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ENHANCED
READER FoRMAt
HONG KONG IN REVOLT
MICHELLE CHEN
HOW THE WORLD LET EBOLA SPREAD
THE EDITORS
THENATION.COM
OC T OB E R 2 7, 2 01 4
It now spans Democratic
and Republican administrations
and its targeting investigative
journalists as well.
Norman Solomon and
Marcy Wheeler
THE GOVERNMENT'S
WAR ON WHISTLEBLOWERS
The Nation. 2
Letters
Can We Talk?
In her tribute to the late comedian
Joan Rivers, Katha Pollitt wrote that
comedy had a big No Girls Al-
lowed sign on the door for most of
her career [Rivers Gets the Last
Laugh, Sept. 29]. But I remember,
as a boy growing up during the late
1930s, 40s and early 50s, enjoying
the excellent humor of funny ladies
of radio, television, movies and live
theater: Billie Burke, Eve Arden,
Judy Canova, Ethel Waters, Shirley
Booth, Kathleen Lockhart, Connie
Brooks, Jane Ace of Easy Aces, Ann
Sothern in Maisie, Myrtle Vail and
Donna Damerel in Myrt & Marge,
Cathy Lewis and Marie Wilson
on the My Friend Irma show, Gale
Storm in My Little Margie and Au-
drey Totter in Meet Millie.
There were many hilarious co-
equal stars of male-female comedy
teams: Fanny Brice in Baby Snooks,
Marian Jordan of Fibber McGee &
Molly fame, Ernestine Wade as Sap-
phire on Amos n Andy, Gracie Allen
with George Burns, Mary Living-
stone with Jack Benny, Portland
Hoffa with Fred Allen and Mary
Tyler Moore with Dick Van Dyke.
And, of course, there were the true
greats: Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett,
with their incredibly funny sidekicks
Vivian Vance and Vicki Lawrence.
Joan Rivers, of course, ranks up there
with the best of them. John A. Moore
lansdowne, pa.
Survival of the Sexiest
Critiques of evolutionary approach-
es to human behavior often have
a stereotyped form of describing a
pedigree of error, from the Social
Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, to
the sociobiology of E.O. Wilson, to
the evolutionary psychology of Leda
Cosmides and John Tooby. Mal
Ahern and Moira Weigels broadside
against evolutionary psychology,
Survival of the Sexiest [Sept. 29],
conforms to the genre.
Spencer, we are told, hailed natu-
ral selection as a force driving the im-
provement of the human species, but
Ahern and Weigel neglect to mention
that Spencer was the author of The
Inadequacy of Natural Selection and
a staunch defender of the inheritance
of acquired characteristics, in part
because the malleability of human be-
havior was more compatible with his
views on social progress.
The work of Margo Wilson and
Martin Daly is ridiculed because they
found that children are at greater risk
of neglect or infanticide if they live in a
household with a man who is not their
biological father, but there is no pause
to consider whether this might be
true of a small subset of stepfathers.
We are speaking of relative risk, and
whether it might have implications
for recognizing children at particular
risk. I had the honor of giving the first
Margo Wilson Memorial Lecture, and
to say that Margo believed that such
behaviors are hard-coded into the
brain is a gross misrepresentation of
her nuanced views. Sturgeons Law
states that 90 percent of everything
is crap, and this is just as true of evo-
lutionary psychology as of any other
field, but it is the good stuff that de-
serves our attention. David Haig
cambridge, mass.
As an evolutionary psychologist,
let me address the question about
the growing popularity of this field.
Many college students find EP ap-
pealing because it documents and
explains certain universal sex dif-
ferences that other social sciences
ignore or attribute to socialization
alone. For example, students want to
know why men tend to seek casual
sex more than women. Categorically
JOAN RIVERS REMEMBERED KATHA POLLITT
IMMIGRANTS BETRAYED DEEPAK BHARGAVA
FROM SURVEILLANCE
TO CIVIL RIGHTS
Muslim New Yorkers Find Their Political Voice
SEPTEMBER 29, 2014 THENATION.COM
by Moustafa Bayoumi
@thenation.com
(continued on page 26)
Comments drawn from our website
letters@thenation.com
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Sierra Leone and Guinea, because it underscores
a troubling conclusion: todays wildfire Ebola
epidemic was not inevitable.
Despite its frightening virulence, Ebola can be
contained through robust public health efforts.
It thrives in chaotic and impoverished environ-
ments where public health systems are frayed and
international assistance weak. Though experts will
debate the roots of this current crisis for years, one
point on which many agree is that local poverty
and global indifference played starring
roles. This isnt a natural disaster, in-
ternational health crusader Paul Farmer
told The Washington Post. This is the
terrorism of poverty.
Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea
are among the poorest countries on the
planet, with health systems that have
been shattered by years of neglect and
conflict. As many as 90 percent of Libe-
rias healthcare workers fled the country during its
long civil war, and some 80 percent of its health fa-
cilities were closed. By the time the Ebola outbreak
was declared an international emergency, Liberia
had less than 250 doctors. Scientists could not have
devised a more nurturing environment for a deadly
virus if they had designed it in a laboratory.
But if local conditions created the opening for
the epidemic, it was global inaction that helped it
to flourish. For months, organizations like Doctors
Without Borders begged the World Health Orga-
nization to begin marshaling resources to fight the
crisis. But after years of budget cuts and the gutting
of its epidemic-response unit, WHO failed to act
with anything approaching the necessary speed
and competence. Nor was it alone: governments
around the world have stalled, unwilling to recog-
nize this outbreak as the global humanitarian crisis
it is. Even now, far too few have stepped up to pro-
vide the medical resources and technical expertise
that are so desperately needed.
For the people in the affected countries, the re-
sult has been disastrous; the Ebola outbreak is rag-
ing well ahead of efforts to contain it, and scientists
have warned that it could become endemic to
the region. The lapses also point to fundamental
weaknesses in our global preparedness for future
epidemics, which, given the intercon-
nectedness of modern life, the world
must begin to face.
Once upon a time, fighting and
preventing epidemics was considered
WHOs responsibility. The world still
desperately needs an organization that
can lead the way with public health
monitoring, rapid response and resource
mobilization. If WHO is to be that
organization in the future, it must have far better
funding and leadership.
Other ideas have been advanced by public health
advocatesfor example, a global healthcare re-
serve corps to be mobilized in a flash to supply pro-
fessionals to hot spotsand there have been calls
for new vaccine development. But beyond such
technical interventions, the fight against future
epidemics requires something far more ambitious:
the creation of a strong domestic health system in
the worlds most vulnerable countries. Frontline
doctors, functioning clinics and basic medical sup-
plies are the most reliable defense against future
outbreaks. Whether the international community
will rise to this challenge remains an unanswered
question. But as Ebola rips through West Africa
and knocks hard at the gates of other countries,
we owe it to the people dying unnecessarily to try.
B
efore Ebola became an epidemic that has killed more
than 3,400 people, before it jumped borders and crossed
oceans, it was a deadly, if rare, disease that had been con-
tained during each of its twenty-four previous outbreaks.
This is crucial to remember as the disease churns through Liberia,
Ebolas Deadly Spread
EDI TORI AL
The Nation.
since 1865
UPFRONT
4 DC by the Numbers:
Budgeting Ebola; 11
Snapshot: The Sacrifice;
11 Back Issues: (1997)
Hitch in Hong Kong
3 Ebolas Deadly Spread
4 Hong Kong in Revolt
Michelle Chen
5 The Score
Mike Konczal and
Bryce Covert
8 Noted
COLUMNS
6 Subject to Debate
Yes to Yes Means Yes
Katha Pollitt
10 Against the Current
Obamas Cancerous
Metaphor
Richard Kim
11 Deadline Poet
A Summary of the
Realignment
Calvin Trillin
Features
12 The Governments War
on Whistleblowers
Norman Solomon
and Marcy Wheeler
Investigative journalists are
being targeted as well.
18 After #Ferguson
Steven Hsieh
and Raven Rakia
Michael Browns death spurs
an activist network.
22 A Tale of Three Cities
Mark Schapiro
The environmental links
between Pittsburgh,
Manchester and
Guangzhou.
Books &
the Arts
27 Transcend
and Organize
Susan Stewart
32 Gathering Fates
Michael Lipkin
35 Films: Gone Girl
The Blue Room
Stuart Klawans
37 Shelf Life
Peter C. Baker
VOLUME 299, NUMBER 17,
October 27, 2014
The digital version of this issue is
available to all subscribers October 9
at TheNation.com.
The Nation. 4 October 27, 2014
Todays Hong Kong is both an amazingly sophisti-
cated and intensely unequal economy, compared with
other developed nations. One-fifth of the population
lives in poverty. The minimum wage, just recently
implemented at the paltry rate of $3.60, cant offset the
astronomical cost of housing and inflation and does little
to curb unemployment. The former colonial trade hub
has lost about 80 percent of its manufacturing jobs since
the early 1990s as industries have shifted to the mainland.
The most impoverished are migrant laborers, youth and
women. The radicals who led the most militant protests
represent twentysomethings tired of economic volatility
and the stagnation of the political system.
After about a week of protests, the standoff in the
streets was growing more tense, with scuffles breaking
out as violent counterdemonstrators rolled into the
peaceful Occupy camps. The seeming reluctance of the
police to intervene led some to believe that the authori-
ties had sowed chaos to derail the movement.
Tensions also emerged within the move-
ment as protesters wrestled over the next
stepswhether to seek negotiations with
Hong Kongs government or hold out on
principle in defiance of police aggression.
The authorities issued an ultimatum for
occupiers to clear out by October 6 or risk
an even heavier crackdown. Meanwhile,
Beijing denounced the uprising as a threat
to stability, though it did not intervene directly. Nei-
ther Beijing nor Hong Kong administrators seemed
prepared to heed the electoral reform demands.
Facing pressure to stop blocking traffic so as not to
disrupt commerce and government functions, many
protesters retreated. They looked to the governments
vague promises of opening official talks with activ-
ists, hopeful that this uprising marked an advance for
pro-democracy forces. While the street protests have
largely faded, the democracy struggle showed it was
in for the long haul.
Sophia Chan, an activist with the pro-democracy
group Left 21, told The Nation, We see free elections
as a major blow to business- government collusion and
capitalist privilege. Although we do think that a
democratic political system is only the first step to real
change, we also think that that in itself would already
be a huge improvement for our fight against capitalist
oppression in Hong Kong.
In 1997, Hong Kong was handed over by Britain
to its motherland as the crown jewel of Chinas new
empire. But the deal turned out to be more than Beijing
bargained for. The mainland regained a piece of terri-
tory, but it never conquered the hearts of a people who
are ready for true decolonization, and will settle for
nothing less. MICHELLE CHEN
Michelle Chen is a blogger for TheNation.com and co-producer of
Asia Pacific Forum on Pacificas WBAI.
Hong Kong in Revolt
Fighting for change in a vastly unequal economy
T
he umbrella is a perfect icon for Hong
Kongs uprising: inclusive, a bit aloof and
pragmatically defiant of the elements
(and, in cinematic lore, readily convert-
ible into a lethal kung fu weapon). It em-
bodies the central plea of the protesters who took to the
streets throughout the city beginning on September
26: a civilized demand for self-determination. Yet the
biggest worry in Beijing isnt the threat of universal suf-
frage, but what might come afterwardthe struggle for
social justice that Hong Kongers face as they pivot be-
tween postcolonial limbo and authoritarian capitalism.
The immediate spark for the protests was a contro-
versy over the nascent electoral process. Activists were
incensed by Beijings decreevia its proxy
authority, the National Peoples Congress
(NPC)that candidates for Hong Kongs
2017 executive election must be approved
by the mainland authorities.
The territorys earlier pro -democracy
protests were largely led by intellectuals
and civic activists, but now the movement
has taken on a decidedly populist, youthful
tone. By October 1Chinas National Daymajor
labor groups, including the teachers union and the
Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, reported
that thousands of members and workers across all
sectors had joined the protests and engaged in work
stoppages. Condemning police use of tear gas on
peaceful demonstrators, the HKCTU declared,
To defend democracy and justice, we cannot let
the students fight the suppression alone.
Underlying the protesters demands for fair
elections is a frustrated generations desire to
control its economic destiny. A statement is-
sued by dozens of labor and community groups draws
the link between an unaccountable government and
Hong Kongs economic divide: The Chinese Com-
munist Party has followed and reinforced almost
every governing strategy used by the British colonial-
ists, the statement reads. Working in tandem, the
CCP and business conglomerates have only worsened
Hong Kongs already alarming rich-poor gap. It is
true that even a genuinely democratic system may not
be able to bring immediate improvements to grass-
roots and workers livelihoods. However, the current
political system and the NPCs ruling are flagrant
violations of our political rights as well as our right
to be heard. Beyond elections, the group demanded
expanded housing protections and welfare policies,
and a government responsive to the concerns of civil
society groups.
C
O
M
M
E
N
T
The
democracy
struggle is
in for the
long haul.
D C BY T HE
NUMBE RS
$1.55B
Amount cut
from the Nation-
al Institutes of
Health budget in
2013 as a result
of sequestration
$1B
Amount sought
by President
Obama to
combat Ebola
$50M
Appropriations
left over from
the Afghan
War and OKd
by Congress to
fight Ebola
[The
Depart-
ment of
Homeland
Security]
has no
assurance
it has
sufficient
protective
equipment
and
antiviral
medical
counter-
measures
for a
pandemic
response.
August
Department
of Homeland
Security report
The Nation. 5 October 27, 2014
T
hrow a rock into the pun-
ditsphere and youll hit
someone arguing that
minimum-wage increases
kill jobs. We shouldnt boost
the wage, these people argue, because
companies will hire fewer of the lowest-
paid workersthe very workers who are
supposed to be helped. Meanwhile, social
movements like Fight for 15 demand a
higher minimum wage in order to raise the
living standards of these workers.
To a degree, the relationship between
the minimum wage and employment is
still debated among economists. When
thirty-eight of them were polled last year,
they were split as to whether a $9 hourly
wage would cost jobs, with about a quar-
ter unable to say one way or another. The
debate pits the Congressional Budget
Office, which found that a $10.10 wage
would reduce employment by 0.3 percent,
against economists like David Cooper, who
found that a higher minimum wage would
support the creation of 85,000 new jobs.
So which is it: Does raising the mini-
mum wage boost living standards for
workers, or does it kill jobs for those who
need them most?
Taking stock of all the conflicting re-
search on the topic suggests the former:
employment is unlikely to suffer from a
higher wage. In 2009, Hristos Doucoulia-
gos and T.D. Stanley published a paper
that reviewed sixty-four studies and found
that when the studies findings were
averaged out, the impact of raising the
minimum wage on employment was close
to zero. Also, the most statistically precise
studies were the likeliest to find no impact.
Increasing the wage by 10 percent could
reduce employment by a mere 0.1 percent.
Critics suggest that employers of low-
income workers will replace them with
machines if their labor becomes more
costly. But in the real world, businesses are
run by human beings who make a range
of choices. Bosses often respond to higher
labor costs not by cutting workers, but
by requiring workers to be more efficient.
They may reduce bonuses for higher-paid
employees. They could pass the cost on to
customers through higher prices, although
a review of academic papers found that a
10 percent wage increase raised prices by
no more than 0.4 percent. Most important,
employers are likely to find that a higher
wage reduces costly job turnover among
trained workers. Higher wages also put
more money into workers pockets to the
tune of some $30 billionwhich would
then be spent at these businesses.
Real-world evidence is reassuring. In
2010, three economists looked at 1,381
counties over sixteen years, finding that
minimum-wage hikes had no effect on
employment. Other economists looked at
every state-level minimum-wage increase
over twenty-five years at times when un-
employment was already high and found
no evidence of an effect on job creation.
Yet another group looked at the effect
of state-level increases on teenagers
canaries in the coal mine of low-skilled
employmentand found zero impact on
their jobs.
Even this year, the thirteen states that
raised their minimum wages on January 1
have experienced higher employment
growth than those that didnt. Washing-
ton, the state that has boasted the highest
minimum wage for fifteen years, had a
job-growth rate 0.3 percentage points
above the national rate. Its impossible
to draw a clear line of causation from a
higher minimum wage to job growth, but
the hikes clearly did not torpedo local
economies. Across the board, theres little
reason to think that a higher wage would
decimate job growth and good reason
to think it could give the economyand
workersa boost. Bryce Covert
Myth: The mini-
mum wage is a
living wage.
Reality: One full-
time minimum-
wage job used to be
able to keep a fam-
ily of three above
the poverty line.
Now it cant keep a
single parent above
the poverty line.
Myth: Mostly teen-
agers in short-term
jobs make the
minimum wage.
Reality: Nearly
90 percent of the
workers who would
be affected by a
minimum-wage
hike are older than
20, and 28 percent
of them are parents.
Myth: Minimum-
wage jobs like fast
food are just entry
points to better-
paid careers.
Reality: In the
minimum-wage
fast-food indus-
try, there are far
fewer managerial
positions to move
into than in other
industries, and few
franchise owner-
ship opportunities.
HALF-FULL: Ten states have passed
minimum-wage increases this year, five
above $10 an hour.
THE SCORE/ MI KE KONCZAL + BRYCE COVERT
THE GLASS IS...
THE
SCORECARD
HALF-EMPTY: Congressional Repub-
licans have blocked a federal minimum-
wage increase three times over the past
three years despite supporting one under
President George W. Bush.
G
R
A
P
H
I
C
:

C
H
E
L
S
E
A

L
E
E
2.10 Washington
-1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5
Rhode Island 1.28
Florida 1.56
Oregon 1.68
Colorado 1.79
1.16 Missouri
1.16 Ohio
0.91 Arizona
0.78 Montana
0.54 New York
0.35 Vermont
0.11 Connecticut
-0.56 New Jersey
PERCENTAGE CHANGE IN EMPLOYMENT: AUG.DEC. 2013 TO JAN.MAY 2014
1
3

