation or court review Zimbabwe violated the bloc’s human-rights provisions. The tribunal stated that its decision was based in part on its finding that the government awarded “the spoils of expropriation primarily to ruling party adherents.” This recording is one of several made by the Etheredges. PETER ETHEREDGE: Afternoon. BODYGUARD: How are you? ETHEREDGE: I’m all right. BODYGUARD: You remember yesterday

you said you just wanted to find somewhere to stay so that today you would pack your things and get some transport? That wasn’t done. We told these guys to be patient, we want to be patient with you. This farm by rights is a government farm of Zimbabwe. Do you understand that? Most of your guys are gone. They are nowhere on this farm. So we are being patient with you. We let you sleep yesterday, we let you go outside your place. Your ninety-one days are gone. So what do you want us to do now? We don’t care, we don’t see any papers from the messenger of the court, we don’t want to see anything. So get outside because we want to plow here. We want to do farming. We want to lift Zimbabwe. Do you understand this? We want to lift Zimbabwe. We are Zimbabweans. We are building Zimbabwe. Okay? ETHEREDGE: I understand that. BODYGUARD: So my friend, we want to be gentlemanly now. Tell us what you want. ETHEREDGE: There is a court case on Thursday. BODYGUARD: No, no, no, we told you yesterday. The court case will go on while you are outside the premises because by rights we own this place. We, we are the government! We are the government! You are forgetting the black man is ruling. We are the government,

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Woodsman 3, a charcoal drawing by George Shaw, was shown this spring at Wilkinson Gallery, in London.

my friend. If you want our compensation, you complain outside the premises, not inside here. So we have come, we are serious with this issue, we are not going back. If you want to report it to the police, you can report it. If you want to report it to the government, you can report it. Everywhere, they know we are here. We have fought for this country, we have suffered for this country because of this land, that’s why we are here and we are going to get it. That’s for sure, my friend. Never make a mistake about courts and business and so forth—the land is ours. You are wasting your money. If you want to play anything, I am very sorry. ETHEREDGE: I don’t know what to do. BODYGUARD: My friend, we want you to take out your things. We are not here to fight, we don’t want to fight. Unless you want to fight yourself. You have got kids in the house and everything, so let’s be like men. Okay? Let’s be like men. I am stopping these guys here

from doing what they want to do, okay? But I have come from Harare. I heard that you said yesterday, Tomorrow I will organize the transport, but today you are coming with a different statement. How can you be a man like that? ETHEREDGE: I didn’t say that I was going to move off today. I said let’s see what happens today. BODYGUARD: Ja, but today, today, my friend, what is happening is you are moving. You take all your property. There is nobody who is going to take even a needle. Take everything and disappear. If you want now to go through the courts, you will file to the courts. Are you getting that? If you want to go to the police, just call them to come and see me. I am not worried, you see. ETHEREDGE: We are law-abiding citizens. BODYGUARD: You are not law-abiding citizens. We have waited for you for ninety-one days, and you didn’t move a piece of your property, so you are not abiding the law. On

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Thursday you are going to court. There are some others that are not going to court; they are going to be jailed. Are you getting me? I am from Harare, I am telling you what is going to happen. You are going to be jailed because you are failing to comply with the laws of Zimbabwe. You are violating the laws. All of them!

[Harassment]

CAR STALK From text messages sent to Jennifer Dicks by Michael Fischer, who was hired by the Auto Financing Network to repossess a car bought by Dicks in March 2008. In April, Dicks, who lives in Phoenix, fell behind on her payments, and a website was created at jenniferdicks.com, stating, “Jennifer Dicks isn’t paying for her Cavalier!” The messages are included in a complaint that Dicks filed against the company and Fischer on April 24.

[Melodrama]

ONE LIFE TO LIVE From an episode of Sibrat, a radio drama that airs four times a week in Ethiopia. The show is produced by Population Media Center, a Vermont-based organization that strives “to improve the health and well-being of people around the world through the use of entertainment-education strategies.” PMC produces soap operas that air in fifteen countries. Although each show is tailored to the perceived needs of a specific country, the programs generally promote AIDS awareness, family planning, and gender equality. Sibrat means “trauma” in Amharic. Gashaw and Tihitina are husband and wife. After this scene, Tihitina is taken to a hospital, where she learns that her prolonged labor and near death are the result of genital scarring caused by childhood female circumcision. Translated from the Amharic by Getahun Mesfin Haile. TIHITINA: [Screaming in pain] Oh, mom! I’m going

to die without seeing you again. MIDWIFE: Push! Be strong! Push a bit more! TIHITINA: Oh, I am dying! Call my mom. GASHAW: [Angered] It’s the midwife you need now,

not your mom. TIHITINA: Oh, I can’t stand it any more! My God!

Call me. You need to call me. I know you don’t give a shit, but I do. I need the car back. Can you quit playing games and give me the car? You no longer own it. Registration is in my name, and I need to get it sold ASAP. Where is it? I’m two miles away. Coming to your house. Are you home? I will stop by anyway. Please tell me where the car is. This isn’t fair to me. Do you have no soul? I’m putting a website up which will be updated daily with ur text messages, pictures, videos, etc. Jenniferdicks.com. You are f*cked! All you do is lie. I wish you died when you fell off the roof. I drive by all your addresses each day. I talk to your old neighbors and offer them cash if they see u. I’m not stopping. And the website is almost done. All about you and you being a deadbeat. I can’t wait. I offered two teens a hundred to call me when they see the car. You’re a crook, so enjoy it. Thought you were good. The website I’m putting up has all public records, and, more important, it’s true. Do you actually think you get a free car? Are you that fucking retarded? You are just a loser. Don’t text me.

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Why won’t you take me to the hospital? MIDWIFE: Are you afraid? Be brave, woman. Don’t

forget that I have helped countless women safely deliver their babies. GASHAW: She’s just putting on a show! MIDWIFE: Please, Gashaw! How can you say that while she is in labor? GASHAW: Well, that’s a fact. All of us respectable folks, haven’t we all been born at home? TIHITINA: Oh, I can’t bear it any longer. If you don’t want to be sorry if I die— MIDWIFE: It will soon be over, baby. Take a break, Gashaw! Will you please leave? Where is the butter? Let me massage her belly with it. TIHITINA: Please! Smother me and put me out of my misery. GASHAW: Do you hear her malice? She knows how much I want to have a child, and yet she wants to die and deprive me of my baby! MIDWIFE: Though we’re not supposed to say that God gets it wrong, wouldn’t it have been better if you men sometimes got pregnant so you could feel the pain? GASHAW: Lady, wouldn’t you rather do your work instead of comparing men and women? MIDWIFE: Sorry, I’m just trying to entertain her. GASHAW: Me having labor pains and giving birth like a woman, is that something that would entertain her? MIDWIFE: I’ve already told you, I was just joking. GASHAW: Look, you are an old woman. You should know what is to be joked about and what is not.

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TIHITINA: Oh! Please help! MIDWIFE: Courage, my dear. Keep on pushing. TIHITINA: I can’t! Where can I get the strength? MIDWIFE: These hands of mine have delivered so

many babies. They are special. Take courage, my dear Tihitina. TIHITINA: Oh dear! Ahh! [Screams] MIDWIFE: This is the pain we had to endure to bring you into the world. TIHITINA: I’d rather not have been born than suffer this pain. MIDWIFE: Hold on, baby! Gashaw, shouldn’t we take your wife to a doctor? GASHAW: Have you been persuaded by what she’s said? She causes me lots of trouble. MIDWIFE: By now the baby should have been on its way out, but it hasn’t moved. GASHAW: Maybe she was lying about her labor pains after all! MIDWIFE: The labor pains have come. There were other signs as well. GASHAW: So what has happened to the baby? MIDWIFE: That’s what I don’t know. GASHAW: Just ignore her. What has not been done for anyone else will not be done for her. MIDWIFE: What if something terrible happens? GASHAW: Why do you want bad things to happen? MIDWIFE: I am only expressing my concern about what could happen. GASHAW: I have never seen a woman as stubborn as she is. She’s so determined to go to the hospital that even if the baby came now she wouldn’t have it here. MIDWIFE: That’s what I mean by you guys not knowing what it’s really like! Is she deliberately delaying the birth of the baby? GASHAW: She will, if she so chooses. MIDWIFE: It’s not right for you to be so unfeeling. GASHAW : Am I not the one who lives with her? Also, if she has the baby in the hospital and it gets switched with another baby, would I not be the one raising someone else’s dirty toddler? MIDWIFE: Why would it be switched? All the babies have numbers. GASHAW: What? Are they going to put a number on my baby, the baby of Gashaw Aschanaqi? It will never happen! She will never have our baby in a hospital. MIDWIFE: All the townsfolk are having their babies in hospitals. GASHAW: That’s their business and not mine. [Tihitina screaming in the background] MIDWIFE: Oh, Gashaw! What has become of you? Take it easy, my dear Tihitina. You’ll soon be okay, honey. Gashaw, her body is getting cold. GASHAW: What a terrible misfortune! MIDWIFE: Oh, I am losing her. Help! Help! I need someone now! Saint Mary, Mother of Light, please don’t fail me now!

[Torture]

DELIVERANCE From a complaint filed December 15 by Catherine Skol, a police officer in Chicago, against Scott Pierce, M.D., and Rush University Medical Center.

A

t 4 A.M. on March 1, when her contractions were eight minutes apart, Catherine Skol and her husband, Larry, proceeded to the emergency department, and the resident assigned to her called Dr. Pierce. At approximately 8:10 A.M., Pierce arrived. He immediately asked, “Did you call anyone before you came in?” Skol responded that her instructions were to come to the emergency room. “You should know better,” Pierce said, “since this is your fifth child.” Over the next two hours, Pierce would not let Skol have an epidural or other pain medication. He would not answer any of her questions and interrupted her repeatedly, saying, “Shut up, close your mouth, and push.” As the room was prepared for delivery, Dr. Pierce took a seat on a stool between Skol’s legs. Pierce then took a cell-phone call from a resident and proceeded to talk at great length about an abortion he was going to perform that day. Pierce scolded the resident on the other end of the call for taking heart tones on a baby that the resident was about to abort. The conversation was overheard by everyone in the room, because Pierce has a very loud voice. Skol was shocked and fearful for her life and for that of her unborn child. In other cellphone calls, Pierce called people “assholes” and told someone to “kiss my ass.” He made comments such as, “That stupid woman, she has no business being pregnant.” At 10:23 A.M., Skol experienced an uncontrolled delivery, which caused a three-centimeter right periurethral laceration. Pierce caught the baby by her arm and leg, almost dropping her. Skol asked to see the baby. Pierce said, “No.” When Skol’s husband asked to hold the baby, Pierce said, “No, the mother always holds the baby first.” Pierce proceeded to stitch Skol without adequate anesthesia. Each stitch was excruciatingly painful. Pierce requested that Skol’s husband hold her down, because she was squirming in pain. Not knowing what else to do, Skol’s husband held her down. When Skol was wheeled out of the delivery room, several people had gathered outside her door, because they had been alarmed by her screaming. Pierce told a nurse that Skol deserved to feel pain because she had not called before coming in and that “sometimes pain is the best teacher.”

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© PRIVATE COLLECTION; COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JAB LONKA GALERIE, COLOGNE/BERLIN, GERMANY

Corrida in Ronda No. 3, by Eric Fischl, is on display this summer at Jablonka Galerie, in Berlin.

[Fiction]

COMPANY TOWNS By Luther Magnussen, from “Work and Industry in the Northern Midwest,” published last summer in The Yale Review.

THE WHITEFISH BAY MERCHANT AND TRADERS BANK

In 1947, I traveled from my family’s summer residence in Interlaken to Whitefish Bay, Michigan, to inspect the books of a bank my father had acquired in a set of complicated financial trades that also involved shares in a petroleum company in Libya and a spice estate in Indonesia. The bank (called the Whitefish Bay Merchant and Traders Bank) had become extremely profitable, mostly because of holdings in a company called Kindersley Provisioners, and my father wanted an assessment of what exactly Kindersley Provisioners did and why they were making so much money. I made the trip from Switzerland, and following a two-

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week stopover in New York and then another week in Cleveland, where a friend of mine owned a now defunct munitions factory, I finally arrived in Whitefish Bay, at the beginning of August. Although I was fairly young at this point, the man they sent to meet me at the somewhat distant airport was extremely deferential, as I suppose he would be given that I was the new owner’s son. But he was also very kind and asked numerous questions about my mother and my sisters, and every time we drove past a roadside restaurant or bar he asked if I’d like to stop for something to eat or drink. I was, in fact, very much looking forward to a cocktail and was pleased when he finally reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a flask. He apologized for the quality of the liquor—it was made locally at a still built on the back lot of an old sawmill—but it was surprisingly good, and by the time we approached Whitefish Bay we were both drunk. Toward the end of the drive, and afterward at a formal dinner where we were served calves’ livers cooked in milk, turnips, salted cod, and

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© PRIVATE COLLECTION; COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JAB LONKA GALERIE, COLOGNE/BERLIN, GERMANY

endless baskets of freshly baked rolls, I heard something about the bank’s success and the nature of Kindersley Provisioners. Several years earlier, the Whitefish Bay Bank had financed a man named William Kindersley, who had been head cook at the Caribou Narrows Iron Mine. He was an ambitious man for a company cook, and he worked hard at making innovations in what he called the “Short Line Cooking Process” and had soon developed a method of cooking good-quality food for about a hundred men with only two assistants. About this time, a Frenchman named Thomas Véline came to him in search of a job, and Kindersley discovered that he had once been a chef at a wellknown restaurant in Biarritz. He had fled to Canada after killing the husband of his lover and, not really liking Montreal very much, had headed west to “lose himself in the North American wilderness.’’ Véline had studied to be an engineer at the Bordeaux Polytechnique before becoming a cook and was interested in things like food preservation, particularly the quickly expanding technology of flash freezing, and he and Kindersley formed a business partnership in the hope of taking what they learned at the Caribou Narrows Mine to other companies in the region. There were a number of hurdles to be crossed, particularly with things like refrigeration, storage, and trained labor. And investors didn’t seem to think mining and timber workers had much use for food made by a French cook. But a man who cuts trees for fourteen hours a day is surprisingly happy when his pot pie is made with first-rate chicken stock and frozen with some sense of how the product should look when it is unfrozen and cooked. The Whitefish Bay Bank was eventually convinced to put up most of the capital, claiming a 20 percent stake in the firm above the interest on the loan. It was the best investment they ever made. Within two years, the company was providing food for nearly all the mines in the Iron Range and had begun to expand to other industries, quickly winning contracts with shipping traffic on the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, military bases in the region, and timber operations as far away as Maine and the Pacific Northwest. I asked if I could meet Kindersley and Véline, but the bankers said this would be impossible. Kindersley had recently died after drinking an entire pint of benzene, which was explained by the fact that he had been blind drunk already and the benzene was stored in an old vodka bottle. Strangely, Véline had also come to an untimely death. The wife of the man he killed had not been particularly happy to lose her husband in that way. She had al-

ways been very much in love with him, despite her sexual transgressions, and because she had access to substantial resources—her family owned a textile mill in Pérouges—she was able to locate Véline without too much trouble. While he was in Crandall, Michigan, visiting a food-science laboratory, she met him outside a small luncheonette and shot him to death with a Beretta M1934. After a speedy trial in Lansing, Véline’s murderer was executed, despite vigorous protests from the French government. But the company (the Whitefish Bay men assured me) was being well managed by three of Kindersley’s nephews, each of whom had a degree in business from the University of Michigan. And, in fact, it was true that the company was being well managed, although I never met any of the nephews. I had only one day to spend in Whitefish Bay because I had to return to Interlaken for a wedding, and the nephews were away on a hunting trip. Instead, I spent the next day shooting grouse and drinking more of the sawmill liquor before beginning my journey back to Switzerland. THE AMERICAN SUN

In 1949 the newspaper consortium American Sun bought nine paper mills in northern Wisconsin from a man named Harris Rollings. The exact sum paid for the mills was not reported since the companies involved were privately held, but by most estimates the deal was worth around $15 million, which, given the time and the place, was a very sizable amount of money. Rollings immediately left northern Wisconsin, telling everyone that he had always hated it there, and moved to Key West, where he threw lavish parties, went out with popular actresses, and invested in various hotels along the Keys, including the Excelsior, the Union, and the Windsor. After about ten years of this, however, he decided that the warm climate had eroded his “masculine stamina,” and in 1959 he returned to northern Wisconsin with dreams of establishing another business there. About this time, early models of the modern snowmobile were becoming popular, and since Rollings now had some experience in the hotel business, he quickly began work on a sort of luxury winter sportsmen’s resort that might cater to wealthy businessmen from places like Chicago and Detroit. He invested his own money but solicited capital from other sources as well, insisting to everyone that he was building the “Chamonix of North America.” The resort was completed in two years and quickly became exactly the sort of luxury retreat for the well-heeled sporting men of the northern Midwest that Rollings had hoped for. I went to the resort one winter with W. H.

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Auden and John O’Hara. We were in Minneapolis attending a conference on Cervantes when we met the industrialist Christian Hoffman, who was staying in the room next door to me at the then famous Finnmark Hotel. Hoffman offered to take us to the resort (called “Nordholm” at that point) in his plane, and the next day I was snowmobiling through the Chequamegon National Forest equipped with two Colt .38 Specials and a large flask of bourbon. I rode all morning, learning how to fire my guns while weaving through trees, and around 1 P.M. rendezvoused with Auden and O’Hara, both of them having flatly refused to ride snowmobiles themselves. We met at what Rollings had named Der Spielzimmer, which was a large outpost built from lodgepole pines on the north side of Lake Nicolet. There were several cooks and waiters in residence at this particular place, and the lunch we were served included turtle soup, fried walleyed pike, and elk backstrap covered with a tart cranberry sauce. We also got extremely drunk during lunch, and O’Hara was nearly shot to death by Auden, who started playing with one of my Colts and (astonishingly) shot it accidentally inside Der Spielzimmer three separate times. Several years later, I was passing through Chicago and decided I might like to spend another weekend at Nordholm. One of my secretaries made inquiries about the trip, and I learned that it had closed down. Apparently, Rollings had fallen in love with the daughter of the plant manager at one of the pulp mills he had sold to the American Sun, and although her father was against the marriage at first, he had acquiesced when it was discovered that she was pregnant. Just before the wedding, however, in early December, they took a snowmobile ride together, and she and her machine fell through the ice, just at the edge of Lake Nicolet. Both Rollings’s future wife and his unborn child were dead within minutes, and after the funeral Rollings moved, brokenhearted, back to Key West. THE HORSE EATERS

During a brief stay in Duluth in 1954, I joined a club called the German Workingmen’s Club, although I was neither German nor did I work in anything like the manner these German men did. But I did have a fairly clear and compelling baritone and spoke German fluently and was invited to join during a time when they were staging a small version of Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. They had once had their own baritone, something of a virtuoso apparently, but he was killed on an ore boat when a cable snapped and a yardarm fell on him.

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These German men drank endless amounts of “brandy,” which was really just the variously flavored grain alcohols so popular with people who live in freezing and lightless climates. I developed a taste for the brandy as well, and found that I could drink enormous amounts and still carry out my fairly demanding vocal duties. We would drink all evening—during rehearsals and afterward—singing wildly and with great enthusiasm as we practiced our parts. It was so pleasurable that I regretted not having performed more in my life, although when I was a boy I made protracted appearances in the choirs at the St. Sebastian chapel in Trieste and the Kyrka Gustavus Adolphus in Stockholm. At any rate, I was so pleased with everything, and so looking forward to opening night, that I sent a courier to Chicago to buy cocaine for the after-party of the first performance, such things not being easily available along the shores of Lake Superior in the 1950s. The performance was a huge success, and we received a standing ovation (although from an audience that had probably never heard another performance of Die Fledermaus to compare it to), and afterward we all went to a brothel on nearby Kipling Lake that was popular with the club members. The brothel was built in the style of a fishing and hunting lodge and had something of a large meeting hall, where an elaborate dinner had been prepared for us. Since many of the Germans came from the so-called Schauinsland foothills, we were served, among other items, large platters of roasted horse meat, a thing all people from that region love. The party carried on for several hours, men disappearing from the dinner table every so often to follow a woman into one of the back rooms, and at two in the morning the German Workingmen were still carrying on the celebration with no intention of stopping. By this point, we were also using the cocaine I had brought. Unfortunately, though, one of the members of the club used too much, and, after trying to swallow what appeared to be an undercooked horse tendon, choked to death beneath a high-standing Hamburg sideboard as we sang a raucous version of “Come Hither Woman, Young and Supple.” To my surprise (because, after all, I was new among them), I was asked to sing Mahler’s “Lied des Verfolgten im Turm” at the funeral, which I did with an enormous amount of emotion and intensity, and afterward we all went to a large Italian restaurant to discuss the tragic event and take comfort in one another’s company.

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Steel Mill, by Peter Waite, whose work was on view last year at Winston Wächter Fine Art, in Seattle. Artwork courtesy the artist and Winston Wächter Fine Art, Seattle/New York City

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BARACK HOOVER OBAMA The best and the brightest blow it again By Kevin Baker

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hree months into his presidency, Barack Obama has proven to be every bit as charismatic and intelligent as his most ardent supporters could have hoped. At home or abroad, he invariably appears to be the only adult in the room, the first American president in at least forty years to convey any gravitas. Even the most liberal of voters are finding it hard to believe they managed to elect this man to be their president. It is impossible not to wish desperately for his success as he tries to grapple with all that confronts him: a worldwide depression, catastrophic climate change, an unjust and inadequate health-care system, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing disgrace of Guantánamo, a floundering education system. Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable—indeed he will refuse—to seize the radical moment at hand. Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. The trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is not what can be done but what must be done. We have confronted such emergencies only a few times before in the history of the Republic: during the secession crisis of 1860–61, at the start of World War II, at the outset of the Cold War and the nuclear age. Probably the moment most comparable to the present was the start of the Great Depression, and for the scope and the quantity of the problems he is facing, Obama has frequently been compared with Franklin Roosevelt. So Kevin Baker’s most recent novel, Strivers Row, is the final installment in his “City of Fire” trilogy about New York City. His last article for Harper’s Magazine, “Change Without Movement,” appeared in the June 2009 issue.

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HOOVER, LIKE OBAMA, COMPREHENDED BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE WHAT NEEDED TO BE DONE. AND YET, HE FAILED

far, though, he most resembles the other president who had to confront that crisis, Herbert Hoover. The comparison is not meant to be flippant. It has nothing to do with the received image of Hoover, the dour, round-collared, gerbil-cheeked technocrat who looked on with indifference while the country went to pieces. To understand how dire our situation is now it is necessary to remember that when he was elected president in 1928, Herbert Hoover was widely considered the most capable public figure in the country. Hoover—like Obama—was almost certainly someone gifted with more intelligence, a better education, and a greater range of life experience than FDR. And Hoover, through the first three years of the Depression, was also the man who comprehended better than anyone else what was happening and what needed to be done. And yet he failed.

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he story of the real Herbert Hoover reads like something out of an Indiana Jones script, with touches of Dickens and the memoirs of Albert Schweitzer. Orphaned and penniless by the age of nine, Hoover was raised by an exploitative uncle who considered him more chattel than son. He had no illusions about the America he grew up in, writing years later, “As gentle as are the memories of the times, I am not recommending a return to the good old days. Sadness was greater, and death came sooner.” Removed from public school at fourteen to work as his uncle’s office boy, Hoover nonetheless learned enough at night school to make the very first class at the newly opened Stanford University, where he studied geology and engineering. He paid his own way by working as a waiter, a typist, and a handyman, and eventually running a laundry service, a baggage service, and a newspaper route. (Unsurprisingly, his favorite book was David Copperfield.) After graduation, he ran mining camps and scouted new strikes around the globe. It was an adventurous life; on one occasion he made a small fortune by following an ancient Chinese map and tiger tracks into a moribund silver mine in Burma. By the time he was forty, Hoover was worth $85 million in today’s dollars, and he retired from business to take up public life. “The ideal of service,” he would later write, was no burden on the striving entrepreneur but a “great spiritual force poured out by our people as never before in the history of the world.” He had long lived up to his ideals. Caught in the siege of the Western delegations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, only Hoover and his fearless wife, Lou, cared enough to sneak food and water to the Chinese Christians besieged elsewhere in the city. He first came to national attention after the start of World War I, when he led the effort to feed the 7 million people of occupied Belgium and France. He worked for free, donated part of his own fortune to the cause, and risked his life repeatedly crossing the U-boat–infested waters of the North Atlantic. His postwar relief efforts rescued millions more throughout Europe and especially in the Soviet Union; it’s unlikely that any other individual in human history saved so many people from death by starvation and want. Questioned about feeding populations under Bolshevik control, he banged a table and insisted, “Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!” In 1920, many people in both major parties wanted to run him for president, but he opted for the Republican cabinet. As secretary of commerce under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he was a dynamic figure, tirelessly promoting new technologies, work-safety rules, and voluntary industry standards; he supervised relief to Mississippi and Louisiana during the terrible 1927 floods and advocated cooperation between labor and management. “We had summoned a great engineer to solve our problems for us; now we sat back comfortably and confidently to watch the problems being solved,”

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the journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote of Hoover’s inauguration in March 1929, in words that might easily have been used in January 2009. “Almost with the air of giving genius its chance, we waited for the performance to begin.”