S
T
A
T
E
S

T
H
A
T

R
A
I
S
E
D

T
H
E

M
I
N
I
M
U
M

W
A
G
E

I
N

2
0
1
4
PERCENTAGE CHANGE IN EMPLOYMENT IN
STATES THAT RAISED THE MINIMUM WAGE
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Does the Minimum Wage Kill Jobs?
The Nation. 6 October 27, 2014
O
n paper, the new California law man-
dating an affirmative consent standard
for sex between students in the state
university system is a feminist dream
come true: yes meansat long lastyes.
True, its a bit hard to imagine how it will play out in
practice, even bearing in mind that consent to each
sexual activity need not be verbal. I can see asking for a
lot of yeses, or moans of pleasure, or whatever, as you
progress from kissing to et cetera with a new partner,
but months into a relationship? Is there never a point
at which you can take some things for granted and just
get on with it?
Still, its not as if the current under-
standing of consent works so well. The
new law, after all, comes on the heels
of a number of much-publicized cases:
thirty-eight current and former students
at Occidental College have filed federal
complaints against the administration for
mishandling charges of sexual assault, fol-
lowed by groups from Berkeley and USC,
as well as schools in other parts of the country, like
Swarthmore and Dartmouth. A federal task force look-
ing into sexual assault on campus under Title IX has
wonderfully concentrated the minds of administrators
and legislators. New Yorks governor has just declared
affirmative consent at the state university system.
Given how poorly its worked, maybe we neednt
cling to the no means no standard, under which a
woman is presumed ready for action even if she lies
there like lox with tears running down her cheeks, too
frozen or frightened or trapped by lifelong habits of
demureness to utter the magic word. Why should the
burden be only on her to set the limits, with her avail-
ability as the default position, rather than on both part-
ners to make sure the encounter is mutually desired?
(And yes, although heterosexual pairing is the most
common, this applies to all sexes and genders.)
In real life, though, heres the difference the new
standard will make: not much. For one thing, as many
have pointed out, it assumes the problem is miscom-
municationI thought you liked it, as the creepy
frotteur said to me on the subway long ago, just before
I stomped hard on his foot on my way out the door.
But far more common than simple confusion is the
situation in which a womans wishes are disregarded
or in which an outright predator has made sure his
target really cant say noshes too drunk, or asleep;
shes in his car with no way to get home. The reason
90 percent of campus rapes are committed by repeat
offenders, and why members of fraternities are three
times as likely to be perpetrators, is not that frat boys
are particularly liable to misunderstand women. Its
that they feel more entitled to sex and more protected
from punishment. Moving to an affirmative consent
standard wont stop these exploitative men; instead of
arguing that the victim didnt say no, theyll claim she
said yes, she moaned with pleasure, she moved against
them in a sexual way It will still be he said, she said.
And that is the basic problem. Our
concepts of sexual assaultwhat it is and
whos responsible under what circum-
stanceslie deeper than our laws about
it, and those concepts are what determine
how the law is applied in practice. The
first wave of rape-law reform, in the 1970s
and 80s, didnt raise arrest or conviction
rates, Stanford law professor Deborah
Rhode told me over the phone. DAs
didnt want to bring cases, because they didnt think
they could get a conviction. Those reforms included
removing such requirements as having a witness to the
rape or proof that the victim demonstrated earnest re-
sistance (preferably by having visible injuries), as well
as barring testimony about
the victims sexual history.
It took a long time before
juries caught up to what
now seem like obviously
enlightened changes in the
law. And plenty of juries and
judges still havent caught
up, especially if a woman
has been drinking or fits
someones image of a slut.
Indeed, Canada already
requires voluntary agree-
ment to engage in sexual
activity, and sexual assault hasnt gone away. But at
the same time, Rhode notes dryly, the sky hasnt
fallen in. Nor has it collapsed in New Jersey, where,
as the sociologist Susan Caringella writes in her book
Addressing Rape Reform in Law and Practice, a state Su-
preme Court decision in 1992 upheld the affirmative
consent rule and defined that in the absence of freely-
Our concepts of
sexual assault lie
deeper than our
laws about it, and
those concepts are
what determine
how the law is
applied.
Yes to Yes Means Yes
Californias law wont solve the problem of sexual assault, but its a start.
I
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U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N
:

A
N
D
Y

F
R
I
E
D
M
A
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Katha Pollitt
WELCOME TO
HONG KONG
#1
Ranking of
Hong Kong in
The Economists
Crony Capi-
talism Index,
which notes
that the city has
long been lax
on antitrust
#2
Position of
Hong Kong
in the Knight
Frank Wealth
Reports global
ranking of most
expensive real-
estate markets
.537
Gini co-efficient
for Hong Kong
as of 2011, indi-
cating one of the
highest levels
of inequality in
any developed
economy
20%
Hong Kong resi-
dents who live
below the pov-
erty line in 2012
$3.60
Approximate
value of Hong
Kongs minimum
wage (there was
no minimum
wage at all until
2010)
All numbers drawn
from Why Hong
Kongs Occupy
Central Movement
Has Beijing Very,
Very Scared by
Eli Friedman, at
TheNation.com
The Nation. 8 October 27, 2014
C R I MI NA L I Z AT I ON
Policing Pain
I
ts been estimated that
half of the people shot
and killed by police of-
ficers in the United States
have some type of mental-
health problem. James Boyd
was killed in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, after a five-
hour negotiation with police,
who were trying to get the
homeless man to leave his
illegal campsite. Boyd had
only two small camping
knives, but he was shot in
the back after the officers
set off a stun grenade.
When they arent killing
people with mental-health
issues, the police are ar-
resting them, a harrowing
and harmful experience in
its own right. Jails are the
number one mental-health
facilities across the country,
San Antonio Police Officer
Joe Smarro explains in a
new video series about
overcriminalization, which
launches at TheNation.com
on October 9. Produced by
Brave New Films in partner-
ship with the ACLU, the se-
ries explores alternatives to
the criminalization of social
problems like mental illness,
homelessness and addiction.
Theres a long history
in America of imprisoning
vulnerable populations. The
criminalizing of homeless-
ness harks back to the days
after Reconstruction, when
outdated vagrancy laws
were suddenly applied to the
newly freed black population.
The black codes targeted
formerly enslaved people,
who were arrested for viola-
tions such as lacking proof
of employment. They were
then sent to prisons that had
sprung up on former planta-
tions, effectively re-enslaving
them. This legacy carries
on through stop-and-frisk
policies and discriminatory
immigration enforcement
measures. Such policies crim-
inalize everyday behavior, are
enforced in a racist fashion,
and designate police officers
as the first and only solu-
tion to societys problems.
Thats why this series is
not just about describing
the problem, but about how
you can take action. These
videos focus on innovative
and cost-effective solu-
tions that actually improve
peoples lives, making us less
dependent on prisons and
policing to address problems
that are far too complex to
be beaten into submission.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH
given permission of the victim sexual penetration was
sexual assault. Nota bene: as with yes means yes
on campus, consent in New Jersey can be expressed
through behavior or actions. Variations of the same
idea are law in Washington and Wisconsin, and courts
in those states are hardly overwhelmed with new-
fangled sexual assault complaints. In 2012, according
to the FBI, New Jersey had the lowest number of re-
ported rapes per capita of any state (Washington was
thirty-fourth; Wisconsin, ninth). The highest number
of reported rapes, by the way, were in decidedly old-
school South Dakota and Alaska.
Whats good about yes means yes is less how it
will change what takes place in courtrooms or campus
disciplinary proceedings, and more how it will become
part of our evolving understanding of appropriate
sexual behavior. Basically, affirmative consent means
both partners have to express their wishes in a way that
the other partner can grasp. Men cant simply have at
a passive, silent womanand women have to assert
themselves instead of, for example, drinking to avoid
taking responsibility for sex they actually want.
So, pundits, hold the jokes about sex contracts
and the hysteria about most sex now being rape. In
a couple of decades, affirmative consent will seem
quite normal. And that will be a good thing. Not so
long ago, after all, husbands could legally force sex on
their wives: that a wife provided sex on demand was
part of what marital duties meant. Some called laws
against marital rape a denial of human nature and
an invasion of privacy. Even Camille Paglia doesnt
argue that anymore. n
In a couple
of decades,
affirmative
consent will
seem quite
normal. And
that will be a
good thing.
N O T E D
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The Nation. 10 October 27, 2014
I
n late August, Secretary of State John Kerry
took to the op-ed page of The New York Times
to rally a global coalition for a mission of ut-
most urgency. No civilized country, Kerry
warned, should shirk its responsibility to help
stamp out this disease. He was referring not to the
West African Ebola epidemicwhich by that point had
killed at least 1,552 people and, as of this writing, has
claimed 3,439 livesbut the cancer of ISIS, which
must not be allowed to spread to other countries.
Kerrys choice of words was no isolated rhetorical
flourish. In pounding out the drumbeat to war, the
Obama administration has increasingly trafficked in dis-
ease metaphors. On at least six occasions,
President Obama has referred to ISIS (also
known as ISIL and the Islamic State) as a
cancer. In an address to NATO allies on
September 5, Kerry warned that an intact
ISIS would leave a cancer in place that
will ultimately come back to haunt us.
Whats in a metaphor? A lot, actu-
ally. As political scientist Michael J. Boyle
pointed out in a Times op-ed, Obamas
language recalls the Bush administrations war against
evildoersa crude vocabulary currently enjoying
a coda in the descriptions of ISIS as barbaric (John
Boehner, Bill Nelson, Al Franken), pure evil (Amy
Klobuchar) and savage (Kerry). It is understandable
that the public beheading of journalists and aid work-
ers has provoked such reactions. But as Boyle argues
persuasively, moralistic rhetoric oversimplifies complex
situations, obscures ISISs strategic aims and discour-
ages further analysis. Metaphors are superb tools for
forging emotional associations and projecting broad,
elusive ideas; they are terrible conduits of information
and misleading frameworks for debate.
Indeed, if Bushs division of the world into good
guys and bad guys epitomized the Manichean world-
view of the neocons, then Obamas cancer metaphor
exemplifiesand enables his administrations pro-
tean strategic drift. The world has been urged, vari-
ously, to eradicate, extract, root out, contain
and isolate the cancer of ISIS. In a single press
conference on September 3, Obama said that the goal
of the US campaign is to degrade and destroy ISIS
and to render it a manageable problem. Which is it?
The disturbing reality, readily admitted by the presi-
dent in late August, is that the administration just
doesnt have a strategy yet. There is, as of now, no
name for the mission, no clear military or political goal,
no end date, no hard limit on costs, and no transparent
reports about the success or failure of these strikes, let
alone the number of civilians casualties. Most impor-
tant, there has been no congressional vote to authorize
this war, and neither the White House nor Congress
seems particularly keen to hold one. As for enemies
to degrade, destroy, isolate or contain, the American
mission has already shifted from ISIS forces in Syria to
the Khorasan Group, an organization that most of the
world first heard of after the United States launched air-
strikes against it on September 22, supposedly in order
to thwart an attack against Western targets
that US Central Command declared immi-
nent, but which one administration official
later described as aspirational. Now, Rear
Adm. John Kirby and FBI director James
Comey admit that the US government didnt
actually know when or where the Khorasan
Group would strike. As Kirby asserted at a
Pentagon press briefing: We hit them. And
I dont think we need to throw up a dossier
here to prove that these are bad dudes.
As for the actual fight against a real disease, President
Obama has repeatedly linked the campaign against
Ebola and the fight against ISIS as manifestations of
American leadershipthe
one constant in an uncertain
world. But in fact, the Unit-
ed States, like much of the
world, has been appallingly
slow in its response to the
latest outbreak, which was
first identified in late March
in Guinea. Along with local
healthcare providers, the
front line has been primarily
staffed by the humanitarian
group Mdecins Sans Fron-
tires (Doctors Without Bor-
ders), which has some 3,000 workers in the region and
has treated over a quarter of the confirmed cases on a
budget of about $60 million. MSFs repeated calls for
international assistance went ignored for months. The
World Health Organization didnt declare the outbreak
a public health emergency of international concern
until August, and the UN Security Council didnt pass
Obamas Cancerous Metaphor
While US officials compared ISIS to a disease, they ignored the spread of Ebola.
The world has
been urged,
variously, to
eradicate,
extract, root
out, contain
and isolate the
cancer of ISIS.
STRIKE DEBT
On September 17,
the Occupy Wall
Street ofshoot
Strike Debt an-
nounced that it had
purchased more
than $3.8 million in
student-loan debt
and then forgiven
the debtors.
The debt
belonged to 2,761
students of Ever-
est College, part
of the for-prot
Corinthian Colleges.
Corinthian is on the
brink of nancial
collapse and facing
some 200 lawsuits,
TheNation.com/Students
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DISPATCHES
Richard Kim
including one for
more than $500
million by the
Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau,
over its alleg-
edly fraudulent and
predatory practices.
Even so, students
may still be liable
for the loans they
took out to attend.
Strike Debts
purchase is a
small step toward
alleviating this
burden. The group
recently launched
the Debt Collec-
tive, which aims to
unite student-loan
debtors in order to
build leverage and
provide tools for
organizing. Visit
debtcollective.org
for more information.
The Nation. 11 October 27, 2014
Imagine a world
in which we had
solutions other
than the military
to our problems!
@sarahljaffe,
journalist Sarah
Jaffe on the only
institution well-
funded enough to
confront diseases
like Ebola
a resolution calling on nations to fight this threat to
international peace and security until September 18
two days after Obama, calling Ebola a threat to global
security, announced that 3,000 US troops would be
sent to the region under the direction of the US African
Command, or Africom.
Since at least 2010, Africom, along with the Joint
Special Operations Command, has built a counterter-
rorism disposition matrix based largely out of Camp
Lemonnier in Djibouti, where Predator drones have
been launched against targets in Somalia and Yemen.
During that same period, with almost clownish osten-
tatiousness, Africom has boasted of its humanitarian
endeavorsbuilding dams and schools, training police
and healthcare workers, teaching Englishin press re-
leases and social-media updates. Part fig leaf for covert
ops, part attempt to win African hearts and minds,
these efforts have been best described by journalist
Nick Turse as COIN-style humanitarian projects.
Even so, the fact right now is that Africoms inter-
vention in the Ebola epidemic is necessary; even MSF,
which has avoided military associations in the past,
has called for the deployments, although the group
has also cautioned that US troops should perform
medicalnot securityduties. It says something that a
multinational response to Ebola was conceivable only
in a security framework; that the language of disease
was so readily co-opted to sell a war in Syria; and that,
in fact, the capacity to respond to global health crises
currently lies in the forces that otherwise conduct
targeted assassinations. Terrorism or counterterror-
ismwhich one is the metastasizing cancer? n
A Summary of the Realignment of
Public Opinion Concerning the Agency
Responsible for the Protection of the
President and His Family
The Secret Service
Now makes us nervous.
Calvin Trillin
Deadline Poet
The Sacrifice
SNAPSHOT/ BASSAM KHABI EH
Muslims around the world celebrated Islams biggest holiday, Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of the Sacrifice, commemo-
rating the story of Ibrahim and his son Ismail (in the Old Testament, Abraham and Isaac). Here, a boy stands in front
of the bullet-riddled facade of a mosque in Damascus, Syria. The war consuming the nation is well into its third year.
Hitch in
Hong Kong
BACK ISSUES/1997
W
hen the
transfer of
Hong Kong
from Brit-
ish to Chinese con-
trol was completed
in 1997, Chris-
topher Hitchens
wrote in his Mi-
nority Report col-
umn about visiting
a joint called Club
64. At first look,
it could be a hang-
out for any group
of wised-up young
people anywhere
on the globalized
globe. But put
a slash between
the 6 and the 4,
and you have the
datethe fourth
of Juneon which
the Tiananmen
Square massacre
occurred in 1989.
Hitchens also
paid a visit to the
headquarters of
the Hong Kong
Confederation
of Trade Unions
on Peking Road.
There were the
tottering piles of
strike leaflets and
the posters about
child labor in West-
ern brand-name
factories. Here
were the grizzled
old militants, some
of them refugees
from the mainland,
and the young ide-
alist volunteers.
I saw no copies
of Mao Zedongs
famous study On
Contradiction. But
possibly there is
no contradiction
in this transition,
perhaps the only
assumption of
power by a Com-
munist Party that
has ever been not
just historically
inevitable but or-
ganized on a strict
bureaucratic time-
table. The young
people at Club 64,
and the workers at
Peking Road, are at
present considered
by all experts to
be on the wrong
side of history.
But history also
teaches us that
such judgments
can be premature.
Richard Kreitner
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TWEET THAT!
THE GOVERNMENTS
WAR ON WHISTLEBLOWERS
It now spans Democratic
and Republican administrations
and its targeting investigative
journalists as well.
by NORMAN SOLOMON
AND MARCY WHEELER
13 October 27, 2014
E
ver since NEW YORK TIMES reporter
James Risen received his rst subpoena
from the Justice Department more than
six years ago, occasional news reports
have skimmed the surface of a complex
story. The usual gloss depicts a conict between top of-
cials who want to protect classied information and
a journalist who wants to protect condential sources.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Sterlinga former undercover CIA
ofcer now facing charges under the Espionage Act,
whom the feds want Risen to identify as his sourceis
cast as a disgruntled ex-employee in trouble for allegedly
spilling the classied beans.
But the standard media narratives about Risen and
Sterling have skipped over deep patterns of government
retaliation against recalcitrant journalists and whistle-
blowers. Those patterns are undermining press freedom,
precluding the informed consent of the governed and
hiding crucial aspects of US foreign policy. The recent
announcement of Eric Holders resignation as attorney
general has come after nearly ve years of the Obama
administration extending and intensifying the use of the
Justice Department for retribution against investigative
journalism and whistleblowing.
Ofcial enmity toward Risen had simmered for years
before the Bush administration sent him a subpoena on
January 24, 2008. Shortly before the 2004 presiden-
tial election, Risen and his colleague Eric Licht blau
put together breakthrough reporting on a warrantless
domestic- wiretap program. As it sometimes does with
stories deemed sensitive for national
security, the Times notied the govern-
ment of its intent to publish. But under
strong pressure from White House of-
cialsincluding some later impli-
cated in the legally suspect program
Times editors delayed the storys publi-
cation for over a year, until December
2005. The coverage won Risen and
Lichtblau a Pulitzer Prize for care-
fully sourced stories on secret domestic
eavesdropping that stirred a national
debate. It was the kind of debate that
the people running the US surveillance state had been
desperate to avoid.
The belated publication of those stories came just
before Risen brought out a book that contained report-
ing on the wiretap program and several other sinister
initiatives under categories like counterterrorism and
counterproliferation. On January 13, 2006, the week
after Risens book State of War reached the stores, At-
torney General Alberto Gonzales told a news confer-
ence that an investigation into the Times wiretap stories
was under way and that its too early to make decisions
regarding whether or not reporters should go to jail.
Though not apparent at the time, facts later emerged to
show that Gonzales was implicated in the illegal wire-
tapping that Risen exposed. (As White House counsel,
Gonzales had authorized continued operation of the
program after the Justice Department refused to do so.)
It turned out that the Justice Department was not
able to prosecute any whistleblower or make legal trou-
ble for any journalist in connection with the wiretap
revelations. But as attorney generalan ofce he as-
sumed in early 2005Gonzales ran the department as
it collected information that would not only jeopardize
the condentiality of Risens sources but also impede his
ongoing reporting. Risens book, a bestseller, included a
chapter that became the ostensible reason for the series
of subpoenas and legal threats that have been aimed at
Risen since George W. Bush began his nal year in the
Oval Ofce.
Under Attorney General Eric Holder, President
Obamas Justice Department took up where the Bush
DOJ left off. Risen received a second subpoena for
grand-jury testimony in late April 2010. As he noted in
a mid-2011 afdavit, It was my reporting, both in The
New York Times and my book State of War, that revealed
that the Bush Administration had, in all likelihood, vio-
lated the law and the United States Constitution by se-
cretly conducting warrantless domestic wiretapping on
American citizens. At the White House and the Justice
Department, he remained unforgiven.
Anger at Risen also endured at the CIA, where of-
cials have loathed his way of ipping
over their rocks. Former head CIA law-
yer John Rizzo singles out Risen for con-
demnation in a memoir this year, writ-
ing that inside the agency he has had
a reputation for being irresponsible and
sneaky. State of War, which depicted the
agencys leadership as inept and danger-
ous, only stoked that antipathy.
Some high-ranking individuals have
been mainstays in the continuation of
policies that Risen exposed in his book.
John BrennanPresident Obamas for-
mer counterterrorism czar and now CIA directorhas
been at notable cross-purposes with both Risen and
Sterling for more than a decade. Brennan was a senior
CIA ofcial when the agency rolled out its torture pro-
gram under Bush, which came under intense public
scrutiny after the use of waterboarding was revealed in
a May 13, 2004, front-page Times story with Risen as
the lead reporter. And Brennan played a key role in the
illegal wiretap program, overseeing the production of
what personnel in the program called the scary mem-
os intended to justify the domestic spying exposed by
Risen (below), who
has been fighting
the governments
repeated attempts to
compel him to reveal
his sources, says,
I think Obama hates
the press.

I
realizedthis
was a story
that the public
had to know
about before
yet another
war was
launched.

New York Times

reporter James Risen
The Nation.
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Risen. (Brennan has since admitted that he relied on in-
telligence from the CIAs interrogation programs to de-
velop such memos, and his tenure in that role spanned
the period when the CIA used its most extreme torture.)
A
s for sterling, brennan played a role
in his unhappy departure from the CIA
a dozen years ago. In 2000, Sterling led
a discrimination complaint within the
agency, asserting that he had been denied
certain assignments because of his race. (Sterling was
one of the CIAs few African-American ofcers.) Bren-
nan, as deputy executive director, was involved in re-
jecting Sterlings claim. Sterling responded by suing the
CIA; he was red in 2002. The CIA rebuffed a number
of settlement offers and then won dismissal of the entire
lawsuit in 2004 after claiming that the litigation would
expose state secrets.
In early March 2003, Sterling met with two Senate
Intelligence Committee staffers to report that Opera-
tion Merlinthe CIAs ill-conceived and bungled effort
in 2000 to use a former Russian scientist to pass awed
nuclear-weapons blueprints to Iranmay have helped
Irans nuclear ambitions. The government concedes that
Sterling went through proper channels when he dis-
closed classied information to committee staff. (In
court documents, the prosecution has complained that
Sterling was unfairly critical of that operation when he
spoke to committee staffers.)
The New York Times was even more deferential to
government pressure on the Operation Merlin story
than it was with its fourteen-month delay of the war-
rantless wiretap scoop: it never published the Merlin
story, which nally reached the public via Risens book
after remaining bottled up at the paper of record for
more than two years. Later, in an afdavit responding to
his third subpoena, which was issued on May 23, 2011,
Risen said that he included the expos of Operation
Merlin in his book to help prevent another trumped-up
war: I realized that U.S. intelligence on Irans supposed
weapons of mass destruction was so awed, and that the
information I had was so important, that this was a story
that the public had to know about before yet another
war was launched.
Alarm bells had gone off as soon as the National Secu-
rity Council got a bootlegged copy of State of War before
its publication. Frantic skimming of the book alighted
on its nal chapter, devoted to the highly classied and
embarrassing story of Operation Merlin. On the last day
of 2005, ofcials at an emergency White House meeting
tried to gure out how to block distribution. As best
anyone could tell, the books were printed in bulk and
stacked somewhere in warehouses, Rizzos memoir re-
calls. We arrived at a rueful consensus: game over as far
as any realistic possibility to keep the book, and the clas-
sied information in it, from getting out.
The leak investigation of Sterling stretched over sev-
en years, from suspicion in 2003 to indictment in 2010.
The Justice Department has sought to justify the delay
by relying on a McCarthy-era extension of the statutes
of limitation associated with charges against him, and by
holding Sterling responsible for the publication of Ris-
ens book chapter rather than for the conversations the
two men allegedly had back in 2003.
The US government has been relentless in its pursuit
of Risen in the Sterling investigation. Along with serv-
ing three subpoenas on the reporter, the DOJ obtained
his credit reports, travel records, credit-card records and
bank records. One former ofcial was asked to sign a
document stating he was not a condential source for New
York Times reporter James Risen, ABC News reported in
May 2006. And the government appears to have obtained
Risens phone records without alerting him, as required by
DOJ guidelines. In an afdavit, Risen said that a witness
who testied to the grand jury investigating the domestic
wiretapping story had been shown copies of telephone
records relating to calls made to and from me.
In its 2011 Domestic Investigations and Operations
Guide, the FBI formally authorized the use of national-
security letters to obtain the call records of journalists
who are witnesses to a crime. (NSLs are secret orders that
the FBI can issue with no judicial review. Recipients are
prohibited from telling anyone theyve received such an
order.) The FBI has not publicly changed this policy de-
spite the attorney generals revised guidelines issued last
year and touted as protection for the press. The judge in
the Sterling case, Leonie Brinkema, even pointed out that
the government has never said whether prosecutors have
recordings of Sterlings conversations with Risen, indicat-
ing that she may suspect they do.
The way the Justice Department has constructed its
legal case against Risen reeks of retaliation. With the ra-
tionale of seeking to rule out people other than Sterling
as his sources, the government says it wants to make Ris-
en go through the books offending chapterstatement
by statementand identify his sources by alias, at least,
to indicate when he learned a certain fact. Such a process
could implicate other sources. Given the small universe
of people who knew about Operation Merlin (at least ac-
cording to the governments claims), such an extent of
detail would likely identify all of Risens sources, regard-
less of any role Sterling may have had.
John Brennan, now
CIA director, played
a key role in the
governments illegal
wiretap program.

All too
frequently
the
governments
real concern
is about
covering up its
own wrong-
doing.

New York Times

reporter James Risen
The Nation. 15 October 27, 2014
Meanwhile, the prosecution claims that Sterling lied
about the details of Operation Merlin in order to get the
Senate Intelligence Committee as well as Risen interested
in the story. According to a government brief in Sterlings
case, The grand jury specically found that the defen-
dant provided information to Risen in a false and mis-
leading manner specically as a means of inducing Risen
to write about it, thus severely undercutting any First
Amendment protection to be afforded that information.
(The government even claims that Sterling lied about be-
lieving that the Merlin scheme might help, rather than
hurt, Irans nuclear ambitions.) But according to Rizzos
memoir, the CIA came to very different
conclusions about the accuracy of Risens
reporting on Operation Merlin. The
memoir, which went through CIA review
and approval before publication, says the
CIAs chief of operations conrmed that
the details largely were all too distressing-
ly accurate and damaging to CIA sources
and methods. In its prosecution of Ster-
ling, the Justice Department is telling a
notably different tale.
Legal maneuvers and contradictions
aside, the government insists that such
strenuous prosecution efforts are all about safeguarding the
CIAs sources and methods to collect information and run
covert ops. But neither Risen nor Sterling had anything to
do with the serious damage to sources and methods in Iran
that the CIA actually suffered during the Bush years. Rath-
er than being caused by journalism or whistleblowing, that
damage was entirely self-inicted. In 2004, an ofcer at the
agencys headquarters in Virginia mistakenly sent data to
an agent that could be used to identify virtually every spy
the CIA had inside Iran, Risen reported in his book. The
mistake morphed into spook disaster when it turned out
that the supposed CIA agent on the receiving end was a
double agent. Wrote Risen: The agent quickly turned the
data over to Iranian security ofcials, and it enabled them
to roll up the CIAs agent network throughout Iran. But
CIA leaders have no interest in acknowledging their Iran-
related failures. Instead, theyve made vague assertions that
Sterling and Risen have caused harm. All too frequently,
Risen points out, the government claims that publication
of certain information will harm national security, when in
reality, the governments real concern is about covering up
its own wrongdoing or avoiding embarrassment.
T
he absurd pretense of merely wish-
ing to protect classied information
certainly didnt begin with the Obama
presidency. While publicly abhorring
leaks, every administration in memory has
leaked large quantities of classied information to serve
its own endsespecially to journalists with a reliable
record of propagating these authorized plants. But the
customary gap between pretense and reality has grown
into a canyon under Obama. While Risen is a high-
prole case, there are othersfor example, in 2013,
when Holders DOJ subpoenaed the phone records of
twenty phone lines affecting the work of 100 journal-
ists with the Associated Press to nd sources for a CIA-
related story by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldmanthus
uncovering a wide array of journalists sources under the
guise of pursuing the leaker(s) behind one story.
At the same time, the much-ballyhooed option for
whistleblowers of going through the proper channels
has often functioned as a trap, snaring them for later ret-
ribution that has included harassment, formal investiga-
tions, strong-arm raids on homes and felony prosecutions.
Several months ago, National Security Agency whis-
tleblower Edward Snowden cited the ordeals of two
high-ranking NSA executives, William
Binney and Thomas Drake, who became
whistleblowers within the system. Their
cases showed us that even if you reveal
classic waste, fraud and abuse, frivolous
spending, things like that, and you take it
to Congress, theres a very good chance
the FBI will kick in your door, pull you
out of the shower naked at gunpoint in
front of your family and ruin your life,
Snowden said. It was Binney, a high-level
NSA intelligence ofcial, who had a gun
pointed at him in the shower one day
in 2007. Drake, an NSA senior executive, was indicted
in 2010; he endured years of bogus investigations and
prosecution on Espionage Act charges before the case
against him collapsed. (For more on these cases, see Tim
Shorrock, Obamas Crackdown on Whistleblowers,
April 15, 2013.)
The CIA is no more hospitable to whistleblowersor
to reporters who turn their disclosures into scandals. A
decade ago, to the growing dismay of top CIA ofcials,
Risen made it clear that he was no garden-variety reporter.
His July 6, 2004, front-page Times story, headlined CIA
Held Back Iraqi Arms Data, was a stunning account of
agency mendacity. Before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq,
the CIA had recruited as informants about thirty relatives
of Iraqi scientistsand received strong indications that
Saddam Husseins government no longer had any pro-
grams for developing weapons of mass destruction. But
the CIA kept mum about those ndings, even as the Bush
White House continued to proclaim that invading Iraq
was necessary due to its purported WMDs.
Eighteen months after breaking that story in the
Times, Risen reported on it in more detail in State of War.
But the section of the book that caused panic from Lang-
ley to the White House Situation Room on the last day
of 2005 was the nal chapter, about the Merlin operation
against Iran, a country the Bush administration had in its
gunsights.
Now, almost fteen years after the CIA gave Iran
some obviously awed nuclear blueprints, Operation
Merlin seems a much more suitable topic for Freedom of
Information Act illumination than courtroom prosecu-
tion. Yet Jeffrey Sterling awaits trial on ten separate fel-
ony countsseven of them under the Espionage Act
for allegedly telling Risen about that CIA operation. If
convicted, Sterling could spend decades in prison. It is
Whistleblower
Jeffrey Sterling, who
could spend decades
in prison for exposing
what Risen calls one
of the most reckless
operations in the
modern history of
the CIA
In effect, top
government
officials seem
determined
to reach a
fundamentally
antidemocratic
goalthe
uninformed
consent of the
governed.
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a case that we intend to see through to the end, Holder
told a news conference in September.
F
or nearly four years, the Obama adminis-
tration has been on record with the broad
claim that whistleblowing to inform the
public is apt to be worse than spying to aid
a foreign power. In a January 2011 brief
against Sterling, the Justice Department declared that
his alleged disclosures may be viewed as more perni-
cious than the typical espionage case where a spy sells
classied information for money. That stance implicitly
views the people of the United States as a potential ene-
my force to be deprived of key information, and whistle-
blowers as hostile agents.
To date, the Obama administration has charged nine
people with violating the ninety-seven-year-old Es-
pionage Actfar more than all other administrations
combined. But those numbers tell only part of the story.
In recent years, many whistleblowers have endured Es-
pionage Act investigations and other coercive measures
short of actual prosecution. Such legal actions are part
of an approach that sees investigative journalism in the
national-security realm as a dire threat. The prosecution
of Sterling and the pursuit of Risen embody the recogni-
tion that truly independent reporting and whistleblow-
ing need each other. In effect, top government ofcials
seem determined to reach a fundamentally antidemo-
cratic goalthe uninformed consent of the governed.
Enough is enough, said three-time Pulitzer Prize
winner David Barstow in a recent statement. The re-
lentless and by all appearances vindictive effort by two
administrations to force Jim Risen into betraying his
sources has already done substantial and lasting damage
to journalism in the United States.
Barstow, a longtime New York Times reporter, added:
Ive felt the chill rsthand. Trusted sources in Wash-
ington are scared to talk by telephone, or by email, or
even to meet for coffee, regardless of whether the subject
touches on national security or not. My fellow investi-
gative reporters commiserate about how were being
forced to act like drug dealers, taking extreme precau-
tions to avoid leaving any digital bread crumbs about
where weve been and who weve met.
At The Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize winner Dana
Priest was no less vehement. If the U.S. government
were so concerned about the information revealed in Jim
Risens stunning chapter on a now 14-year-old CIA op-
eration against Iran gone wrong, it would have moved
quickly to resolve this matter eight years ago when it was
rst published, she wrote. Instead, it seems obvious
now that what ofcials really want is to hold a hammer
over the head of a deeply sourced reporter, and others
like him who try to hold the government accountable for
what it does, even in secret.
This past May, Eric Holder made a statement that has
been often cited since: As long as Im attorney general,
no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail.
Now that Holder has resigned, the phrase as long as Im
attorney general has an ominous ring. But in the long
run, the more pivotal concern for the First Amendment
hinges on what doing his job is understood to mean.
For the men and women who work with integrity as jour-
nalists, the job must include protecting rather than be-
traying condential sources. Yet the ofcial position of
the Obama administration insists on such betrayal. In a
brief to the Supreme Court in April, the Justice Depart-
ment argued that the government should enforce what it
called the longstanding common-law rule that reporters
have no privilege to refuse to provide direct evidence of
criminal wrongdoing by condential sources.
The Justice Department was quick to present itself as
a supporter of the journalists arrested in Ferguson, Mis-
souri, in mid-August. Its public-affairs director tweeted:
DOJ is lucky to have a gutsy reporter like @Ryanjreilly
on our beat. But CNNs Jake Tapper retorted: how do
you distinguish between the gutsy reporters and the one
the administration is threatening to put in jail?
T
he legal assault on risen and the
prosecution of Sterling are integral to the
escalating siege that targets core values of
investigative reporting and public-service
whistleblowingeven as Obama contin-
ues to tout what he calls the most transparent adminis-
tration in history. An atmosphere of fear inside govern-
ment has intensied. Too little media attention has gone
to scrutinizing the insidious program known as Insider
Threat, which pressures federal workers to monitor and
report fellow employees suspected of ideological or attitu-
dinal deviance. More recently, Director of National Intel-
ligence James Clapper ordered that government employ-
ees in a wide range of intelligence-related agencies must
get permission before sharing any nonclassied informa-
tion with journalists. Clapper called for clearance hold-
ers to be continually monitored, an order that Senators
Charles Grassley and Ron Wyden worry carries particular
hazards for whistleblowers.
The administrations xation on information control
hardly stops with the intelligence agencies. Day-to-
day intimidation of sources is chilling, said Sally Buz-
bee, Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press.
According to Buzbee, the AP transportation reporters
sources say that if theyre caught talking to her, they
will be red. Even if they just give her factsabout safe-
ty, for example. Government press ofcials say their or-
ders are to squelch anything controversial or that makes
the administration look bad.
Recognizing whats at stake for press freedom, some
in the media establishment have decided to speak up for
Risen. In August, a petition backing himwith 100,000
signers and support from press-freedom groups and oth-
er organizations, including The Nationwas presented
to the Justice Department. The petition points out that
journalism without condential sources would be merely
a conduit for ofcial storiesa situation antithetical to
the First Amendment.
But Sterlingwhose situation is far more precari-
oushas received almost no public support. That should
change. At the very least, Sterling chose an admirable but

Trusted
sources in
Washington
are scared
to talk by
telephone, or
by email, or
even to meet
for coffee.

New York Times

reporter David Barstow
Norman Solomon
and Marcy
Wheeler are
journalists with
ExposeFacts
.org, a project of
the Institute for
Public Accuracy.
Solomon is the
author of War
Made Easy and
a co-founder of
RootsAction.org,
which has orga-
nized in support
of James Risen.
Wheeler blogs at
emptywheel.net
and writes widely
about the legal
aspects of the
war on terror
and its effects on
civil liberties.
YEARS OF INSTIGATING PROGRESS
IN HONOR OF OUR UPCOMING 150
TH
ANNIVERSARY,
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The Nation. 18 October 27, 2014
hazardous path by going through channels to inform Sen-
ate Intelligence Committee staff about Operation Merlin.
When announcing his indictment in January 2011, the
Justice Department denounced Sterling for his under-
lying selsh and vindictive motivationsan accusation
widely reported by news outlets across the country. Not
surprisingly, he has had difculty nding gainful employ-
ment as the pretrial legal maneuvers drag on.