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enius got its chance less than eight months after Hoover was sworn in, when the stock market collapsed. At the time, such an event wasn’t seen as having anything much to do with the president. Wall Street crashes happened every five to ten years in the old American economy, and it was understood that these crashes would sometimes start nationwide recessions. They might last a year or two, like the recession that started in 1920, or for much longer, like the devastating depression that began in 1873 and, according to some economists, didn’t really end until 1897. How long would it take to recover from the crash of ’29? Who could know? Mere politicians were supposed to leave the outcome to the workings of the market. But Hoover—much like Obama—plunged right in, with a response that was designed to rise above old ideological battles and effect a new partnership between the public and private sectors. Less than a month after the Wall Street crash, he began what would be weeks of meetings at the White House with hundreds of “key men” from the business world. There the president briefed them on everything he had done so far and urged them to cut as few jobs as possible for the duration of the slump. He also encouraged public and private construction projects, signed bills recognizing the right of unions to organize, and used the fledgling Federal Reserve both to ease credit and to discourage banks from calling in their stock-market loans. All of these projects were anathema to old-line conservatives in Hoover’s own party, such as Andrew Mellon, the tax-slashing secretary of the treasury throughout the go-go years of the 1920s boom, who offered the president the absurdist advice to let the market “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” Cutting one of the main ties to the trickle-down wisdom of what was suddenly a previous era, Hoover eventually shipped Mellon off to serve as ambassador to England. Yet there remained little immediate action that the president could take, hobbled as he was by the limits of a federal government that made up less than 4 percent of the GDP and by the reluctance of those around him to interfere in any way with the sanctity of the markets. At what John Kenneth Galbraith would later skewer as “no-business” meetings, the key men of industry pledged their full support, then went home to slash wages and cut as many jobs as they could. By the end of 1930, the gross national product had dropped by nearly 13 percent, unemployment had shot up to nearly 9 percent, and over 600 banks had closed. The Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives, but the primary response to the Depression offered by their laconic speaker, “Cactus Jack” Garner, was a national sales tax designed to balance the budget. Liberal legislators in both parties were more sympathetic, but they wielded little power. As the Depression spread around the world, Hoover—like Obama— towered above the squabbling, suspicious leaders of Europe as well. Only Hoover, who had lived all around the world (like Obama) and also been part of the U.S. delegation at Versailles, seemed to understand the true threat the Depression posed to the global economy. Democratic forms of government were under assault everywhere in the West, and especially in the Weimar Republic, still staggering under the indemnity the victorious Allies had imposed on Germany in 1919. Hoover sought to alleviate the growing world credit crunch by pushing through a moratorium on the repayment of Europe’s considerable war debt to the United States—on the condition that the Allies also forgave Germany its

Illustrations by Ross MacDonald

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THE PRESIDENT WAS HOBBLED BY THE RELUCTANCE OF THOSE AROUND HIM TO INTERFERE WITH THE SANCTITY OF THE MARKETS

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MELLON’S PLAN: “LIQUIDATE LABOR, LIQUIDATE STOCKS, LIQUIDATE THE FARMERS, LIQUIDATE REAL ESTATE”

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indemnity. It was an example of statesmanship at its most enlightened, and if any single U.S. action at the time could have prevented the rise of the Nazis to power, this would have been it. Back on the domestic front, Hoover tried to organize national, voluntary efforts to hire the unemployed, provide charity, and create a private banking pool. When these efforts collapsed or fell short, he started a dozen Home Loan Discount Banks to help individuals refinance their mortgages and save their homes, and created an unprecedented government entity called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Authorized to spend up to the thenastonishing sum of $2 billion, the RFC was a direct rebuttal to Andrew Mellon’s prescription of creative destruction. Rather than liquidating banks, railroads, and agricultural cooperatives, the RFC would lend them money to stay afloat. Hoover, as the historian David M. Kennedy writes, had shown “himself capable of the most pragmatic, far-reaching, economic heterodoxy,” a trait that “would in the end carry him and the country into uncharted economic and political territory.” New Dealer Rexford Tugwell would, many years later, claim that “practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.” Indeed, “Hoover had wanted—and had said clearly enough that he wanted—nearly all the changes now brought under the New Deal label.” Tugwell’s appraisal, though considerably exaggerated, nonetheless testifies to the boldness of Hoover’s program. The only problem was that it did not work. The nation’s credit system still would not thaw, banks kept falling like dominoes, unemployment rates and human suffering continued to rise. For all of his willingness to break with precedent and intervene directly in the economy, Hoover remained unable to turn his back fully on what Kennedy describes as the prevailing “legacy of perception and understanding of economic theory.” As Europe faltered, for instance, foreign gold began to flow out of America’s banks and back home. Hoover reacted by increasing interest rates and raising taxes, in an effort to further deflate the economy, balance the federal budget, and thereby lure the gold back. This was the textbook economic response of the time to fleeing gold reserves; in the midst of the Great Depression, it was a disaster. Meanwhile, the RFC was derided by populist critics as “bank relief” and “a millionaire’s dole”—criticisms echoed today by all those who see George W. Bush’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and Obama’s own Public-Private Investment Program as outrageous giveaways. And, as Kennedy points out, once Hoover had set in motion the great bank bailout of 1931, he “had given up the ground of high principle” and “implicitly legitimated the claims of other sectors for federal assistance.” Critics raised the same criticisms they would raise about Obama’s bailout plans seventy-eight years later. If the banks get a bailout, why not everyone else? Were bailouts only for the rich? Exacerbating the entire situation was the RFC itself. Hoover’s leading weapon to combat the Depression performed with TARP-like languor, secrecy, and nepotism. Throughout 1932, as banks continued to topple by the hundreds, the RFC disbursed only three-quarters of its available money. Although Hoover had declared that the agency was “not created for the aid of big industries or big banks,” a record of its operations revealed that most of its money had indeed gone to a very few of the country’s biggest financial institutions. In June of 1932, the RFC’s president, Charles G. Dawes—who had just served as vice president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge—resigned his post, took a new job as head of the Central Republic Bank in Chicago, and promptly secured for his employer an RFC loan that nearly equaled the bank’s total deposits. Dawes’s successor, Atlee Pomerene, then lent another $12 million to a Cleveland bank of which he remained a director. These facts were, in the end, wrestled out in the open only by con-

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gressional fiat. The recipients of some $642 million of the RFC’s loans— nearly half its total expenditures—were not revealed at all. Hoover, like Obama, had insisted on secrecy to keep the proceedings from being “politicized,” but, inevitably, this fear of politicization in the end only led to more politics. The writer John T. Flynn, who reported much of the RFC scandal in the pages of this magazine, found that most of the money was distributed “by a group of directors drawn from those business groups whose performances during the pre-crash years have rendered them objects of suspicion to the American people” and that the “immense sums they dispensed were given to borrowers, many of whom, to put it mildly, have forfeited, justly or unjustly, the confidence of the people.” The RFC’s deliberations were understood—with good reason—not as effective management but as insider dealing: common financial practice through the 1920s, but politically and morally insupportable at a time when millions of Americans were losing their jobs, their homes, and their savings, and when some were literally dying of starvation. What’s more, even the loans that were made proved less than effective. The rescued banks, much like the rescued banks today, simply hoarded the new capital and refused to venture out into the marketplace. Neither the RFC nor any of Hoover’s other programs did anything to seriously address the other major problems then plaguing the American economy: the decades-long farm crisis that was sweeping away Dust Bowl farmers’ actual soil along with their holdings; the near annihilation of the labor movement; a wildly unequal distribution of wealth; the lack of any real safety net for the old, the indigent, and the unemployable; a corrupt, non-transparent financial system that remained largely unregulated—in short, the need for systematic, wholesale reform of a nation that had foundered on the changing circumstances of the modern world. It would have been very difficult to make most of these changes, because by and large they were advocated only by what were then the most radical individuals on the fringes of the political system. The one thing to be said in favor of such changes was that they were absolutely necessary. By the summer of 1932, the country was in a state of near rebellion, with the “Bonus Army” of angry veterans camped out in Washington, farmers dumping their produce on the highways in protest, and mobs forcibly stopping evictions in the cities. The liberals in Congress had moved at last beyond Hoover, with even Jack Garner backing a $2.1-billion package of public works and direct relief. Hoover vetoed it, warning against the moral entrapments of “the dole.”

WHY WAS HOOVER SO RELUCTANT TO MAKE THE RADICAL CHANGES THAT WERE SO CLEARLY NEEDED?

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hy was Herbert Hoover so reluctant to make the radical changes that were so clearly needed? It could not have been a question of competence or compassion for this lifelong Quaker, who had rushed sustenance to starving people around the world regardless of their nationalities or beliefs. Ultimately, Hoover could not break with the prevailing beliefs of his day. The essence of the Progressive Era in which he had come of age—the very essence of his own public image—was that government was a science. It was not a coincidence that this era brought us the very term “political science,” along with the advent of “nonpartisan” elections and “city managers” to replace mayors. Since the 1890s, Hoover and his contemporaries had promoted this brand of progressivism as an alternative not only to the political and corporate corruption of the Gilded Age but also to the furious class and regional warfare that progressivism’s predecessor, populism, seemed to promise. Progressivism aspired to be something of a political science itself, untrammeled by ideological or partisan influence: there was a right way and a wrong way to do things, and all unselfish and uncorrupted individuals could be counted on to do the right thing, once they were shown what that was. There were plenty of progressives, led by Teddy Roosevelt, who under-

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HOOVER COULD NOT ACCEPT THAT THE BASIC ECONOMIC TENETS HE HAD BELIEVED IN ALL HIS LIFE WERE DISCREDITED

stood that bringing real change meant fighting to bust up trusts, regain public ownership of utilities, and secure rights for labor, women, and others. But the great national effort inspired by World War I softened memories of the bitter class conflict that had characterized much of American politics since the Civil War, just as the rollicking prosperity of the 1920s erased memories of the postwar Red Scare and the crushing of labor unions. Throughout the decade, big business sought to co-opt any lingering labor resentments by forming “company unions” under what they called “the American Plan.” Volunteerism and boosterism would take care of the rest. Prosperity would come through an always rising stock market. Hoover’s every decision in fighting the Great Depression mirrored the sentiments of 1920s “business progressivism,” even as he understood intellectually that something more was required. Farsighted as he was compared with almost everyone else in public life, believing as much as he did in activist government, he still could not convince himself to take the next step and accept that the basic economic tenets he had believed in all his life were discredited; that something wholly new was required. Such a transformation would have required a mental suppleness that was simply not in the makeup of this fabulously successful scientist and self-made businessman. And it was this inability to radically alter his thinking that, ultimately, distinguished Hoover from Franklin Roosevelt. FDR was by no means the rigorous thinker that Hoover was, and many observers then and since have accused him of having no fixed principles whatsoever. And yet it was Roosevelt, the Great Improviser, who was able to patch and borrow and fudge his way to solutions not only to the Depression but also to sustained prosperity and democracy. It was FDR, brought up with the entitled, patronizing worldview of a Hudson Valley aristocrat, who was able to overcome attachments to all classes, all theories. It was Roosevelt who understood the imperfections, the rough-andtumble of politics. The programs of the First and Second New Deals were a hodgepodge of ideologies—which is precisely why they worked. The innovations they brought about, however sloppily, were the core of twentieth-century American liberalism in that they reflected the complex ever-changing realities of the modern world. Originally, Roosevelt, too, endorsed much of the progressive vision—or at least its pale 1920s imitation—as evidenced by his National Recovery Administration, a flabby utopian plan that would have had business, labor, and government collaborate to set prices, wages, and industry standards down to the most minute details. The NRA would have carried 1920sstyle business progressivism right to the doorstep of the corporate state, had it been even vaguely workable. But right from the beginning, Roosevelt also endorsed reforms, from regulating Wall Street to saving the farmers to backing labor unions in their organizing wars, that required conflict—the only way in which a political and economic system can be fundamentally remade. When the NRA quickly proved to be a bust, FDR discarded it, and replaced his failure with the Second New Deal, in which business, labor, and government were situated as countervailing forces against one another—a fundamental power shift that enabled advances in both prosperity and democracy unmatched in human history.

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uch like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past—without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like Hoover, he is bound to fail. President Obama, to be fair, seems to be even more alone than Hoover was in facing the emergency at hand. The most appalling aspect of the present crisis has been the utter fecklessness of the American elite in failing to confront it. From both the private and public sectors, across the entire political spectrum, the lack of both will and new ideas has

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been stunning. When it came to the opposition, Franklin Roosevelt reaped the creative support of any number of progressive Republicans throughout his twelve years in office, ranging from New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to Nebraska Senator George Norris to key cabinet members such as Henry A. Wallace, Harold Ickes, Henry Stimson, and Frank Knox. Obama, by contrast, has had to contend with a knee-jerk rejectionist Republican Party. More frustrating has been the torpor among Obama’s fellow Democrats. One might have assumed that the adrenaline rush of regaining power after decades of conservative hegemony, not to mention relief at surviving the depredations of the Bush years, or losing the vestigial tail of the white Southern branch of the party, would have liberated congressional Democrats to loose a burst of pent-up, imaginative liberal initiatives. Instead, we have seen a parade of aged satraps from vast, windy places stepping forward to tell us what is off the table. Every week, there is another Max Baucus of Montana, another Kent Conrad of North Dakota, another Ben Nelson of Nebraska, huffing and puffing and harrumphing that we had better forget about single-payer health care, a carbon tax, nationalizing the banks, funding for mass transit, closing tax loopholes for the rich. These are men with tiny constituencies who sat for decades in the Senate without doing or saying anything of note, who acquiesced shamelessly to the worst abuses of the Bush Administration and who come forward now to chide the president for not concentrating enough on reducing the budget deficit, or for “trying to do too much,” as if he were as old and as indolent as they are. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—yet another small gray man from a great big space where the tumbleweeds blow—seems unwilling to make even a symbolic effort at party discipline. Within days of President Obama’s announcing his legislative agenda, the perpetually callow Indiana Senator Evan Bayh came forward to announce the formation of a breakaway caucus of fifteen “moderate” Democrats from the Midwest who sought to help the country make “the changes we need” but “make sure that they’re done in a practical way that will actually work”—a statement that was almost Zen-like in its perfect vacuousness. Even most of the Senate’s more enlightened notables, such as Russ Feingold of Wisconsin or Claire McCaskill of Missouri or Sherrod Brown of Ohio, have had little to contribute beyond some hand-wringing whenever the idea of a carbon tax or any other restrictions on burning coal are proposed. President Obama, with a laudable respect for the separation of powers, has left the details and even the main tenets of his agenda to be worked out by these same congressional Democrats. This approach looks like an exercise in democracy drawn from his days as a community organizer, the sort of strategy that helps a neighborhood to decide whether it wants, say, a health clinic or a youth center. What he doesn’t care to acknowledge is that, in the case of the U.S. Congress, he’s dealing with a neighborhood where maybe half want a health clinic and the rest are holding out for grenade launchers and crystal meth.

A PARADE OF ANCIENT SATRAPS FROM VAST, WINDY PLACES IS STEPPING FORWARD TO TELL US WHAT IS OFF THE TABLE

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OBAMA, LIKE HOOVER, IS ALMOST ALONE AMONG POLITICIANS IN GRASPING THE MAGNITUDE OF THE CRISIS

Some have suggested that this is a subtle strategy to ensure that the White House retains the whip hand, that Obama is reserving for himself the role of “decider” over competing plans. But what is the decision then? Half a health clinic and one grenade launcher? A plan for universal health care that is not universal and doesn’t cut costs will not work. A plan for combating climate change that perpetuates the shibboleth of “clean coal” will do nothing. Far from controlling the process, Obama’s procedure is more likely to commit him to one of Congress’s nebulous non-plans. Yet Obama’s lack of direction, his lack of accomplishments in his Hundred Days and counting, cannot be attributed solely to his illusions about the august body he just vacated. Obama, like Hoover in his time, is almost alone among politicians in grasping the magnitude of the crisis. In his masterful February speech before the joint houses of Congress, Obama explained to the country why we cannot afford to continue with a tottering health-care system that has left 46 million Americans uninsured and that impedes our exports by adding, for instance, $1,500 to the cost of every GM car; why it is that climate change has to be addressed now, and how by addressing it we can regain our industrial base and actually begin to make things again; why it is that our financial system could not simply be bailed out and patched up but must be fundamentally reformed and reregulated. Above all, he explained the necessary interaction of all these reforms, of how they were not just some liberal wish list but the actions that the radical moment demanded. Speeches almost as powerful have followed, always linking these ideas together. But, like Hoover, Obama has been unable to make his actions live up to his words. Health care is being gummed to death on Capitol Hill. Obama has done nothing to pass “card check” provisions that would facilitate union organization and quietly announced that he would not seek stronger labor and environmental protections in NAFTA. He has capitulated on cap-and-trade in the budget outline and never even bothered to push for an actual carbon tax. Only minuscule portions of the stimulus bill or his budget proposals were dedicated to mass transit, and his indifference to the issue—what must be a major component of any serious effort to go green—was reflected in his appointment of a mediocre Republican time-server, Ray LaHood, as his transportation secretary. Still worse is Obama’s decision to leave the reordering of the financial world solely to Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, both of whom played such a major role in deregulating Wall Street and bringing on the disaster in the first place. It’s as if, after winning election in 1932, FDR had brought Andrew Mellon back to the Treasury. Just as Herbert Hoover could not, in the end, break away from the best economic advice of the 1920s, Barack Obama is sticking with the “key men” of the 1990s. The predictable result is that, even as he claims to recognize the interlocking nature of the problems facing us and vows to solve them as a whole, the president is in fact abandoning most of his program, at least for the time being.

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o doubt, President Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would claim that by practicing “the art of the possible,” they are ensuring that “the perfect does not become the enemy of the good.” But by not even proposing the relevant legislation, Obama has ceded a key part of the process—so much so that his retreat seems not so much tactical as a reversion to his core political beliefs. A major theme of Obama’s 2006 book The Audacity of Hope is impatience with “the smallness of our politics” and its “partisanship and acrimony.” He expresses frustration at how “the tumult of the sixties and the subsequent backlash continues to drive our political discourse,” and voices a professional appreciation for Ronald Reagan’s ability to exploit such divisions. The politician he admires the most—ironically enough, considering

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the campaign that was to come—is Bill Clinton. For all his faults, Clinton, in Obama’s eyes, “instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being presented to the American people” and came up with his “Third Way,” which “tapped into the pragmatic, non-ideological attitude of the majority of Americans.” This is an analysis consistent with Obama’s personal story. Like Herbert Hoover, Obama grew up as an outsider and overcame formidable odds—hence his constant promotion of personal responsibility and education. He came of age in a time when hardworking young men and women like him went to Wall Street or to Silicon Valley, and—once properly “incentivized” by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—seemed to save the national economy, creating what appeared to be great general prosperity while doing well themselves. There’s no need to do battle with these strivers and achievers, individuals as accomplished in their fields as Obama is in his. All that’s required is to get them back on their feet, get the money running again, and maybe give them a few new rules to live by, a new set of incentives to get them back on track. Just as Herbert Hoover came to internalize the “business progressivism” of his era as a welcome alternative to the futile, counterproductive conflicts of an earlier time, so has Obama internalized what might be called Clinton’s “business liberalism” as an alternative to useless battles from another time—battles that liberals, in any case, tended to lose. Clinton’s business liberalism, however, is a chimera, every bit as much a capitulation to powerful and selfish interests as was Hoover’s 1920s progressivism. We are back in Evan Bayh territory here, espousing a “pragmatism” that is not really pragmatism at all, just surrender to the usual corporate interests. The common thread running through all of Obama’s major proposals right now is that they are labyrinthine solutions designed mainly to avoid conflict. The bank bailout, cap-and-trade on carbon emissions, health-care pools—all of these ideas are, like Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 1993 health plan, simultaneously too complicated to draw a constituency and too threatening for Congress to shape and pass as Obama would like. They bear the seeds of their own defeat. Obama will have to directly attack the fortified bastions of the newest “new class”—the makers of the paper economy in which he came of age— if he is to accomplish anything. These interests did not spend fifty years shipping the greatest industrial economy in the history of the world overseas only to be challenged by a newly empowered, green-economy working class. They did not spend much of the past two decades gobbling up previously public sectors such as health care, education, and transportation only to have to compete with a reinvigorated public sector. They mean, even now, to use the bailout to make the government their helpless junior partner, and if they can they will devour every federal dollar available to recoup their own losses, and thereby preclude the use of any monies for the rest of Barack Obama’s splendid vision. Franklin Roosevelt also took office imagining that he could bring all classes of Americans together in some big, mushy, cooperative scheme. Quickly disabused of this notion, he threw himself into the bumptious give-and-take of practical politics; lying, deceiving, manipulating, arraying one group after another on his side—a transit encapsulated by how, at the end of his first term, his outraged opponents were calling him a “traitor to his class” and he was gleefully inveighing against “economic royalists” and announcing, “They are unanimous in their hatred for me—and I welcome their hatred.” Obama should not deceive himself into thinking that such interest-group politics can be banished any more than can the cycles of Wall Street. It is not too late for him to change direction and seize the radical moment at hand. But for the moment, just like another very good man, Barack Obama ■ is moving prudently, carefully, reasonably toward disaster.

IN THAT OBAMA’S MAJOR PROPOSALS ARE DESIGNED TO AVOID CONFLICT, THEY BEAR THE SEEDS OF THEIR OWN DEFEAT

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LABOR’S LAST STAND The corporate campaign to kill the Employee Free Choice Act By Ken Silverstein

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n a Monday morning this past April, a few dozen Arkansans from that state’s Chamber of Commerce could be found holing up in a Marriott hotel in Crystal City, Virginia, less than a mile from Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport. They assembled in the hotel’s Jefferson Ballroom, on one wall of which hangs a portrait of the third president standing before a giant Declaration of Independence. Despite the early hour, the visitors were cheerful, sipping from big Starbucks cups as they gathered up political literature and hard candies and waited for their program to begin. These men and women had come to town as part of a lobbying “fly-in” coordinated with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Their mission: to battle the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a bill that would make it easier for workers to organize unions, which now represent only 12 percent of the American labor force (compared with

nearly a third in Canada and more than a quarter in the United Kingdom). That morning the group was to be briefed by Glenn Spencer, a deputy chief of staff at the Labor Department during the George W. Bush years who is now coordinating the Chamber of Commerce’s campaign against EFCA. Another squad of flyins from Arkansas was meeting at the Chamber’s downtown Washington headquarters, and the two forces would soon join to fan out across Capitol Hill for meetings with members of the state’s congressional delegation. That night, the Arkansans would reconvene at the hotel for a reception and dinner at the Sky View Lounge, an event to help business leaders “maintain close and productive contact” with the state’s two senators and four representatives. Among the sponsors of the dinner were some of Arkansas’s most powerful corporations, including Tyson Foods, the steel company Nucor, and, of

Ken Silverstein is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine.

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Illustrations by Richard Mia

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course, Walmart. The true purpose of all this effort and expense was to persuade the state’s two senators—Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln, both Democrats—to support a Republican bid to stop EFCA from coming to a vote. After eight years in the Bush wilderness, the labor movement has achieved some early victories under Barack Obama. He has issued an executive order supporting the use of union labor on government construction projects, for example, and another barring federal contractors from seeking reimbursement for anti-union expenditures; also, he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which extends the deadline for filing paydiscrimination claims. But for business, EFCA is seen as a sort of Armageddon. Currently, when workers wish to unionize, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will oversee an election after 30 percent of the employees in a given workplace sign union authorization cards. Under EFCA, if half of the company’s employees sign such cards, no election would be required, a practice that is standard in much of the industrialized world. Another provision of EFCA, and one fiercely opposed by business, calls for binding arbitration after 120 days if a company and a new union are unable to come to terms on a contract. EFCA’s opponents deride the bill as “card check” and say it would strip workers of their “sacred right” to hold a secret-ballot election. “This is the demise of a civilization,” Bernie Marcus, the former CEO of The Home Depot, said of EFCA during a business conference call last fall. Sheldon Adelson, the hotel magnate and funder of right-wing causes, calls EFCA “one of the two fundamental threats to society,” the other being radical Islam. Randy Zook, head of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, spoke in similarly dire terms when I met him at the Marriott. “For small-business and plant managers to have a chance to survive, they have to be incredibly flexible and incredibly ruthless in terms of efficiency and cost-cutting measures,” said Zook, who before joining the Chamber spent three decades with the Atlantic Envelope Company. “It’s not just about wages but [union] work rules, which are very rigid. We have companies in Arkansas selling 25 to 30 percent of their total output abroad. We are in a global environment, and to succeed you have to be better, faster, and cheaper than your competitors. The business community is unanimous on EFCA, and I mean so unanimous that it’s crazy.” EFCA enjoys overwhelming support in the House, and there has never been any doubt that the bill will pass there. It also commands a majority in the Senate, but supporters need sixty votes for “cloture,” that is, to stop a promised filibuster by the bill’s G.O.P. opponents. In March, exactly two weeks after the U.S. Chamber spon-

sored a fly-in from Pennsylvania, Senator Arlen Specter announced that he would oppose cloture on the bill—a potentially fatal blow, because Specter, who himself co-sponsored the bill in 2003 and 2005, was thought to be the Republican most likely to vote for cloture. When he announced in April that he was switching parties, Specter went out of his way to reiterate his opposition to EFCA and cloture. Two weeks before the Marriott event, Senator Lincoln, always carefully attuned to the desires of Walmart, announced her intention to oppose cloture. This announcement no doubt helped to explain the upbeat mood of the Arkansan delegation, which occupied three rows of folding chairs before a black-draped table at the head of the room. “When you see [Lincoln] later today,” Glenn Spencer told the audience, “it’s important that you thank her and let her know she did the right thing. We really need to get Senator Pryor to follow her lead. We haven’t gotten him quite there yet, but I know you guys will keep working him and we will get him across the goal line. The forest has gotten a little thinner, but we’re still not out of the woods. It’s still too early to pull out the champagne.” “What about a beer?” retorted Zook, to general amusement. Spencer said that the strategy now was to win over a few more Democrats “and fully bury this.” From the crowd, a voice asked which Democrats might be persuaded to vote with business. Spencer counted out about a dozen on his fingers, including Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Jim Webb of Virginia (who the same day expressed reservations about EFCA), Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Tom Carper of Delaware (“He’s a co-sponsor, but I was on a conference call with him and he said he thought this was a terrible bill”), and Dianne Feinstein of California (“believe it or not”). “I’m not a seasoned lobbyist like some of those in the room, but as I see it we’re in a pretty good position not to compromise,” said a man in the audience. “Yeah,” replied Spencer. “We are. But the unions have not given up on this bill. At some point they will have to make a strategic decision: do they try to get a compromise bill now and come back for more later, or do they go down fighting on this bill and then see if they can pick up a few seats in the 2010 elections? This shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but unfortunately it largely breaks down along the lines of Rs and Ds. We’ve got to keep fighting to make sure that a bad compromise bill doesn’t come to the floor, and keep fighting right through 2010.”

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efore dispatching the Arkansans to their lobbying mission on the Hill, Zook made a forceful declaration: “It is critical that we take the

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view that our beef is not with organized labor but with a terrible piece of legislation.” This is a central talking point—cooked up by Navigators Global, the chief public-relations firm for the anti-EFCA coalition—but it is not convincing on even a cursory examination of the coalition’s leadership and its prehistory. Indeed, the campaign to defeat EFCA is best seen as the latest onslaught in a business crusade to destroy the labor movement, one that began in the early twentieth century but has been waged with increasing intensity only since the mid1970s. During 1974 and 1975, with the specter of stagflation looming—and amid the twin political crises of Vietnam and Watergate—top corporate officials held a series of meetings under the auspices of The Conference Board. The climate was dark. Feeling pressured by the unions, as well as by the demands of an ungrateful citizenry, the assembled CEOs feared a popular revolt might be

thing; a little money to go with the rhetoric is better. They listen better.” Around the same time, unions sought to push through a labor-law reform bill that shared many features with EFCA. The legislation would have made it easier for workers to organize, by streamlining the process of holding elections under the oversight of the National Labor Relations Board and imposing stiff fines on companies that fired activists. The Business Roundtable, the traditional political leader of major corporations, had generally hesitated to take anti-union positions in public, and some members initially declined to oppose the bill. The group ultimately joined the fight, however, as did a number of major trade associations and the newly revitalized U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represented smaller businesses and took a much harder line toward labor. As with EFCA today, the business interests

THE BUSINESS LOBBY HAS FRAMED ITS OPPOSITION TO EFCA AROUND THE “SECRET BALLOT” AND LABOR “COERCION.” BUT THE CURRENT RULES GIVE EMPLOYERS A CHOKEHOLD OVER UNION ELECTIONS imminent. “We have been hoist with our own petard,” one executive said. “We have raised expectations that we can’t deliver on.” Another executive complained, “One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War II.” With profits down and debt up, business determined that the rules of the game had to be changed in its favor. “[I]t will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow—the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more,” Business Week stated bluntly in 1974. “Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept the new reality.” A key part of the sales job was an ideological attack on unions. In order to target universities, intellectuals, and the media, corporations shoveled cash into conservative think tanks. They also vastly increased their lobbying efforts—as Kim Phillips-Fein recounts in her new book, Invisible Hands, most Fortune 500 firms didn’t have Washington public-affairs offices in 1970, but 80 percent did by 1980—and poured money into the political system as well. Justin Dart, chairman of California’s Dart Industries and a major financial backer of Ronald Reagan, was an early champion of corporate political-action committees. “I don’t advocate that business buy a legislator,” he said in 1978. “Rhetoric is a very fine

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in the late 1970s mounted a multimilliondollar campaign that included a massive lobbying effort by CEOs from around the country to pressure Congress, as well as the formation of “grass-roots” coalitions and the purchase, from friendly economists, of research concluding that the bill would all but destroy the U.S. economy. As with EFCA, the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, and the legislation had overwhelming support in the House of Representatives. Yet the unions couldn’t get it through; in the end, it was filibustered to death by Senators Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar. “For the first time in twenty years, the business community had vanquished organized labor in a fight over a ‘gut’ issue for labor,” the New York Times observed at the time. No significant revision of union-organizing laws has taken place since then, as labor’s ranks, and influence, have steadily dwindled. In 1954, there were 17 million union members, which then meant 35 percent of the workforce. This was the high point of unionism in the country and also was, not coincidentally, when the American middle class was created. The decline of the union movement since then has been accompanied by growing social inequality, slashed salaries, and, for the first time in American history, a de-linking of rising productivity from rising wages. Labor has had al-

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most no voice in any administration since 1980, including that of Bill Clinton, whose White House political director, Rahm Emanuel (now Obama’s chief of staff), was a chief operative in passing NAFTA over the strenuous objections of labor; moreover, Clinton’s chief of staff, John Podesta (who led Obama’s transition team), spearheaded the campaign to pass Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, which further decimated union jobs. Under George W. Bush, all the key agencies were stacked with anti-union appointees. Bush’s labor secretary, Elaine Chao—the wife of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and now a “distinguished fellow” at the Heritage Foundation—worked openly against EFCA, saying in 2007, “A worker’s right to a secret-ballot election is an intrinsic right in our democracy that should not be legislated away at the behest of special-interest groups.” The attorney Robert Battista, whom Bush appointed chairman of the NLRB, had during the 1990s counseled Detroit’s newspapers on union-breaking and now works for a law firm that advises companies on how to keep unions out. Although the business lobby has framed its opposition to EFCA around the issues of the “secret ballot” and labor “coercion,” the current rules give management a chokehold over union elections. Employers can require that workers attend “captive audience” meetings, that is, antiunion presentations during the workday at which union supporters are forbidden to speak. Firing of union activists and intimidation of employees during organizing drives are routine practices and have been encouraged by lax enforcement of the law: according to the NLRB’s most recent annual report, it took an average of about eighteen months for administrative-law judges to rule on charges of unfair labor practices. In the uncommon cases where an employer is found guilty of illegally firing or demoting a worker, the firm typically needs only to reinstate the worker and pay back wages, minus any income the worker may have earned in the interim. With delays so long and penalties so minor, as the group Human Rights Watch noted in a recent report, companies often regard fines as “a cost of doing business—a small price to pay for defeating worker organizing efforts.”