I
n the end, whether risen goes to jail
for contempt or not, the last seven years of
his battling subpoenas are well-designed to
intimidate other investigative reporters,
Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel
Ellsberg told The Nation. Likewise, Sterlings ordeal
comes from a strategy to frighten potential whistleblow-
ers, whether he was the source of this leak or not. The
aim is to punish troublemakers with harassment, threats,
indictments, years in court and likely prisoneven if
theyve only gone through ofcial channels to register
accusations about their superiors and agency. That is, by
the way, a practical warning to would-be whistleblowers
who would prefer to follow the rules. But in any case,
whoever were the actual sources to the press of infor-
mation about criminal violations of the Fourth Amend-
ment, in the NSA case, or of reckless incompetence, in
the CIA case, they did a great public service.
Such public service is the kind of good deed that rarely
goes unpunished. Attorney Jesselyn Radack, who directs
the program on national security and human rights at the
Government Accountability Project, described the grim
terrain that confronts whistleblowers, especially the ones
charged under the Espionage Act: When journalists
become targets, they have a community and a lobby of
powerful advocates to go to for support. Whistleblowers
are in the wilderness. Theyre indicted under the most
serious charge you can level against an American: being
an enemy of the state.
The case against Sterling has inched toward trial.
In June, the Supreme Court let stand a Fourth Circuit
decision that no journalists privilege exists covering the
condentiality of sources, a decision avidly sought by the
Justice Department. The government successfully ap-
pealed an order by Judge Brinkema throwing out two
of its witnesses. A pretrial conference is expected later
this fall, and unless theres a plea dealwhich appears
increasingly unlikelythe Sterling case will be headed
to trial by spring. Risen remains resolute that he will not
betray a source; its anyones guess whether that will re-
sult in his imprisonment.
If the governments indictment is accurate in its claim
that Sterling divulged classied information, then he
took a great risk to inform the public about an action
that, in Risens words, may have been one of the most
reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA. If
the indictment is false, then Sterling is guilty of nothing
more than charging the agency with racial bias and go-
ing through channels to inform the Senate Intelligence
Committee of extremely dangerous CIA actions. Either
way, Jeffrey Sterling is now facing dire consequences as a
whistleblower in the Obama era. n
W
hen darren wilson, a white police
ofcer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot
and killed Michael Brown on Au-
gust 9, King D. Seals, age 27, was at
the crime scene within the hour. He
lives just a few blocks away from Caneld Green, the
predominantly black apartment complex where the un-
armed teenager was shot. He saw Browns body, which
would lie on the street for an additional three hours. It
wasnt even a protest yet, Seals said about the gather-
ing when he rst arrived. It was a black boy being shot
in the community. It was about ten other women and
men out there, and the family. The next day, members
of the community passed around a large plastic bag for
donations to Browns family. Seals put in $100; others
donated $50, $20, whatever they could. By the end of the
day, the bag was lled with money. Before it became a
riot, before it became a protest, it was just the commu-
nity coming together, Seals said.
On the second night, there was a protest on West
Florissant Avenue, and the St. Louis County police met
it with armored vehicles, M-4 ries and riot gear. Of- J
E
F
F

R
O
B
E
R
S
O
N

/

A
P
by STEVEN HSIEH AND RAVEN RAKIA
The protests that followed the police shooting of Michael Brown created a network of youth in revolt.
AFTER #FERGUSON
The Nation. 19 October 27, 2014
cer Wilson remained unidentied and unarraigned,
even as protesters called for his arrest. During the rst
week, a few demonstrators resorted to property damage
to air their grievances. Seals remained on the front lines
through the height of the police crackdownand not for
the rst time. Last year, he protested when Cary Ball Jr.
was fatally shot twenty-one times by police ofcers in
St. Louis City. He is still in contact with Balls mother.
Recalling the differences between last years demonstra-
tions and this years, Seals said that the protests in the
wake of Browns death were more effective. After Ball
was killed, we did everything positive; we did every-
thing peacefulI feel like [the Ball protest] is a prime
example that when you do things quote-unquote the
right way, you dont get any results. The internal police
investigation later declared the shooting of Ball justied.
The outcome of last years protests left Seals distrust-
ful of community leaders like Antonio French, a Ferguson
alderman, and the clergy in St. Louis, who have urged
a voter-registration campaign in the wake of the recent
protests. After watching politician after politician come
and go without any improvement in the communities hes
grown up in, Seals is skeptical that voting will solve the
many problems plaguing the area, especially the poverty
and systemic racismproblems he knows all too well
from mentoring local kids, the same people out there
ghting and putting their lives on the line every day [at
the protests]. The same kids that are written off as thugs
and criminals and nothing.
Since the protests began, a few people have started
to call him and several friends the Ferguson Freedom
Fighters. Moving forward, Seals hopes to improve eco-
nomic security for the black community in Ferguson. Al-
though the citys resident population is about 67 percent
black, the majority of businesses there (55 percent) are
white-owned. Seals plans to create a T-shirt print shop
that would provide local black youth with jobs. We
dont need leadership; we need ownership, he said. We
need black-owned businesses in the black community.
We need a whole different system; we dont need a dif-
ferent person in the [existing] system.
Seals recalls getting harassed by police ever since he
was old enough to leave the house alone. Its like South
Africa apartheid out here, he said. Why [are] all these
white people controlling these black communities?
T
he ferguson freedom fighters were
not the only ad hoc group to form in the
crucible of the Michael Brown protests.
Marching for justice during the day, and
running through clouds of tear gas by
night, young protesters bonded and shared ideas. Cliques
formed, occasionally along the lines of common interest
or social class, but more often by happenstance: the Lost
Voices, the Millennial Activists United and Hands Up
United. When the protests slowed, these groups stayed
in touch. They held strategy meetings in churches and
schools, attended training sessions by national organiza-
tions, made T-shirts and solicited donations. They have
shifted the political culture in the city, and their goals, as
they develop, will be crucial to its future.
This new generation of protesters represents a marked
break with the older generations of black leaders in the
city. They disagreed with the tactics of the civic leaders
and clergy members who, for example, urged protesters to
obey police curfews widely viewed by the young people as
disrespectful of the communitys legitimate outrage. Most
of these older leaders already had a stake in the political
process in St. Louis through nonprots or as politicians.
National gures like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were
treated with similar skepticism. Jackson was booed at a
rally when he asked for donations. Resisting co-optation,
the majority of St. Louiss young protesters took matters
into their own hands. As Dr. Reynaldo Anderson, assistant
professor of the humanities at Harris-Stowe State Univer-
sity, told The Nation, the protesters are not interested in
hearing what the establishment has to say. But that doesnt
mean theyre going to go off in the other direction and lis-
ten to what the old-line...black nationalists have to say ei-
ther. I suspect theyll come up with someone quite unique,
[someone] that is empowering to them in their community
but still has the ability to cooperate with people who are
not members of the community.
The protests that followed the police shooting of Michael Brown created a network of youth in revolt.
AFTER #FERGUSON
Steven Hsieh is a
freelance writer
from St. Louis.
Raven Rakia
is a freelance
journalist focused
on policing and
prisons and based
in New York City.
The Nation. 20 October 27, 2014
The young activists have not, however, ruled out help
from outside groups offering training and expertise. Ac-
tivist icons like Harry Belafonte and Cornel West held a
number of calls with them, offering counsel and encour-
agement. Whats happening in Ferguson right now is
young black folks deciding they have the ability within
them and the power within them to change the condi-
tions in which they live, said Charlene Carruthers, na-
tional coordinator of the Black Youth Project 100, who
traveled to Ferguson to teach St. Louiss newly activated
youth how to organize and win campaigns. Much as the
killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 galvanized national
organizations like BYP100 and the Dream Defenders,
Browns death awakened many of St. Louiss youth. In
Ferguson, were going to continue to do that work in
helping them build capacity specically among young
black people, Carruthers said. So making sure they
have the training and also the critical analysis, [thats]
how we put those things together and turn [them] into
transformation in our communities.

O
ur work is in the beginning stages
of going national, said Ferguson ac-
tivist Taurean Russell. People are see-
ing we have political power, and you
also have power of the people. People
are willing to put their bodies on the line. Russell works
with Hands Up United, a new coalition that includes the
Organization for Black Struggle and Missourians Orga-
nizing for Reform and Empowerment, two long-
standing groups dedicated to combating injustice
and inequality.
I had never protested, marched or anything
like that before, Russell recalled. Then I saw that
body lying out there for four hours and said, That
could have been me. He remembered turning
off his TV and driving down to the scene of the
shooting that afternoon, where a crowd had al-
ready gathered. Russell tweeted out a call to action
and joined a group of eight other rst responders.
They marched to the Ferguson Police Department to
get answers.
Two weeks after the shooting, Russell, along with local
rapper Tef Poe and activist Jeffery Hill Jr., held a press
conference to unveil a list of demands. Seated before the
gathered members of the local and national media, they
called for the immediate arrest of Ofcer Wilson, the re-
moval of St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch
from the case, a federal civil-rights investigation of north
St. Louis Countys police departments, and the ring of
Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson. This was the
rst time the trio spoke under the banner of Hands Up
United, which has become one of the more visible forces
in the ongoing search for justice in Ferguson. Russell and
his colleagues are still leading efforts to register voters,
train activists and organize further actions.
Hands Up United was joined in the protests by Mil-
lennial Activists United, a group made up of nine students
and recent grads who were initially more focused on doc-
umenting the events. MAUs membersve women and
four menmet through Twitter during the early days of
the protests on West Florissant Avenue. They quickly de-
veloped a tight-knit community, sustained by their addic-
tion to social media. Together, they live-tweeted, Vined
and Instagrammed every protest, through the sweltering
days and tumultuous nights, as well as the direct actions
taking place elsewhere in the St. Louis area. Their fol-
lower counts skyrocketed.
In the beginning, the members of MAU played a
mostly supporting role in the protests, while producing
a steady stream of tweets. Theyd offer rides to people
who wanted to attend the protests but didnt have the
means. Theyd take part in direct actions called by exist-
ing grassroots organizations. During one of these ral-
lies, a demonstration outside the building that houses
Governor Jay Nixons St. Louis ofce, 28-year-old
Larry Fellowsone of the nine members of what would
become Millennial Activists Unitedwas arrested and
charged with failure to disperse. After this, the group
became a cornerstone of the Ferguson protests.
There was just one problem. People kept asking
us who we were with: What organization do you work
for? Fellows recalled. We couldnt answer them. That
was how all that came about. We didnt really have a
name until September.
These days, MAU has decided to put its efforts
toward political education. There needs to be some-
thing in place where people that want to run for ofce
in their own communities can be well prepared and well
equipped to do so, said Brittany Ferrell, a 25-year-
old student and Millennial Activist. If they un-
derstood the power in that, they could cause a
shift in a major way. The rst step was to hold
weekly Twitter discussions under the hashtag
#FergusonFriday, which continue to this day.
Johnetta Elzie, another 25-year-old student
and MAU member, traces the groups role to a
larger national movement to defend the lives of
young black men. We saw it with Trayvon Mar-
tin. We saw it with Jordan Davisbut I always felt
away from everything. Then I saw Browns body
laying out there, and I said, Damn, they did it again!
But now that it happened in my home, Im not just going
to tweet about it from the comfort of my bed. So I went
down there. You could still see the bloodstains deeply
and darkly in the streets after they moved his body.
N
ot all of the young activists have
rejected the older generations call for a
focus on voter registration in Fergusons
black community. Jazminique Holley was
just 8 when her godfather, a 26-year-old
black man, was shot and killed by the St. Louis Police.
He was unarmed. I remember we were marching,
she recalls. We chanted No justice, no peace! in Pine
Lawn, but we never got justice.
Years later, Holley, now 24 and in her last year at
Harris-Stowe State University, nds herself organizing
around the killing of Michael Brown. The president of
the universitys NAACP chapter, Holley led a canned-
good food drop-off in Caneld Green and organized
cleanup crews during the day. Although she would of-
A Lost Voices activist
leads a march in
Ferguson. The
acronym on the
protesters T-shirts
stands for Get It By
Any Means.

Our work
is in the
beginning
stages of going
national.

Taurean Russell,
Ferguson activist
R
A
V
E
N

R
A
K
I
A
The Nation. 21 October 27, 2014
ten leave before the heavy police presence at night, she didnt dis-
tance herself from some of the other nightly protesters. I think
we all want the same thing, which is for justice to be served. I
think we are all going about it differently, she said. Theyre
hurting. [Some] are just expressing themselves in a more aggres-
sive waybut I cant say the way they expressed themselves was
the wrong way.
On August 17, she organized a panel discussion at Harris-
Stowe titled Truth Has No Color. The guests included Jesse
Jackson and retired judge Greg Mathis, along with several young
or student organizers who had been active in Ferguson. She hopes
to do another panel focused on healing. We need to heal those
wounds rst, she told The Nation. As for long-term solutions,
Holley believes that voter registration and education will prove to
be an effective strategy. We need to vote in elected ofcials who
like or respect us African-Americansand in some cases, we need
people who look like us, she said. You cant respect people who
dont understand your struggle.
A
long with refocusing the national spotlight
on Americas race problem, the Ferguson protest-
ers can already claim at least two other victories.
On September 4, the Justice Department launched
a probe of the Ferguson Police Department to de-
termine whether its ofcers engaged in a pattern of civil-rights
violationsa mere rung below Hands Up Uniteds demand for
a countywide investigation. Four days later, the Ferguson City
Council announced a set of proposals in response to the protests,
including a reduction of the municipalitys crippling ticket fees,
which had come under intense national scrutiny, and the establish-
ment of a civilian review board to monitor police activities. Still,
even with this progress, dont expect Ferguson to fade away any-
time soon. More than 3,000 residents have registered to vote in
the next election.
As the national media turned their attention elsewhere, a group
of young activists calling themselves the Lost Voices rose to prom-
inence. Its members, ages 15 to 26, staked out a campsite behind
a barbecue joint at the corner of Caneld and West Florissant,
where they slept for weeks. Community members and fellow ac-
tivists, inspired by their dedication, donated tents, food and other
essentials, as well as a basketball hoop. The ten activists took to the
streets every night at 7 pm to march and chant, encouraging others
to join. If people riding on the street see us every day, its going to
make a difference, said Cheyenne Green, a 21-year-old resident
of neighboring Dellwood. It didnt take long for others to rally
behind the Lost Voices enthusiasm.
When the police dismantled the activists campsite, forcefully
arresting two in the process, outrage ensued. Hands Up United
posted a video of the raid on its website. Members of MAU tweet-
ed their support. Although the many emergent activist groups in
Ferguson vary in their tactics, it is clear that they see themselves
ghting for a common cause.
Two months after Michael Browns death, theyre still ghting.
Protests at the Ferguson Police Departments headquarters happen
regularly. Activists arent afraid to be arrested, blocking roads and
disobeying commands to disperse to bring attention to their move-
ment. The grand jury hearing evidence on Ofcer Wilsons role in
the shooting is due to make its decision soon, and rumors swirl that
those seeking justice for Brown will not be happy with the result.
What happens next will be shaped by Fergusons newest, youngest
and fastest-growing political force. n
The Nation on
WATERGATE
19522010
Foreword by
Elizabeth
Holtzman
Edited by
Richard
Kreitner
SMOKING GUN
Available NOW!
Go to
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The Nation. 22 October 27, 2014

T
he allegheny river pulses through
the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, like a
muscle. Along its waters traveled the steel
that became the backbone to our railroads
and skyscrapers, and the coal that red up
the factories fueling Americas twentieth-century in-
dustrial might.
In the 1980s and early 90s, however, the steel started
leaving. Today, some two decades after the ight of the
last mill, the Allegheny has been transformed into a new
kind of symbolone of the modern green city. The
river has been cleansed of many of the most toxic sub-
stances that formerly poured from those factories; now its
meandering ow is featured in municipal sites against a
glittering downtown skyline that hosts one of the high-
est concentrations of green buildings in the United States.
From green skyscrapers to a new greenwalk that
snakes along the river, Pittsburgh has been attacking its
polluting gases as if its survival depends on itand it does.
The city and surrounding communities once produced a
signicant portion of the steel in the United States. After
the industry bottomed out, a coalition of businesspeople,
city planners and environmental engineers staked out a
development plan that positioned Pittsburgh as a hub of
innovation in ecologically oriented design.
Today, the skyscraper windows are angled to maxi-
mize natural light, heat is piped in from thermal pools
deep underground, and solar panels line the roofs far
above the bustling sidewalks. The city has a full-time
sustainability manager charged with shifting its energy
sources away from fossil fuels by means of mass tran-
sit, urban planning, and municipal procurement poli-
by MARK SCHAPIRO
How Pittsburghs pollution became Guangzhous
problemand Manchester found a solution
Mark Schapiro
is a longtime
journalist. This
article is adapted
from his recently
published book,
Carbon Shock: A
Tale of Risk and
Calculus From
the Front Lines
of the Disrupted
Global Economy
(Chelsea Green).
A TALE OF THREE CITIES
Smog strangles the
sky over Guangzhou.
A
L
V
I
N