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eading the fight against EFCA has been an organization called Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (CDW), an ad-hoc group formed in cooperation with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Buoyed by funding from hundreds of companies and trade associations, CDW and its allies have spent tens of millions of dollars on TV and radio advertisements, worked the right-wing talk-radio cir-

cuit, and paid for “independent” studies to be trotted out in congressional hearings. Technically, CDW was created in 2007, but its true origins date to several years earlier; and its effective birthplace, as with so many conservative efforts in Washington, was the offices of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. As early as the fall of 2005, Norquist’s group began discussing the danger EFCA posed during the monthly meetings of its First Friday Labor Reform Working Group. On November 16, 2006, eight lobbyists—all representing organizations that had taken part in

the First Friday meetings and that would become key actors in CDW—signed an antiEFCA letter on U.S. Chamber of Commerce letterhead and sent it to Congress. The lobbyists included Bruce Josten of the Chamber, John Gay of the National Restaurant Association, and Robert Green of the National Retail Federation Association. Other early advocates of the anti-EFCA campaign included the Retail Industry Leaders Association, the International Council of Shopping Centers, and the

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Food Marketing Institute—in all of which associations Walmart looms large as a donor and political force. On an institutional level, the prime movers against EFCA have been CDW and dozens of other nonprofit advocacy groups. Norquist’s group opposes EFCA through its Alliance for Worker Freedom, a special project that opposes “overregulation of the marketplace” and other “atrocities.” Another key group, SOS BALLOT, which seeks to stop card-check at the state level by amending state constitutions, is headquartered at a Las Vegas mail drop; its sole officer is one Charles Hurth, a frequent cat’s-paw for right-wing corporate efforts.1 Yet another group is the Employee Freedom Action Committee, created by Richard Berman, a prominent lobbyist for the food and restaurant industry. In terms of personnel, the fighters in the anti-EFCA crusade are approximately two dozen lobbyists and consultants, most of them Republicans, some of whom are married to each other, many of whom have shared the same jobs in government and at the trade associations. A number are former G.O.P. staffers from Capitol Hill, such as Doug Loon, regional director of the U.S. Chamber in the Midwest and a onetime aide to Specter, and Breana Teubner, who once worked for Congressman Jeff Flake and now lobbies for Walmart. Next come those who are politically connected through blood and the campaign trail, such as Katherine Lugar2 of the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) and Todd Harris, a former Jeb Bush and John McCain aide who crafted CDW’s lobbying and media strategy at the public-relations firm Navigators Global. A number of central figures are veterans of Elaine Chao’s Labor Department: besides Glenn Spencer, these include Marlene Colucci, of the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AH&LA), and Geoffrey Burr, a lobbyist for Associated Builders and Contractors. (Burr’s wife, Danielle, works for Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl, a strident EFCA opponent.) But with Republicans now a diminished presence in government, the anti-EFCA lobby desperately needs Democrats to block the bill. “Coalition members are also thinking ahead,” 1 In 2004, Hurth helped set up Choices for America, a secretive G.O.P. effort to get Ralph Nader on the presidential ballot in key states so that Republicans would have an electoral advantage. More infamously, Hurth was also successfully sued by, and in 1990 forced to pay $27,500 in damages to, a woman whose buttocks he bit in a St. Louis bar. 2 Her husband, David Lugar, lobbies for the Chamber of Congress and Tyson Foods; her father-in-law is Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana.

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Colucci wrote last December about a CDW Steering Committee meeting. “We have scheduled meetings with some of the more conservative Democrats who recognize the threat card check poses to the health of the American economy.” To win over the majority party, anti-EFCA advocates have spent heavily to buy Democratic lobbying power. Key acquisitions include Jonathan Hoganson, Rahm Emanuel’s former legislative director, who represents RILA and Walmart for the firm of Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti; Tony Podesta, brother to John, whose firm represents Walmart and whose lobbyists include a former top aide to Senator Pryor; Tony Podesta’s wife, Heather, whose firm represents The Home Depot; and The Alpine Group, which also represents The Home Depot, using a team that includes a former legislative aide to Senator Lincoln. The amount of money being spent by this coalition is anyone’s guess. Public records show that during the last quarter of 2008, there were at least 126 registered lobbyists working against EFCA on behalf of companies and trade groups. And countless more nonprofit groups, which aren’t required to register, are also lobbying against the bill. For example, Employee Freedom Action Committee—the group run by Richard Berman, the food and restaurant lobbyist—shares office space and staff with the Center for Union Facts, which in addition to its own advocacy against EFCA also gathers “information about the size, scope, political activities, and criminal activity of the labor movement.” Berman and Company, a for-profit management firm of which Berman is sole owner and president, runs both groups, as well as at least another ten interlocking corporate front groups. Berman himself holds no fewer than thirteen positions within these various entities. Berman is required to publicly disclose virtually no financial information about his company and very little specific data about his nonprofits. The Center’s 2007 IRS tax return, the last currently available, shows that it took in $2.5 million that year, almost entirely from unnamed donors, including one who put up $1.2 million. About half of the group’s money was spent on an anti-union print and online ad campaign, and $840,000 went to Berman and Company for “management” services. (The Center rails against highly paid union officials, listing on its website the annual salaries of top officials at the AFL-CIO. But as of 2006, the last year listed, the federation’s three highest-paid employees made about $680,000 combined, well less than what Berman’s company takes to manage only the Center for Union Facts.)

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In addition to all this money for Washington lobbying and consulting, prodigious sums are also being spent on advertising and other, more shadowy activities. The website of the AH&LA says it is seeking to raise “a minimum of $30 million” for the CDW’s coffers to pay “for a ‘surround sound’ campaign targeting swing voters in key states.” The Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs, a CDW spin-off, has the specific purpose of providing academic “research” to counter EFCA; it funded a March 2009 study titled “An Empirical Assessment of the Employee Free Choice Act: The Economic Implications,” which was written by Anne Layne-Farrar, an economist at a corporate consulting firm, and predicted dire consequences if the bill was passed. (A Fox News Special Report highlighted Layne-Farrar’s Senate appearance—as did a number of other outlets, none of which mentioned the source of her funding—quoting her as saying that passage “would result in an increase in the unemployment rate of around 11/2 to 3 percentage points.”)

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et’s stand up to the business lobby,” Barack Obama declared in April 2008 at a union event in Pennsylvania, during a presidential campaign in which he pledged to make passage of EFCA a top priority; and in fact, during his term in the Senate, Obama had cosponsored an earlier version of the bill. Unions spent tens of millions of dollars to support Obama against John McCain, dispatching thousands of volunteers to swing states to bolster the young nominee’s ground operation. Overwhelming union support for Obama in Michigan made it the first swing state the G.O.P. gave up on, and labor backing was vital to Obama’s eventual triumphs in Ohio and Pennsylvania. So one can hardly blame the unions for imagining that Obama would aggressively promote their interests, EFCA in particular, after he assumed office. But the unions’ few legislative victories notwithstanding—as well as the appointment as labor secretary of former Representative Hilda Solis, who by all accounts is very sympathetic to unions— Obama has failed to embrace their agenda. Privately, union officials clearly feel let down by the new president. “It’s been disappointing,” one told me. “We would like a higher decibel level. We haven’t had the bully pulpit. Strengthening unions is one of the most important things he can do to rebuild the middle class, but he hardly mentions EFCA when he talks about that goal.” The day after we spoke, the New York Times published a lengthy interview with Obama in which he said that better schools, financial reform, and

more affordable health care were the pillars of the future economy. Asked specifically what he saw as “today’s ticket to the middle class,” the president replied: “I think it would be too rigid to say everybody needs a four-year college degree. I think everybody needs enough posthigh-school training that they are competent in fields that require technical expertise, because it’s very hard to imagine getting a job that pays a living wage without that—or it’s very hard at least to envision a steady job in the absence of that.” Missing was any mention of unions or EFCA. The best assessment of Obama’s mind-set I’ve heard so far was offered by Glenn Spencer at the Chamber of Commerce. “The administration is working on a lot of serious issues, the kind of things that make a legacy—health care, the economy, immigration reform,” he said. “This is just a distraction. It will split the Senate right down the middle, and you still may not win. [Obama’s] not going to ignore the unions. But will he sink a lot of political capital into a radioactive issue like this? I don’t think so. Congress has noted the lack of engagement. They know what his priorities are.” The Democratic-led Congress also has been a letdown to unions. Back in August of 2008, when it was already clear that the G.O.P. would be routed in the fall election, the Retail Industry Leaders Association gathered for a retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. One of the group’s top flacks, Brian Dodge, flipped through a PowerPoint presentation that warned of “Harsh Realities” regarding EFCA’s favorable chances. Consideration of the bill, one slide advised, would be “likely in the first 100 days of the next Congress,” which would be more amenable to the bill than the last Congress. But the intense business lobbying of recent months has clearly had an impact on wavering legislators, especially moderate Democrats from states like Arkansas, where union voters are few. Ironically, Obama’s election might also have helped to flip some senators’ votes (for example, Specter and Lincoln) or prompted others to delay in announcing their position (as Landrieu and Pryor have). When the bill came up for a vote in 2007, noted Gene Barr, head of government affairs for the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, “you had a president who was adamantly opposed and sure to veto it. So it was a free vote. You could tell labor you were with them but there was no chance it was going to pass. This time it’s a different climate.”

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n April I traveled to Pittsburgh to meet with the pro-EFCA activists from the United

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Steelworkers (USW). The city has rebounded from the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s and is often hailed today as a model of urban post-industrialism. Most of the new jobs there have been in health care and higher education, and these jobs typically pay much less than what workers at the steel mills made. Moreover, the city’s demographics have become bizarrely skewed, as college graduates and middle-aged people have fled—leaving large ranks of the elderly, who scrape by on union health-care benefits and pensions. Overall, Pittsburgh is one of the only major cities in the country to have lost population for the past three decades. Since the collapse of the steel industry, the USW has had to diversify, with more than 80 percent of its membership now working in non-steel industries, including automobile parts, aluminum, mining, plastics, and rubber, as well as forestry and even undertaking. Steffi Domike, an outreach coordinator for the union, drove me out to the old site of Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Works mill, where in 1892 strikers fought with hundreds of Pinkerton detectives brought in by the company. The mill shut down in 1986 and was demolished and replaced fifteen years later by The Waterfront, the biggest shopping complex in the region. All that remains of the mill is a dozen old brick smokestacks and the pump house, where the strikers fought Carnegie’s thugs. It was a cool, sunny day, and a breeze carried the overwhelming smell from a P. F. Chang’s. “This was all mill and now it’s all mall,” said Domike, who wore a blue USW jacket. “We’ve gone from production to consumption. They’ve created an Industrial Stonehenge with these relics dropped down in the middle of a consumption paradise. It’s like those suburban neighborhoods called Foxhall Manor, where they killed all the foxes to build it.” The following day, at the USW’s thirteenstory headquarters in downtown Pittsburgh, I met Tim Waters, head of the union’s Rapid Response network on EFCA. Along with Bob McAuliffe, a regional coordinator on Waters’s team, we drove to Beaver, an aging industrial town an hour north of the city. “I’ve been an organizer in this union and I can tell you this,” Waters said over his shoulder, looking me in the eye in the back of the car. “If the boss really doesn’t want the union and is willing to spend what’s needed, you can’t win. They hire union-busting firms that charge $600 to $1,000 an hour, and they’re good at what they do. At the end of the day, they just fire, threaten, and harass the leaders. Even if you get past that and the workers vote for a union, you still need a contract; if you don’t have one

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in a year they can begin the process of decertifying the union, so the company will just stall it out. By then, the workers are disillusioned, they’ve taken abuse, some have been fired, and they start peeling off.” USW Local 8183 is located in a brick building on a side street in Beaver, a block off the Beaver River. Waters headed straight for the office of Phil Lucci, the union president, and eyed the jars of peanut-butter pretzels, caramels, and red gummy bears on his desk. It wasn’t long before the conversation turned to the bitter topic of Arlen Specter. Early this year, before Specter left the Republican Party, the AFL-CIO thought it had a deal with him: labor would back him for re-election against a Democratic opponent in 2010 in exchange for his continued support of EFCA. Waters acknowledged his frustration with Specter but said it was important for union activists to keep their heads. “I’ve never been madder at any legislator than I am with him right now,” he said. “But our challenge becomes what do we do about it. We’ve asked our members to take action [on EFCA] fourteen times already, but now we have to go back and tell them, ‘I know we told you he said he was with us, but you have to do more.’ We have to assume that he changed his position before and there’s no reason to think he can’t do it again.” (In fact, of this writing, Specter had softened his opposition and was trying to broker a compromise with pro-labor Democrats in the Senate.)

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he unions have fought too long and spent too much money to walk away from the EFCA fight with nothing. Can they push Obama and the Democrats to approve a compromise bill that genuinely makes it easier for workers to organize unions? Or will any bill end up being merely a face-saving gesture? Given the shakiness of support for EFCA, unions will probably have to drop the two key provisions on organizing: majority sign-up and binding arbitration. Labor will now likely focus on heightening the penalties for companies that violate labor law, and on narrowing the window during which union elections are held (which would give employers less time to exert pressure on workers). Meanwhile, business will be doing its best to prevent the passage of any bill at all. “From the union perspective, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Glenn Spencer told me at the Crystal City Marriott. “They have the White House and a near filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. They’d be foolish to waste the opportunity. For business, we see this as a killer.” He added: “And if it passes, when is the next time we’ll have a ■ filibuster-proof majority to repeal it?”

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ECLOGUE On the rich sin of meddling By Mark Slouka

I. It’s a small thing, really. Every June, soon after the oaks have leafed out over our cabin, a pair of phoebes weaves a small, tight nest under the eave by the door. The nest is quite low, and by holding a long-handled mirror under the slope of the roof we can see the clutch of white eggs glowing there against the twigs and the dead grass and the pocket lint. There’s always something hidden and wonderful about this first glimpse: the wavering reflection as I tip the mirror this way and that, searching for the right angle, the glass reflecting down to us the sixty-year-old cedar boards, the moldering supports, and then, like a quick window into another world, like that tiny couple in the mirror in the painting by Van Eyck . . . the nest. This is Act One. Nearly every year, soon after the phoebes lay their clutch, another, largMark Slouka is the author, most recently, of the novel The Visible World (HoughtonMifflin).

er egg appears in the nest. It’s mottled and lovely, and it hatches first. Thus begins Act Two. The fledgling cowbird that emerges from the egg is

porch) slowly starve under the imposter’s wings. Act Three: The cowbird chick crams the nest, its wings folded over the sides, absurd as a bear in a bassinet. It grows silky and fat. And then one day they’re all gone and the nest is empty. Sometimes I find a desiccated packet—a beak and a few bones, little more—under the nest. Curtain and applause. ne year I carried O the cowbird’s egg into the woods and

grotesquely huge, nearly the size of the adult phoebes themselves. The parents, however, notice nothing wrong; they work frantically to supply that cavernous open beak, that gaping, yellow throat, even as their own offspring (if they haven’t already been shoved onto the planks of the

Constellation, oil-on-book-page engravings, by William Smith. Courtesy Littlejohn Contemporary, New York City

threw it against the trunk of a tree, where it made a dark, wet spot. Another year I didn’t notice the egg until after it had hatched. Unable to watch the nestlings starve, I took the intruder out of the nest and then, feeling like a fool, tried to feed it chopped worms and minced bits of largemouth bass with a straw. It died—to spite me, I think—sitting hunched up in a corner of the shoebox like a bitter old man in an ill-fitting suit. A third year, shamefully, I killed the thing outright like a miniature chicken, though the distress of the phoebes over its disappearance

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touched my heart. After that I let things alone. And that’s where it stands now, more or less. Some years the cowbird comes and the phoebes’ nestlings die. Other years it doesn’t, and they live. As it has always been, as it was long before I was around to be troubled by it, so it remains. A cowbird was laying its eggs in a phoebes’ nest (this is what I tell myself) when Jamestown was founded, when Christ was a somber lad wandering the roads of dusty Judea, when the Enlightened One, moved by mercy, supposedly threw himself into a pit to feed a starving tiger. hat troubles me about the rituW al that plays out under the eave, I think, is my own uncertainty in the face of it. It’s a problem. I don’t know how to read it. On the one hand, its mute endurance awes me; disturbed by my interference, it simply parts like a stream around a child’s finger—for years, if necessary, or decades—until the finger is moved. On the other, although I recognize the play’s authority, sense its rightness, I find it difficult to be still. The Sophoclean cruelty of the arrangement, which has the parents dutifully feeding their children’s murderer even as their own young, unseen, starve under its wings, gets to me every time. Antiquity and endurance are not quite enough. I can do something, save something now. And yet . . . And yet, far off, I can hear something whispering that this compulsion to do, to intrude ourselves, to improve on what is—even when wholly wellintentioned, particularly when wholly well-intentioned—is the source of all our troubles. Could it be that one of our most essential, even admirable human traits constitutes a richly ironic sin, a sin for which we, in the fullness of time, will be punished? Could it be that the pendulum, having swung over the course of the centuries from humility to hubris in the face of nature’s mystery, has reached the end of its arc? Caught in the pause, neither moving forward nor yet falling back, I do nothing—badly. I sit on my sagging porch reading the New York Times, trying to ignore the parents flicking to the nest over my head, their beaks crammed with broken insects and worms, trying not to hear the insa-

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tiable screeching of the invader or, worse, the faint asthmatic peeping of the phoebes’ brood. I turn the page, snap the crease—turn my mind to the pointless (or pointed) cruelties of men, to which I am accustomed. I stand up. I sit down again. II. I spend my summers—or the bulk of them—in a four-room cabin by the side of a small pond, immersed in the chanting, rasping, riotous chatter of the natural world, a chatter I adore but cannot understand, a chatter punctuated at regular intervals—as if by an invisible host, tapping his knife to a glass—by death. One day I returned to the shack in which I write to find the makeshift door pushed open and my papers covered in blood and hair. Cleaning up the mess, I discovered a hoofed leg, like a miniature satyr’s, caught in a crack in the floorboards. On a hot, still August morning, walking the road that encircles our pond, loosely, like a necklace on a table, I found a painted turtle crushed into the dirt. An aquatic species, it had obviously come from the water to lay its eggs when the car’s tire found it. It was only after I’d gently pushed it into the weeds with my foot so the kids wouldn’t see it that the thought occurred to me that I didn’t know if it had died coming from the water or returning to it. I bent down and drew it back out of the grass. Like all painted turtles, it had been beautiful to the point of tastelessness, the underside of its indigo shell, now broken into unfamiliar continents, a child’s swirl of yellows and reds spilling, as if through an excess of sheer joy, onto the soft, phallic folds of the neck. I lay it upside down on my hand. It felt warm, I realized, because it had been in the sun. And although I didn’t want to, I slid my fingers into the ugly split in the skin and under the cracked plastron and felt them there: small, smooth, oval. I slipped them one by one out of that wreckage—startlingly white, apparently undamaged—and brought them back to the cabin, where I placed them in an old Thompson Cigar box between two layers of sphagnum moss left over from some gardening venture.

They meant a good deal to me, those five orphans, and over the next few weeks I checked the box often, already imagining the Washington-quarter-size hatchlings—perfect miniatures—scurrying over the moss, the aquarium we would set up for them on the bench, the day in September when, halfgrown, they would swim off our palms into the darkness of the lake. Instead they browned, then collapsed, as though something inside them had left. The world has its own imaginings. That afternoon, carrying the box with its increasingly aromatic cargo into the woods, I noticed for the first time the design on the lid—a seventeenth-century antique map of the Americas, complete with representations of three-masted schooners sailing the Mare Pacificum and monstrous cyclones under the circulus aequinoctialis. In the lower left-hand corner, inside an ornate frame suitable to a wall mirror, were the words “America: Nova Tabula.” In another age, I might have heard the low chuckle of divine mirth, sensed a smile in the fiddlehead fern waving frantically on a windless day. “The nova tabula is in your hands, you fool,” the wind would whisper to me. “There is no map—read as you may, write what you will.” III. The very notion of an intelligent design, I have to say, is slightly embarrassing—it seems so open-faced and naive, so primitive, so depressingly lacking in irony. It suggests that one has somehow missed the fact that life is now all DNA sequencing and logarithms—wetware, to recall the cyberists’ piquant phrase—or worse, that one has bought into one of the religious right’s cartoons, which is mortifying. Since I have little hipness to lose, I’ll confess it straight out: intelligent design is a notion, a myth—all right, a theology—I’ve always been attracted to. Unapologetically in love with both the natural world and the written page (between which I sense all manner of linkage, both of which seem to me to be fading from our lives, to our inestimable loss), most at home in myself when I am navigating one or the other, I’ve found

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myself wishing at times that on some level it could all be true. Not that Toto might reveal to us at long last the benevolent, white-haired wizard behind the curtain, but something . . . subtler: that we could glimpse the wisdom behind it all, sense, even if momentarily, the pattern in the carpet. How glorious it would be to feel the key turn, to be able to enter the culture of things outside of us, to understand not only the what of the universe but the why. To read the slow rain of rising trout, or comprehend—really comprehend—the shocking orange of fungus, labial and exquisite, shining on the underside of a rotting log. To grasp the intent and the glory, the slow fire of life, behind them. It’s a fantasy with a long pedigree. Untitled PPC, an etching by William Smith. Courtesy Littlejohn Contemporary, New York City

For countless millennia, after all, like three-year-olds who can’t read but nonetheless turn the pages, move their lips, we imagined meaning, a narrative, agency. And since everything ultimately has to be about us, the story we imposed on nature was largely our own. The agency behind the screen had not only to resemble us but to care about our welfare. It’s almost touching, this presumption. Knowing nothing, we assumed all. Nature became our mirror, our metaphor bank. Well into the nineteenth century, we read the world metaphorically, much as a Freudian psychoanalyst might read our gestures and verbal slips as clues to the workings of the unconscious. The visible world was a system of signs, pointing to some

deeper, hidden actor who was communicating with us. The cigar was never just a cigar. It didn’t work, of course. The cigar, it turned out, was just a cigar; the sand flea just a sand flea. Nature was not “a grave,” “a kind parent,” “a merciless stepmother.” It didn’t “abhor a vacuum,” or “the old.” Alas, it didn’t abhor anything at all. It just went on, perfectly. If nature was a story, it was a new kind of story: plotless, endless, at once both circular and linear, so vast it seemed not to move at all—a millennium hand, an eon hand—yet everywhere seething with a strange and wondrous energy, telling over and over of two great armies folding into each other without rancor or victory . . . we couldn’t grasp it. So we made up our own story, more suited to us. And when our made-up story no longer satisfied us, round about the seventeenth century, we decided to take the book apart. Thus, science. As if untying the volume’s signatures and teasing apart the paper’s weave could reveal something, some wisdom; could teach us, at long last, our place. Eventually, rounding the curve of the second millennium anno Domini, the majority of us simply lost interest in the game. We had outgrown childish things. The Other had nothing to do with us. Starting in the industrialized West, we migrated indoors, into mediated environments from which the natural world in all its mystery had been seamlessly removed. We were enough for ourselves. We exchanged “information.” We worried about our equity. We spent large portions of our lives watching people we didn’t know pretending to be living lives that were not their own. The high wind tossing the continents of trees, the paper wasp tending its soft, masticated nest, the blossom trembling in the sun—these had nothing to do with us. The Other had become merely other—an afterthought, an irrelevance. If it got in our way, or troubled our oversensitive skin, we killed it. If it didn’t work the way we wanted, we shaped it to our needs. Wonder? What was there to wonder at? It occurs to me, though, that our inability to read the Book of Nature— and yes, I intend that uppercase N in all its Romantic glory—doesn’t nec-

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essarily mean there is no book to be read, only that we can’t read it; that the stories we’ve told and the tools we’ve developed to disarticulate it, and the indifference we’ve cultivated to make it go away, won’t do. That we need something different. Why? Because the text still matters, whether we can decipher it or not. Because, as seems increasingly clear, unless we reach some proper accommodation with nature, show it a bit of respect, admit our ignorance of it, it will bury us with as little fanfare as night follows day. The evolutionary tide of a billion years will wash over us and recede; a few ticks of the clock hand, and the scars we’ve made will heal; a paper wasp, moving in the shadow of Lincoln’s lower lip, will tend its soft, masticated nest. Which would be a shame: I’ve grown fond of our maudlin, murderous tribe. IV. Seen through the other end of the telescope, from the kind of distance that confers clarity, one thing seems certain: we have not yet found the language with which to front the world we inhabit, a world that has worked superbly, if life is the proof, for unfathomable time; a world that continues to hold us—despite the din of our distractions—exactly the way a nest holds an egg. We have not even begun to learn this language; its alphabet is a mystery, its declensions unknown. There are times, sitting up to my chin in a warm pond watching a damsel fly the precise iridescent green of cheap tinsel perch on a spear of weed protruding above the water, feeling the velvety sides of the bullhead catfish bumping against my feet, when I can almost feel it. A genius. A music just beyond my range of hearing. The surface film, cooking in the August sun, stretches before my eyes, a teeming graveyard of mayflies and midges and tiny, ivory-white moths, a macabre and gorgeous litter of wings and legs and antennae, of pale exoskeletons like comic-book armor and lime-green duckweed. Twenty feet out, I can make out the dull glint of a dead bluegill. Water striders and dragonfly larvae move over and through this mat, this mulch. Organisms I know nothing about—a thousand to a bottlecap—

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zip and spin in every palmful of water. Something is swirling now beneath the dead bluegill, and the fish jerks and then rises to the surface again. And I think to myself: This is beyond us. Only reverence is appropriate here. V. On a still July afternoon two summers ago, a neighbor called to say he’d found a baby rabbit in an open field by his woodshed. There was no nest in evidence, no mother. It appeared to be starving. Knowing my daughter’s willingness to serve as nursemaid (or priest, if necessary) to any and all, he thought she might take it in. We walked over together to find a baby cottontail, some weeks old, crouched in the corner of a book carton. It was smaller than a man’s fist. It had impossibly soft brown fur and strangely sentient brown eyes and wheat-pale whiskers that moved whenever its nose twitched, which was often. When my daughter picked it up, it sat perfectly still in her hands and twitched its rubbery little nose. By the time we’d carried the carton back to our cabin, it had a name. Winston died three days later. He seemed to be doing well the first day, greedily suckling warm milk out of the eyedropper, wetting his rabbit chin, but by the next morning something was clearly wrong. A terrible stiffness had set in, as if his spine had curved and solidified. His big hind legs, with their reversed rabbit knees, twitched and kicked spasmodically. We brought Winston to one of those good Samaritans who specialize in animal recovery at their own expense, who told us there was nothing we could have done, that baby cottontails were among the most delicate of commonly found creatures. My daughter, who has grown up in the natural world and thus understands—perhaps better than I—that death, too, is in the picture, buried him, along with the dragonflies and the voles and the chipmunks and the cowbird I’d tried to nurse, in the clearing behind the second oak. to say something, for all I wanted three of us, but what could I say?