C
H
A
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R
E
U
T
E
R
S
cies that place a value on low-carbon alternatives. The
citys water-treatment system is considered a model even
for other eco-conscious cities like San Francisco. Major
property developers agreed to halve their 2003 carbon
footprints by 2050; the city now has the highest concen-
tration of LEED-certied buildings in the country.
The citys transformation has been so complete that
the G-20the body representing developed countries,
many of which have experienced similar declines in man-
ufacturingheld its yearly conference there in 2009 and
highlighted the citys green strategy as a model for the
postindustrial way forward. Pittsburgh is now one of the
greenest of the midsize cities in Americaa designation
that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.
Back then, in the 50s and into the 80s, no one was
thinking about climate change, and no one was ask-
ing about emissions of carbon dioxide, says Aurora
Sharrard, who served as the director of innovation for the
Pittsburgh Climate Initiative, a collaboration among the
business, municipal and scientic communities to devise
emission-reduction strategies. From 1900 to 1970, the
area experienced a steady annual increase in its indus-
trial greenhouse-gas emissions, from 14 million tons to
more than 30 million tons. But as industries ed the area,
greenhouse-gas emissions dropped sharplydeclining
by at least 40 percent throughout the area from 1970 to
2000and have continued on a downward trajectory.
By 2008, Pittsburghs emissions had declined to about
6.8 million tons. By 2013, the city was on the way toward
its goal of reducing emissions 20 percent from 2003 lev-
els, and it aims for progressively steeper declines over the
decades to follow. In a country that is reliant on local im-
provisation to tackle the problem, with few legal guide-
lines from the federal government, Pittsburgh is consid-
ered among the leading urban climate innovators. It lost
its manufacturing base and refashioned itself as a city far
more reliant on brains than brawn.
But whatever happened to all those greenhouse gases
that once came spewing from Pittsburgh?
They did not disappear.
W
elcome to guangzhou, a city of
over 15 million on Chinas southeast
coast. The freighters that come into the
port here, and the two other ports ser-
vicing Guangdong province, are loaded
with a container approximately every secondall carrying
goods made in China to the United States, Europe and
elsewhere around the world. Industrial clusters through-
out the province are home to more than 1,000 steel manu-
facturing and trading companies. They produce skyscrap-
er girders, auto parts, appliances, ships, refrigerators and
even American bridgessteel products that were once
made in Pittsburgh and other Midwestern cities during
Americas century of industrial dominance.
Guangdong is also, in the United Nations estimation,
one of the top ten carbon-emitting provinces in a country
that is itself the leading emitter. Some 8,000 miles from
Pittsburgh, the CO
2
that used to come from that city now
fumes into the atmosphere from Guangzhou. It wasnt
just Pittsburghs manufacturing jobs that migrated to Chi-
na; the greenhouse gases associated with them went, too.
Today, the residents of this churning industrial center
of China have a per capita annual footprint of 7.8 tons
quite a bit more than the average Pittsburgher. But
theres a story hidden in those numbers. Only 6 percent
of Pittsburghs emissions, according to that citys Cli-
mate Inventory, come from industrial sources. Yet emis-
sions produced by the Chinese industrial sector account
for 56 percent of the totalalmost ten times higher, as a
percentage, than those of Pittsburgh.
The huge discrepancy between the industrial emis-
sions of Pittsburgh and those of Guangzhou, which
started trading places in the 1980s, suggests that what has
changed signicantly is not so much the lifestyle choices
of the people of Pittsburgh, but rather the regions entire
economic support system, based as it was on greenhouse-
gas-intensive manufacturing.
In turn, what the Chinese numbers tell us is that legions
of urban residents there have a far smaller personal foot-
print as a percentage of the overall total than do their Pitts-
burgh counterparts. As Chinese consumption grows, that
footprint will growbut at this stage and for some time to
come, it is production, not consumption, that accounts for
the overwhelming bulk of Chinese emissions. Indeed, as
much as 60 percent of Chinas exports are manufactured by
China-based afliates of multinational corporations, many
of them American and European. The Chinese, in short,
are producing greenhouse gases on our behalf.
China was responsible for about 10 percent of the
worlds greenhouse-gas emissions in 1990; by 2013, its
global contribution was more like 30 percent. But green-
house gases end up in the same atmosphere wherever they
are generated. Does it matter where they come from? On
one level, it does not. But on another, more fundamental
levelthe level at which we decide who is responsible for
reducing those emissionsit matters quite signicantly.
Climate scientists say that to avoid a potentially cata-
strophic rise of 4C by 2050, each of us should ideally
be emitting no more than two tons of greenhouse gases
annually. Consider this nding from the Carnegie In-
stitution for Science at Stanford University: Americans
per capita footprint would jump by 2.4 tons annually if
their consumptionmostly of goods made in China
is taken into account.
Globalization has ipped the calculus on the central
question of who is accountable for greenhouse-gas emis-
sions. Richard Feldon headed up a team working with the
International Council for Local Environmental Initia-
tives to devise a set of 2012 protocols for American cities
seeking to limit their emissions. He told me that includ-
ing consumption in their calculations was one of the most
controversial issues they faced. Thats because it blurs the
line between our contribution as consumers and industrys
contribution as producers, and gives a new way to under-
stand our greenest of green cities.
Lets say Pittsburgh still had its industrial base, and
that steel from Pittsburgh was being used in a city like
San Francisco, Feldon explained. Well, it would be
unfair to say that San Francisco, under that scenario,
is a greener city than Pittsburgh. The same equation,
he said, applies to Pittsburgh and Guangzhouor the
Pittsburgh is
now one of
the greenest
midsize cities
in America
a designation
that would
have been
unthinkable
even a
decade ago.
C I T I E S RI S I N G
United States and Europe, jointly the worlds biggest
consumers, and China, its biggest producer. This also
means that when you do the numbers, the United States
trades places with China to become the worlds worst
emitter of greenhouse gases.
Most of us are urban dwellers70 percent of the
worlds population will be by 2020so reducing those
emissions, city by city, is one of the fundamental chal-
lenges the world faces in devising a new energy system
that keeps greenhouse gases to at least livable levels.
Just because emissions arent happening in our backyard
doesnt mean that theyre not oursa reality that at least
one of the worlds cities is facing head-on.
W
elcome to manchester, birthplace
of the Industrial Revolution. This city
in the northwest of England was at the
center of Britains industrial rise and
has experienced a trajectory similar to
Pittsburghs ever since. Like Pittsburgh, Manchester has
dropped from being one of Britains leading greenhouse-
gas emitters to a center for high-tech innovation, and it
is now host to a cluster of leading universities conducting
cutting-edge research into renewable energy.
The legacies of both cities are deeply interwoven
with the evolution of greenhouse gases and their con-
tribution to climate change. Pittsburgh was the center
of American steel; Manchester, for its part, was home to
the worlds rst steam-driven factory, which of course
was reliant on coal. In the eighteenth century, that coal-
red energy was put into the service of processing the
vast amounts of cotton that Britain was
obtaining from its colonies in Asia and
North Africa. Indeed, one can see Man-
chester as having assumed the industrial
greenhouse-gas contribution on behalf of
the British colonies, which were expected
only to send raw materials to the mother
country for processing and manufacture.
By 1850, Manchester was widely consid-
ered a model of the modern industrial
city. From this foul drain, wrote Alexis
de Tocqueville of his visit to the city, the
greatest form of human industry ows out to fertilize the
whole world. From this lthy sewer pure gold ows.
As with other imperial cycles, Manchesters dominion
came home to roost. The textile companies disappeared
many of them relocated to India and Chinaand by the
1990s, the city had skyrocketing unemployment. Practi-
cally an entire generation of workers in Manchester was
compelled either to leave the city or live on the dole.
Their greenhouse gases went with them.
Then, in 1996, in the center of downtown Manches-
ter, the Irish Republican Army set off one of the most
powerful bombs in the history of its conict with Britain.
More than 200 people were injured, and the neighbor-
hood around the City Hall devastated. And it was then,
according to Sarah Davies, the person in charge of en-
vironment strategies for the Greater Manchester Com-
bined Authority, that the city was compelled to decide
how it wanted to rebuild itself.
Davies told me there was a shift in the mindset of the
citys traumatized leaders, who met as the world prepared
for negotiations over what would become the Kyoto Pro-
tocol. Manchester would return to its role as a center for
technological innovation, but this time that innovation
would serve the emerging vision of a new low-carbon
economy. Theres the sense, Davies added, that we cre-
ated the energy-hungry economy, and now we have some
responsibility for nding our way out of it.
P
ittsburghs and manchesters industrial
histories may be similar, but the way that the
two cities deal with their greenhouse-gas ac-
counting is not. The divergence can be seen
in their ofcial climate strategies. According
to the Pittsburgh Climate Initiative, Emissions resulting
from many personal and business-related activities and
decisions that might be evaluated in an individual, carbon-
footprint-style inventory are excluded from a city-level
GHG inventory approach. In other words, the city isnt
counting the carbon embodied in the goods and services
its residents consume or generated by their travel.
By contrast, the plan published by the Manchester
City Council calls for counting and reducing emissions
produced by city residents wherever those emissions take
place. This includes the energy needed in the growth
and transport of food; the extraction and processing of oil
used by automobiles and factories; the emissions gener-
ated through the manufacture of electrical devices; and
estimates of aviation emissions by residents ying out of
town. Taking these consumption-based emissions into
consideration adds roughly 30 percent to
each citizens carbon contribution to the
atmospherefor a total of some 15.7 tons
per person, according to a 2011 estimate.
The Greater Manchester Combined
Authority, representing some 3 million
people in the city and surrounding com-
munities, launched an initiative to reduce
the citys footprint not only at home, but
also along the global supply chain. Its
room to maneuver is limited, of course,
but its procurement policies now favor
imported goods with lower greenhouse-gas impacts
than their competitors, and the city has embarked on
an effort to educate employers and homeowners on pre-
cisely why purchasing goods closer to home, and reduc-
ing energy use, is good for the citys economy as well as
for the planet.
Davies, whose ofce sponsors the Carbon Literacy
Project, identied a central principle of that effortpro-
viding a motive beyond some vague sense of well-being.
You have to ask, What is it that people want? They
want to earn more, pay less, have a decent quality of life
thats what people aspire to. So carbon literacy must be
put through these channels. They need to see prosperity
as green. Manchester is trying to make saving carbon
desirable: the citys long-term goal is to reduce emissions
by 41 percent from 2005 levelsa goal that Davies ar-
gues makes economic and environmental sense. Having
this target makes us more attractive to investors, she
Blue skies over
Pittsburgh, a green
oasis that was once
described as hell
with the lid off
It wasnt just
Pittsburghs
manufacturing
jobs that
migrated to
China; the
greenhouse
gases
associated
with them
went, too.
C I T I E S RI S I N G
G
E
N
E

J
.

P
U
S
K
A
R

/

A
P
The Nation. 25 October 27, 2014
explains. Siemens has established a green-technology center in
Manchester, as have many other European and Japanese rms; and
textile companies are being lured back to the city from India and
China, attracted by the new fuel-efcient ink-and-dye technolo-
gies developed with the assistance of city subsidies to the univer-
sity. This provides a double bonus: creating jobs and seriously
decreasing the money spent on greenhouse-gas-intensive trans-
portation. Between 2007 and 12, the city created 37,000 new jobs
in its evolving green economy, representing $7.5 billion passing
through Manchester that otherwise would have gone elsewhere.
The Greater Manchester economy grew 4 percent in 2012, fed
largely by the infusion of green investments, Davies says, at a time
when growth in the rest of the United Kingdom was at.
In this way, consumption-based greenhouse-gas accounting
prompts a fundamental change in our understanding of global-
ization. You cannot decouple production from consumption,
says Cindy Isenhour, an associate professor at the University of
Maine, who has conducted extensive research on a variety of en-
vironmental issues. Yet far too many governments insist on doing
just that: the Center for International Climate and Environmen-
tal Research in Oslo concluded that virtually every developed
country on the planetincluding the United Stateshas under-
estimated its emissions by about 25 percent by failing to include
increased consumption.
Were talking about changing habits and lifestyles, says
Alice Bows, a researcher at the University of Manchesters
Sustainable Consumption Institute. People think they have a
choice. But choice is always constrainedlimited by circum-
stances, nancial and other realities. So we need to alter the con-
cept, the circle of possibilities, included in choice.
And so this tale of three cities brings us back to the most dis-
comting realization of all. If you follow the many circuits of
production, or the trail of greenhouse gases rising into the at-
mosphere, you will ultimately alight upon each of us, making our
own individual choices about what to consume and from where.
Thus, at what stage we actat the point of production, or the
point of consumptionwill be a matter of how directly we face
our contributions to climate change.
The outsourcing of emissions presents a challenge akin to the
outsourcing of gruesome labor conditions. Pittsburgh and Man-
chester are signatories to a commitment that includes more than
300 cities around the world, all of which have agreed to seriously
reduce their greenhouse-gas contributions. Both Pittsburgh and
Manchester are largely unheralded leaders among the worlds
cities in facing up to the challenges of climate change. Manches-
ter, however, is at the forefront in attempting to account accu-
rately for its outsourced emissionsa forward-looking approach
to what is bound to become an increasingly volatile question as
individual jurisdictions (cities, states, regions and whole nations)
are left to improvise in the absence of a global climate accord.
Of course, local and national governments are limited in the
inuence they can have over the production practices in other
countries. The means of regulating greenhouse gases, to the
extent that theyre regulated at all, remain entrenched in tradi-
tional ideas of national sovereignty and jurisdiction. But just as
climate change is altering the fundamental conditions here on
earth, it is also altering our sense of the limits to those traditional
notions. Manchesters approach suggests a way for cities to wres-
tle with their emissions while addressing underlying inequities in
the ght to stave off climate disaster. n
and
w w w. u p g n a t i o n . c o m
Read your morning headlines
alongside Calvin Trillin!
The Nations new mug
features his poem
The Best Thing
You Can Be Is CEO.
Front
Back
The Nation. 26 October 27, 2014
blaming society or capital-
ism is unsatisfying.
Too many leftists, like cre-
ationists, dismiss Darwinism
on ideological, not empirical,
grounds. The authors of this
article cite no scientific data to
refute the EP assertions they
mock. Instead, they resort to
misrepresentation and guilt by
associationSocial Darwinism,
Nazism, etc. Interested people
might read works by evolution-
ists themselves, such as David
Busss Evolution of Desire.
EP uses data from neurosci-
ence, animal behavior, archaeol-
ogy, genetics, endocrinology and
anthropology. Like any other
science, EP self-critically tests
hypotheses, rejects some, and
progressively refines its claims.
The field harbors no political
agenda beyond pursuing a better
understanding of human nature.
Glenn Weisfeld
detroit
The main insight that EP
should bring us is that we are
animals. The fact that we have
moral lives and can discuss
concepts such as evil or justice
is unique in the animal king-
dom. But it, like everything
else about us, is evolved be-
havior. Our ability for cultural
transmission is itself genetically
determined. Instead of won-
dering whether current re-
search offers people excuses
for their behavior, marvel that
youre even capable of consid-
ering the question. Paul Dirks
A proper view of human na-
ture with respect to evolution
should establish a kind of na-
ture-and-nurture hierarchy
basically, a serenity prayer for
the modern human: God (or
Darwin or the Flying Spaghetti
Monster) give me the serenity
to accept my nature, the ability
to change my environment to
best express said nature, and
the wisdom to know that I will
probably never really know
what my nature is (but can
make some educated guesses,
provided I remain damn well
skeptical). Berlapple
Ahern and Weigel Reply
Professors Haig and Weisfeld
state that research in evolu-
tionary psychology is far more
nuanced than is our portrait
of it. This misses our point
somewhat. The primary mo-
tive behind our investigation
was to discover why clickbait
versions of EP scholarship
have proven so appealing
to nonspecialists. Like most
people, we first encountered
EP in contexts that favored
simplified accounts of the
disciplinein undergraduate
lecture courses, newspapers,
magazines, and the umpteen
blogs and posts that regularly
poach their stories. Upon in-
vestigating, we found that
evolutionary psychology lends
itself to pat explanations be-
cause of its frequent dismissal
of social context in favor of a
certain easy determinism. We
cited neurobiologists and phi-
losophers who have described
the wide variety of factors
involved in triggering gene
expression specifically to high-
light the importance of context
as well as heredity in deter-
mining our behaviors. (We do
not doubt that stepfathers may
abuse stepchildren at a slightly
higher rate than biological
fathers abuse their biological
children; we question only
whether evolution is the most
useful way of explaining why.)
Mr. Dirk observes that
EPs main insight is to remind
humans that they are animals
who should marvel at the fact
that we are capable of asking
questions at all. We would like
to assure him, we find asking
questions marvelous.
Mal Ahern and Moira Weigel
new haven; brooklyn
Letters
@thenation.com

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(continued from page 2)
Books & the Arts.
Transcend
and Organize
W
riting in 1930 with Baudelaire and, subsequently, Goethe on
his mind, T.S. Eliot took up the question of what it means for
a poet to possess the sense of his own age. While it may be
true, he noted, that Goethe was the representative Enlighten-
ment dilettante, pursuing his scattered scientific and aesthetic
hobbies, and Baudelaire a theological in-
nocent, writing as if the problem of evil had
never occurred to anyone before, Eliot never-
theless concluded that they are bothmen
with restless, critical, curious minds and the
sense of the age: both men who understood
and foresaw a great deal.
Is there any poet in the postwar period
who was driven by a sense of the ageits
archaisms and barbarisms, its new looks and
new media, its corollary fears and hopes
more intensely than Pier Paolo Pasolini?
Born in 1922the same year as the Ameri-
can poet Jackson MacLow, a year younger
than the Italian poets Andrea Zanzotto and
Maria Luisa Spaziani, a year older than the
French poet Yves BonnefoyPasolini seems
of an entirely different era from his long-lived
contemporaries. He is fixed in the amber of
the 1960s and 70snot only because of his
early death (murdered on the beach at Ostia
on November 2, 1975, at the age of 53), but
also because in his poems, films, novels, plays,
journalism, criticism, drawings and paintings,
he continually took the measure of his time.
Best known today in the English-speaking
world as a director, Pasolini considered him-
self to be above all a poet, and described his
work in film as a cinema di poesia. In a 1970
essay To the New Reader, he explained that
a certain way of feeling something is repeat-
ed exactly when reading some of my verses
and viewing some of my cinematic shots,
emphasizing that there were formaland
not merely thematicconnections between
his work in the two mediums. As the film
critic P. Adams Sitney has explored at length,
Pasolinis films have linguistic as well as mu-
sical soundtracks: they feature imitations of
animal cries and birdsong, insults and curs-
ing, proverbs and recitations, nicknames and
diminutives, laughter and weeping. At the
start of Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Spar-
rows), the pop crooner Domenico Modugno
even sings the credits as a raucous ditty in
rhyming couplets. Mamma Roma begins with
a scene of verbal dueling at a wedding feast;
and as the prostitutes son lies dying in prison,
a Sardinian convict recites the first glimpses
of Hell from Canto IV of Dantes Inferno.
Accatone begins with a Dantean epigraph
from Purgatorio, Canto Vthe Devils com-
plaint when deprived of the redeemed soul
of Buonconte da Montefeltro: Tu te ne porti
di costui letterno / per una lagrimetta che l mi
toglie (You carry off with you this mans eter-
nal part / For a little tear hes taken from me).
Whether he was describing ancient rural
Easter traditions in his early poems, written
in the Friulian dialect, or revealing the logic
of human sacrifice at the origins of Western
ritual (including Easter), as he did in his
1969 film Medea, Pasolini made his work
an ambivalent register, a tape recorder, of
contemporary life as it flowed from the past.
He moved constantly between a poetry of
private emotion and a poesia civile, or civic
poetry. His last, unfinished book of poems,
Trasumanar e organizzar (Transcend and Or-
ganize), takes its title from Dantes paradoxi-
cal account of the majesty hes encountered
in Paradise: Trasumanar significar per verba
/ non si poria (To pass beyond the human
cannot be put into words; Paradiso, I:70-
71). The verb trasumanar is, in fact, a
neologism that Dante invented precisely
because there is no word to describe what
he has seen and done. In turn, the brilliance
of Pasolinis title lies in the juxtaposition of
these two imperatives: an intuition of the
ineffable spiritual existence to come versus
the down-to-earth necessity of organiz-
ing. An accused blasphemer deeply devoted
to Franciscan Catholicism, a Gramscian
communist permanently expelled from the
party, an avowed homosexual dedicated to
the consensual sexual freedom of everyone,
a champion of the local on a global scale, a
neorealist of the imagination, and a radi-
cally innovative poet alienated from the ex-
isting practices of the avant-garde: Pasolini
is not so much a figure of contradictions as
he is a force against the incoherence hiding
in every hypocrisy.
By Susan Stewart
Susan Stewart is the author, most recently, of The
Poets Freedom: A Notebook on Making.
The Nation. 28 October 27, 2014
W
ith the publication of the seventy-
plus pieces in The Selected Poetry
of Pier Paolo Pasolini, edited and
translated by Stephen Sartarelli,
we have the first extensive Italian/
English edition of Pasolinis poetry since
Norman MacAfees distinguished (but far
briefer) 1982 selection. Sartarellis full intro-
duction outlines the centrality of poetry to
everything Pasolini did, and English readers
can now follow the trajectory of his career
from juvenilia to late work. Augmenting
Walter Sitis annotations for the monumen-
tal three-volume, 5,708-page Mondadori
edition of the complete poems, which ap-
peared in Italy a decade ago, Sartarelli pro-
vides a perceptive set of notes and includes
reproductions of three autograph manu-
script pages and six of Pasolinis sure-handed
and inventive drawings.
Born in Bologna in the period that Mus-
solini came to power, Pasolini was the son of
Carlo Alberto Pasolini, a Bolognese military
officer and Fascist, and Susanna Colussi, a
Friulian schoolteacher. The family moved
from town to town because of the fathers
postings; during the war, Carlo Alberto was
stationed in East Africa, where he was a pris-
oner of war for a time before returning, in
his sons words, a sick veteran, poisoned by
the defeat of fascism in his country and the
defeat of the Italian language in his home
a ferocious wreck, a tyrant with no remaining
power, crazed even more by too much bad
wine, more than ever in love with my mother
who had never truly reciprocated in her love
for him. In the years before his death in 1958,
Carlo Alberto served as his sons secretary.
Pasolini entered the University of Bo-
logna in 1939, where he studied philology,
literature and art history. Roberto Longhis
lectures on Renaissance painting, with their
emphasis on close attention to form and
detail, inspired him, and he was eventually
mentored by the great philologist Gianfran-
co Contini as well. In La Ricchezza
(Riches), Pasolini writes of this period:
Being poor was only an accident
Whereas I possessed libraries,
museums,
tools of every sort of study. Born
to the passions, my soul already
housed Saint Francis, whole, in bright
reproductions, and the frescoes of San
Sepolcro and Monterchi; all of Piero
as the symbol of ideal possession,
object of love of my teachers
Longhi, Continiprivilege
of a nave and thus exquisite
pupil.
The poem turns on the realization that the
poet can never lose this wealth, which he will
always possess internally: Oh, to withdraw
into oneself and think! he exclaims.
In 1942, Susanna, accompanied by Paolo
and his younger brother Guido, fled Bolo-
gna and returned to a village near her native
town of Casarsa della Delizia. There Pasolini
produced his first book of poems, Poesia a
Casarsa (Poems of Casarsa). On September 1,
1943, he was drafted into the Italian army.
On September 8, the day of the armistice,
his regiment was captured by the Germans,
but he escaped dressed as a peasant and made
his way back to Casarsa. Guido joined the
local partisans, who supported the eventual
unification of Friuli with Italy. He was killed
in an internecine massacre in 1945, murdered
by communist partisans who supported a
Friulian alliance with Yugoslavia.
Only a few weeks after Guidos death,
Pasolini and his Friulian-speaking friends
founded the Academiuta di Lenga Furlana,
or the Little Friulian Language Academy.
Pasolinis passion for the dialect was driven
by more than nostalgia for his mothers
world. (In fact, Susanna apparently spoke
Venetian as much as Friulian at home, while
the fathers bourgeois Bolognese family
spoke standard Italian.) Instead, he and the
other young local writers believed that
speaking and writing this isolated dialect was
a blow against fascism. Pasolini later ex-
plained how totalitarians objected to his
Casarsa dialect poems: fascismto my great
surprisedid not concede the exist ence of
local particularisms in Italy, he wrote. These
were thought to be idioms of some obstinate
idlersmy pure language of poetry had
been mistaken for a realistic document that
proved the existence of shoddy eccentric
peasants, or at least of peasants ignorant of
the idealistic guidelines of the central Au-
thority. The young Friulian academicians
also dreamed of joining forces with other
Mediterranean dialect communities, espe-
cially those in Spain and Provence. Pasolini
translated the poems of Antonio Machado,
Pedro Salinas, Federico Garca Lorca, Jorge
Guilln and Juan Ramn Jimenez into
Friulian, and in 1946 published more of his
original dialect poems through the school.
Yet during this period, Pasolini also began
to write the works in standard Italian that
would make his reputation when they were
finally published in 1957: Le ceneri di Gramsci
(The Ashes of Gramsci) and LUsignolo della
chiesa cattolica (The Nightingale of the Cath-
olic Church). He stood at a linguistic cross-
roads: the poems that he and his friends were
writing as the war ended were the first works
ever published in Friulian; at the same time,
he was one of the first well-known Italian
writers brought up in a household that used
standard Italian on an everyday basis. Out-
side of Tuscany and Rome, a domestic stan-
dard Italian appeared only in itinerant
households like the Pasolinis, where the
parents came from different regions. Italian
was the language of academic discourse, the
radio and newspapers, a formal lingua that
Pasolini often found sterile, but that en-
abled him to develop a national audience.
Despite the murder of his brother by
Titos partisans, Pasolini became a member
of the Italian Communist Party after the
war. Working fervently as an organizer, he
supported farmworkers in their struggles
with estate owners. By 1948, he would suffer
persecution himself at the hands of his fel-
low communists. Following an incident at a
rural fair where he was accused of having a
sexual encounter with several teenage boys,
he was fired from his teaching job. The local
au thori tiesbeholden to Christian Dem-
ocrats and former Fascistsfiled charges
against him for corrupting minors, even
though no complaints were registered by
the youths themselves. Never concealing or
deny ing his sexual preference for men, Paso-
lini was accused of indegnit morale by his
comrades and ex pelled from the party. Over
the course of his lifetime, the state would
bring him to trial for obscenity or indecency
thirty-three times. In every case, Pasolini
was eventually acquitted.
I
n 1950, Pasolini and his mother moved
to Rome, though the charges against him
were not settled until 1953. The two lived
in poverty in the bleak neighborhood
of the Rebibbia prison. Pasolini secured
a teaching job and began to build friend-
ships with contemporary writersAlberto
Moravia, Elsa Morante, Giorgio Bassani and
Attilio Bertolucci, the father of Bernardo
(who, in the early years of his career, would
serve as an assistant director to Pasolini). Bas-
The Selected Poetry
of Pier Paolo Pasolini
A Bilingual Edition.
Edited and translated by Stephen
Sartarelli, foreword by James Ivory.
Chicago. 494 pp. $45.
Discussed in This Essay
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The Nation. 30 October 27, 2014
sani introduced him to the nascent Italian film
world, and in 1957, Pasolini served as a dialect
coach for the actors playing prostitutes and
pimps in Fellinis Le notti di Cabiria. Within a
few years, he had launched his own career as
a director with his Roman-dialect films set in
the new suburban slums, the borgate.
Pasolini embodied the clich of the Italian
mammone, or mamas boy, at an existential
level: his love for his mother was the well-
spring of his world. He often told an origin
story about his work as a poet, recounting
how, when he was 7, his mother had given
him a sonnet she had written expressing her
love for him; the next day, he composed his
own first verses. At 21, sending thanks to
Contini for his favorable review of Poesia a
Casarsa, Pasolini wrote: I must thank you too
on behalf of my mother who is certainly more
ambitious and desirous of recognitionfor
methan I am myself. His youthful poems
in Friulian and Italian are peopled with boys
and their mothers, figures sometimes drawn
from his own childhood and images of the
ragazzi of Casarsa, and at other times
representing a young Christ and the Virgin
Mary. Returning to the medieval origins
of rhymed poetry, he imitates the trouba-
dour literature of Provenal and the Spanish
romancero traditionwriting, for example,
his Narcissus Pastourelle in an Occitan
formyet he replaces the traditions themes
of adulterous heterosexual love with classical
and religious imagery. A homegrown Mari-
olatry runs throughout Pasolinis work, even
in the longing for the mother repeatedly
expressed by the tortured victims depicted in
his last film, his Sadean allegory Sal. In The
Gospel According to Matthew of 1964, he cast
his mother as the aged Virgin Mary herself.
Pasolini remained a perpetual boy among
boys. In a 1950 poem, he declares, like a
28-year-old Peter Pan: Adult? Never
never, like life itself, / which never matures,
forever green / from splendid day to splendid
day. The root of this sensibility lies in the
poems of Giovanni Pascoli, the subject of his
University of Bologna undergraduate thesis.
Pascoli celebrated, in a turn-of-the-century
essay, his poetica del fanciullino, an aesthetics of
the little boy, suggesting that the poet should
be a figure of perpetual innocence and won-
der. Pasolini was drawn as well to Pascolis
form, the poemettoa mid-length meditative
form that stood between the epic ambition of
the poema, or long narrative poem, and the
short lyric, the poesia. The length and shape
of the poemetto, like the greater Romantic lyric
of English poetry, lends itself to retrospection
and commentary.
Nevertheless, in the harsher light of the
postwar period, Pasolini recognized that a
total victory in the Oedipal struggle could be
a defeat. He described his work in Italian as
O ivory hendecasyllable, / O violet madrigal,
O statue / of poeticseternally adult. In his
Plea to My Mother, from his 1964 book
Poem in the Shape of a Rose, he wrote:
You alone in all the world know what
love
has always come first in my heart.
This is why theres something
terrible you should know:
its from your grace that springs my
sorrow
For the soul is in you, it is you, but
you are
my mother, and in your love are my
fetters.
The poems in this volume continue the
emotional narration of his homosexual-
ity begun in the long poems of LUsignolo
admitting the longings for men, / the love
for my mother. Yet Pasolini, without the
support of any movement for gay rights,
expressed his desires straightforwardly and
placed them in a political frame. By 1974,
in an essay on Constantine Cavafy, he could
wryly survey the many euphemisms that the
Alexandrian poets editor had used for homo-
sexuality: these ambiguous utterances be-
tween the masculine and the feminine made
out of a puritan, maybe even Victorian
prudery. He writes that Cavafy practically
had sex as often and as much as he wanted:
homosexual love was accepted in his world.
In a certain way it was indeed honoredhe
wasnt tolerated, he was free. Pasolini seemed
to pursue his own version of William Jamess
will to believe: whether or not he was in fact
free, he would act with freedom.
T
he poemetti of Le ceneri di Gramsci
were a breakthrough for Pasolini. He
worked throughout the eleven-poem
sequence in a fluent terza rima, broken
by interludes in longer stanza forms
of nine or ten lines and a recit in couplets.
He created a sweeping order for the book as
a whole that English readers can now grasp
more clearly, for Sartarelli translates all three
of the books longer pieces: The Apen-
nines, Gramscis Ashes and The Cry of
the Excavator. The Apennines opens the
volume as a tribute to the geology and his-
tory of the long chain of mountains uniting
all of peninsular Italy, and hence connecting
the territories Garibaldi had dreamed of
uniting politically. The red tatter of hope
of the camicie rosse is woven through the
work, eventually appearing as a geranium, a
scrap of cloth hung from a trestle at a work
site, and a battered Communist flag. The
birds-eye view of The Apennines takes in
the ancient and the contemporary at once.
The omniscient speaker touches down to pay
tribute to the art and architecture of Orvieto;
glimpses a shepherd asleep on the rocks;
travels through Tuscany and along the Tiber
to Rome (where the night has a powerful
smell of urine); and sees the dead-end
villages between bright / twentieth-century
churches and highrises where immigrants
from the South live in destitution. From
there, he follows the mountains to Gaeta,
Sperlonga and on to Naples, ending in an
evocation of those who speak their dialects in
some bedeviled hillside or district, mak-
ing Italy a thing of their own.
This vast panorama, with its view unfold-
ing southward toward Gramscis native Sar-
dinia, is composed in a standard Italian that
incorporates Greek, Latin and Etruscan place
names, high diction (nel ventre della nazione:
in the womb of a nation), and vistas of
mud-covered tables in pigsties. Its motion
makes all the more vivid the still, meditative
intensity of the title poem. The speaker is
reflecting upon Gramscis grave, near the
tombs of Shelley and Keats, in the Protestant
Cemetery in Rome. He provides an inven-
tory of the sounds that can be heard from this
lonely, noble garden with its gray tomb-
stones as he considers the central problem he
has inherited from Gramsci: how to reconcile
a Crocean idealism, which views the intuitive
and expressive powers of art as continuous
with spiritual life, and a Marxist material-
ism. Although Gramsci found the traditions
of classical literature and philosophy to be
relevant to liberal political structures more
than Pasolini seems to acknowledge, the
poet struggles to find common ground. He
believes that the postwar economic boom
has brought a soul-crushing pursuit of vulgar
materialism to Italy, transforming the lives of
workers so drastically that Gramscis future-
oriented ideas of social change no longer
seem relevant. Pasolini is driven to recuperate
the past, including a primitive Catholicism:
The scandal of self-contradictionof
being
with you and against you; with you in
my heart,
in the light, against you in the dark of
my gut
I take for religion
its joyousness, not its millennial
struggleits nature, not its
The Nation. 31 October 27, 2014
consciousness. It is mans primordial
strength, having been lost in the act,
that gives this faith the joy of
nostalgia,
the glow of poetry.
Although Sartarelli does not attempt to carry
over the terza rima, his choices are exact and
vivid throughout the sequence, and especially
in this passage near the close of the poem:
kids light as rags play in a spring
breeze
no longer cold. Burning with youthful
brashness on their Roman evening
in May, dark adolescents
whistle down the sidewalks in the
twilight
celebration; the rolling shutters of
garages
crash and thunder suddenly, joyously,
after darkness has quieted the night
That individual, familiar clashing sound
of closing up shop, which marks the work-
days end in any Roman alleyway, here evokes
the notion that our history has ended. In
the third long poem of the work, The Cry
of the Excavator, Pasolini draws (as he did
in his cinematic masterpiece Teorema) on a
vision of the ubiquitous postwar construc-
tion site as a scene of apocalyptic change.
Through a dreamlike night walk charged
with memories, he excavates his own political
and poetic history. At dawn, he sees a back-
hoe and hears a plaintive, inhuman crythe
cry of the excavator and of the earth itself.
Throughout the 1960s, Pasolini traveled
to India, Africa and the Middle East. He was
drawn to the continuity of peasant culture in
the Third World at a time when he found
Italy enveloped in both consumerism and civil
unrest. He condemned the student protesters
as anthropologically middle class and, dur-
ing the clashes of 1968, sympathized with the
police as children of the poor. He charged
that this unlucky generation had neglected
its true taskto be intellectualsand he
despaired that the world of genuine readers
had vanished. Here is a passage that Sartarelli
translates from a late interview poem:
Verse! I write verse! Verse!
(goddamned idiot,
verse you would never understand,
since
you know nothing about metrics!
Verse!)
verse NO LONGER IN TERCETS!
Understand?
Thats the important part: no longer
in tercets!
Ive gone straight back to the magma!
Neocapitalism has won, and Im
out on the street
as poet, ah [sob]
and as citizen [another sob].
In this half-comic vein, he goes on to de-
scribe lyric poems whose arrangement / of
time and place / deriveshow strange!
from a ride in a car / meditations at forty
to seventy miles per hour / with quick
pans and tracking shots.
In contrast to such parody, between 1971
and 73 Pasolini wrote a remarkable series of
112 sonnets, published posthumously under
the title The Sonnet Hobby. Sartarelli includes
seven of these works. Composed in varia-
tions of the Petrarchan form, the series is also
indebted to Shakespeares sonnet themes, as
an older man addresses a younger man who
has been his lover. Pasolinis interlocutor
is his own great loveNinetto Davoli, the
radiant boy who had been his companion
since 1963 and acted in so many of his films.
In 1971, Davoli had fallen in love with a
woman and decided to marry her. The series
begins with one of Pasolinis most original
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The Nation. 32 October 27, 2014
by MICHAEL LIPKIN
W
alter Kempowskis writing career
began on a winter evening in 1950,
nineteen years before he published
his first novel. Then 21, he was
serving time for espionage in an
East German prison at Bautzen. For two
years, he had passed the time by going from
bunk to bunk and plying his fellow prison-
ers with questions about their lives. He met
a glassblower from the Vogtland, a busi-
nessman who had worked in Persia, a bank
president. He discovered Auschwitz survivors
sleeping above former camp commandants,
Americans alongside Finns and Brits, and
a Frenchman who had been stationed at
Dien Bien Phu. One evening, as Kempowski
trudged through the yard for his nightly exer-
cise, he found himself thinking how painful it
was that the conversations going on through-
out the prison at that moment should be
lost, like the choir of voices swirling around
the Tower of Babel. The guard on duty told
Kempowski to pay attention. Those are
your comrades in the cells, he said. Theyre
telling you something.
By the time of his death in 2007, Kempow-
ski had earned an international reputation as
Germanys premier chroniclera quirky old
uncle spending time in his attic, surrounded
by faded photographs and dusty junk. Anyone
Kempowski came across could expect to be
peppered with questions about their wartime
memories, the subject of their dissertation,
their first car. Some enthusiastic readers would
drive to his rural home in Nartum, Lower Sax-
ony, to recite their family stories into his tape
recorder. These interviews would serve as the
basis for many of his novels and documentary
works, but they were more than just source
material: Kempowski possessed an inexhaust-
ible curiosity about the lives of others.
He also possessed an impish wit and took
great pleasure in raking the muck. In inter-
views, he liked to take aim at his more suc-
cessful contemporaries, at West Germanys
political class and, above all, at himself. Kem-
powski gave a frank interview to Die Weltwoche
Gathering Fates
and striking poemsa work that plays radi-
cally on the idea of the sonnets volta, or turn,
as the speaker awakens in great happiness
from a dream of riding horses, only to have a
miraculous thought of how he might hang
himself from a tree in the garden. One of the
last sonnets describes a night of cruising in
which Pasolini glimpses Ninetto in another
car with an orribile thief, and finds himself
in his own car with a boy who is a fascista,
poverinoa circumstance that strangely an-
ticipates the night of his death.
In 1975, in his last remarks in his final
interview only hours before his death,
Pasolini warned: Everyone knows that I
pay for my experiences in person. But there
are also my books and my films. Maybe Im
wrong, but Ill keep on saying that were
all in danger. His murder remains under-
investigated and unsolved. Perhaps this wel-
come new edition of Pasolinis poems will
lead eventually to an English edition of the
complete poemsand to the justice, poetic
and otherwise, he surely deserves. n
a few months before he died of intestinal
cancer. When the interviewer remarked to
him that he had lived a German life, Kem-
powski replied, with typical dryness, that his
interlocutor was right to use the past tense.
That life had been a hard one. As a child in
Rostock, a city on the North Sea, Kempowski
had resisted his duties for the local chapter
of the Hitler Youth, playing the truant so
brazenly that he was almost sent to a prison
camp. (The troop leader happened to know
his father, and so his name was struck from
the list.) Kempowskis father, a Wehrmacht
soldier, was killed during the occupation of
Rostock by the Soviet Union, sparking a life-
long hatred of the USSR and its East German
satellite in his two sons. At the end of the war,
the Kempowski brothers furnished the Allies
with documents showing that Russian forces
were stripping Rostock of more industrial
equipment than had been sanctioned by the
West. They were arrested by the Soviet au-
thorities and sentenced to twenty-five years
in prison. The familys shipping business was
liquidated, their apartment given away, and
their possessions taken and sold. For failing
to report their activities, their elderly mother
was sentenced to ten years of hard labor.
Kempowskis eight years at Bautzenhis
sentence was commuted in 1955were the
most important of his life. He told his biog-
rapher, Dirk Hempel, that the first several
were spent struggling with the knowledge of
what he had done to his mother. He tried to
kill himself. He re-read the twelve books in
the prison library and tramped through the
darkness during exercise hour. As time passed
and his despair began to wane, Kempowski
decided to fashion a life for himself as best
he could. He learned French and became
director of the prison choir. He also cultivated
a friendship with the chaplain that would
endure for decades. Their long conversations
about guilt and atonement led Kempowski to
accept his sentence as punishment for the ruin
he had brought on his family, as well as for
what Germany had wrought during the war.
Restitution could only be achieved by fac-
ing the horrors head-on: by listening to and
recording answers. At his bunk, Kempowski
began writing an epic poem about an outbreak
of plague in a medieval town; when no one
was looking, he would scribble verses onto
bits of toilet paper pilfered from the latrines.
Though his debut novel, A Report From
the Cell Block (1969), attracted little at-
tention, Kempowskis fascination with the
lives he so diligently recorded soon began
to pay dividends. Cell Block was followed
by the bestselling Tadellser & Wolff (1971)
and Were Still Golden (1972), the first two
Walter Kempowski on the set of A Standalone Chapter, a film based on The German Chronicle
Michael Lipkin is a doctoral candidate in Germanic
languages and literature at Columbia University.
The Nation. 33 October 27, 2014
installments of what became The German
Chronicle. Assembled from family diaries
preserved by his sister, the sprawling nine-
volume work is an unsentimental depiction
of his familys struggles from the early
twentieth century until the brothers ar-
rest in 1948. The novels depict his fathers
and brothers initial support for Hitler, the
brutality of the war, and the deranged opti-
mism of the years following its end. (Were
Still Golden owes its title to Kempowskis
mother, who, as the Red Army swept into
Rostock, remarked: So long as you dont
have gallstones or TB, were still golden.)
The success of the books was an impres-
sive achievement, considering that the novels
are hardly typical crowd-pleasers. In place of
a coherent literary narrative, Kempowskis
novels line up long strings of brief, haiku-like
paragraphs, rarely more than a few sentences
long. Here is Kempowskis account of his ar-
rest, which opens Cell Block (and closes Were
Still Golden): They came for me in the gray
morning light. Two of them wore leather
jackets. When you get back, I thought, youll
really have something to talk about. Of
the captain reviewing his case, Kempowski
wrote, Totally unprompted, hed say, All
the apple trees have died! ( The temperature
had plunged during the night.) Because I
called the Soviet Union Russia, they made
me stand in the corner.
But despite impressive sales, institutional
recognition eluded Kempowski for the first
several decades of his career. His novels were
not nominated for prizesa serious snub
in the German literary world. Even at the
height of his fame, Kempowskis influence
never rivaled that of Gnter Grass, who was
esteemed not only as a novelist but as the
conscience of Germany, pressed for comment
whenever crimes of the past surfaced in the
news. (To date, translations of Kempowskis
work remain few and far between.) At a time
when public discourse swung between high
condemnation and uncomfortable silence, the
impassivity of Kempowskis prose confounded
critics. Younger readers, for their part, saw it
as a sign of deep conservatism that Kempow-
skis harshest criticisms were leveled not at
the Nazisif anything, his childhood under
National Socialism appeared in a suspiciously
rosy lightbut at the Soviet Union and East
Germany. A 1975 film adaptation of Tadel-
lser & Wolff raised his profile, but through
the 1970s and 80s, Kempowski was mostly
neglected by the literary establishment, very
much to his chagrin. I was poisoned, he told