Science couldn’t help me here—it spoke a different language, a language washed clean of sentiment and pain. Christ couldn’t help me much either. I could have said something, I suppose, about God’s plan, but I really had no idea what God’s plan might have been in paralyzing Winston, and so, fighting the slightly absurd tightening in my throat, I said that I didn’t know why Winston had died and that I was very sorry for it and that we can’t always understand why things happen but that life was all around us—that there were cottontails at that moment along the edge of the meadow—so something had to be working right. Something to that effect. Then we read aloud, as we always do, James Dickey’s “The Heaven of Animals.” It’s a good poem, and it was just good enough. That pain. I wondered about it then, wonder about it still. What was it I mourned, precisely? Not just this creature, or this creature alone. Not just his leaf-soft ears, or the inward curl of his front paws, or his mute distress—which seemed obvious enough by the second morning—but something else as well. Time, maybe. “Time robs us of all, even of memory,” Virgil reminds us in the Eclogues, his vision of a perfect, haunted world. But whose time? A rich vein of self-regard, I began to suspect— and self-indulgence, maybe—ran beneath my sorrow. What Winston called to my attention that afternoon—the impatient clink of the knife on glass—was death itself. My own, of course (the inevitability of which has always struck me as distinctly unfair, and somewhat unlikely), but much more so that of the little girl next to me, whose life means more to me than anything else, and whose own mortality . . . It’s a thought I touch like a red-hot coal. And suddenly I’m there—on the border of acceptance. Of deference. Perhaps even of wisdom. On this side of the line is everything eternal, the vast tide of life breathing in and out, endlessly. Beyond it—marked by a running stream, a stand of trees, a thousand miles of wire—is the territory of love. And I’ll step across it ■ every time.

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WE STILL TORTURE The new evidence from Guantánamo By Luke Mitchell

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e face the temptation to believe that an election can “change everything”—that the stark contrast between Barack Obama and George W. Bush recapitulates an equally stark contrast between the present and the past. But political events move within a continuum, and they are driven by many forces other than democratic action, including the considerable power of their own momentum. Such is the case with the ongoing American experiment with torture. The release in April of documents from the International Committee of the Red Cross, from the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council, and from the House Armed Services Committee gave further credence to what had long been known about CIA and military interrogation techniques. They are brutal and, despite the surreal claims of the Bush Justice Department, they are illegal. The assumption underlying coverage of “the torture story,” however, has been that U.S.-sponsored torture came to a halt on January 21. The culpability of the previous administration remains to be determined,

Luke Mitchell is a senior editor of Harper’s Magazine.

we are told, and in terms of ongoing criminal liability, the worst Obama himself could do is obstruct an investigation. Regarding the launch of that investigation, we must be patient. We cannot be patient, though, and not simply because justice must be swift. We cannot be patient because not only have we failed to punish the people who created and maintained our torture regime; we have failed to dismantle that regime and, in many cases, even to cease torturing.

Untitled #1/05, ink on paper, by Sandy Walker. All images courtesy the artist and sandywalker.com

This last charge is the least heard. Although it is true that waterboarding is once again proscribed, it is equally true that the government continues to permit a series of “torture lite” techniques— prolonged isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, forcefeeding—that even Reagan appointee Judge Susan Crawford had to acknowledge amounted to torture when she threw out the government’s case against one accused terrorist. Like waterboarding, these techniques cause extreme mental anguish and permanent physical damage, and, like waterboarding, they are not permitted under international law. But unlike waterboarding, they remain on the books, in detailed prison regulations and field-manual directives, unremarked by anyone except a few activists.

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he United States has always tortured. But our approach to torture has evolved over time. In the past, we preferred to keep the practice hidden. During the Cold War, we exported most of our torture projects to client regimes in Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia, while at home we worked to perfect a new form of

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“no touch” interrogation that would achieve terror and compliance without leaving scars, even as we denounced similar practices employed by our enemies. This was the age of hypocrisy— our secrecy was the tribute war crimes paid to democracy. The hypocritical period ended, of course, with the attacks of September 11, the national flinch, the chestthumping of George W. Bush, and the grim pronouncements of Dick Cheney, who loudly advertised his willingness to take the United States to “the dark side.” This, as we have all come to understand, was the time of open torture. It was the “shameful era,” when we put the techniques we had developed during the Cold War to use in the new “war on terror.” Now we have entered what we may wish to call the post-torture era, except that it is not. Indeed, we cannot even revert to the easy hypocrisy

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of the Cold War. We have returned to our traditional practice of torturing and pretending not to, but the old routine is no longer convincing. We know too much. We know that we are still imprisoning men who very likely are completely innocent. We know that we still beat them. We know that we still use a series of punishments and interrogation techniques—touch and “no touch”— that any normal person would acknowledge to be torture. And we know that when those men protest such treatment by refusing to eat, we strap them to chairs and force food down their throats. We know all of this because it is well documented, not just by reporters and activists but by the torturers themselves. It is this very openness that suggests why this new age—let’s call it the era of legitimized torture—is so perilous, not just to the men who are tortured

but to liberal democracy. The moment is rapidly approaching when President Obama will cease to be the inheritor of a criminal regime and instead become its primary controlling authority, when the ongoing war crimes will attach themselves to his administration. And when they do attach themselves, Obama’s administration will be forced to defend itself, as all administrations do. And it will defend itself by claiming that what we call crimes are not in fact crimes. This process has already begun. Rather than end illegal torture, we are now solidifying the steps that we have taken to make these activities legal. By failing to change the underlying problem even as we celebrate its supposed “solution,” we actually further entrench the past, the “bad” Bush era, into the present, the “good” Obama era. We will return to the rule of law, but within that rule will remain a rule

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of torture, given all the greater authority by our love of the new regime.

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e have a tendency in the United States to judge actions not by their intrinsic merit but by the stylishness with which they are executed. Although the ostentatious lawlessness of the previous administration was pleasing to some, it ultimately frightened the majority of Americans. It was far too flamboyant. Obama and the Democrats seem to have rejected ostentation and lawlessness, and are all the more popular for that rejection. But they have not rejected torture itself. As we learned from the Office of Legal Counsel memos, it is possible to parse “torture” to a considerable degree. What is the allowable incline for a waterboard? How many calories will suffice to avoid starvation? Which insects are permitted to be used in driving a man insane? The correct answer, according to those who parse, is the difference between a war crime and a heroic act of patriotism. The OLC memos have been discredited but not the thinking behind them. We are still parsing, still weighing, still considering the possibilities. Whereas once we understood torture to be forbidden—something to be hidden and denied—now we understand it to be “complex.” We are instrumental in our analysis, and that instrumentality is held to be a virtue. We don’t torture not because it is illegal or immoral or repugnant to democracy but because “it doesn’t work,” leaving the way clear to torture that does “work.” The combination of complexity and instrumentality creates the potential for a new inversion. We enter the “complex” realm of torture and draw a new line, and the logical consequence—the unavoidably intended consequence—is that whatever is on the “good” side of that line, the “useful” side, can no longer be called torture. And since it is no longer torture, it must be something else. In this way we arrive at the strangest and most absurd conclusion. What was once a crime becomes a sensible approach to law enforcement. And in becoming sensible it also becomes invisible.

Untitled #2/05, ink on paper, by Sandy Walker

It is our evolving understanding of force-feeding that most clearly demonstrates this process of inversion and invisibility—not because it is the most horrifying form of torture, though it is horrifying, but because it has been so completely mainstreamed. Indeed, as it is practiced at Guantánamo, forcefeeding is understood not only to not be torture but in fact to be a form of mercy. It is understood, above all, as a way to “preserve life.”

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s of this writing, at least thirty men are being force-fed at Guantánamo. They are being force-fed despite the departure of the administration that instituted force-feeding, despite the current administration’s order to shut down Guantánamo, and

despite its even more specific order requiring prisoners there to be treated within the bounds of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which—by every interpretation but that of the U.S. government—clearly forbids force-feeding.1 1 The conventions forbid “humiliating and de-

grading treatment,” and doctors who advise the Red Cross, which in turn has considerable oversight in interpreting the conventions, have repeatedly made clear that force-feeding is humiliating and degrading. See, for instance, the judgment of Red Cross adviser Hernán Reyes, in a 1998 policy review: “Doctors should never be party to actual coercive feeding, with prisoners being tied down and intravenous drips or oesophageal tubes being forced into them. Such actions can be considered a form of torture, and under no circumstances should doctors participate in them, on the pretext of ‘saving the hunger striker’s life.’”

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ful. The pain makes the strike unbearable, and therefore it prevents further protest. This is not just a logical inference. The first experience many Guantánamo prisoners had with being forced to eat was not when they went on hunger strikes but rather when they underwent interrogations at the secret CIA bases where they were held prior to their arrival at Guantánamo. At these “black sites,” we now know from the ICRC and OLC reports, CIA interrogation teams used “dietary manipulation” as a “conditioning technique” to help gather “intelligence.” These techniques, in other words, were a form of torture, no different from other, more infamous techniques outlined in the same reports, including “walling,” “cramped confinement,” and “water dousing” (now better known as waterboarding). A 2005 memo signed by Steven Bradbury, then the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, explains the method. Dietary manipulation “involves the substitution of commercial liquid meal replacements for normal food, presenting detainees with a bland, unappetizing, but nutritionally complete diet.” The CIA interrogation team would strap the prisoners to chairs and feed them bottles of Ensure Plus—cited by name—for weeks on end. As Bradbury noted, it was hoped that this would cause the prisoners to become compliant.

Most of these prisoners are not facing imminent death. In fact, force-feeding is itself a risky “treatment” that can cause infections, gastrointestinal disorders, and other complications. The feedings begin very soon after prisoners begin a hunger strike, and continue daily— with military guards strapping them to restraint chairs, usually for several hours at a time—until the prisoners agree to end the strike. This hunger striker is not an emaciated Bobby Sands lying near death after many weeks of starvation. He is a strong

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man bound to a chair and covered in his own vomit.2 If force-feeding does not save lives, then what does it do? What makes it useful? From the perspective of the prisoner, there can be only one answer: Pain makes force-feeding use2 Dr. William Winkenwerder, who served as Bush’s assistant secretary of defense for health affairs and was therefore responsible for the forcefeeding policy at Guantánamo, explained this peremptory approach to me three years ago with an almost poignant question: “If we’re there to protect and sustain someone’s life, why would we actually go to the point of putting that person’s life at risk before we act?”

The interrogation team believed [redacted] “maintains a tough, Mujahidin fighter mentality and has conditioned himself for a physical interrogation.” The team therefore concluded that “more subtle interrogation measures designed more to weaken [redacted] physical ability and mental desire to resist interrogation over the long run are likely to be more effective.” For these reasons, the team sought authorization to use dietary manipulation, nudity, water dousing, and abdominal slap. In the team’s view, adding these techniques would be especially helpful [redacted] because he appeared to have a particular weakness for food and also seemed especially modest.

In imposing dietary control, safety

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was always a concern. “While we do not equate commercial weight-loss programs and this interrogation technique,” Bradbury wrote, “the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.” Bradbury even anticipated the almost sentimental patina of caregiving that informs the presentday discussion of force-feeding at Guantánamo, noting that “a detainee subjected to the waterboard must be under dietary manipulation, because a fluid diet reduces the risks of the technique”—by reducing the risk of choking on undigested vomit. The force-feeding, in other words, was for the good of the prisoner. Forcing a man to drink a diet shake may seem like a minor affront, far removed from the rack or even from waterboarding. But actual prisoner testimony from another set of documents, the Red Cross interviews acquired by Mark Danner and published in The New York Review of Books in April,

Untitled # 2/07, ink on paper, by Sandy Walker

suggests that the dietary manipulation was traumatizing: During the first two weeks I did not receive any food. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. A guard would come and hold the bottle for me while I drank. . . . During the first month I was not provided with any food apart from on two occasions as a reward for perceived cooperation. I was given Ensure to drink every 4 hours. If I refused to drink then my mouth was forced open by the guard and it was poured down my throat by force. . . . I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by [the] hands and feet [and] given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time. . . .

That is how we treated prisoners at CIA black sites, back in the shameful era. It is by no means the worst instance of man’s inhumanity to man.

But dietary manipulation clearly was not a technique meant primarily to preserve life.

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ompare now the shameful and repudiated practice of dietary manipulation under Bush to the sensible, life-preserving practice of “involuntary feeding” at Guantánamo today, in the post-torture era. In February, Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley, a U.S. military lawyer representing Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was recently released from Guantánamo, described a now-familiar situation to the Guardian. “Binyam has witnessed people being forcibly extracted from their cell,” she said. “SWAT teams in police gear come in and take the person out; if they resist, they are force-fed and then beaten.” Bradley continued, It is so bad that there are not enough chairs to strap them down and forcefeed them for a two- or three-hour period to digest food through a feeding tube. Because there are not enough chairs the guards are having to force-

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feed them in shifts. After Binyam saw a nearby inmate being beaten it scared him and he decided he was not going to resist. He thought, “I don’t want to be beat, injured or killed.”

That same month, Ahmed Ghappour, an attorney with the human-rights group Reprieve, which represents thirty-one detainees at Guantánamo, told Reuters that prison officials were “over-force-feeding” hunger strikers, who were suffering from diarrhea as they sat tied to their chairs. He said in some cases officials were lacing the nutrient shakes with laxatives. And the situation was getting worse. “According to my clients, there has been a ramping up in abuse since President Obama was inaugurated,” Ghappour said, speculating that guards there wanted to “get their kicks in” before the camp closed. David Remes, an attorney who represents fifteen detainees at Guantánamo, wrote in an April petition to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that one of his clients, Farhan Abdul Latif, had been suffering in particular. When the nasogastric tube “is threaded though his nostril into his stomach,” it “feels like a nail going into his nostril, and like a knife going down his throat.” Latif had in recent months resorted to covering himself with his own excrement in order “to avoid force-feeding and that, when he was finally force-fed, the tube was inserted through the excrement covering his nostrils.”3 Another prisoner, Maasoum Abdah Mouhammad, told his lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights that he and fifteen other men had also refused to eat: Mr. Mouhammad described that men 3

Latif, who is now being held in Guantánamo’s “Behavioral Health Unit,” has quite clearly been broken by his many years of confinement. Remes reports that his client has made several suicide attempts, the most recent of which was in his presence. “Without my noticing, he chipped off a piece of stiff veneer from the underside of the table and used it to saw into a vein in his left wrist,” he said. “As he sawed, he drained his blood into a plastic container I had brought and, shortly before our time was up, he hurled the blood at me from the container. It must have been a good deal of blood because I was drenched from the top of my head to my knees.” Latif survived this attempt as well.

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were vomiting while being overfed. Some of the striking detainees had kept their feeding tubes in their noses even when not being force-fed just to avoid having the tubes painfully reinserted each time. Mr. Mouhammad reported that interrogators were pressuring and coercing the men on hunger strike to eat, making promises that they would be moved to the communal living camp if they began eating. Mr. Mouhammad described these experiences as “torture, torture, torture.”

What was torture at the black sites remains torture today at Guantánamo. It is perhaps ironic that what began as a method for making men talk—in fact, as we are now learning, in order to make them lie, about ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq—is now a method of preventing men from “talking,” of preventing them from registering protest at the injustice of their condition. But that irony should not prevent us from recognizing the simple fact of the torture itself.

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very U.S. institution that could prevent force-feeding has failed to do so. Congress has failed to act, as have the courts, as has the president. Today the American Medical Association refuses even to sanction the doctors employed at Guantánamo, and one of those doctors, William Dudney, actually touts his previous job as the “Chief of Psychiatry, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba” in an advertisement for his “Medical Weight Management” services. District Judge Gladys Kessler had the opportunity to address forcefeeding in February, when lawyers for Mohammed Al-Adahi and four other prisoners at Guantánamo sought an immediate injunction against the practice. Kessler denied the injunction on the unconvincing grounds that her court lacked not just the jurisdiction but the competency to dispense justice. “Resolution of this issue requires the exercise of penal and medical discretion by staff with the appropriate expertise,” she wrote, “and is precisely the type of question that federal courts, lacking that expertise, leave to the discretion of those who do possess such expertise.”

Once again, complexity prevents intervention. (Kessler, it should be noted, began her career working for Democrats in Congress.) The Pentagon, so richly empowered by the circuit court, has failed as well. Dr. Ward Casscells was appointed assistant secretary of defense for health affairs in 2007 and thus far has survived in his role as the Pentagon’s top health official. I asked his spokesperson, Cynthia Smith, why he was continuing the previous administration’s policy of force-feeding even after the new president had ordered prisoners to be treated within the bounds of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. “The policy does save lives,” Smith wrote back (a week later, stipulating that I attribute quotes to her instead of to Casscells). “Idly watching detainees for whose care we are responsible engage in self-starvation to the point of permanent damage to health or death is not required by U.S. law, Common Article 3, or medical ethics.”4 Smith went on to note that some strikers may be protesting because they feel pressured to do so by other prisoners. In such cases, forcefeeding was a way to help them resist that pressure. This was a strange argument. Given that the prisoners are separated from one another and are under constant surveillance, such pressure could come only in the form of appeals to conscience. Smith’s logic was reminiscent of the claim by Marc Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter, in the Washington Post in April: “The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely”—which itself brings to mind the case of Alvaro Jaume, who was tortured under medical supervision in Uruguay in the 1980s, and who recalled, “These doctors are saving 4

Smith is one-third right. Force-feeding is indeed permitted under U.S. Bureau of Prison guidelines. But as previously noted, the Geneva Conventions are well understood to forbid the practice, and the guidelines of the World Medical Association are even more unambiguous: “Forcible feeding is never ethically acceptable.”

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lives, but in a perverse way. The aim of torture is thwarted if the victim cannot support the interminable ordeal. The doctor is needed to prevent you from dying for your convictions.”5 All of which, in any case, suggests that the Pentagon has no intention of changing its policy. President Obama, to date, has done nothing either. In February, Ramzi Kassem, a Yale law professor who represents one of the hunger strikers, sent a formal letter to Gregory Craig, the new White House counsel, outlining the legal concerns about forcefeeding and recommending in detail how to bring the treatment of hunger strikers in line with the Geneva Conventions (for instance, by prohibiting the use of restraint chairs). Oba5 The historian A. J. Langguth recalled some similar thinking many years ago in the New York Times, drawing from the memoirs of a CIA asset in the Uruguayan police force who was trained in the 1960s by Dan Mitrione, of the U.S. Office of Public Safety (which was founded to facilitate the training of officials in states believed to be threatened by Communist subversion). “Before all else,” Mitrione explained to his Latin American protégé, “you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist.” Mitrione was a bureaucrat at heart. “It is very important to know beforehand whether we have the luxury of letting the subject die,” he said, adding that a “premature death means a failure by the technician.” Compare Mitrione’s claims with the words of the top lawyer at the CIA’s CounterTerrorism Center, Jonathan Fredman, at a 2002 strategy meeting (the minutes for which were released in 2008 by Carl Levin as part of an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which he chairs). Fredman was similarly professional, emphasizing that “techniques that lie on the harshest end of the spectrum must be performed by a highly trained individual. Medical personnel should be present to treat any possible accidents.” He also discussed the strong requirement of a bureaucracy for documentation: “If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental. Everything must be approved and documented.” And he brought the same dark, almost humorous, perception of his task to bear, declaring that torture “is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong.” Fredman, it should be noted, claims that he was “paraphrased sloppily and poorly.”The prudent degree of specificity may vary from regime to regime, but the mind of the torturer remains the same at all times and in all places.

ma could simply order these changes, but he has not. Obama did ask Navy Admiral Patrick Walsh to visit Guantánamo and report back on conditions there. Walsh found the practices in question, including the use of restraint chairs, to be perfectly acceptable. When Reuters asked Walsh about specific incidents of abuse, he was evasive. “We heard allegations of abuse,” he said. “What we found is that there were in some cases substantiated evidence where guards had misconduct, I think that would be the best way to put it.”

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orce-feeding is an especially egregious example of legitimized torture, but it is far from the only example. Just one percent of the prisoners held offshore by the United States are held at Guantánamo, and many other techniques remain legally available to their jailers. The Army Field Manual still permits solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, and sleep deprivation, as well as so-called emotional techniques such as “fear up,” which involves terrifying prisoners into a state of “learned helplessness.” It is difficult to know the degree to which these practices are employed, though, because President Obama has adopted not only much of the Bush Administration’s torture policy but also its radical doctrine of secrecy. The Obama White House has sought to prevent detainees at Bagram prison in Afghanistan from gaining access to courts where they may reveal the circumstances of their imprisonment, sought to continue the practice of rendering prisoners to unknown and unknowable locations outside the United States, and sought to keep secret many (though not all) of the records regarding our treatment of those detainees. The result is that what would at first seem to be something positive— a “national conversation about torture”—has instead become a form of complicity. We know that torture occurred, and we know that it continues to occur. Yet we allow ourselves to pretend otherwise because we don’t know enough. The secrecy allows us to transform a taboo into an “issue,” and most voters seem to desire, as Judge Kessler did, to leave the

resolution of that issue to the “penal and medical discretion” of “a staff with the appropriate expertise.” In one recent poll only 35 percent of Americans called for the closing of Guantánamo, whereas 45 percent wanted to keep it open and 20 percent weren’t sure what we should do. As ever, Democrats are attempting to split the difference. A major claim by Obama is that he does not want people in the CIA “to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders”— presumably because he does not want to prejudge their “appropriate expertise.” A more persuasive means of preventing torture would be to say precisely the opposite, that people in the CIA should spend all their time looking over their shoulders. But that is not what Obama has said. Now those who would speak against torture in a crisis situation face a strong deterrent. They will be understood as taking a side on an issue—a complex issue—rather than simply upholding well-established legal (and at one time political) precedent. We have seen too much in the past eight years to pretend any longer that the United States is incapable of criminal abuse or to trust the “experts” to act secretly in what they believe, sincerely or not, to be our best interests. We have seen too much to permit ourselves the luxury of ambivalence. Indeed, now that we have seen what our nation has done in the depths of a panic, we should also be able to recognize the larger, longer-term crimes of our leaders. We have for many years imprisoned a greater proportion of our own people than any other nation on earth, kept many of those prisoners in the kind of prolonged solitary confinement that is shown in study after study to drive people insane, and countenanced the rape of those who aren’t in solitary confinement as part of a system of “rough justice.” We have known this about ourselves for a very long time and done nothing. Now we have a choice. We can continue our experiment with torture or we can harness the obvious horror of the last eight years to rectify the more discreet horrors of the distant past and the darkening present, and in so doing at last become a nation whose actions ■ embody its pretensions.

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THE GHOSTS OF DOONGERWADI Among Bombay’s dwindling Parsis By Sherally Munshi

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have never been to a Parsi funeral. I almost went once, when I was about fifteen. A thick-haired man in his early thirties, a family acquaintance and recent arrival from Bombay, died suddenly of a heart attack. I had met him a few weeks earlier, poolside, at one of the Parsi gatherings I dutifully attended almost every week growing up in Miami. As others stood around eating noisily, darkening their clothes with sweat, the young man excused himself, stripped to his bathing suit, and, from the diving board, sprang into the air and slid into the water. The two nearest priests drove down for the funeral, one from Boca Raton, the other from Sarasota. A third, his father, arriving from Bombay, did not make it in time. Before we left the house, my mother checked to make sure my father and I were appropriately dressed: she packed a prayer topee for my father and two scarves to cover her head and mine. On the way to the funeral, my parents began whispering to each other in the front seat, ratcheting urgency with every exchange, until I finally shouted, “What?” My mother, cringing, turned around. “Do you have your period?” Yes, I answered, annoyed, but what did that have to do with anything? My parents resumed their Sherally Munshi is a writer living in New York City.

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whispering, then my mother again turned to me, this time to apologize— there were rules, they didn’t like them either, but it’s not our funeral—as my father made a quick U-turn. I hadn’t thought about these funerary traditions again until at a recent Parsi dinner party I overheard Farida Auntie, a family friend, mention that she had come across a story in a Parsi magazine. A sixty-five-year-old woman named Dhun Baria had somehow sneaked a camera into Bombay’s Towers of Silence, where Parsis have disposed of their dead for more than three hundred years. A few weeks later, Parsi colonies in Bombay woke up to find unmarked DVDs slipped under doors and into mailboxes. Other homes were visited by young men delivering copies “on behalf of concerned members of the community.” Parsis on their way to the agiary, or fire temple, for morning prayers were met by strangers handing out flyers with gruesome images: bodies in all states of decomposition, mouths gaping at the sky. “Horrible,” Farida Auntie said, shaking her head. Others at the gathering had also heard about it. “Disgusting!” someone shouted. “We Parsis are all backward!” My father recalled that when he visited the Towers of Silence in Baroda in 1992, a few days after his mother died, he could smell the rotting flesh— “Probably my mother’s.” My own mother frowned, “Naha, baba, not my

cup of tea.” The room filled with cries of recrimination but soon settled as the party drifted toward a gloomy consensus: the Towers of Silence, so long a repository of the Parsi past, might soon themselves be consigned to it.

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he Parsis are a small and introverted Indian community, most of them enclosed in walled colonies in and around Bombay. They are the descendants of Zoroastrians who left Iran more than a thousand years ago to escape religious persecution. For as long as Parsis have lived in India, they have observed dokhmenashini, the Zoroastrian ritual for disposing of the dead. As a Dominican friar observed in the fourteenth century, Parsis “cast their dead into the midst of a certain roofless tower and expose them utterly uncovered to the fowls of heaven”— vultures, kites, and crows. To bury the dead, Zoroastrians believe, is to desecrate the earth; to burn the dead, to desecrate fire; to give the dead to rivers or the sea, to desecrate water. The dead are laid to rest in dokhmas, squat cylindrical structures, into which only pallbearers are allowed to enter.* The *

In Zoroastrianism, there are two types of pallbearers: khandias, who carry the bodies to the dokhmas, and nassasalars, who carry the bodies into the dokhmas. But the distinction is rarely noted, and most Parsis use only the term khandia.

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khandias arrange the bodies on a platform in one of three concentric rings—the outer ring for men, the center ring for women, the inner ring for children. Vultures quickly consume a body, and the bones, picked clean and bleached by the sun, are tossed into a pit at the dokhma’s center. In Bombay, five dokhmas—“Towers of Silence” is the gothic embellishment of a nineteenth-century British official—are enclosed within a roughly fifty-five-acre estate atop Malabar Hill, a thin ridge overlooking the Arabian Sea. The first was built around 1670, when Malabar Hill still seemed far from the civilized world; women were barred from funeral processions for fear that they would be carried off by the tigers and hyenas loping among the trees. Over the next two centuries, as Parsis

flocked to the city, they built four more dokhmas. Wealthy Parsis bought up the surrounding woods and entrusted the land to the Panchayat, the council of elders that still governs the community’s religious affairs. The estate was called Doongerwadi, a Gujarati word meaning “orchard on a hill.” By the turn of the twentieth century, Malabar Hill was no longer a remote wilderness. The governor’s mansion had been moved there. In the decade following India’s independence in 1947, the city’s population nearly doubled, and dozens of high-rises were built. By the 1970s, residential development had crept right up to the edges of Doongerwadi. As the buildings encroached, the vultures began to disappear. The trees in which they nested were cut down; they were frightened by the sounds of construction.

Photograph of one of the Bombay Towers of Silence, circa 1955 © Alice Schalek/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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Then they seemed to vanish completely. Bird watchers began reporting that the vultures appeared lethargic. Their necks dangled below their bellies. They fell from trees. During the 1990s, the population of three native vulture species declined by more than 97 percent. Not until 2003 did a veterinary researcher from the United States determine that the vultures were being poisoned by Diclofenac, a cheap drug introduced in India in the mid-1980s for the treatment of arthritis in humans and later used primarily as a painkiller for animals. The carcasses of humans and animals that die soon after they have been given Diclofenac contain sufficient traces of the drug to cause kidney failure in the vultures that feed on them. As the birds disappeared, residents of the apartment buildings overlook-

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ing Doongerwadi began to complain about what most Parsis already suspected: dead bodies were lying unconsumed, left to rot in the dokhmas. The Panchayat responded by closing two of the more exposed dokhmas. In the others, it began conducting strange experiments. Ozone pumps were installed to deodorize the air, but they were expensive and ineffective. Khandias were told to scatter chemicals and microorganism-rich substances over corpses to speed their decomposition, but during the monsoon, the rain washed the powders away. Khandias tried pumping chemicals into the bodies’ open orifices, but the process was unbearable. Corpses turned to sludge, and the khandias slipped on the human residue. The Panchayat turned to priests and advisers for other ideas. Khojeste Mistree, a prominent religious scholar, recommended building a giant aviary at Doongerwadi for the breeding of a captive vulture population. The idea was supported by conservative Parsis and conservationists, but the Panchayat was ultimately discouraged by the cost. And there was further cause for skepticism: vultures are notoriously fussy breeders, especially in captivity. Some researchers estimated that it would take at least a decade to breed the number of vultures needed to consume all the Parsis consigned to Doongerwadi—803 last year. At one point, the Panchayat announced that it would erect solar reflectors inside the dokhmas, hoping that a gentle harnessing of the sun’s energy would enhance the existing practice without upsetting traditionalists. Although many had misgivings— Mistree suggested that the technology turned the dokhmas into crematoria— the community seemed relieved that the problem had been addressed. But the reflectors, Dhun Baria revealed, were terribly ineffective. Having spent the previous fifteen years caring for her bedridden mother, Baria sent her mother’s body to Doongerwadi in November of 2005. She and her relatives observed the traditional four days of prayers and rituals, but after others had offered their final farewells, Baria, suddenly alone and with little else to do, continued to spend long days at Doongerwadi. She

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prayed and made small talk with the staff. One afternoon, several months after her mother’s death, Baria asked a khandia, “Mummy gaye?” Has Mummy gone? “Oh-ho, no,” he said, laughing. “Mummy isn’t going anywhere for a while.” Baria was horrified. She began asking questions, and before long, perhaps with the help of other Parsis, she obtained a video of the putrefaction inside the dokhmas. At first she had no intention of making her video public; she merely wanted to capture the attention of the Panchayat. But when they rebuffed her, Baria threatened to release it. “Go ahead,” one member challenged. “No one will listen to you.”

I

arrived in Bombay in June, the middle of the monsoon. Although I had drifted from the Parsi community since adolescence, I was haunted by the images of bodies rotting in the Towers and by the communal decay those images seemed to capture. I had made plans to visit Dhun Baria and to tour Doongerwadi, but the trains had stopped running; private car companies refused to send a driver. For days, I was marooned with my mother’s cousin Maz in her apartment in Andheri, a suburb fifteen miles north of Malabar Hill. Most of what is now Bombay was under water until the second half of the nineteenth century, when extravagant land-reclamation projects transformed scattered islands into a long contiguous peninsula. Developers blasted the hills and dumped them into the sea, rolling out the edges of the northern suburbs, extending the southern tip of the city, Colaba, and rounding out the bay that now stretches from Colaba to Malabar Hill. But every year during the monsoon, the sea rises up to reclaim the land, beginning with the low-lying streets of Bombay’s northern suburbs. Maz said that during the monsoon of 2005, after three feet of rain fell in a single day, she and everyone else who relied on the trains to get to and from work spent the night wading through kneedeep water. Buses were stalled in the roads, passengers stranded inside after the drivers had fled. People living in

the buildings alongside the roads rushed to greet the commuters with cups of tea. A biscuit factory opened its doors and sent biscuits traveling downstream for blocks. I asked Maz if there were snakes in the water. “Never mind the snakes,” she said, “there was shit and piss everywhere. But what else were we going to do, after all that tea? And the water was cold!” After a few days, when the waters receded and traffic returned to the streets, Maz and I found a rickshaw driver willing to drive us south to Bombay. As we arranged ourselves in the back seat, the driver gazed at the mural painted near the entrance to Maz’s colony. “Who is that?” he asked, lifting his chin toward an image of Zoroaster, robed in white, finger pointed heavenward. “That is our prophet,” Maz said. The driver nodded distractedly. Sizing me up in his rearview mirror, he asked, “At what age do you marry off your girls?” “No such age,” Maz answered. It is true that there is no set age at which Parsis marry their girls, but I was about twenty-six when I was told it was time to think about settling down. I began receiving phone calls from eligible Parsi doctors and engineers. A greeting card arrived from a man in Canada who included a photograph of himself in his stiff red Mountie uniform. Maz, thankfully, is one of the few Parsis I know who never asks when I plan to marry. She has never offered to introduce me to a nice boy just because he has a good job at Motorola, notwithstanding the fact that he lives in rural Mississippi, and I have never asked Maz why she divorced her husband after a few years and never remarried. But our driver, a handsome young Muslim, no older than twenty, probably married with two or three children, persisted. “Then how does it work?” “A girl finds a boy that she likes and then she marries him,” Maz explained, no longer concealing her irritation. The driver blinked. “But she might spend half her life looking.” “Never mind,” Maz said. The driver had hit upon a source of anxiety among Parsis. One third of Parsi men and women never marry. Another third

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marry outside the community. Conversion into the religion is prohibited, and because Parsis traditionally refuse to recognize the children of interfaith marriage as coreligionists, those children are dropped from the official count. The decade preceding Indian independence was the last decade of Parsi population growth. In 1941, there were approximately 115,000 in India. In 2001, there were fewer than 70,000. Emigration accounted for much of the early decline, but low marriage and birth rates have accelerated it. Last year, 147 Parsis were born and 842 Parsis, most of them in their eighties and nineties, died. In 2021, when India’s population is expected to reach 1.2 billion, there will be fewer than 30,000 Parsis in the country, at which point Parsis will be demoted on the census from a “community” to a “tribe.” Maz and I, unmarried and childless— at least for now—are the terminal branches of a dying and decrepit family tree.

O

ver the phone, Dhun Baria introduced herself to me as “a nice Parsi lady.” In my mind, she had become Antigone, a woman in rageful defiance of authority, refusing to sacrifice the bonds of family to the symbolic rites of community. “Me too,” I said, and she invited me over for tea. Baria lives alone in a small oneroom apartment in a widow’s block in the Mehrzbahn Parsi Colony. Her mother, Nergis, became a widow when Dhun was still a child. “I am sorry for my small apartment,” she said. “I am a poor woman.” She pulled a chair into the middle of the room for me and sat herself on the bed, careful not to disturb the row of jasmine buds lining her pillow. “Have some tea and then I will show you the Doongerwadi photos.” My host disappeared behind a curtain. Alone, I scanned the walls of her room: a framed illustration of Zoroaster, the Air India Maharaja bowing obsequiously in a plastic case, a ballerina frozen in fourth position. A black-and-white photograph hung above the curtain. “Is that you?” I asked. The young woman in the photograph sings into a microphone, eyes closed, her arms snaking above her head.

“Yes, it is me!” The photo was taken some forty years ago, when Baria traveled the country singing qawwali and ghazals—Sufi spirituals and Persian love poetry. Baria hurried back into the room to hand me a flyer with a portrait of the same young woman and the caption “8TH WONDER OF THE WORLD, India’s finest and only Parsi lady Urdu Qawalla.” The photo was old but the flyer was new. Baria told me that she planned to sing again, to raise money for her trust benefiting poor and disabled Parsis. By the way, she asked, would I happen to know anyone in America interested in hiring an Urdu qawalla? She disappeared behind the curtain again and began to sing, her voice flaked and furrowed like old tree bark. “You should record a CD,” I shouted. “Doongerwadi CD? Yes, yes, I will show you.” No, no, I said, your own songs. “Yes! Once an artist, always an artist!” I asked Baria why she stopped singing. “Mummy was strict.” Men from all over the world would come to listen to Baria. She began receiving marriage proposals—“Not friendship proposals, straight to marriage.” But these were not Parsi men, and Baria’s mother set an ultimatum: Baria had to put a stop either to the proposals or to the singing. Baria stopped singing and never married. She returned from the kitchen with a single cup of tea and a saucer piled with lapsi, a sweet sticky grain. “I don’t have any children,” she said, watching me eat, “and I like having a daughter around.” I asked Baria how she was able to make hundreds of copies of the DVD. “Hundreds?” she said. “Thousands!” But she had help, she confessed, lowering her voice. I asked how the DVDs had been circulated among so many homes and agiaries. She plucked her chest, “Me!” Baria opened a trunk and pulled out a bright orange envelope. “Now you will see.” She sat down and leaned in so close I could smell her hair oil. She shuffled the stack of photos before revealing one to me. “See,” she said, pointing at an image of a prone body, limbs stiff, eyes hollowed. Crows pick only at the small

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parts, Baria explained, eyes and tongues, not like vultures. Another photo showed bodies piled along the edges of the bhandar, the deep pit at the center of the dokhma. “This heap is ten meters high.” Baria pushed on like an expert witness, patient and painstaking in her explanation of every photographic detail. Some bodies were arrayed neatly around the platform, but most others were strewn haphazardly, men and women in scandalous proximity. Some bodies baked in the sun, others lay buried in the shadows. Stumped legs hung over the edge of the bhandar; fat streaked down its walls like bird droppings. To make room for new bodies, Baria explained, every few months the khandias toss the old bodies, in all stages of decomposition, from the platform into the bhandar. Baria said it takes four khandias to lift a body swollen with rain. Corpses fall apart. Rather than drag a bloated body from the dokhma’s outer circumference to the bhandar, khandias leave the heaviest ones at the bhandar’s edge and shove them into the pit when space on the platform becomes scarce. “Poor khandias,” Baria said, grimacing. Most Parsis with whom I spoke have mixed feelings about Baria’s revelation. “What she did was right,” I heard repeated, “but the way she did it, airing our dirty laundry in front of the world—that was not right.” Others resented Baria for confronting them with matters to which they would have preferred to remain oblivious: the eclipse of a lovely old way of life, the dying of an ancient people, the disintegration of community itself. I sensed, though, that Baria relished the spotlight she had regained for herself, as well as the company of curious visitors that her photographs brought to her door. Baria finally snatched the stack of pictures from my lap and replaced them with a personal photo album. “Okay, now let’s look at some nice pictures.” She showed me old concert photos and a formal portrait of her mother and her mother’s mother. We spent the rest of the afternoon swapping stories, comparing the rough outlines of our lives, our conversation rocking back and forth between

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Gujarati and English with the familiar politeness of estranged relatives. As I got up to leave, she asked if I would come again. I did, but only to retrieve the umbrella I had left behind.

W

hen it began to rain again, Maz and I spent the afternoon with her neighbor and good friend Jeroo. “What are you doing here,” she asked me, “during the monsoon, of all things?” Maz explained that I had come to visit the Towers of Silence. “Oh-ho.” Jeroo’s smile broadened. “You’re interested in bawajis”—crazy old Parsis. It’s true, Jeroo volunteered, that there are bodies rotting at Doongerwadi. “I have seen the bodies with my own eyes, from a balcony above the Towers.” What about the smell? I asked. “No. Never. There’s no smell,” she said. “Prayers eliminate the smell. Our prayers are very powerful,” she assured me. I searched Maz’s face for doubt— Maz had mentioned that this same friend kept her windows closed to shut out the stench. “Does that mean you want to be left in the dokhmas?” I asked. Jeroo scowled for a moment, “Dokhmas, I’m not so sure, but the prayers I want.” Jeroo lowered herself to the floor, unlocked a cabinet, and began stacking yellowed prayer manuals for me to read. “Have you heard,” she asked, “about the ghosts of Dadar Parsi colony?” A few years ago, she continued, two young Parsi couples were killed in a car accident. A stream of metal rods slid from the back of an open truck and into the car, skewering two brothers and their fiancées. The brothers’ parents were anxious to understand why their sons, both professional race-car drivers, were unable to avoid the accident, so they recited a prayer to summon their sons’ souls. The prayers worked. The souls appeared, the parents asked what had happened, the souls explained. The problem, Maz interrupted, was that these parents kept summoning their sons’ souls. “Once or twice, fine, but, my god, it was becoming a habit with those parents.”

Eventually, the souls had enough. They asked their parents to please stop calling them. “The traveling back and forth—it was too much.” The souls needed their rest; they were trying to move on. “Can you imagine so much traveling. And in this monsoon?” Maz laughed. “It would be damn inconvenient.” “Parsis don’t believe in ghosts,” my uncle Merwan later objected. But whenever I mentioned to Parsi relatives and acquaintances that I had come to visit Doongerwadi, they would tell me about angels and black magic, astrology and numerology, sai baba and feng shui. I noticed copies of The Secret, the self-help manual about the power of positive thinking, on more than one bookshelf. The city of Pune, I was informed, is full of ghosts because it houses a military base—lots of untimely deaths, hurried funerals, improper burials. “Pune isn’t full of ghosts,” Merwan insisted, “its full of bawajis.” He recommended I redirect my questions to a priest. I met Rooyingtan Peer, a priest with kind olive eyes, in the library of the K. R. Cama Oriental Institute. “You have to bear in mind,” Peer explained, “that we have lost so much of our religion.” What Parsis no longer understand about life and death in terms of our own teachings, we attempt to understand in borrowed terms—Christianity, Hinduism, humanism, ghosts, and so on. “Unlike other religions, ours is not an unbroken tradition,” Peer said. “Zoroastrianism has suffered three major ‘catastrophes.’” The first was Alexander the Great—“Alexander the Accursed,” to use my uncle’s words—who, in the fourth century b.c., destroyed the fire temples and slaughtered the priests. The temples were eventually rebuilt, but the oral tradition had died with the clergy. Zoroastrianism began to be revived in Iran in the third century a.d., when priests created an alphabet for the language Avestan, to record what they could recover from the past. But with the Arab conquest in the seventh century a.d.—the second catastrophe—Islam replaced Zoroastrianism as the religion of Iran. Muslim armies gave surviving Zoroastrians a

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choice of death, conversion, or exile. Most converted. In the thirteenth century, Mongol hordes destroyed nearly everything—the third catastrophe. By that time, a small group of Zoroastrians had migrated to India, but the traditions they brought with them were only fragments. After my conversation with Peer, a frocked librarian ushered me to a recent English-language acquisition: a multi-volume history of the great Parsi industrialists and entrepreneurs of the modern era. As I turned the pages, modernity began to seem like a fourth, sustained catastrophe for Zoroastrianism in India. When the East India Company set up its first trading factories along the coast of Gujarat, it found its most willing collaborators among Parsis, who were apparently less constrained by religious restrictions than some of their neighbors. In English schools, Parsi boys, already estranged from Zoroastrian teaching, soon assimilated to the dogmas of scientific rationalism. Parsis so thrived under colonial rule, amassing fortunes in shipbuilding, moneylending, and manufacturing, that, by the early nineteenth century, nearly half of the forty-two foreign firms trading opium in China were fully owned by Parsis. But after the collapse of colonial power, the Parsi community lost its vitality. “Now our community is in darkness,” Dasturji Firoz Kotwal, a former high priest in Bombay, had lamented to me. “No one reads the old languages. No one remembers the prayers. Parents cannot teach their children anything because they know nothing themselves. If Parsis keep marrying outside the community, we will disappear into the sea of everyone else.”

I

asked my cabdriver to take the long way to Malabar Hill, across the yawning stretch of the bay, past the long line of hopeful applicants at the U.S. Embassy, past the children’s park crowded with old men. At the entrance of Doongerwadi, I was stopped by a young man in uniform. He flicked his eyebrows once, as if to say, Where do you think you’re going? “Doongerwadi?” He shook his head and pointed to a sign. parsis only.

“I am Parsi.” The guard pointed to another sign. no trespassing. “I am not trespassing,” I said. “I am Parsi.” “Whose funeral?” he asked, his mouth gory with betel nut and spit. I had dressed modestly, as if for a funeral, but was too flustered to lie. “Please,” I said. From the side of his mouth, he whispered, “Look, lady, I’ll lose my job,” rolling his eyes toward the camera hanging from my neck. The Panchayat has strictly forbidden photography at Doongerwadi. The guard and I appealed to two women approaching the security gate. They were both tall and lean, wearing head scarves like proper mourners. The guard pleaded his case—She has a camera, her Hindi is unintelligible— and I pleaded mine—I came a long, long way to exercise this one birthright. The two women ruled in Hindi— She’s American, but Parsi nonetheless. The guard relented, turning his head to release a red arc of spit as I passed. I wandered up the driveway, along the sloped stone wall that spirals Malabar Hill, girding Doongerwadi from the slurs of traffic below. As I ascended, the skies seemed to unfold, and centuries reeled back. I tried to comport myself with some semblance of religiosity, but the effort was undone by the sound of a scooter. A young woman wearing a tight churidar and sleeveless kamise flew by me, her dupatta flapping freely behind her. Why, I wondered, was I beetling up this hill, covered from ankle to wrist, while this halfnaked girl sped right along? I called Maz. “Shortcut,” she explained. Residents of Godrej Baug, an adjacent apartment complex, are allowed to cut through Doongerwadi. Godrej Baug and another building, the Spenta, were both built on land that was once part of Doongerwadi. In May 2007, the Panchayat licensed an advertising company to erect billb o a rd s over t he ent r a nc e to Doongerwadi. The billboards advertised Maruti Suzuki cars. One urged, “Rev Up Your Night Life.” Another recommended simply, “Life. Style.” Parsis were appalled. Trees had been hacked down, the Panchayat apparently made very little money from

the deal, and the wording of the advertisements—plugging life—was singularly out of place. Several weeks later, the ads were changed. Halfway up the hill, the driveway circled a waterless fountain and opened onto a small parking lot. A turnstile separated the driveway from the bunglis, the four squat bungalows in which priests and families gather to recite prayers over the bodies of the dead. Nestled between them was an unwalled pavilion where women, traditionally excluded from the prayers recited in the bunglis, used to sit and wait. I made a point of sitting in one of the open bunglis. A young man glanced in my direction before returning his smile to his cell phone. Other men slept, stretched across wooden benches. Yellow dogs panted in the shade. An overhead fan churned slowly. In the past decade, the controversies surrounding Doongerwadi have centered on the bunglis. In 2001, a group calling itself Disposal of the Dead with Dignity at Doongerwadi appealed to the Panchayat to make available the prayer bunglis to Parsis who choose to bury or cremate their dead. The Panchayat, sympathetic to the group’s concerns, passed a resolution a year later that would have allowed all Parsis to use the bunglis, regardless of how they disposed of their dead. But soon after, the Save Doongerwadi Action Committee formed to challenge the resolution. Priests likewise issued a statement against the measure, and a few months later the Panchayat suspended it. Since 2006, the matter has been pending before the Bombay High Court. I drifted past the bunglis toward another gate. What lay beyond it was astonishingly beautiful: date palms and silver oaks stretched upward, their tips illuminated with new growth. Giant peach-colored bulbs hung from the swollen stalks of bushes stooped under the weight of their own profusion. I walked slowly along a deepening cavity. Stone-ribbed walls rose up on either side of a narrowing path. Staircases stopped in midair. The forest seemed to darken, and from among the shadows, men in uniforms appeared and disappeared, swinging buckets of smoldering sandalwood, smudging the air with blue smoke.

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I climbed a staircase that opened onto a tidy rose garden, a simulacrum of the paradise I had seen depicted in medieval Persian paintings. A gardener stood urinating behind a tree. From beyond the garden, I heard a voice echo. In a cold white agiary, an unshaven priest was shouting into a telephone. As I continued, I found myself walking more slowly, deliriously slowly, until I finally stopped. Somewhere among the trees, tired souls were making their final rounds, closing their accounts on life, preparing themselves for the next. I feared I had crossed some invisible threshold and become a trespasser after all. As I turned around, a gardener approached. He closed his eyes and clasped his hands before his face. “Sahibji,” he said. I returned the honorific. He opened his eyes and said it again, more urgently this time, “Sahibji, sahibji,” and I understood that it was time for me to leave.

“T

o understand dokhmenashini,” Khojeste Mistree said, “one has to understand the relationship between good and evil.” Mistree, the vulturebreeding advocate, is perhaps the most interviewed (at least among nonParsis) expert on Zoroastrianism and the most hated among Parsis (at least the ones I met), for the same reason: he is a purist. I met him at his home in the Kharegat Parsi Colony, a sixtyyear-old development wrapped around the bottom of Malabar Hill. His building, shiny and tall, looms over the others. “As a religious scholar,” he said, “my position on dokhmenashini is likely to differ from what most Parsis loosely feel. There is such a high level of ignorance among most Parsis.” “In Zoroastrianism,” he continued with authoritative languor, “God is good and perfect.” Unlike the gods of other monotheisms, however, the Zoroastrian God is powerful but not almighty. According to the prophet Zoroaster, God created human beings to assist him in driving evil out of existence. Death is overcome when evil is finally eradicated; God will become all-powerful, the earth will be restored to its original perfection, and good souls will spend the

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rest of eternity in paradise. This final resurrection is called frashokereti, “the making wonderful of the world.” But until then, Mistree said, death and decay remain the triumph of evil. Into the traditional death rites, the entire struggle of good and evil is enfolded. The bounded symmetries in the architecture of the dokhmas, the ritual segregation of the living from the dead, the practice of bathing the dead, the exclusion of menstruating women from funerals—these are all practices of containing pollution and confusion, reestablishing purity and solidarity among the living. “If one is committed to overcoming evil—I’m not sure most Parsis are—then one is obliged to observe the rituals that contain death and decay.” For the true Parsi, literally everything is at stake. And for the Parsi concerned with at least getting herself into paradise, the holy books make clear that burial and cremation are, according to Mistree, “an absolute doctrinal no-no.” Spiritually, he explained, the soul is in a traumatized state. He offered me a sympathetic analogy. “Imagine you are in an unfamiliar place, you have no contacts, you don’t know your way around. You’d be very uncomfortable, wouldn’t you?” I nodded, suddenly homesick. The soul is shocked and timid. For four days, as it nervously awaits its judgment, we do everything we can to comfort the soul, which has suddenly been cut adrift. That’s why we light candles near the body— so t hat t he soul k nows where to find all that’s familiar. The soul actually hovers over the body. Towers of Silence permit that; cremation and burial don’t. Dokhmenashini is not optional. “To put it crudely,” he said, “it’s a package deal.”

M

y last morning in Bombay, I woke up early to return to Doongerwadi, this time with a chaperone, Dasturji Framroze Mirza. Mirza grew up in an old Malabar Hill Parsi colony, since torn down to make room for a highway. He became a priest when he was sixteen years old, more than forty years ago, reciting prayers for the dead alongside his father.

Mirza was the supervising priest at Doongerwadi for a few months in 2002, until, as he said, he was nudged from his position by more powerful orthodox contingents. As the sky darkened and it began to rain, I waited under the roof of the Albless bungli. One of the maintenance workers smiled and switched on a fan. Mirza was only a few minutes late, but my mood had turned by the time he sidled up to me on my bench. I was tired, I complained, and I wanted to go home. “How old are you?” Mirza asked. “I’m fifty-five,” he said. “I have back problems, bad teeth—but look at me!” He threw open his hands as if he’d just performed a magic trick. It was true that Mirza was especially animated for the hour, for a man of his age and calling. “By the way, why are you not married?” he asked. “Even for a Parsi, you’re late!” Some other morning, I might have turned around and walked away. But having become aware of what a stranger I was at Doongerwadi, I was almost comforted by Mirza’s nagging. I had heard others describe Mirza as a “renegade priest” because he performs weddings for Parsis who marry outside the community and funerals for those who decide to cremate or bury their dead. He thinks the prayer bunglis at Doongerwadi should be available for all forms of obsequies, not just dokhmenashini. “There’s nothing sacred about the bunglis,” he said. They were built in the 1920s as a matter of convenience, when housing in Bombay grew scarce and prayer rooms in colonies were converted for rental. “But now, Parsis don’t like to change,” he said. “They like to fuss.” He explained that the overwhelming majority of Parsis in Bombay—98 percent— continue to send their dead to the dokhmas. I asked why. “Convenience.” When someone dies, all you have to do is pick up the phone and call Doongerwadi; the hearse comes, the body is taken to the bunglis, the priests arrive. Another package deal. Mirza rose as the rain subsided. “Come,” he said, “follow me.” He led me past security gates and gardeners, past the fire temple, spools of smoke reeling from its windows, before reaching the end of the paved road. We followed a trail that tapered be-

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fore a squat stone well, the VachaGandhi dokhma, the oldest dokhma on the hill. It was smaller and meaner than I had imagined, conveying the nullity of death. Mirza asked if I noticed the smell. “Incense?” I asked, inhaling deeply. “Not incense.” And then I noticed it, buried beneath the smoke of sandalwood, the faintest stench—I gagged. Mirza nodded. “I told you.” We retraced our steps and continued in the opposite direction, toward the Anjuman dokhma, the largest tower. From where we stood, behind a tall iron gate embellished with two Persian sentinels, the circumference of stone seemed endless. Solar reflectors hovered just above the rim of the outer wall. They were small and uninspiring, nothing like the stadium floodlights I had imagined. Mirza explained that the reflectors can focus sunlight on only a small part of a body at any given moment. I remembered how as children my brother and I would try and try to incinerate centipedes with a magnifying glass, tracing the curl of their bodies with a point of light that invariably failed. Because the solar reflectors are difficult to maneuver and tilt, khandias drag bodies through an awkward piecemeal processing, pointing the sun first at the chest, then the stomach, then the legs. “And anyway,” Mirza asked, opening his palms to the clouded sky, “what sun?” “Come,” he said. “I’ll show you how dokhmenashini works.” We wandered into another building, a kind of office, where Mirza uncovered a styrofoam model of the Anjuman dokhma. Bones, picked clean by vultures, are left to blanch in the sun before they are swept into the bhandar. From there, any remaining waste f lows through four underground channels to four separate wells located a hundred or more meters from each dokhma. The underground channels are lined with charcoal, which filters and purifies the passing fluid, so that what eventually reaches the wells and seeps into the ground is clean water. “That is how it is supposed to work,” Mirza continued. But the underground channels have been destroyed by development, the pipes are clogged with

human remains. The Anjuman dokhma was built to hold 300 bodies. Mirza estimates that today there are as many as 700 bodies there. “The dokhmas have become a warehouse,” he said. “And what do we do in a warehouse? We store things. The Parsi community in Bombay is storing the dead.” And what happens to the inventory? I asked. On the model, Mirza pointed to a footpath leading from the center pit to the outer wall of the dokhma. A few times each year, he explained, the khandias line up along the footpath. A few unfortunate khandias crawl down the pit and pull out decomposing bodies, which are often stuck to one another—Mirza pressed the back of his hand against mine— “like glue.” They then wrap the bodies, several at a time, in large blankets, and pass the bundles along, from one to another, out of the dokhma. “And then what happens?” he asked me, without waiting for an answer. “There’s a pit behind the dokhma. And into the pit, the bodies are dumped, several at a time. They are buried.” Mirza and I walked back toward the bunglis in silence. As we parted, we shook hands and promised to stay in touch. Only after he disappeared on his scooter did his words begin to unravel. They are buried. Well, I thought, let the dead bury the dead. From the Grant Road station, I caught a train back to Andheri. A distressed parade of child vendors passed between the seats, selling glass bangles, fried vegetables, scrubbing brushes. Amputees bobbed their hands, asking for money. Outside the train’s windows, bare-bottomed children scurried among piles of wet garbage. Along the station platform at Andheri, an assembly of legless vendors spread their wares on the ground—lemons, bindis, and a small scale (one rupee per weigh). As the train emptied and homeward travelers spilled from the platform onto the street, I stopped to watch a blind old man with fine freshly cut hair rake his knuckles across his mat, pushing his plastic combs, one beside the other, in some imperfect order, only to have them scatter again as another tide of tired bodies washed ■ across the platform.