the reporter from the Weltwoche. In another
interview, he claimed that the lack of recogni-
tion was what caused his cancer.
Still, Kempowskis financial success fur-
nished him with the resources to start gath-
ering fates, as he called it. He conducted
interviews with anyone and everyone he
encounteredeven the students who some-
times heckled him at his readings. This ma-
terial became the basis for the Chronicles two
question-volumes, Did You Ever See Hitler?
(1973) and Did You Know About It? (1979).
These books divided readers, who had ex-
pected another installment in the Kempow-
ski family saga. The answers appeared to be
arranged randomly, without commentary
or conclusionbut conclusions were never
Kempowskis mtier. Like the novels, the
question-volumes were meant to preserve,
not to interpret. For Kempowski, historys
power lay not in the grand narrative but in
the tiny detail, such as the little rhyme that
one housewife recalls reciting with her star-
struck girlfriends after catching a glimpse of
Hitler in the flesh. (Our Fhrer, if you will /
Come up to our windowsill.) Without the
texture of individual experience, Kempowski
felt, history became nothing but statistics
and geography. It never means anything to
me when people say that three or four mil-
lion people were gassed, he told Die Welt-
woche. But when I hear that an SS man in
Dachau tortured poor Pastor SchneiderI
can get a picture of the monstrous horrors.
By 1980, Kempowski had amassed so
much interview material that he decided
to formalize his endeavor by creating an
official archive. He placed notices in Die
Zeit and other German newspapers and
was swamped with responses from readers.
Some mailed him a few letters or pages from
the diary of a deceased relative; others sent
detailed family chronicles, which Kempow-
ski transcribed, digitized and stored in a
complex system of wooden cabinets in his
attic. His home in Nartum became a house
for the deadthough for Kempowski that
was not such a gloomy proposition. Dead
Germans, he observed, spoke much more
uninhibitedly than their living countrymen.
Past lives offered him a form of com-
panionship that he was unable to cultivate
with the living. With the exception of his
wife Hildegard, Kempowskis diaries men-
tion few intimates; a casual reader might
never learn that the couple had children. The
only people who achieved true personhood
in Kempowskis eyes were the authors and
historical figures, like Thomas Mann and
Karl Liebknecht, whose memoirs and letters
he devoured. Biographies are my favorite
reading, he admitted to his diary, after a long
night in the archive in 1983. My loveliest
hours are those I spent busy with the courses
of other peoples lives.
O
ver the years, as Kempowskis archive
grew ever larger, the writer began to
question his literary method. At nearly
3,000 pages, the Chronicle was not lack-
ing in detail. But as the diaries, letters
and interviews made abundantly clear, the
Kempowski familys experience of the war was
not exemplary; there was no single, unifying
experience of World War II. A soldier sent to
the hellish Eastern Front told a very different
story in his letters home than one sent to the
West. By the same token, life in occupied
Parishumiliating, morally compromised,
but ultimately livablewas worlds away from
the situation in occupied Poland, where thou-
sands of families were deported east to make
way for repatriated Germans. Even a Jew
sent to Bergen-Belsen, known for its well-
organized communist prisoners, was the vic-
tim of a different Holocaust than the one who
passed with assembly-line efficiency from
the ramp to the crematorium at Auschwitz.
What was needed, Kempowski decided, was
an objective approach, a book in which the
full chaotic scope of the war could be rendered
without sacrificing the unique texture of each
individual voicea work that could replicate
what he felt forty years ago listening to the
noises of the exercise yard at Bautzen, sur-
rounded by the Babel of voices in the snow. It
A Report From the Cell Block
Knaus. 320 pp. 22.
Tadellser & Wolff
btb. 480 pp. 10.
Were Still Golden
btb. 384 pp. 11.
Did You Ever See Hitler/
Did You Know About It?
Knaus. 352 pp. 19.99.
Sonar: A Collective Diary
btb. 3,070 pp. 74.
Alkor: Diary 1989
Knaus. 608 pp. 29.
All by Walter Kempowski.
Walter Kempowski
A Biography.
By Dirk Hempel.
btb. 320 pp. 9.50.
Books Discussed in This Essay
The Nation. 34 October 27, 2014
was as much a job for the former choir direc-
tor as it was for the writer he had become.
The result, Sonar: A Collective Diary, was a
massive four-volume collage assembled from
the wealth of documents in Kempowskis
archive, as well as from his extensive library.
The text consists of particles, as Kempow-
ski called thembrief excerpts from diaries,
cables, letters and newspapers montaged into
a kaleidoscopic view of the wars darkest days.
There were Berliners cowering in bomb
shelters and prisoners at Dachau awaiting
their fate. There were increasingly deluded
radio addresses from the Nazi high com-
mand and reflections from exiles like Thomas
Mann, who watched from afar, wondering
what would have befallen him had he stayed.
Sometimes Kempowski used rapid cutting to
tell a dramatic story, like that of the White
Rose resistance, bit by terrifying bit; at other
points, he set banality alongside historical
horror, a favorite technique. The reader
learns, for example, that while British pris-
oners at Nanndorf were being served a cup
of cold tea to alleviate their homesickness,
Anas Nin, safe in New York City, was admir-
ing a lovely velvet hat she had been given by
a friend. Feeling whimsical, Pablo Picasso
painted its enormous plume light pink.
A historian constructing chains of causality
would have made little of the connections
documented in Sonar. But for Kempowski,
simply knowing that the French writer and
the wretched British soldiers existed under
the same sky, breathing the same air, linked
them one to the otherthey were like iron
filings, charged by the same unseen magnet.
In Kempowskis own journal, published in
Alkor: Diary 1989, the drama of the daily
headlines, which he dutifully recorded each
morning, provides a context for and a contrast
to the banal events that unfold beneath them.
It is difficult to determine what, if anything,
it might signify that Kempowski was sharing
peppermint schnapps with guests at his liter-
ary salon the same day two Libyan planes were
shot down by the US Air Force. Though they
never wholly meet, the two events reach out
for each other across the blank space Kem-
powski leaves between them.
Many of these headlines announced pa-
rades, memorials and mass demonstrations
commemorating the historical events that
Kempowski was documenting. The year 1989
alone saw the seventieth anniversary of the
Weimar Republic, the fiftieth anniversary of
the invasion of Poland, the fortieth anniver-
sary of a divided Germanyand, of course,
became a landmark year itself when the Berlin
Wall finally fell. Not for nothing do the Ger-
mans call anniversaries Wiederkehre: returns.
T
he publication of Sonars first volume
in 1993 marked the first time in his
career that Kempowski, readers and
the national conversation were in ac-
cord. The intergenerational conflicts
of the 1960s and 70s had given way to the
building of memorials, public expressions
of remorse and the collection of survivor
testimony. Readers, reviewers and, at long
last, prize committees all hailed Sonar as
a milestone in what German academics
have called memory culture, no less a
historical achievement than a literary one.
A spokesman for the German government
announced that Kempowski was one of
the most prominent authors in the German
language, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung called him bitterly essential. The
collective diary was awarded a heap of liter-
ary prizes, including the Konrad Adenauer
prize for literature. Still, after twenty years
as a self-identified outsider, the success was
bittersweet. Frankly, he told Die Welt-
woche, it could have come sooner.
Kempowski benefited from another, sub-
tler shift as wellthe formerly unspeakable
but growing public sentiment that, during
the war, the Germans had suffered too. As
Sonar hit bookstores, a controversy raged
over the Neue Wache memorial in Berlin,
which was dedicated to victims of war and
tyranny, including, it was implied, the sol-
diers of the Wehrmacht. Though Sonar was
often mentioned alongside other testimo-
nial works, like Claude Lanzmanns Shoah,
it is significant that the books symphonic
structure did not privilege the murder of
the Jews over the carnage of Stalingrad
or the Allied destruction of Dresden and
Hamburg. Kempowski had never shied away
from asserting that the Germans had been
victims as well as perpetrators. But while,
before, critics had held him at arms length,
now he found himself at the crest of a wave
of literature about the crimes of the Allies,
from Gnter Grasss Crabwalkpublished
two years after Grass was awarded the Nobel
Prizeto W.G. Sebalds On the Natural His-
tory of Destruction, which used the rhetoric
of Holocaust amnesia to chide Germans
for their silence about the destruction of
their cities. Reviewers ignored this aspect of
Sonar; Kempowski did not. Yes, at the end
of the war I saw a train with concentration
camp prisoners cross a troop transport. Its
so appalling that there is no consolation
in knowing that Stalin killed ten million
people, he said. But one should be able to
say that one can no longer stand this eternal
perpetrator status. That depresses me.
For all his talk of murmuring to
the dead, Kempowskis mosaic often
told his own story as much as it did his
intervieweesthe story of a comfortable
life under National Socialism shattered by
the horror of the wars final years. In this
respect, the title of Sonar is particularly tell-
ing: the stories that Kempowski gathered
were, to use his term, plankton, while he
cast his seine from a ship up above, plucking
them from the lightless depths of oblivion to
illuminate their meaning. He decided which
part of the story any one persons testimony
would serve to illustrate, what went in and
what stayed out. (Kempowskis diaries are
full of bemused anecdotes about interviewees
who wanted money for their stories, or a say
in how they would be used.) What distin-
guished Kempowski from the scores of other
writers and historians who struggled to shape
narratives about the war was his unshakable
optimism in the ability of literature to repre-
sent and even provide a kind of restitution for
its atrocities. Kempowski may not have been
able to resolve intractable problems of guilt
and absolution, but that did not keep him
from bearing witnessboth with his own
experience and by recording that of others. It
was just a matter of pulling oneself together
and going about ones work
That faith madeand continues to
makeKempowski unusual in a country
that has had good reason to doubt the hu-
manizing power of literature. In his final
years, Kempowski continued to dream up
grand projects, including an enormous web
archive of music, diary materials, film clips
and newspapers spanning the years 1850
2000. He hosted a literary salon at his home,
where his fans, now old men and women,
came to discuss German letters and the last-
ing legacy of the war. (After his death, the
archive was transferred to the Academy of
the Arts in Berlin.)
A Der Spiegel reporter who visited him in
his final days described Kempowski, sharp as
ever, carrying his feeding tube in one hand
and a backpack in the other. As they sat over
tea, the reporter observed that the backpack
might serve as a figure for Kempowskis
oeuvreabout the guilt, the fate, that one
must carry. A backpack, yes, thats right,
Kempowski replied. Youve got to be grate-
ful. Easy to say, but thats been my experi-
ence: the more monstrous the pain one has
to bear, the easier it is. The conversation
paused as Kempowski, who had refused che-
motherapy, squinted at the bag. If your wife
leaves you, thats not, at bottom, a problem,
he finally went on. That one can take the
greatest, most terrible calamities of life and
turn them aroundthats whats at stake. n
The Nation. 35 October 27, 2014
by STUART KLAWANS
A
movie thats sure to make you feel bet-
ter about your marriage, Gone Girl be-
gins and ends with the screen-filling
image of a womans head, viewed as
if through a haze of powdered sugar.
First, for a long moment, you see only the
puzzle of her piled-up hair. Then she turns
and reveals her face, which is lovely and
clear-eyed but tells you nothing, except that
shes looking back at you from her pillow.
Meanwhile, in voiceover, a man speaks re-
flectively about the impenetrable mysteries
that lie at the heart of his marriage. (Gone
Girl is definitely the mans story, even though
a whole series of women will vigorously
contest the narrative.) These same mysteries
confront every spouse, he proposes: What
are you thinking? Who are you?
Yes, the viewer responds, assenting per-
haps from personal recollection and perhaps
from recognizing a great literary theme.
Didnt Gabriel Conroy, too, learn to his
sorrow that he had understood far too little
about his Gretta, who mourned for poor
young Michael Furey in the gasworks? And
didnt this knowledge make Gabriels sympa-
thies expand beyond himself, into the world
where the snow fell (like powdered-sugar
lighting) upon all the living and the dead?
You have about one second to dwell in
the illusion that David Finchers new movie
means to unite you with all humanity, in-
cluding the wives and husbands who fumble
toward mutual comprehension. Then the
voiceover continues, and you understand
in a breath that you are not in the gaslit
and gossipy moral universe of James Joyces
The Dead but the cable-news-obsessed
America of Gillian Flynns novel Gone Girl.
What did the speaker want to do with that
beautiful young female head were looking
at, and thats looking at us? Crack it open,
he says, and unspool the brain.
Sprung on you even before the credits
blink across the screen, this abrupt leap
from dreamy meditation to brutal admis-
sion is only the first of the cascade of shock
effects that Fincher gleefully sets tumbling
through the chutes and corridors of his Gone
Girl. Working from a screenplay credited
to Flynn, he has turned the novel into a
funhouse maze of chronological switchbacks
and perspectival shifts, deceitful clues (some
with the word clue hand-lettered on them)
and multilayered masks, artfully suggested
scenarios of violence and equally artful de-
pictions of bloodletting.
Like Finchers Zodiac, though without
that films palpable unease and defiant lack
of resolution, Gone Girl revels in its own
complexity. Like Finchers more recent The
Girl With the Dragon Tattoothough with-
out as blatant an appeal to the more brutal
mass-audience appetitesGone Girl is also
American Minotaur
a thoroughly efficient thriller that never
wastes a shot or fails to make a scene pop
from within. ( This honesty of construction
compares well with the strained first-person
narration of the novel, of which it might
be said: trust a suspected murderer to have
a supposedly fancy prose style.) You chase
excitedly, and willingly, through Finchers
labyrinth, and when you get to the center,
you are not cheated of a monster.
But the beast (not to give away the plot)
proves to be rather different in form from
Ben Affleck as the highly dubious husband,
Nick Dunne, or even Rosamund Pike as his
mysterious, and mysteriously missing, wife
Amy. In Gone Girl, the flesh-eating creature
proves to be a rampaging composite of dollar
signs, winning smiles and TV market share.
At first, this Minotaur of American suc-
cess would seem to lurk far from the films
setting. Gone Girl mostly plays out in a drab
Missouri city that Fincher has assembled
from a handful of parts: a glassy modern
police station, a decaying brick-and-stone
downtown thats waiting for rehab, an aban-
doned factory converted into an indoor skid
row, some modest old wood-frame houses
in varying states of repair, and a new sub-
development where everything looks fresh
and outsize and not quite inhabited. This
last site is where you first see Nick Dunne,
who steps out in the morning with laggard
gait and sagging features to roll the plastic
garbage bins to the curb. Its also the place to
which he returns in the early afternoon, his
color improved by a few bourbons, to find
the cat in the yard, the coffee table shattered
and Amy inexplicably not at home. The date
is July 5, their fifth wedding anniversary.
Already the texture of the movie is thick
with post-independence implications, a trou-
bled day of remembrance and some serious
waste removal. ( Just how much stinking trash
is in those bins? They look big enough to
swallow a corpse.) You also get a lighter and
more fun-loving overlay of surface details:
board games (which Nick provides for cus-
tomers at the bar he owns with his sister),
riddles (the teasing rhymes that Amy has left
behind, to lead Nick on a treasure hunt to his
anniversary present) and the always entertain-
ing apparatus of a police investigation, from
high-tech chemical swabs to low-tech yellow
Post-it notes. A detective named Boney (Kim
Dickens), who is studiously humorless and all
the more amusing for it, sticks the latter here
and there around the house as she begins to
piece together her account of Nick and Amy.
To these scraps, Fincher adds still more
sheets of paper bearing another womans
reconstruction of events. These are several
Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne in Gone Girl
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The Nation. 36 October 27, 2014
years worth of diary entries, which Amy
wrote in a looping script, and which you
hear her read in voiceover in the tones of a
radio actress telling a bedtime story.
The diarys tale does have its picture-
book aspects. As Fincher visualizes the
entries, translating them into dark-hued
sequences that he intercuts with the present-
day investigation, you learn that Amy grew
up in public as the model for a popular
childrens-book character called Amazing
Amy, the perfect little girl who could suc-
ceed in everything, including making the real
Amys parents rich. It was impossible to live
up to this fictional double, Amy told Nick
soon after meeting him in New York. Still, as
we see, she came close enough to the image
to be witty, poised and sophisticated, even
while pouring saccharine- laced acid over her
parents creation; and she found Nick to be
just handsome and smooth-talking enough
to stand in for a fairytale prince. From being
a character in stories, Amy progressed to
screwing among them, as she and Nick dared
each other into a quickie in the deserted aisle
of a used-book shop. They were that fasci-
nated with their lives as a dazzling fiction.
They were that determined to be sexy, clever
and forever superior to the boring people.
Then the recession hit, they lost their
jobs and most of their money, and the com-
mon rut opened before them. Nick dragged
Amy back to his sad little hometown, where
he was content to teach a few classes at the
local college and be co-owner of a financial
sinkhole of a bar. At this point, according
to the history in Amys diary, he became
neglectful, angry, frightening. At a corre-
sponding moment in the present-day story,
the one that Detective Boney is construct-
ing, Nicks behavior becomes questionable.
And now, as it reaches full speed, Gone
Girl bursts into yet another storytelling mode,
that of the twenty-four-hour TV news cycle.
Here, too, the narrative is in the hands of a
womana poof-headed blond fury (Missi
Pyle) who judges people from the bench of
a cable channelaided by an ever-expanding
force of video crews, newspaper photogra-
phers, and random people who want to grab
a selfie with Nick and post it wherever, includ-
ing on the furys show. American film has a
long tradition of both satirizing the scandal-
and-sentiment industry and drawing energy
from its ballyhoo: think of Nothing Sacred,
Hail the Conquering Hero, Ace in the Hole. Gone
Girl stops ticking and finally detonates the
moment it makes contact with this heritage
when Amy, having been reduced to a beautiful
photograph, becomes permanently Amazing,
and Nick turns into a TV character, known
everywhere by his embarrassed grin and un-
persuasive nice-guy posture.
Affleck, who is predictably good at being
the swaggering and seductive Nick, is even
better in Gone Girl in his moments of ex-
cruciating self-consciousness. (I cringe, even
now, to think of one of the speeches he makes
before the TV cameras, with every note ex-
actly off-pitch.) With an admirable lack of
vanity, Affleck also shows you the Nick who is
petulant, morose, sluggish, nasty and badly in
need of something to spur him into action. Its
a performance of impressive rangeand so,
too, is Rosamund Pikes. Hers is more difficult
to discuss, in part because she is cast for her
inborn ability to look and sound like a real-life
Amazing Amy. Let me just note that Pike has
another side, tooit came out in the pro-
foundly British sci-fi comedy The Worlds End,
in which she fought hand-to-hand against
alien robotsand this quality is not wasted in
Gone Girl. In fact, Gone Girl is deep in actors
with strong credentials in comedy: not only
Pike and Missi Pyle but also Tyler Perry, Neil
Patrick Harris, Casey Wilson and Patrick
Fugit. For a thriller that is ostensibly about
a mans murderous rage against his wifeor
the wifes desperation at the boredom of her
marriageGone Girl is cast for buoyancy,
even with the actors playing it straight.
This tone perhaps explains why the end-
ing of Gone Girl, though grim and claustro-
phobic, sends you out of the theater with
a smile. Its a joke to see the Minotaur of
success feed on people who have spent their
lives racing toward hima good enough
joke that only the most chronically self-
critical moviegoer would go away wonder-
ing Am I that bad? rather than thinking,
with pleasure, Thank God thats not me.
And this tells me that the most dread-
ful problem in Gone Girl is finally not the
terrifying unknowability of ones spouse.
Its the corrosive effect of an American
smugness that Fincher presents as almost
universal, shared by everyone from the
beautiful young thing with two Ivy League
degrees to the casual criminal holed up in
a trailer park. In Gone Girl, we all think we
know everybody else, because TV tells us
so. And like that trailer-park resident at the
secret heart of the movie, were only too apt
to watch a cable-news report about Amy and
say, She probably had it coming.
O
ne of the pleasures that film festivals
allow is the Rorschaching of themes
and mini-clusters out of a big blot of
cinematic this-and-that. The New
York Film Festival, which opened in
late September with Gone Girl, has been
particularly generous to pattern-seekers this
year by also selecting Mathieu Amalrics
excellent The Blue Room, a nicely contrasting
mystery about an unhappy provincial mar-
riage and suspected murder.
Adapted from a novel by Georges Sime-
non and brought to the screen in an appro-
priately brisk seventy-six minutes, The Blue
Room is a story about sexual desire as an over-
whelming force, incapable of being ignored
or mistaken, and about the ambiguity of
almost everything else: memory, language,
actions and motives. This imbalance is es-
pecially unfortunate for the protagonist of
the story, an agricultural agent named Julien
(Amalric), who is small of stature, impover-
ished and hardworking by background, and
seems to have been destined from childhood
for anything but a grand passion.
Yet there he is at the beginning of The
Blue Room, locked in voracious sex with the
tall, superb Esther (Stphanie Clau), while
a lush, minor-key string rhapsody plays
on the soundtrack and afternoon sunlight
seeps through a hotel rooms blinds. Brief,
static views, as sharp as hammer blows
a detail of the room, a strand of pearls, a
drop of blood on Juliens lip, the opening of
Esthers thighsnail the adulterous couple
into their union.
Then equally abrupt views of a police
station and a magistrates office nail Julien
into some unspecified trouble, almost a
year later. He is being asked for the details
of his tryst with Esther, over and over
again. From what weve seen, he tries to
reply honestly. But something doesnt add
up for the investigators. Life is differ-
ent when you live it, is all Julien can say,
from when you go back over it later. Sure
enough, the episodes we see in scrambled
flashbacks, leading somehow to death and
then more death, are no more than puzzle
pieces, which can be assembled in one way
by a prosecuting attorney and in another,
too late, by a glance from Julien as he help-
lessly sits on trial.
One of the great contemporary actors
a vivid bright-eyed dancer, multidirectional
fount of wit, dialogic fencing master, Pierrot
and picaroAmalric has muted himself to
play Julien, rarely using anything more than
a small, restrained gesture in deference to
Amalric the director. Like the quick, sharp
views of the visual scheme, the performance
serves the ambiguities of the story. The big-
gest effect you get is a subtle trembling of
Amalrics face at the end, as Julien realizes
what has happenedand though nobody
says a word of explanation, you understand
and feel the floor drop away. n
The Nation. 37 October 27, 2014
SHELF
LIFE
bers of the legislature represented at least
40 percent of the population. Through-
out the twentieth century, the population of
urban districts swelled, but their legislative
representation never increased accordingly.
In much of the nation, a rural vote was worth
more than an urban onewhich suited busi-
ness leaders and white supremacists just fine.
After World War II, as reapportionment
movements sprang up, businesses and poli-
ticians who benefited from the status quo
hired lobbyists to defend it. It was a matter,
they said, of balance and minority rights.
What they failed to recognize or admit,
according to Smith, was that states had a
sovereign existence prior to their union as a
nation; districts, by comparison, were mere
by PETER C. BAKER
incredibly fine-grained detail (meeting by
meeting, argument by argument), how the
Court came to take up the question again
just eighteen years later, in Reynolds v. Sims.
By then, Frankfurter had been forced into
retirement by a stroke, and Earl Warren
was the chief justice. Earlier in his career,
as governor of California, Warren had sup-
ported the over-representation of the states
rural voters. Now he seemed eager to switch
his position.
Critics of reapportionment argued that
it would tear the fabric of the nation apart.
Even some supporters of reform were wary
of going too far, too fast: Archibald Cox, the
solicitor general who presented the amicus
curiae brief in Reynolds, felt sure that the com-
plete realization of proportional repre-
sentation in every statehouse would
precipitate a major constitutional crisis
causing an enormous drop in public
support for the Court. What exactly
this crisis would involvebeyond giv-
ing urban, black and immigrant per-
sons a vote equal to everyone elsesno
one could specify.
Warren led the Court to a sweeping
decision that made one person, one
vote the rule for statehouses across the
nation. For the rest of his life, he would
refer to the Reynolds decision as the most
important of his career. The ruling
was broader than most observers ex-
pected, and the immediate results were
drastic, with states having to suddenly
revamp their districts for the first time
in decades. In Michiganone of the
most unevenly districted states in the
nationfourteen out of thirty-eight
State Senate incumbents chose to retire
before the next election, and another
nine were defeated.
Smith is right that Reynolds was an
important legal landmark. But some
of the books play-by-play analysis of the
case would have been better spent on con-
textor argument. Only in the epilogue
does he turn to the possibility that the deci-
sion in Reynolds, while epochal at the time,
has been almost entirely hollowed out by
the influence of money and sophisticated,
computer- aided gerrymandering, in which
voting districts are equally weighted but
drawn to maximize the re-election chances
of incumbents. These possibilities cast the
books carefully researched details in a some-
what tragic light: the democracys door-
step of the title seems less like a threshold
cleared and more like a mirage, floating
further and further in the distance even as
so many struggle in its name. n
one person, one vote: is there any
more concise expression of American sen-
timents about democracy? We know that
people are sometimes intimidated into not
voting or stripped of the right to cast a ballot;
that not every ballot always gets counted; and
that money plays an outsize role in shaping
the roster of candidates. Who could
argue with a straight face that it
could ever be otherwise?
In truth, though, one person,
one vote has been more principle
than reality for much of US history.
To this day, it doesnt really apply
at the federal level. Hawaii has
1.4 million residents; California
has 38 million. And yet both states
have two US senators. While each
Californians vote counts equally
when it comes to selecting Califor-
nias senators, those votes influence
the composition of the nations
Senate almost thirty times less than
votes cast in Hawaii. This inequity
is a product of the grand constitu-
tional compromise through which
individual states ceded their sov-
ereignty to the union. Each states
number of seats in the House of
Representatives is determined by
its population; but in the Senate,
all states are equal. Right or wrong,
thats the setup.
Until relatively recently, how-
ever, deviations from the ideal of equal rep-
resentation were in practice far beyond the
US Senate. Prior to 1964, most states based
representation in at least one house of their
legislature on factors other than popula-
tion. This meant the weight of individual
votes varied from district to district. In 1962,
writes the historian J. Douglas Smith in
On Democracys Doorstep: The Inside Story of
How the Supreme Court Brought One Per-
son, One Vote to the United States (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux; $35), only five states
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Oregon,
West Virginia, and Wisconsinapportioned
districts so that majorities in both cham-
Former Chief Justice Earl Warren on the eve of his eightieth birthday, March 18, 1971
H
E
N
R
Y