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S

T

O

R

Y

WAIT TILL YOU SEE ME DANCE By Deb Olin Unferth

when people will die. I meet Iandknow them, I can look into their faces see if they have long to last. It’s

earth and shows a man the future and how bad it’s going to be, and the man looks at the future and says, ‘But what

like having a knack for math or a green thumb, both of which I also have. People wear their health on their faces. here was a time I T lived alone in the crappiest neighborhood

his office assistant T sat at her desk and handed out notices about

I would ever live in and had few friends and worked at a place where the people I saw were all quietly abandoning their plans, like I was. I had the faces of dying people all around me. One day the office assistant called me over to her desk and said she was an Indian dancer and how would I like to go to an Indian dance? his same office assisT tant had once said to me, “You know what I think every time I look at you? Guess. Guess what I think.” “Here comes the bride,” I said. “Wrong,” she said. “I think about that movie where the angel comes to Deb Olin Unferth is the author, most recently, of the novel Vacation (McSweeney’s). She teaches at Wesleyan University.

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the library!’ You should put that on your voicemail.” “I don’t work at the library.” “People would know they had the right number.” After that she called me Mary and soon had them all calling me Mary.

about Mary? What happens to her?’ And the angel says, ‘You’re not going to like it, George.’ And George says, ‘Well, I have to know. Tell me, Angel.’ And the angel says, ‘She’s an old maid! She works at the library!’ And the man says, ‘Nooooooo!’” “I don’t know that movie,” I said. “‘She’s an old maid! She works at

forms that people had forgotten to fill out. She wrote down on slips of paper chore lists, reminders, disclosures she’d received from above: Tag your food. Turn in your book orders. You have been chosen for a special assignment. I didn’t like her. She was young and hard to talk to and not nice. She wasn’t the only office assistant. There were two others who were locked in an eternal battle and fought every single day. A partition had been raised between them in the hope that if they didn’t see each other they would cease to believe in the other’s existence. It hadn’t worked. All it did was make them think they each had their own offices, which they protected fiercely. The entire setup was confusing and inconvenient. If you wanted

“Inside the View, No. 10,” by Helen Sear. Courtesy Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn

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anything done, you had to depend on the first office assistant, the one who had asked me to the dance. o this assistant was a lot of things S but she certainly was not Indian, and on the day she asked me to the dance I said so. “What kind of an Indian are you supposed to be?” I said. Then it turned out she meant Native American, not Indian. But she wasn’t that either. “You have the cheeks of a cowgirl,” I said. “You have the face of a cowboy.” It was true. She was both pretty and masculine. Well, she had learned how to dance some Native American dances and her own mother had sewed her a Native American costume. It was beautiful, the costume, she said, and if you drove out of the city, you could find the land the Native Americans once lived on and still do today and where they dance still. She had a flyer about it, look. “I never heard of this place,” I said. “Do you want to come or not?” “I don’t know how to dance any Native American dances.” “They’ll teach you, everyone will. They’re very nice out there.” I didn’t know why she wanted me along. Maybe she wanted more friends, which might not be so bad considering the way things were going just then. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.” “Great,” she said. Her eyebrows went up. “You’ll drive? I don’t have a car.” t this job, four times a day, thirty people assembled before me and it was my duty to tell them some useful fact about the English language, a fact they could then take and go out into the world with and use to better their positions in society. There were no grades in the class. It was a “pass/fail” class and whether they got a “pass” or a “fail” depended on an essay they had to write on the last day, which was read and evaluated by outside sources. These outside sources were supposed to be mysterious, were maybe not even people, were maybe just God, but I happened to know were simply whichever teacher or two the

A

office assistant lined up to do it. It was a probationary class, intended for the students so illiterate that it was almost unseemly to have them there. It was the last-chance class. It went by the number 99. Anyone who passed got to enter college for real, sign up for 101. Anyone who failed had to leave. The students from 99 were all over the hallways. They didn’t care about any useful facts to take out into the world. They cared only about the essay graded by outside sources. Thirty percent failed most years and everybody knew this. The students in 99 disliked me with a vigor and a courage that was kind of amazing. I stood at the front of the room on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and said, “The test is graded by outside sources.” I used this to respond to every complaint, defense, and plea. The test is graded by outside sources. The test is graded by outside sources. The test is graded by outside sources. hat day, after I agreed to bring T the assistant to the dance, I went and stood in front of my third class of

2. ome months before the assistant S asked me to the dance the associate chair called me into his office. This was a man whose face held the assurance of the living: he’d hold up a good long while yet. “Do you have room in any of your classes?” he said. “No,” I said, “I don’t have any room. I certainly don’t have room two weeks into the semester.” “I’m sorry to hear that, Mary, because we’ve got this kid here.” He pointed to a kid in the corner whom I hadn’t noticed yet. A thin boy who clutched several plastic grocery bags to his chest. “My name’s not Mary,” I said. “It’s not?” “He missed two weeks,” I said. “Forget it.” “He’s here on a visa.” “Does he speak any English?” I said. We looked at him. He looked back at us as if he might startle himself off his chair. “Take the kid,” the associate chair said.

the day. It was nearly the end of the semester and they had that unstrung look to them—gaunt, spooked, blaming. “Let me remind you,” I told them, “I don’t grade the tests. And I can tell you this much: any essay without a proper introduction will not get a ‘pass,’ so let’s turn our attention back to the board.”

nce a visa student in 99 wrote me O a poem about how much I was helping him improve his grammar. One

was what is called an adjunct: a Ia dependent thing attached to another thing in or subordinate position.

bled essay and I thought: There is no way this kid is going to pass. And I thought: What a bother for him to fly all the way across the world to sit in my class and then to fly back home. And by the time I finished those two thoughts he was already shifting to the back of my mind, he was already taking a seat amid the blur of other students, whose names I would never know, whose faces I’d forget, and whose passing or failing grades were like changes in the air temperature, were nothing to do with me. Every semester I went through this. I’d had the job two years. I had local city kids and a few foreign stu-

he assistant had it a little wrong T about the movie, by the way. It wasn’t the future that George got to see. The angel’s job is to show George what the world would be like if George had never existed. The premise of the movie—because of course I’d seen it, everyone’s seen it, if you were born in America you’ve seen it—is that George is unhappy and has been for many years, his whole life nearly, and he is so full of regret and fear that he wants to die, or, even better, to have not been born in the first place.

of the lines of the poem went: Thou laid really strong excellent basement. he kid was a worse-than-average T 99 student. He couldn’t write a sentence. He turned in his first jum-

STORY

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dents, all of them ready for certain destruction. Some brought me fruit baskets. Some tried to bribe me into passing them. One threatened me, told me his “alliances” would look me up one day. By the third week of the semester what this kid was to me was nothing to do with me. y accident I heard him play. I was B walking down the hallway toward another tedious day and a strange sound stopped me. Strands of violin and piano were coming from behind a door. I looked in. Did I mention that this run-down school, this flat barrel-bottom place was run between the walls of a building designed by a very famous architect? Yes, it was. It had been the high point of the architect’s career. It was while making this building that the architect had come up with his very best ideas about designing buildings and had summed these ideas up in a short catchy sentence that he said aloud and that was later written into books that were read all over the world and was now familiar even to the layperson. After saying this catchy sentence, the architect succumbed to his drinking problem and never straightened himself out and eventually died bankrupt and alone, but this building still stood, and now somehow these people had gotten their hands on the place and were ruining it as fast as they could. Water damage, broken tiles, missing doorknobs, and, worst of all, modern rehab: linoleum floors, drop ceilings, paint over wood. Catastrophe was setting in, but this one room had been preserved—perhaps because the public still encountered it on festive holiday occasions. The architect’s one mistake had been to put this room on the seventh floor. The public had to be ushered in past the wreckage to reach it, up the new fake-wood-paneled elevators, over the colorless hallway carpet that had been nailed down there. But once inside, an auditorium opened up overhead and it was perfect. It marked that thin line of one artistic movement shifting into another, one great artist at his best.

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n the stage the kid from my O class was on the piano. Another student was playing the violin. The kid kept lifting one hand, keeping the left hand going and conducting the violin with his melody hand. Then the violin stopped and the kid continued to play and the sound I was hearing was formal and sad and peculiar. I myself had studied piano for years. I’d wanted to be a concert pianist in high school, which is its own separate bad joke now, but I knew this guy was super good. The piece had a density and a mathematical oddness, an originality. He stopped playing and looked up. I ducked out the door. in the hallway, thinking. How Iourstood had such a talented kid wound up at school? The school was no great music school. There were better music schools up the street, not to mention all over the country and the world. I felt like I couldn’t breathe for a moment, like my lungs were being pressed. I saw the emotional deadness in me and I saw it lift. It was temporarily gone. nother paper of his landed in the A pile. I couldn’t understand any of it. Something about cars. The color of cars. Maybe about the color of cars. Something about the advent of America, of bank machines and microwave sandwiches. That afternoon he sat in the back of the class and wrote down whatever was going up on the board. I told him to talk to me at the end of the hour. He came and stood in front of me, his plastic bags in his hands at his sides. He was the same height as me, and he had sharp, dark good looks, though his nervousness shaded them. “Yes, miss?” he said. “Why don’t you explain to me what you’re trying to say here,” I said. I had his paper in my hand, and he lifted his eyebrows over it. “Is it not right?” he said. I dropped the paper on the desk. “This writing is horrendous,” I said. “What are you doing at this school? Didn’t you apply anywhere else? Proper music schools?” He said nothing. Suddenly I was overwhelmed. “Well?” I said. “Well?”

The room was washed out that day, even the fluorescents were dim. “You’re never going to pass this class,” I said. He turned and walked toward the door. “I heard you in the auditorium,” I said, shaking. “I saw you.” He stopped at the door and looked back at me. it’s so easy doing Youwhat’sthink right? nce I had a student from MexiO co who’d crossed the Rio Grande over and over and always been caught. At one point he’d been lost for three days and nights, alone in the Texas desert. He’d thought it was the end of him for sure. At last he found a road and thought, My God, I am saved. The first car that came down the road was border patrol. He was back in Mexico in an hour. Another time he had tried to cross and had been sent back and had been so frustrated that he decided to use all his money and fly to Canada that same day, which he did. I don’t know why he didn’t just stay in Canada. I never asked him that. What’s so bad about Canada? But he had that American addiction, I guess. He tried to cross at Niagara Falls, had been caught again, and was sent back again—so two times from two sides of the country in thirty-nine hours. Well, he’d made it to the U.S. at last, and the only reason he wanted to be here, he said, was to get an education. (“What, they don’t have schools in Mexico?” I’d said, and he’d been annoyed.) Here in the U.S. he’d gotten fake papers, he told me. He’d gotten a job with those papers, was working under a fake name. The job paid for him to go to college, so he was getting a degree under a fake name and would have to give up his identity forever, but he didn’t care. If he didn’t pass the class, the college would make him leave and the job wouldn’t pay for school anymore. He didn’t pass. Frankly I knew it didn’t matter if he passed or not, because I knew he wouldn’t live for long. I had no idea how he would die but I knew.

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into the chair’s office to find Ithewent this kid’s file. The music kid, not Mexican kid. “What are you doing in there?” the office assistant called to me. “You’re not supposed to be in there.” She followed me in and watched me pull open a cabinet drawer. “Those are confidential,” she said. “That is strictly administrative.” “I need to see something.” I took out the kid’s file. “What do you need to see?” she said, coming up behind me and leaning over my shoulder. “You don’t get to see.” “Could you shut up for two seconds? For God’s sake.”

T

he name of his country was at the top of his file and it surprised me. It happened that his country was in a civil war that year. We’d been bombing them for reasons that had become suspect. It was all over the news. It was a mess. The file had several notes in it. There was his acceptance date and his refusal letter. He’d received scholarships from several schools. He’d not chosen our school, the letter said. But thank you. Next there was a note from admissions, dated a year later. He wanted to come after all. He’d lost his scholarship from the school of his choice. He hadn’t been able to get out of his country. He was of drafting age. There was a freeze on his passport. But this year, this week, there was a temporary reprieve. He could leave if he had sponsorship. Would we sponsor him? The date of the note put it two weeks into the semester, three days before he’d joined my class. Any other school would have said, Come spring semester, come next year. But he couldn’t come next year. It was leave then or be drafted and surely die. Probably his second choice and third choice had refused him. Fourth choice. Who knows how low on the list we lay. All I know is our school said they would take him—not out of generosity, it seemed from the paperwork, but sheer incompetence. If he failed this class, he’d have to go back, sign up for the war like everybody else.

thing was, I looked at him TheandoddI couldn’t get a read on him. STORY

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Monkey Wrench Gang

the

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www.kensandersbooks.com

8 0 1 . 5 2 1 . 3 8 1 9

s a lt l a k e c i t y, u ta h

SOLUTION TO THE JUNE PUZZLE

NOTES FOR “GETTING AHEAD”:

The alteration to be applied to the appropriate Down words is DECAPITATION.

Puzzle editing by Dan Asimov. Note: * indicates an anagram.

A L L I A N C E T A U T

G R A N N Y O L A P S E

R A V E N T O U R E A N

A S E X U A L C O R N S

R Y N P L A T I T U D E

I N D E E D U D E A L S

A C E R A O R A N S O M

N O R T H U N T I E T E

E P E E O B O E G L U M

R A T E R L U D M I R B

O T O N S E T R A N G E

S E N N E T S E S T E R

ACROSS: 1. a-g(r[ural]-a-ria[rev.])-n; 7. rev.; 10. * (types/a con); 11. la(vend)er[rev.]; 12. rev.; 14. *; 15. annu(a)l; 17. *; 20. double-T.; 22. co-0-l; 23. two mngs; 25. eluc*-1-dated; 31. tar(o)t; 32. *; 34. a-PE-r; 35. l(in)t, l(o)t; 36. s(and)lot; 37. (s)urge; 38. hidden; 39. two mngs. DOWN: 1. d(anger)-a-l(l-i)ance (D)ALLIANCE; 2. gra(n-n)y; 3. crave-n (C)RAVEN; 4. *; 5. in-deed; 6. hidden; 7. t(E.P.)ee (T)EPEE; 8. * (I)RATER; 9. homophone; 13. on-set; 16. * (P)LATITUDE; 18. O.B.(0)E.; 19. to-Ur; 21. (t)aunt-i.e. (A)UNTIE; 24. * (T)RANSOM; 26. * (E)LAPSE; 27. * (A)CORNS; 28. * (I)DEALS; 29. o(rganizational)-ran-GE (O)RANGE; 30. * (N)ESTER; 31. homophone; 33. hidden

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He could live another month, or he could live eighty more years. went to his musical-composition Iplanned teacher and asked him what he to do about this kid. “ ‘Do?’ ” said the composition teacher. “Explain ‘do.’ Can you guess how many students I have?” he wanted to know. “Look, I’m not a blood donor. Do I look like a blood donor?” “I’m an adjunct too,” I said. “Okay. You know what I’m talking about.” he adjuncts were always tired. Our classes were overenrolled. The school didn’t give us health insurance. Every year there was a Christmas party and the adjuncts were never invited. All the adjuncts shared one big office in a space like a spaceship, full of desks and boxes and books. We worked under contract and were paid nearly nothing. Below minimum wage. People were shocked when they found out how much I made. I hated the other adjuncts, some younger, some older, all with their own cowardly reason for being there. And I hated the associate chair and the smug new-world music he played with his suburban band on weekends, and how he assigned me 99 semester after semester, somehow slotted me in there without even knowing my name. And I hated myself for hating all these perfectly reasonable citizens who were just going about their lives.

T

to just pass him myself. Ihimneeded Put a big P on his paper and move through. I guess I was in love with him a little. I didn’t want him to go back. wasn’t used to being in love, not Ia student, with anyone and certainly not with certainly not one eleven years younger than I, one I barely spoke to. It was horrible. I had to wait for our class and then hope to see him in the hallway beforehand, maybe walk in at the same moment, and I had to wonder whether he’d be going to some performance at the school that night and therefore whether I should go too. I had to puzzle out where he’d be rehearsing and which group he hung around with (the oth-

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er foreign musicians: the Chileans, the Russians, the Japanese) and where they might be and whether I could sometimes be nearby, watching. I tried to do an especially good job in his class. I stopped reading aloud from the textbook. I required the students to visit the writing center. The papers came back even worse. I was giving it up, had given it up. He wasn’t even going to pass the stupid class. hat’s some lousy job you’ve got.” This was the office assistant talking. I was stapling sheets of paper together. I was pulling out staples from papers I had incorrectly stapled and restapling the papers to the correct ones. I looked over at her and could suddenly see that she was doomed. I could see it as clearly and abruptly as if I’d reached over and stapled right through her jugular, put six staples in her neck. “What else do you do,” she said, “walk dogs? Clean up their crap? This job’s not for you. You should quit.” A staple lodged under my fingernail. “Hey,” I said, “do you have anyone lined up to do the essays yet?” “What essays?” “99.” “Oh crap. I was going to bribe someone.” “I’ll do it.” “No one wants to do it.” “Put me down.” “I can’t put you down.” “Go ahead. Put me down.” “Can’t do that. You’re not an outside source.” She was right about that. The outside sources weren’t from outside the school or the country or the planet but from outside 99. The 101 teachers read the 99s. The 205 teachers. I said, “Who checks? Does anybody check?” “I check. I’m supposed to check.” “Don’t check.” “I’m not putting you down.” I was surprised by this. In previous semesters, I’d been on the receiving end of mass emails begging someone to volunteer. Anyone not teaching 99 could expect to get asked to come in on the last Saturday of final-exam week. I had thought it

“T

would be easy to convince her, that she would be relieved. ’m not saying it’s proper or right to Ito pretend love a student, and I’m not going I never did anything about it because I did, but I can say I didn’t do much. All I did was to bring the office assistant to the dance and threaten to kill her. the movie about George and the Ithenangel, the angel shows George what world would have been like if George had never existed. It turns out that without George the world would be a cold, dark place. Without George people would be poor and lonely. Some people would be dead because he hadn’t been there to save them. Others would be older than they would be if he had lived. Without George a dark force would be in control, and the population would be suppressed and subdued by it. People would walk, bundled against the fierce winds, to their coal stoves to eat their bland Christmas dinners alone. The moral of the movie is that, well, it’s too bad that George is so unhappy and that he never got to do the things he wanted to do, that he never even got to form a clear idea of what he might want to do, had instead carried with him in his heart all these years a vague longing, a sense that somehow this was all wrong, that there was a shimmering ship bumping around out there in the dark that he’d wanted to board, not knowing where it was headed but feeling so trapped and helpless where he was that he had to believe the ship would bring him someplace better. It’s too bad that’s how it was for him, that his life had been so sad, but on the upside, look how much his misery was doing for others. His daily struggles, his failures, his defeats, somehow held in place this delicate system, so that while the population wasn’t happy exactly, at least they weren’t despondent or dead.

3. t was toward the end of the seIwinter mester. We were rushing toward break, zooming around the

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hallways. Outside, the city looked as if it had been tacked up and smudged with a thumb. It was the days of early darkness, a few sprigs of tinsel. No snow, but somehow we had slush or something slushish and damp on the streets. “How would you like to go to an Indian dance?” the office assistant said to me. “What kind of an Indian are you supposed to be?” I said. n Saturday morning I drove to O her neighborhood. It was the first clear bright day we’d had in weeks. Her neighborhood consisted of a set of small streets squeezed between two enormous bridges. She lived at one end of a long brick street that started out luminous, with shiny storefronts and upscale groceries, and smoothed out into pretty little residential three-flats, painted matte colors or made of brown stones. As I drove down it, I could see glimpses of the river between buildings. I pulled up and waited.

I

had known my brother would die young and he did. I had known my neighbor would die. I had known about a high school friend and about another friend who became a lover and then went back to being a friend and then was dead. This was the kind of neighborhood where people live long lives.

he office assistant came out of T the building. She was carrying a large black case, like for an awkwardly shaped instrument. “What is that?” I said. “Our costumes,” she said.

T

he dance turned out to be incredibly far. It took hours to get there. We drove on roads leading out of the city and into the vast land of America. It was a hell of a lot of highway out there unreeling beside the median strip, dry fields behind chain-link fences, antenna towers, tollbooths, flagpoles, sky. It was the kind of drive where you pass a series of billboards and road signs that promise there will be snow cones, there will be rest in forty-eight miles, God is on the way. There was a sud-

den insane rainstorm, clear out of a drained day. The rain drummed down so hard on the car it drowned out our voices. All we could see were stars of water on the windshield. We were driving through outer space, through a comet. “I’m going to pull over,” I said. “No,” she said. “Go.”

THE DEMOCRACY THAT NEVER WAS Theory of subversion in United States. Model of true democracy. Plan to make it happen. http://www.americaninstitutefordd.com

fter a while the rain dried up, and A we were once again going over the empty land, passing an occasional spray of houses, the lost communities of our citizenry. A line of fat white birds flew by overhead, making it look like real work to get where they were going. s the dance on a reservation?” “Iwondered, No, what did I think, the assistant that the reservations were just there for anyone to go in and steal out of their wigwams? “Where then?” Well, I’d see, for God’s sake. Now would I quit asking questions and listen to the story the assistant was trying to tell about her mother, something about the costumes, how her mother had sewed them with her own fingers based on a Native American costume description. Her mother had supported her through everything. When she drew comic books her mother had always been the first to read them. When she had love problems she could always bring them home. She’d had drug troubles, she’d suffered rejection from her father, but her mother had always been there. I still hadn’t told her that no matter how great her mother was I wasn’t wearing any fucking Indian costume. nother note about the movie. A The office assistant had not been comparing me to George, the lead, who at the end of the movie cries out that he is grateful for his bad life and enjoins his daughter to get over to that piano and play them all a song. I was being compared to Mary, his wife, who if she were not around, nothing would be much different—George would have married a different lady, that’s all—and I have to say I do see the connection. Nothing would be different if I weren’t around. I haven’t

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caused anything, good or bad. Even if I have done something inadvertently, as, say, in the movies where a man moves a cup and a thousand years later all of humanity explodes, it’s likely that if I hadn’t been born, my mother would have had a different baby around the same time and that baby would have been somewhat like me or mostly like me and would have made similar choices, probably the very same ones, and she would be here right now instead of me, feeling the things that I feel in my stead. And any ill or beneficial effects that I may have caused would be caused by her, not me. She’d take care of moving or not moving any cup that I would have or not.

“Y

ou should quit that job,” said the office assistant. “You’re no good at it.” “I do all right,” I said. “You might let me help you out with those essays.” “What essays?” “99.” “Not this again.” “Did we talk about this?” “What makes you think you have any reason to ask me for a favor?” “Not a favor. I’m doing you a turn. A friendly turn, friend to friend.” “You think we’re friends? Why do you think I asked you? You have a car. I asked five other people before you.” “I’ll pay you a hundred dollars,” I said. This made her laugh. “You think I’m going to risk my job for a hundred bucks?” “A thousand.” She looked over at me then, and I could see she knew I had my secret reasons for wanting to do this, reasons that were in some way shameful. And she knew it because she had her own dark shameful secrets, all you had to do was look at her to see them, lurking behind her face, old pains, secrets having to do with the ancient beginnings of her life—and with the end of it too.

over,” she said. “P“Noull“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go home.” way,” she said. “I just have to pee.”

We were on the blankest, bleakest stretch of road of the whole trip so far. I don’t know why she chose that moment and not twenty minutes back at the gas station and not twenty ahead into whatever was up there waiting. “All right, all right,” I said. I eased to the side of the road. “Hurry.” She got out and ran over the brown land. I stared out the windshield at the flat land. Bits of rain and mud were still coming down. I waited. I considered dumping the costumes on the side of the road where she wouldn’t see. he thing about the kid’s music T was that you didn’t know what was going to happen next. You’d think you knew where it was going but you were wrong. There are very few parts of life like that. hat was she taking so long W for? I stretched my neck around, saw nothing. The land around me seemed pressed into the ground, the blades of grass crushed, the few trees bent and barren. I noted the time on the dashboard. She’d been gone twenty minutes. I turned off the engine, put on the flashers. Got out. It was damn cold. Was she playing a trick on me? Had somebody picked her up out there? Was I supposed to wait here for hours and then, after dark, drive back lost, run out of gas, wander around on these roads with a gas can, which I didn’t even have, only to be made fun of on Monday? I knew there was a game that went something like that, but in the version I knew the person in the field was the one left behind. The one in the car was the one who laughed. called to her. I locked the car and Ithought took a few steps in the direction I she’d gone. I called to her again. It was early afternoon by this time, but the sky had turned a heavy dark gray. I stepped into the field and looked back at my car to be sure she wasn’t springing out, breaking a window, hot-wiring the car, and speeding away without me. The wind swayed the antenna. I walked farther into the field. It was when I

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came to a little block of cement, no higher than my knee, that I finally heard her. “Hey! Hey!” “Where are you?” I said. On the other side of the cement was a hole. I leaned in and saw her. “What are you doing in there?” I said. It was a well that had been partially filled in. The sides were smooth. Her face was turned up to me, and in that moment her death came at me so strongly and vividly I felt dazed. “That’s the stupidest question anyone has ever asked me in my life,” she said. “Didn’t you hear me screaming?” The fact is, no, I hadn’t, until I was almost upon her. The wind, I guess. From the road I hadn’t heard a thing. The well was far too deep to climb out of. She could have been out here for days. She could have never been found. “Are you hurt?” I called down. “I’m wet. There’s mud.” “Did you break anything?” “I don’t think so. Get help.” I hesitated. If I left, went driving down the road, I was pretty sure I’d never find her again. “Maybe I have something in my car,” I said. “Well, go look.” I ran back to the car, studying the angle so I’d find my way back. I had so much crap in my trunk—crates of books, laundry detergents. I had a board she might be able to grab onto. I found a piece of rope from when I’d tied my mattress to the roof and moved over two blocks. I ran back to the well. “I’ve got this rope,” I said. “Might be long enough.” I crouched down on the wet ground. “Toss me an end.” I almost tossed her an end. I didn’t toss her an end. I dangled the rope out of her reach. “You’ll put me down?” “Put you down?” She jumped for it, missed. “99. You’ll let me read?” “For fuck’s sake,” she shouted. “Will you?” I waved the rope between us. She thought about it. “No,” she said. “Suit yourself,” I said. I pulled the rope out of sight. So it turned out

her death was by my own hand, or lack of, it appeared. I walked away. I heard her call, “You don’t scare me . . .” and then her voice was gone. I went back to the car.

I

t may seem like I was being heroic here, trying to save this kid, but the truth is I was just grateful to be feeling something. I started the car. If she was gone, paperwork would jam up for weeks. There’d be an administrative breakdown. Next week was finals. They’d be grateful to me for volunteering to do the essays. “Don’t worry about 99,” I’d say. “I’ve got it covered on this end.”

I

f, at that moment, someone had been strolling along, they would have thought I was checking my map, not leaving a life in a hole. And if someone were looking in from overhead, she, in her hole, would look completely separate from me. What was really going on was a fact she and I would share and no one else would ever know, because there was no one looking down from the clouds. Civilization settled on that a century ago. It would be her word against mine for all eternity, and who would ever believe a person would do something like that? shut off the car. I got out and went I“No, back. “You still there?” I said. I left,” she said. I didn’t ask her if she’d changed her mind, if she was ready to beg. I just lowered the rope and she grabbed it. I had done this for a kid who’d never even looked my way. I grasped the rope with all my might and, inch by inch, I pulled her out.

S

omething she had on me, this assistant, which I didn’t know at the time, was that I had been fired already. Or not hired back. The next semester’s class assignments were sitting in our boxes. There was nothing in my box. I just hadn’t realized it yet. There’d been complaints about me, poor evaluations. The students in my 99s had the lowest passing rates. For two weeks now she’d been trying to tell me and I’d

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ignored her. I’d thought she was just being mean. e? If I had been her, I would M have agreed to anything. I would have let her assist in whatever she wanted if she would have assisted me just then. And assuming she did lift me out, there was no way I would have still gone to the dance with a nut like that, but she was. The fact that she was capable of that, of refusing me and now of brushing off the dirt, hopping into the car, slamming the door, and saying, “We’re almost there!” made me a little afraid of her. e arrived. It was a regular W grade school and the dance was held in the gym. And, yes, she had been telling the truth. Regular Native Americans were coming in and going out. And, yes, they had on their regular traditional outfits, just like she had said they would, and some of them had on a piece of a different outfit—from when the British came galloping across the land and the Native Americans knocked them over with a spear and took their jackets and then passed them from hand to hand until today, when one showed up wearing a Benjamin Franklin jacket and another showed up in a white wig, and isn’t that interesting? Yes it is. veryone started dancing. There E were a couple of men on the side with some drums. “Now look,” I told the office assistant, “you don’t have to stick to the story. Everybody here knows that we’re not Native Americans and that they all are, and what do you think they’re thinking about us?” “But I have our costumes.” She patted her box. “All right, let’s see them,” I said. “Let’s have a look, but even in traditional Native American outfits we are not going to look like Native Americans. Nobody’s going to believe it.” “But wait till they see me dance,” she said. She opened the box. Inside were two giant pom-poms, that’s what they looked like. Each costume was

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made out of bright orange yarn, long strings of it, and it covered your whole body and even had a flap for the head. She put it on me. I stood there and let her. Then she put on her own costume. The other dancers had on animal hides, beaded dresses, but no one tried to keep her from dancing. They just stopped and stared as the assistant, in her orange outfit, walked out onto the dance floor. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Of course, I did not dance. Then she came back and got me. hey’d had meetings about me, T my name was on the table. There was no way she could have assigned me to do it. So that part I understand. But this is what I wonder: Why had she asked me to drive her to dance? Was she that nervy? Or was it possible that she meant to warn me, give me advice? o she got me into the costume, S she had me beat on that, but the fact was: she was still going to die. Pulling her out had done nothing. I’d win in the end—not a race I was particularly excited about, a pain-inthe-ass race, one I hadn’t asked to be in, one that was far lonelier than I’d expected. But she would be gone and I’d be going on. So we each had something on the other, the office assistant and I, when we went out onto that dance floor. The kid would not die young. He would live on and on, much longer than the office assistant, much longer than I. He’d live almost forever. I know that because the next semester I had to find out if he’d passed the class and made a life in these United States, or if he’d failed, returned to his war-torn land, fought, and died. I snuck into the school several times after I’d been let go, skulked around the cafeteria looking for him. Finally one day I saw him coming out of the elevator, saw his face, and I hurried back outside. The office assistant must have slid his paper into the pass pile a week before she died. She’d seen me with his file. It wouldn’t have taken a genius to put it together.

weeks after the dance she leapt Twooff the building, made the papers. kay, so what, so we look crazy in O these pom-poms. Leave the poor assistant alone. Imagine what she must have been through to wind up looking like that. Imagine what her life must have been like, having a mother who would make something like these. Imagine what suffering she has had that I will never know. Just clear the floor for her. Everybody get out of the way—can’t you see the office assistant wants to dance? Would you give her a little space? Give her a little music too? A little bang on the drum for her to stomp a foot to? Well, the Native Americans were ready to see something like that, so they took seats in the bleachers to watch. And as for me, I may be an old maid, and I may spend my life loving people who never loved me, and loving them in ways that aren’t good for me, but I stepped ■ around with her. I danced. July Index Sources 1 Pew Research Center, Project for Excellence in Journalism (Washington); 2 American Journalism Review (College Park, Md.); 3 Walter Robinson, Northeastern University (Boston); 4 Todd Smith (St. Louis); 5,6 Tyndall Report (N.Y.C.); 7 WardheerNews (San Diego); 8 U.S. Department of Justice; 9 White House Press Office; 10 Travis Jackson (Dillon, S.C.); 11 Pew Research Center for the People & the Press (Washington); 12 Gallup Poll (Washington); 13 Rasmussen Reports (Asbury Park, N.J.); 14 U.S. Census Bureau (Suitland, Md.) 15 Harper’s research; 16 U.S. Senate Historical Office (Washington); 17 China Internet Information Center (Beijing); 18 Phantom Fireworks (Youngstown, Ohio); 19 Larry Kramer (N.Y.C.); 20 Virginia Uranium (Chatham, Va.)/The Ux Consulting Company (Atlanta); 21 Center for Western and Cowboy Poetry (San Francisco); 22 USA Today (McClean, Va.); 23 Experian Simmons (N.Y.C.); 24 Pere Brachfeld, EAE Business School (Barcelona); 25 Embassy of Japan (Washington); 26 Oxfam International (London); 27 The World Bank (Washington); 28,29 International Monetary Fund (Washington); 30,31 Harrison Group (Waterbury, Conn.); 32 Abt SRBI, Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.); 33 Utah State Courts (Salt Lake City); 34 Spectrum Gaming Group (Linwood, N.J.)/Stop Predatory Gambling (Washington); 35 Friedrich Schneider, Johannes Kepler University (Linz, Austria); 36 The Wedding Report, Inc. (Tucson, Ariz.); 37 The Nielsen Company (Schaumburg, Ill.); 38,39 Neil Malhotra, Stanford University (Palo Alto, Calif.); 40 Harper’s research.

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R

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NEW BOOKS By Benjamin Moser don’t imagine many readers bother to peruse the acknowledgments section of a biography, that laundry list of copyright holders, helpful archivists, encouraging spouses, and generous foundations without whom the work would never have seen the light of day, and none of whom bear any blame for the work’s eventual flaws, responsibility for which, the writer modestly emphasizes, is entirely his own. But when I recently had occasion to acknowledge everyone who helped with my biography of Clarice Lispector, I realized that those few pages contained the kernel of an entirely new book, one that would tell of my adventures in creating it, including my acquisition of a never-before-seen manuscript in exchange for a bagful of the highest quality Dutch skunk seeds, destined for a back yard in Rio de Janeiro. So it’s thrilling to see that precisely such a shadow biography has now been written, not about Lispector but about another great writer, Albert Camus. It isn’t often that I read a book with which I have as much personal affinity as I did with Elizabeth Hawes’s CAMUS, A ROMANCE (Grove, $25), which tells of her lifelong fascination

I

with the Algerian, and which reads as if she has filled out all the stories lurking in the acknowledgments section. This is a biography that allows the reader such unfettered access into the actual process of writing, which often is as full of intrigue as the story of the life it purports to tell. Hawes tells us where the archives are, describes her unexpected emotions when handling a rare edition, and captures the biographer’s weird jet lag of spending the day in 1930s Algiers only to walk out, at closing time, past the fraternity houses, coffee shops, and taco joints of contemporary Austin. She speculates, as I so often have, about the letters that might still be out there and who might have them. She berates herself for being too lazy or distracted to have found the time to track down vital witnesses—who then die before she gets around to it. She never did see the car Camus died in, but Hawes sheepishly admits that she

Hand-painted photograph of Albert Camus © The Granger Collection, New York City; “Café de Flore, tôt le matin,” by Jeanloup Sieff © The Estate of Jeanloup Sieff

still wants to. (She knows where it’s stored, of course.) And she describes how her romance with Camus was tied up with that other great romance, one common to so many generations of artistic kids stranded out in the provinces: the romance of France. Looking back half a century later, she remembers her hokey teenage dreams. “After I graduated, I planned to go to Paris, and I imagined that somehow [Camus and I] would have a drink at the Café Flore or one of the other Left Bank establishments I had heard about, and that over a café filtre or a vin blanc, we would talk for hours.” By the time she made it to Paris in 1963, the brooding genius was gone, victim of the car crash that ended his life at just forty-six. Now, all these years later, she has produced a beautiful memoir of a lifelong obsession, a peek behind the curtains at the biographer’s art, and,

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not least, a rich and vivid portrait of Camus himself. n ninth-grade French class, like so many others dreaming of a postgraduation existence more Café Flore than Cracker Barrel, I read Camus’s short novel The Stranger, in which the oddly passive Meursault, the one who can’t remember if it was today or yesterday that his mother died, offers his famously blasé account of a murder he committed. A man on trial, his apparent lucidity eroding throughout the course of his monologue—it’s a setup reminiscent of RUPERT: A CONFESSION (Open Letter, $14.95), by the Dutch poet and novelist Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. His Rupert is a walker in the city who offers extended thoughts on the proper layout of public squares, methods for downloading and cataloguing online pornography, men who wear comfy sweaters (“an arresting demonstration of farmerly freshness of the kind that . . . feels sorry for you because you’re too uptight and inhibited to dress properly”), and the type of woman who “wants to rove around Afghanistan on stolen horses and feel the auras of Tibetan scales with the energy paths of her vulva.” “Rupert watches. Because that is simply what I am—a spectator.” But despite, or perhaps because of, the careful brilliance of Rupert’s observations, it gradually becomes clear that Rupert is not all there, that no matter how colorfully his sexuality exists in a mind he constantly feeds porn and peep shows, he is unequal, in the real world, to making love, even to the delectable Mira. When at last she tires of him, a desperate Rupert follows her through the weird, unnamed city, his observations becoming all the more dazzling as his purchase on sanity loosens. In the final scene, Rupert wanders hopelessly into the city’s upper quarter, an old, winding area of shady denizens and blind alleyways—a quarter that, as it happens, rather resembles the Kasbah of Camus’s native Algiers—his

I

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testimony reaching a denouement that would be upsetting if it wasn’t so cleverly absurd. he situation Michela Wrong describes in IT’S OUR TURN

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TO EAT: THE STORY OF A KENYAN WHISTLE-BLOWER (Harp-

er, $25.99) is both absurd and upsetting, because one suspects that her book is so urgent and important that almost nobody will read it. It is the third installment of Wrong’s epic trilogy of modern Africa, which includes a book on Mobutu’s Zaire and an unforgettable recounting of the travails of Eritrea. It’s Our Turn to Eat opens with the unexpected arrival at Wrong’s London apartment of the charismatic chief of Kenya’s anti-corruption authority, John Githongo. Wrong had known him distantly from her work covering Africa for the Financial Times, and the story she recounts, ranging from the disaster of British colonial rule in Kenya to its disappointing existence as an independent state, focuses above all on corruption, the one evil she, like John Githongo, sees as the source of almost every other African problem. Githongo arrived at Wrong’s flat bearing cargo dangerous to many powerful people: the tapes he had secretly made of his discussions with Kenya’s leading authorities about his investigations into the country’s endemic sleaze, the very affliction that the new president, Mwai Kibaki, was elected to stamp out. With this massive payload, Wrong sets us up for a grand finale that never comes: as we root for Githongo to use his carefully catalogued recordings to take down the crooks who have kept Kenya tribally Balkanized and economically Sicilianized, we begin to realize that catharsis isn’t coming, that the system is stronger than this courageous and patriotic man; and that instead, as one revelation after the other is buried by a seedy judiciary and ignored by international donors too busy with “the big picture” to notice that the country is collapsing, Kenya

nears the edge of a precipice. When it careens over that edge, in the form of the devastating race riots that followed Kibaki’s “reelection” at the end of 2007, the very idea of Kenya—the postcolonial hope that large and diverse societies could develop the political and economic institutions that would offer their peoples genuine freedom in the modern world—seemed doomed. The existence of people like Githongo shows that these promises may yet be redeemed, but only if they are willing to keep up their dangerous and unequal struggle. nother kind of redemption awaits Neil White, a Mississippi publisher whose own petty corruption brings him into contact with a population whose invisibility is matched only by its antiquity: lepers, a stigmatizing word White puts in quotation marks in his vibrant and readable memoir, IN

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THE SANCTUARY OF OUTCASTS

(William Morrow, $25.99). He encounters them when he is sent to serve an eighteen-month sentence at Carville, a minimum-security prison in rural Louisiana. To his astonishment, the prison shares space with the nation’s last leprosarium, and White’s curiosity gets the better of him. He sets about befriending its inhabitants, many of whom have spent their entire lives in the institution. The patients are supposed to be kept apart from the convicts, but the boundaries aren’t unbreachable, and White decides to use his time in prison to gather the patients’ stories. One resident, an elderly, legless African-American woman named Ella Bounds, tells White how her father brought her to Carville when she was diagnosed with Hansen’s disease as a child. She waved to him from the doorway. “From the front seat of the wagon, he nodded again. Then she turned and stepped into the building where she would spend the rest of her life.” White tells us in his postscript that Ella Bounds died at Carville in 1998 and was buried in an unmarked grave. For her and her fellow inmates in this “colony of outcasts,” White’s book is a digni■ fied memorial.

Photograph of the Kasbah in Algiers © Rue des Archives/The Granger Collection, New York City

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ELOQUENT PHANTOM Tayeb Salih’s search for an elusive present By Robyn Creswell Discussed in this essay:

Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih. Translated by Denys JohnsonDavies. New York Review Books. 139 pages. $14.

ealism, that capacious mainstream of European and American fiction, is only one of the many currents and countercurrents that run through the Arabic novel in its short but turbulent history—one in which existentialism, melodrama, satire, and allegory all crowd for position. Why realism has never been dominant isn’t an easy question to answer, but part of the explanation may lie in the configuration of the Arabic language itself. Written Arabic, fusha, stands at a remove from the quotidian worlds of family, street, and workplace, where a colloquial language is used (the various dialects of Arabic bear roughly the same relation to the written language as contemporary English does to that of the King James Bible). Almost all Arabic novels are written in fusha, which cannot but establish a certain distance between the elevated medium of description and the mundane events it describes—in other words, between style and content. If realism is chiefly concerned with the representation of consciousness, with the rough-and-tumble of the everyday and what Henry James once called

R

Robyn Creswell is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at New York University. His article on Mahmoud Darwish appeared in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Illustration by Leigh Wells

its “more or less bleeding participants,” then it is no surprise that realism has been only one experiment among many in the laboratory of Arabic fiction. It is true that the most imposing of all Arabic novels—Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy—is a work of realism, abuzz with the manifold particulars of old Cairo and its inhabitants. But Mahfouz may be the exception rather than the rule (and even for him realism was a passing phase). Many of the most exciting and intelligent Arabic novels—

Emile Habibi’s The Pessoptimist, Gamal al-Ghitany’s Zani Barakat, Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun—are in some sense anti-realist. Lacking an easy commerce with the vernacular of the moment, these novels look for forms and subject matter in the literary tradition itself: not only the Arabic tradition of One Thousand and One Nights, the medieval maqamat, and classical history, but also the tradition of the West, from Voltaire to Faulkner. These are novels with a rich, at times almost suffocating, sense of their heritage. Rather than rush into realism’s vivid and palpable present, they tarry with ghosts. Season of Migration to the North, by the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih, is full of such specters. Published in Beirut in 1966, the novel was immediately recognized as a classic, and, as Laila Lalami notes in her introduction to the new edition by New York Review Books, it has also enjoyed an unusually “happy life in translation.” Like all of Salih’s fiction—he wrote three other novels and a handful of short stories—Season of Migration to the North is remarkably compact, really a novella rather than a novel. But woven into the brief text is a dense tracery of allusions to Arabic and European fiction, Islamic history, Shakespeare, Freud, and classical Arabic poetry—a corpus that haunts all his writing. Salih, who died this past February in London, packed an entire library into this slim masterpiece. It is literature to the second degree. And yet it is anything but labored. Rather, it is alive with drama and incident: crimes of passion, sadomasochism, suicide. It is a novel of ideas wrapped in the veils of romance. he unnamed narrator of the story is a young man from the north of Sudan who returns to his native village after seven years of study in Britain. It is the late 1950s; Sudan is on the cusp of independence.

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The narrator has spent much of his time abroad imagining the people and places he left behind. Back home, he tries to convince himself that its drowsy landscape of riverbanks, palm trees, and thudding water pumps is where he belongs: “I felt not like a storm-swept feather, but like that palm tree, a being with a background, with roots, with a purpose”; and then again, as though reassuring himself, “I am not a stone thrown into the water but seed sown in a field.” The metaphors are studied. They suggest a bookish nostalgia—the narrator spent several of his years in Britain “delving into the life of an obscure English poet”— rather than real rootedness. Among the crowd that welcomes the narrator home is a stranger, an older man with a mysterious smile. This is Mustafa Sa’eed, who arrived in the village five years earlier, taking a local woman for his wife. During a communal drinking session one evening, the narrator overhears Sa’eed reciting to himself, “with an impeccable accent,” a poem by Ford Madox Ford. The narrator, who supposed himself the only English speaker in this remote village by the Nile, and certainly the only expert in British poetry, feels his idyll drop away. It is a scene out of Poe, this uncanny recognition of oneself in a stranger: Had the ground suddenly split open and revealed an afreet standing before me, his eyes shooting out flames, I would not have been more terrified. All of a sudden there came to me the ghastly, nightmarish feeling that we—the men grouped together in that room—were not a reality but merely some illusion. Leaping up, I stood above the man and shouted at him: What’s this you’re saying? What’s this you’re saying?

Sa’eed does eventually tell the narrator his story, a fantastical tale-withina-tale about a great mind put to murderous uses. Sa’eed was an intellectual prodigy whose success at school took him from Khartoum to Cairo and eventually to interwar London, still the cynosure of this colonial world. There, he is adopted into the circles of Britain’s bohemian left. He gives lectures on classical Arabic poetry, fits his room out like a jewel box à la Delacroix— “There were small electric lights, red,

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blue, and violet, placed in certain corners; on the walls were large mirrors, so that when I slept with a woman it was as if I slept with a whole harem simultaneously”—and casts himself as a dark-skinned Casanova. His conquests, all white women, line up for parts in this orientalist charade. But Sa’eed’s adventures have a gruesome finale. He eventually marries a woman who taunts him with her infidelities. He kills her in a fit of passion and is convicted of murder. (The echoes of Othello are conspicuous.) His sentence completed, Sa’eed returns to Sudan hoping to find peace in a village where no one will know him. Sa’eed disappears soon after telling his story, apparently a suicide, and the narrator spends the rest of the novel trying to fill the many gaps in Sa’eed’s narrative. He meets with men who were Sa’eed’s peers at Gordon College in Khartoum, or who encountered his legend at Oxford. Their versions are not always credible, and some are flagrantly in contradiction. One school friend remembers him as a stooge of the imperialists, whereas a former student paints him as a leader in the anticolonial struggle. The narrator claims to have gathered these stories at random, the fruit of his travels across the country as a schools inspector. “I would hope you will not entertain the idea,” he pleads with his readers, “that Mustafa Sa’eed had become an obsession that was ever with me.” But of course we do entertain the idea, and it is the mystery of this obsession, at once obvious and disavowed, that gives Salih’s novel its weird urgency. o you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible.” This is Marlow, the narrator of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, despairing—with his usual prolixity— over the limits of what words can convey. What Marlow wants us to see is the kernel of his own tale-within-atale: the figure of Kurtz, the ivory trader who has turned his back on Europe

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and made himself a savage chieftain in the middle of the Congo. But Kurtz is never quite visible because Marlow cannot make up his mind about him— whether he is “an emissary of pity” and “a remarkable man,” or else an explosion of the id, not a man at all but a nightmare or a tremor of romance. As the latter, the symbolic burden he is made to bear (“all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz”) is too great for the conventions of realism. We can’t see him clearly because he is indeed a figure of dream. Many critics have noted that Season of Migration to the North is in some sense a rewrite of Conrad’s novella, whose symbolic pilgrimage it cleverly reverses. Rather than following a white man traveling upriver into the heart of Africa, where he indulges in a fantasy of primitivism, Salih sends Mustafa Sa’eed down the Nile and into the heart of Europe. There he masters the ways of the natives—Fabian economics, but also race-think—the better to subjugate them. These mirror images are ingenious, but it is possible to make too much of them. Postcolonial critics, who have set the terms for the reception of Salih’s novel in the Englishspeaking world, read it as a classic example of “the empire writing back.” Salih’s inversion of Conrad’s compass is taken to be an act of resistance, a critique of the imperialist perspective that Heart of Darkness is assumed to represent. But this reading slights the complexity of both works, as well as the relation between them. It makes Conrad’s racism, which is obvious and conventional, the keynote of his fiction. And it imputes a narrowly political agenda to Salih, whose primary concerns lie elsewhere. The central drama of Salih’s novella is not Mustafa Sa’eed’s journey to the heart of Europe but the confrontation between Sa’eed and the narrator, who, like Marlow, feels himself “captured by the incredible,” faced with a character too big for the otherwise realistic fiction he inhabits. It is Salih’s understanding of this dilemma, which is ethical and literary rather than straightforwardly political, that makes his reading of Conrad distinctive. To appreciate how distinctive it is, we might recall the reading of Conrad by Salih’s contemporary V. S. Naipaul.

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The biographies of Salih and Naipaul have a number of convergences. Both arrived in Britain from the colonies soon after World War II; both worked early in their careers for the BBC (the Caribbean Service for Naipaul, the Arabic Service for Salih, who once credited his work in radio for the economy of his prose); both wrote novels about the sexual fascination of white English women with foreign black men (an enthrallment that always ends in violence: this was Naipaul’s theme in Guerrillas as well as his essay on Michael X); and both were deep readers of Heart of Darkness. In an essay written in 1974, Naipaul praised Conrad’s “honesty”: the austere virtue of a writer “who is missing a society”—how Naipaul had come to define his own predicament as well— and so makes do with what the Polish novelist called a “scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own sensations.” Naipaul’s Conrad is an artist with perceptions rather than ideas, whose best work is precise and reportorial, starved of encumbering abstractions and ideologies. He admires Conrad’s habit of basing his fictions on “incidents from real life,” on newspaper stories or his experiences at sea. His best characters— most of them minor, vivid, and unpleasant—are not literary types but “much more real, and still recognizable in more than one country.” Yet once Conrad strays from these factual données, Naipaul complains, “he does not . . . involve me in his fantasy.” This is true, he says, of Heart of Darkness: “the story of Kurtz, the upriver ivory agent, who is led to primitivism and lunacy by his unlimited power over primitive men, was lost on me.” The admission points both to the acuity of Naipaul’s reading and to its limitations. He discovered (or invented) a Conrad most readers had not known was there but who is now part of the myth: a chronicler of “half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made,” a writer without illusions. But the discovery is also a diminishment. For Heart of Darkness without Kurtz is Conrad without romance. omance, fantasy, the incredible: these keywords of Conrad are anathema to Naipaul, as they were to many of Conrad’s con-

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temporary critics. Romance acknowledges and even exaggerates its own literary nature. A heightened form of artifice, it is always in danger of falling into melodrama or camp. Naipaul’s appeal to sensation is his way of avoiding this trap. So long as a writer cleaves to the truth of his perceptions (“The world is what it is”), his writing cannot be tainted by cliché. Salih handles this anxiety in a different way. Rather than make a fetish of the factual, Salih fills his novella with allusions. And rather than ignore or feign incomprehension of the romance that he finds in Conrad, he makes it an explicit subject for his fiction. Romance is Mustafa Sa’eed’s native habitat; he luxuriates in its clichés. Sa’eed’s mirror-lined room in London is full of Arabic books in ornate script, Persian carpets, and prints of “boabab trees in Kordofan, naked girls from the tribes of the Zandi, the Nuer and the Shuluk, fields of banana and coffee on the Equator, old temples in the district of Nubia.” Sa’eed arranges his bibelots like so many booby traps for the unwary adventurer; he is the prop master of these effects and not their puppet. The narrator is alive to all this romance. There is something heroic about Sa’eed’s Don Juaning through the capital of empire, ensnaring his prey in their own racist fantasies and promising to “liberate Africa with my penis.” But Sa’eed’s playacting is as limiting as it is liberating. The stereotypes he embraces threaten to make him a parody of himself. The narrator recognizes this, dismissing as “a melodramatic phrase” Sa’eed’s declaration to his former masters: “I have come to you as a conqueror.” Later, he decides that Sa’eed’s life has been nothing more than “a farce.” The narrator’s skepticism tells us that Season of Migration to the North is not itself a romance but more like an attempt to measure the attractions of romance, and to gauge the difficulty of doing without it. The narrator’s difficulty stems from a sense of his own belatedness. Wherever he goes, he finds that Mustafa Sa’eed has been there before him. Sa’eed was the first Sudanese to be sent abroad on scholarship—also the first to marry an Englishwoman—and

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Turning Toward Home REFLECTIONS ON THE FAMILY FROM HARPER'S MAGAZINE Some of our most loving—and most difficult—relationships are with our parents, children, siblings, and extended families. These complicated relationships are the foundation of our society and our lives: they define our past, give us hope for the future, teach us to get along with others, and, often, provide excellent examples of how not to behave. The moving essays in Turning Toward Home, all of which were originally published in Harper’s Magazine, gracefully explore these dynamics. Authors include David Mamet, Donna Tartt, Richard Ford, Sallie Tisdale, Louise Erdrich, and many more. Introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg. Order today through www.harpers.org/store Published by Franklin Square Press ISBN 1-879957-08-6 Softcover $14.95 FRANKLIN SQUARE PRESS

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the legend of his success at Oxford is one the narrator knows he can never match. But Sa’eed has also spoiled his homecoming. There is a cruel humor in the narrator’s discovery that someone he assumes to be a village peasant can recite English poetry more fluently than he can. What he feels toward Sa’eed is a latecomer’s resentment. Faced with the older man’s heroic example, however flawed, his own life seems secondrate, imitative, unpoetic. There is an episode at the end of the novella that neatly captures this emotional jumble. It is another scene of literary rivalry. Before killing himself, Sa’eed designates the narrator caretaker of his family and property—a coerced complicity. Among the papers he inherits, the narrator finds a page of verse in Sa’eed’s own hand, a conventional lament about lost love and the hardships of travel (the great themes of classical Bedouin poetry). “A very poor poem,” the narrator sniffs, too reliant on “antithesis and comparisons.” The text is unfinished, however. It ends with a Quranic figure of humiliation but leaves an ellipsis where the answering figure of demonic defiance should be. Perhaps Sa’eed was unable to find a phrase to fit the meter and rhyme. The narrator reflects for a moment, then erases the last line and replaces its incomplete antithesis with a figure of repetition: “Heads humbly bent and faces turned away.” A line, he reflects, “no worse than the rest.” The narrator’s judgment of the poem mirrors his judgment of the writer. He thinks Sa’eed is too reliant on the worn-out tropes—the romantic stereotypes—of the colonial world. That is a Manichaean world of antitheses: West and East, civilization and savagery, Self and Other, humiliation and defiance. The narrator wants to believe that world is no more, and in some ways he is right (Sudan has achieved independence, after all). But his gesture of finishing Sa’eed’s poem, of crafting a phrase to fit the form, makes for a more melancholy acknowledgment. It suggests that the past constrains the present in subtle ways. The narrator can choose his words, but they must match a pattern he did not choose.

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alih once spoke in an interview of his sense that the past and future are in “a continual conspiracy against the now.” In his fiction, Salih often associates the agents of this conspiracy with orthodox Islam. A scene in The Wedding of Zein,1 Salih’s first novel, makes this point. The tale is set in the same Nile-side community as Season of Migration to the North. The titular hero is a kind of village fool, and the story of his marriage to the village belle is, for the most part, a sunny fable. But in describing the feelings of the villagers toward their imam, Salih lets a pall drop over the landscape. It is the shadow of the future:

The trilling cries of joy from the women surged and gushed forth, echoing in and around the mosque. They were carried by the winds of summer, which circulated in the courtyards, the alleyways, the fields, above the tops of the date palms, the acacia, the sant, the haraz and sayyal trees, above the esparto and the tamarisk and the ushar bushes, and across the Nile.

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Each would leave the mosque after Friday prayers boggle-eyed, feeling all of a sudden that the flow of life had come to a stop. Each, looking at his field with his date palms, its trees and crops, would experience no feeling of joy within himself. Everything, he would feel, was incidental, transitory, the life he was leading, with its joys and sorrows, merely a bridge to another world, and he would stop for a while to ask himself what preparations he had made.

Against the constraints of the past and the joy-sapping sermons of the imams, Salih’s fiction returns again and again to the abundance of the present, the incidental, the transitory. There is a strong current of mysticism in his work, an attempt to still the flux of time into moments of ecstasy. Salih often interrupts his stories, as though pausing for breath, with scenes of celebration: births, weddings, feasts. These moments of joy are liable to break out at any moment. They are inclusive and impromptu, reflective of Sudan’s popular Sufi traditions rather than the rituals of mosque and minaret. These festivities belong to a different calendar than the one used by clerics, in which each tick of the present acquires its meaning only on the Day of Judgment. In Salih’s third novel, Bandarshah, it is instead the fullness of the moment—its fleeting self-sufficiency— that we hear in the shouts of wedding celebrants. Their ululations restore to the landscape all the poetry that the imam’s warnings had drained away: 1 To be published in a new edition by New York Review Books in February 2010.

s there any equivalent to the poetry of Arabs in its yearning for the homeland?” The question comes in the midst of a series of articles Salih wrote in late 1988, when he made a trip back to Sudan.2 He had not lived in the country of his birth since 1953, the year he left to work in Britain. Writing for al-Majallah, a London-based weekly, Salih described a country he barely recognized. In Khartoum, he found lines everywhere: lines for gas and foodstuffs; lines for visas at the embassies; lines of migrants trying to escape the civil war between north and south. Also lines of poetry. Wherever he went in his homeland, Salih found that the poets had been there before him. The sight of women waiting on a breadline in the middle of the night recalls to him the verse of an eleventh-century poetess, who described the skittishness of Meccan gazelles forced out of their sacred precincts. At the airport, crowded with would-be emigrants, he sees a woman whose skin color tells him that she is of the Beja tribe. This recalls to Salih the greatest of classical poets, alMutanabbi, fleeing Egypt on the back of a Beja camel whose swiftness he immortalized in verse. Poetry, for Salih, is the language of nostalgia—the nostalgia we feel for places that are before our eyes and yet remain difficult to recognize. This language has a magic of its own. It can make present, if only for a moment, what has vanished: people, voices, elements of the landscape. (Proust writes, “I need only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood.”) Poetry can make present to us even those places we have never known, using words we hardly under-

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Salih’s journalistic writings, which run to nine volumes, have not been translated.

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stand. This is one of the lessons Salih draws from the story of Yahya bin Talib al-Hanafi, a poet of the eighth century, whose verses he recalls while sitting in the unhappy airport lounge in Khartoum. Before he was a poet, alHanafi was a trader in the Arabian Peninsula. Overly generous in his affairs, he acquired a debt he couldn’t pay back and so fled north to Khurasan, in present-day Iran, where he composed poems about the places he left behind. One of these poems reached the ears of the Caliph Haroun alRashid in Baghdad. Salih cites these lines (my translation):

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NOBLE AND SAVAGE The bitter extremes of Elsa Morante By Robert Boyers Discussed in this essay:

Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante, by Lily Tuck. Harper. 263 pages. $25.95.

Before I die, will I smell the scents of Khuzama and look again on Qarqara? Before I die, will I drink the waters of al-Hujayla and heal my sickness? Tamarisk trees of the valley! My heart is heavy with you and unconsoled. Tamarisk trees of the valley! Travel has wearied my companions. Is there a place to rest in your shade? I want to rush toward you—but a heavy debt lies in the way and turns me back. I talk to myself about you, for I cannot return to you and sadness has made a home in my heart.

Khuzama, Qarqara, al-Hujayla—the names must have meant as little to Haroun al-Rashid, at home in the citified luxuries of Baghdad, as they mean to us. And yet, Salih reports, the caliph wept on hearing these verses. He sent money to pay off al-Hanafi’s debt, but the messenger arrived too late. The poet had already died. Few modern novelists have been so attuned as Tayeb Salih to the poetry of the past, so intelligently aware that the novel is a latecomer to literature. At the heart of his fiction—lyrical, allusive, unconsoled—is this sense of belatedness, a mood that is not nostalgia but is instead a kind of unreconciled yearning for the present. The narrator of Season of Migration to the North begins the novel believing that he is like that palm tree, “a being with a background, with roots, with a purpose,” but ends up, in the final scene, treading water in the middle of the Nile, crying out for help, unable to reach the far bank or to go back. One suspects that for Salih there is no real alternative to rootlessness, and no place to be but the mid■ dle of the river.

Illustration by Joseph Adolphe

hirty years ago, it seemed that Elsa Morante had established herself as a major literary figure. History: A Novel (1974), which was a best-selling book in Italy, was widely reviewed in the United States when it was published here in 1977; such critics as Alfred Kazin and Stephen Spender debated her merits, and even those who wrote of her with misgiving acknowledged that, at her best, she was a gifted and compelling novelist. Morante was often grouped

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Robert Boyers is the editor of Salmagundi and director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. His last essay for Harper’s Magazine, on Nadine Gordimer, appeared in the February 2008 issue.

with other leading Italian writers of her generation, including Cesare Pavese and her former husband, Alberto Moravia. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to learn that until recently there had been no biography of Morante in any language, and that the first should come from the American novelist Lily Tuck. Tuck notes that “few Italians actually read much of her work” today, and even scholarly books devoted to contemporary Italian women writers are apt to omit any reference to someone who happened to mean a great deal not only to Italians of her generation but also to Doris Lessing, Harold Brodkey, and various other discerning readers. Of course, the ups and downs of literary reputation are notoriously difficult to understand, though it is tempting to wonder whether the sudden explosion of interest in the French writer Irène Némirovsky (totally forgotten for more than sixty years and now absurdly overvalued for Suite Française and other novels) should not give us hope that Morante, with her many gifts, will also be rediscovered. Tuck’s biography is perhaps a promising sign, and Morante is in every way a promising subject: a difficult, prickly, volatile character who for much of her life craved the company of others equally brilliant and combustible. In Tuck she sometimes appears as a case of arrested emotional development, a woman sub-

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ject to infatuations and resentments of the sort she anatomized in her novels. But she was also a glamorous figure, married to Moravia (from whom she separated after twenty-one years), and the embattled friend of many of Italy’s greatest artists, including the filmmakers Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, and Bernardo Bertolucci. Her editor at the Italian publishing house Einaudi was the novelist Natalia Ginzburg, a devoted admirer and promoter whose attentions Morante sometimes spurned and derided. But Morante’s early years were interesting in ways that had nothing to do with glamour or celebrity, as Tuck scrupulously demonstrates. Born in Rome in 1912 to a schoolteacher mother named Irma and a probationaryofficer father named Augusto, Morante also grew up with two uncles who appeared at the family apartment from time to time; one of them was Augusto’s brother, the other a family friend who was sexually involved with the mother (and was Elsa’s biological father). Openly contemptuous toward the hapless Augusto, Irma was an intimidating presence, and the household over which she presided was noisy with threat and acrimony. At the same time, Irma was determined that her precociously gifted daughter should rise in the world. Thus she arranged for Elsa to live for months at a time with a wealthy woman in an elegant Roman villa, where the girl developed a penchant for the finer things as well as an ambivalence toward people who were less than refined. That ambivalence is fiercely, even desperately evoked in Morante’s novels, which alternate between a deep sympathy for the poor and an equally deep feeling for those, like a character in her novel Aracoeli, possessed by an “aristocratic concept of class.” Tuck is at her best in bringing to life Morante’s struggles with emotions she was unable to master, and it is clear that these struggles originated in her earliest years. Morante never quite worked out the relationship between love and hate, envy and solicitude. The mixed signals sent by a mother who was overbearing yet caring, by turns embittered and generous, left the daughter feeling that uncertainty was the enemy; indeed, Tuck informs us, Morante

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always “maintained that she would have preferred to be either loved or hated,” and she “could not stand people who were falsely humble or felt disappointed in their lives.” One way or the other was what she demanded. She could tolerate either the truly humble or the truly cold and aloof; she despised those who envied what they couldn’t have. Yet Morante was by no means clear or consistent herself; in fact, she was as susceptible to spite and envy as anyone else. She never really forgave Alberto Moravia for writing a first novel, The Time of Indifference (1929), that made him famous years before they fell in love. “A. is a snob . . . ,” Morante wrote in 1938 in the private diary she kept, “and I myself want to satisfy his snobbism by, for example, having a high position in society or by being famous.” But even when she complains that Moravia is “unavailable” and “cut off” emotionally, she continues to crave his company and to wonder at his ability to provide genuine “tenderness, love . . . and great comfort.” Tuck’s account of the long onagain, off-again relationship with Moravia is never less than compelling, yet what she makes of it is not always persuasive. Although Moravia came to Morante with a reputation as a womanizer, she was entirely open about her own affairs and candid about having resorted to prostitution when short of money in the early Thirties. Referring to the diaries, Tuck declares that “the sex between Morante and Moravia might have been one-sided and not particularly fulfilling for Morante,” but then Tuck takes her speculation much further to find in this “an example of how accommodating women can be and how they tend to sustain the hope that the men they sleep with can provide them with understanding and intimacy.” “Accommodating”? Not precisely the best word to describe someone whose “relationship to sex,” as Tuck herself reports, “was terrible and savage,” who openly criticized Moravia’s inadequacies to their mutual friends, and who described women—herself included—“with such mocking animosity” that some close friends thought of her as a “misogynist” writer. She could be pitiless with those she loved, comparing her pal Bertolucci to Hitler

when he’d become unforgivably famous after the success of his film Last Tango in Paris. Natalia Ginzburg reports that Morante invited her out to dinner so as to let Ginzburg know that her new play was “fatuous, silly, sugary, affected and false.” Obviously, Morante was more inclined to rage than to submissiveness, and her refusal to accept bullshit was legendary in the circles she frequented. The notion that she was a pathetic, put-upon woman is questionable, to say the least, and since Tuck cannot have based her speculations on the evidence of Morante’s life, one might wonder whether “accommodating” women figure prominently in Morante’s novels. In the main, they do not. iven the importance of Morante’s novel History, it’s appropriate that Tuck devotes considerable attention to the period of the Second World War, and she builds a sobering narrative of the years when Morante and Moravia went into hiding from the Italian fascist regime. Both writers were half-Jewish, and, after their marriage in 1941, they were forced to move from place to place to avoid arrest, eventually landing in Rome. The cruelest days of the war are unforgettably captured in History: “During the last months of the German occupation,” Morante writes,

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Rome took on the appearance of certain Indian metropolises where only the vultures get enough to eat and there is no census of the living and the dead. . . . The Germans were encamped around the inhabited areas . . . and the disastrous cloud of the air raids . . . spread over the city a great tarpaulin of pestilence and earthquake. . . . The populace had fallen silent. The daily news of roundups, torture, and slaughter circulated through the neighborhoods like death-rattle echoes.

Although Morante and Moravia were in Rome for only part of the war, their experience of the period was the experience of vast numbers of people who were similarly forced to negotiate their fates with what Morante calls “the true master,” which was “hunger.” Tuck also captures the combined gaiety and febrile intensity of Roman literary circles in postwar Italy, the debates and petty jealousies and rumors of betrayal, all of it colored by Morante’s mood swings and her preference—as

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Moravia put it—for the “exceptional” and the “impassioned moments” in life. The war period was never far from the minds of Italy’s writers; Ginzburg wrote that her contemporaries would “never be cured no matter how many years” went by. Morante believed that the Italian people had been willing accomplices in all that had befallen their country, a people perfectly exemplified by their leader, Benito Mussolini: crude, mediocre, venal, conceited, superficial, and sentimental. Considering her passion for the distinguished, the noble, the just, the war years inspired in her a determination never to relent in the demands she placed on herself and on others. That she could be comically defensive and self-important never affected her conviction that she was the implacable foe of mediocrity and self-indulgence, and in this she was largely supported by her loyal friends, one of whom described her as “a cannibal, waging war [as a] way of living; with her one had to attack or retreat, bite or be bitten.” oth passion and contradiction are ever present in Morante’s fiction, which is never sure or efficient in its unfolding but is always moving on the edge of intensities it can barely contain. In the first of her four novels, a 725-page work called House of Liars (1948) that chronicles the disintegration of a family, Morante did her best to keep the unruly devices and actions of her characters in control by insisting that every stray thought be accounted for and that palpable mysteries be made to add up. And yet, as Tuck rightly notes, the book remains “sprawling and confusing,” the writing often “lugubrious” and “irritatingly precious.” Morante would always be a vehement, driving prose writer, attracted to abundant detail and an overwhelming sensory immediacy. But in House of Liars she had not mastered her own gifts, and it is not at all surprising that there has been no successor to the 1951 English-language translation, which omitted nearly two hundred pages of the original. Morante’s second novel was a very different matter. Arturo’s Island (1957) not only won the Italian Strega Prize but attracted an enthusiastic readership in the United States as well. It is

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a strange book, savage and sinister and, in its way, adolescent in its willed celebration of childhood and of heedless, reckless emotion. A boy lives largely unattended on a remote, sparsely populated island, visited occasionally by a father who comes and goes and seems to his son a godlike figure in his rude, peremptory, unforgiving detachment. But with the appearance of the teenage wife Arturo’s father eventually installs in the island home, the boy’s life changes. Everything in the book is writ large, as if Arturo, who is also the narrator, were throughout in the grip of uncontrollable passions. Everywhere we find his “heart’s impossible longings” and “sacraments . . . beyond all human measure and human littleness.” Arturo refers to “the pitilessness of my soul” and to his fantasies of unleashing “the most barbarous, unheard-of cruelty.” The tenor of the work is hectic, the coloring often lurid. Punctuating the narrative are frequent references to destiny, fate, the inexplicable. The prose feels, much of the time, excessive, overwrought, and yet the unflagging energy of the book is by no means unattractive. Tuck says of the novel that it is Morante’s “most lyrical and luminous work,” but its primary achievement lies in its uncanny portrayal of varieties of enthrallment and disaffection, of hatred giving way to love, and violence miraculously overtaken by tenderness. The peasant wife of Arturo’s father is majestic in her simplicity and depth of feeling, and if, much of the time, she is held in thrall by the man who abuses her and she is unable to communicate adequately with the adolescent stepson who mistrusts her and lusts for her, she embodies elements of generosity and self-possession that loom large as the novel hurries to its conclusion. Ask yourself what Arturo’s Island is about and you are apt to conclude that it has nothing to say yet reveals a great deal about the irresolvable tensions that bedevil us all. he consensus, among Morante’s readers and admirers, is that History remains her greatest novel, though when it was first published in Italy it inspired controversies that had little to do with its literary merits. Tuck notes that “the Italian

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left in the early 1970s was riding along on a wave of great optimism and it viewed [History] as far too pessimistic a vision of the world.” Several Italian writers issued a public “invective-letter” denouncing “Morante’s [apparent] refusal to align herself with any one political party.” Pasolini, though at one time a close friend, savagely attacked the novel’s ideological confusion, and it was clear that anything resembling a dispassionate assessment was impossible in the Italy of 1974. There are other factors that even now make assessment difficult. Principal among them is the fact that History is a work so vast and tumultuous that it is hard even to provide an outline of the action. In brief, a multitude of working-class characters struggle to survive the chaos of war and to maintain some modest semblance of fellow feeling and family life. Much of the book recounts the difficult experience of children, whose suffering is made bearable to us only by unexpected irruptions of humor and the interventions of a talking dog. Morante’s vision never seems fixed or repetitive. Although fatality looms over Morante’s blasted landscape, she never retreats to the detached voice of the weary chronicler. Even her youthful characters, those possessed by a desire to “SMASH EVERYTHING” in order to escape the prison of their society, are permitted their intoxication with the beauty of the life they hope to create. For this writer, the innocent and the feral, the still living and the departed are together her sacred charge. Among American critics of History, the most negative was Robert Alter, who complained most emphatically about one essential feature of the book. Each year of the novel’s action—it covers the period between 1941 and 1947—is “prefaced,” as Alter wrote in his 1977 review of the American edition, “by a three- or four-page summary of the year’s principal events in world politics,” reflecting “a kind of simplified popular Marxism. . . . Schematically and tendentiously, world disasters are attributed to the sinister mechanizations of big industry everywhere.” One of Morante’s more articulate characters puts it this way: “History is a history of fascisms, more

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or less disguised”; another character, late in the novel, observes that “the scenes of the human story (History)” are comprehensible as “the multiple coils of an interminable murder. . . . All History and all the nations of the earth had agreed on this end.” Alter declared it “pernicious nonsense to reduce all of history to such a grossly leveling common denominator. . . . It is a way of not really thinking about history but of feeling about it, and feeling one thing— blind, seething resentment.” Of course, Alter was not alone in noting that contemporary critics of a monolithic, undifferentiated “power” often operate from a “blind, seething resentment.” But Morante’s novel is not informed by resentment. Neither is it much interested in elaborating a formal theory of history. The prefaces affixed to each chapter should not be read as blunt ideological statements. They condemn political formations ranging from terrorist groups in Palestine to North Vietnamese operations against the French. Stalinist crimes are condemned along with American postwar missile production. More important, the prefaces do not, except in rare instances, directly relate to anything that follows in the respective chapters. Considered as framing devices, they are fragmentary and transparently inadequate. They cannot possibly tell us what to make of the abundant narrative materials assembled in the various chapters, where the focus is relentlessly intimate. Morante’s humble yet gargantuan task is to look closely at the experience of living in a time of crisis, to take us inside the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people. What there is of theory in any of this is minimal and clearly irrelevant in shaping the impressions we derive as readers who are privy to these lives. Why, then, include the prefaces at all? Why grant to particular characters extended passages in which they offer a theory of history and thereby presume to account for everything under the sun? Morante understands all too well the temptation to reduce experience to a series of emblematic, unitary phenomena. The novel is set up to express that temptation and to demonstrate the futility of those comprehensive theories and explanations. The

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texture of History, page after page of close-grained narration and sympathetic portraiture, gives the lie to the didactic leveling apparatus she assembles with the prefaces. The truth of Morante’s novel—the authenticity it impresses upon us throughout—has to do not with any explanatory schema but with its openness to the physical, the inconsolable, the redemptive, the irrelevant, the vagrant particulars that reveal, whether or not the novelist herself believes it, that “there is more than politics,” as Susan Sontag put it in an essay on Victor Serge, “more, even, than history.” hree years before she died in 1985, Morante brought out her last novel, Aracoeli (which will be reissued by Open Letter Books this month). It was a large departure from History, and it wasn’t well received. Lily Tuck reports that the first time she read it she found it “almost pointlessly disturbing and shocking,” and the word “pointlessly” suggests what is especially problematic about the book. Late in a novel filled with dreams, flashbacks, and fantasies, the ghost of the narrator’s mother, Aracoeli, declares that “there’s nothing to be understood,” and throughout the novel Morante’s narrator derides efforts to make sense of things that are, in their nature, incomprehensible. Tuck speculates that as Morante grappled with old age and the deterioration of her body, she had reached a “terrifying awareness that nothing matters,” including efforts to make sense of one’s life and the lives of others. Plausible, to be sure, though Tuck may be too ready to associate Morante herself with the forty-threeyear old male narrator of her book, a man whose extreme cynicism and sometimes portentous solemnity betray a dark, deterministic cast of mind. In fact, this man, Emanuele, moves so entirely in the grip of what he takes to be an overmastering fate that we cannot but think him terminally impaired, an unreliable narrator employed by the novelist not to express her own sentiments but to permit her to explore the effects of neurosis and self-loathing on a person vulnerable and submissive. The subject of the novel is aptly described by the late critic Lionel Abel as one man’s “subjection to his mother, and his love-

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hate for her, which has continued over the years long after her death.” His mother “is held responsible for his homeliness, bourgeois status, homosexuality, and inability to idealize anyone but her.” Improbable though it may seem, we do not experience Aracoeli as if it were merely an expression of grotesque emotion indulged for its own sake. To grasp the spirit of the thing we may need to recall a sentence by Dostoevsky, who wrote that “almost every reality, even if it has its own immutable laws, nearly always is incredible.” A novel featuring a nymphomaniac mother who inspires her son to believe that “it would have been better if you had aborted me, or strangled me at birth with your hands” is bound to verge at times on the preposterous. But we believe in Morante’s characters. The nearhysteria that marks much of Aracoeli has to do not with authorial selfindulgence but with the emotional lives of those who are incapable of ordinary restraint. The heightened language of the novel reflects Morante’s refusal to nullify or tastefully chasten what authentically belongs to her characters. Primary in the view of life that emerges here, as elsewhere in Morante, is the sense that all relationships and loyalties are precarious and, in the end, disappointing. There was something ruthless and unforgiving in Morante’s imagination that remains bracing and exemplary. She could not bring herself to believe in the redemptive promise of enlightened values or of love, and she seemed bravely impervious to the delusion of comfort. At the same time, there was nothing complacent in her pessimism, nothing didactic in her mounting of the available human evidence. Her characters are made to struggle with their fate even when they believe that struggle is futile. In each of her three major novels, Morante moves with a sense that nothing can be done to alter what must happen, but she does not understand why this should be so, and she is compelled to demand some further understanding that is denied her. She offers an exploration of reality in which the point—if there must be one—is resistance to the very determinism that the novelist, like many of her characters, ■ finds nearly irresistible.

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PUZZLE 1

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3

4

5

6

7

8

12

NEW COLLECTIVES By Richard E. Maltby Jr.

A

10

11

13 14

15

16

17

20

21

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gaggle of geese, an exaltation of larks, a murder of crows—these are classic, centuries-old collective “terms of venery.” Since times have changed, this puzzle offers several new collective terms for today’s world. Clue answers include four proper nouns and one common foreign word. 30A, 2D and 19D are uncommon. Unchecked letters in the twelve unclued theme entries can be rearranged to spell TABULATION WON SMILE. As always, mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its solution. The solution to last month’s puzzle appears on page 67.

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18

19 22

25

23

26 27

29

28 31

30

32

33

34 37

35

36

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40

39 41

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42 44

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ACROSS

1. 6. 12. 13. 14. 16. 18. 20. 21. 24. 26. 27. 29. 30. 33. 34. 38. 40. 41. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

A of 15D (7) A of 32D (7) Total number seeing Odd Man Out (6) Too closeted in heterosexual society (4) Confused, as Bruce Lee was moving to Hollywood? (11) A of 25D (6) Try to twist and veer, going around a circle (8) Elevate Cardinal outside of Puerto Rico (5) A of 6D (9) Time Republican moved left. Well done? Hardly! (4) On tour, cast needs to move to a new location (6) Van Gogh’s unbound date book is getting people stirred up (10) Advertising light bourbon: “Everything but the last drop, period” (4) State with refined taste our opera house is in the outskirts of Gotham (10) Wrestler holds a mister back by the hair (8) When dry, it turns blue (5) Punished again for being fastidious? (7) A of 36D (6) Damsel in distress—which one goes in? Show of hands, perhaps? (7) A bodybuilder with a heavenly body (8) A of 1D (4) Abstract and vague—Cripes! (6) High point at Cape Canaveral no one draws in less than a minute (8) Shut off behind (4) Tiredness might come from livers (9)

DOWN

1. 2.

See 44A (10) Material lab arranged on both sides, in medicine (11)

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 15. 17. 19. 22. 23. 25. 28. 30. 31. 32. 35. 36. 37. 39. 42. 43.

Dropout from finishing school? Quite right, and about time (7) What’s missing in TV series? A lot of directions not watched (6) Formerly called sexual excitement: getting high from pot (6) See 21A (9) Burned after taking top off, feeling hot (4) A square in New England goes around it (4) Good at making piece of a crook (3) Bit of land mile, mile off (3) Stuck in an arena, sounds like this can help you hold your water! (5) See 1A (6) Chorines, or shimmying, can make one horny! (10) Dropping around continent to gain time in Arabia— that’s the spirit! (5) Rev. Gladstone’s heading international organization (3) Over-extended, with no extension (5) See 16A (9) Old Scottish town is paired with police department in the surrounding areas (4) “Left, right, left” carrying one hypocritical daughter (7) Something that falls between Britain and European country (7) See 6A (7) I sculpted nude, concealing Catholic cause (6) See 40A (6) European called up in draft (5) Close to afraid, relative to alarm (5) Rising quaver during a sort of collar (4) Likely to be flat, shortly (3)

Contest Rules: Send completed diagram with name and address to “New Collectives,” Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York,

N.Y. 10012. If you already subscribe to Harper’s, please include a copy of your latest mailing label. Entries must be received by July 13. Senders of the first three correct solutions opened at random will receive one-year subscriptions to Harper’s Magazine. Winners’ names will be printed in the September issue. Winners of the May puzzle, “Ups and Downs,” are Dirk Epperson, Berkeley, Calif.; Les Reid, Springfield, Mo.; and James South, Austin, Tex. PUZZLE 83

FINDINGS B

iophysicists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center discovered that red pandas can taste aspartame, neotame, and sucralose and will consume large amounts of these substances if given the chance; lions, meanwhile, proved indifferent to artificial sweeteners. Researchers who injected goldfish with morphine or saline and then attached small heaters to the fish noted that the placebo-group goldfish experienced cognitive pain—fear, anxiety, and wariness— in addition to reflexive pain, which was also observed in the drugged fish. Entomologists tricked Argentine ants into disposing of live pupae by dousing the living antlings with the smell of the dead. Male Trinidadian guppies’ sexual harassment of female guppies was found to cause the females to shun other females they know and to seek out new friends. Swedish scientists identified the human body’s pleasure nerves, which activate when a person is stroked at a speed of 4 to 5 centimeters per second. Other Swedish scientists found that Swedes were becoming increasingly logical. A growing number of sentiment-analysis programs were tracking the emotional content of blogs, and researchers who watched more than 5,000 videos of dancing animals on YouTube determined that fourteen parrot species are capable of keeping time to recorded music. Due to bandwidth scarcity, experts feared imminent Internet brownouts.

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ale African-American CEOs are more successful if they are baby-faced, whereas white male CEOs are less successful in direct proportion to their babyfacedness. An attempted infanticide was observed among tuxuci dolphins. Gay-rights activists, pointing to a study of rising anti-gay violence in Brazil, warned of a “homocaust.” An island of fairy penguins was suc-

cessfully defended against foxes and feral dogs by Maremma sheepdogs, and an English hedgehog suffering from spinelessness was taken to Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital in Buckinghamshire. Chinese officials were distributing contraceptive pills to gerbils in the Gurbantunggut Desert. Biologists remained unsure why spotted hyenas giggle but theorized that the giggles may express frustration. Japanese scientists correlated higher levels of lithium in drinking water with lower rates of suicide among local populations. Tundra swans were dying en route to Alaska after consuming lead in Idaho. Kentucky is the saddest state.

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exas scientists created a carbon-based supermaterial more rigid than diamond, stronger than steel, and almost as light as air. Computer models of the growth and collapse of mountains on the surface of neutron stars revealed the stars’ crusts to be 10 billion times stronger than any terrestrial metal. An infrared survey of white dwarfs concluded that many dead stars are surrounded by dead planets that hurl smaller rocky masses toward the stars, where they are torn apart by gravitational tides. Astronomers continued to search for rogue black holes that have been wandering the universe since the Big Bang. Dust in Earth’s stratosphere was found to be older than the Sun. Physicists determined the source of the plasmaspheric hiss, a faint ssh sound in the upper atmosphere, to be a “chorus” of electromagnetic waves. Magnetic tornadoes were observed on Mercury. Mars may have mud volcanoes and pools of brine, and the center of the Milky Way tastes like raspberries and smells like rum. A professor of clothing at Japan Women’s University invented stink-free underwear for astronauts. South Korean scientists created ■ beagles that glow.

Dream, Part IX, a painting by Francis Di Fronzo. Courtesy the artist and Somerville Manning Gallery, Wilmington, Delaware 84

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