B
U
R
R
O
U
G
H
S

/

A
P
administrative creations of the states. This
may be truebut its also a hard sell to, say,
any high-schooler with a basic sense of fair-
ness. Why would a system that was manifestly
unjust at the state level be unobjectionable at
the federal one? And why should a compro-
mise from 225 years ago change the answer?
In 1946, a challenge to representational
disparities in Illinois reached the Supreme
Court in the case of Colegrove v. Green. The
Court, led by Felix Frankfurter, declined to
intervene on the Kafkaesque grounds that
the remedy for unfairness in districting
is to secureusing an unfair and self-
perpetuating systemState legislatures
that will apportion properly. Much of On
Democracys Doorstep is spent explaining, in Peter C. Baker is a writer in DeKalb, Illinois.
The Nation (ISSN 0027-8378) is published weekly (except for eleven double issues published the first week in January, the second week in March, from the second week in June through the sec-
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JOSHUA KOSMAN AND HENRI PICCIOTTO
Puzzle No. 3340
The Nation. 38 October 27, 2014
ACROSS
8 Monetary failure I almost resell for a large profit (6)
9 Dowdiest jockeys like a coin (3-5)
10 Old poem inscribed in cheddar (4)
11 Eloquent British novelist to nudge Austen in the rear
(4-6)
12 Misshape foreign accent (8)
14 Brutal raids preceding introduction of motion to take
guns away (6)
16 Artistic movement is fleet if 14, at first (4)
18 Fluff always involves a sponge (5)
19 Abomination is unruffled if 20 (4)
20 Showed disapproval, breaking dishes (6)
21 Managed moldy garbage any which way (8)
23 Body part where Polly, undressed, wears, e.g., a
diamond earring initially (10)
26 Charger gossip (4)
27 Told a story in article thats regressive and not suitable
for everyone (8)
28 Former Disney chief: I sneer rudely (6)
DOWN
1 Moved swiftly? Um, that sounds like good judgment
(6)
2 Suckers swallowing nonsense with man in the dumps
(5,5)
3 Stream is green if 8 (4)
4 Speechless sorrows float uncontrolled in commercials
(2,1,4,3,5)
5 Like a buggy telephone, plastic was red inside (5-5)
6 Drunkards game piece if 1 (4)
7 Darn! Blunder near a pest (5,3)
13 Unity note: put it in madmans diary (10)
15 Frightful shocks engulfing ancient Eastern workplace
(6,4)
17 Aristotle Onassiss #2 taking up an ounce for a
Phoenician, perhaps (8)
22 Heed tangled tinsel (6)
24 Attract protected status if 22 (4)
25 Nights before trepidation if 28 (4)
SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 3339
ACROSS 1 H(OM)EBREW 5 ER +
AS + ER 10 P(I)LAF (flap anag.)
11 ANTI-QUIT Y 12 hidden
13 I + RIS-[k/H] 15 anag. 18 EYE + W
+ EAR 19 O + VERB + ID
21 rev. hidden 23 flocks 24 anag.
28 TAG(SALON)G 29 anag.
30 setter anag., street anag.
31 TRA S[o]HCAN (rev.)
DOWN 1 HOP + I 2 ME LON
3 3 defs. 4 E-LAND 6 RE + QUIRE
7 S(PIC)INES + S 8 RA-[n/Y]-CH
+ ARLES 9 S(TAM)PEDE (speed
anag.) 14 anag. 16 P(REF)LIGHT
17 END + EAVOR (over a anag.)
20 BO(XC)ARS 22 MUFF + IN + S
25 TI(G)ER 26 CU + BIC 27 O + DIN
~1~2~3~4~5~6~7~
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s```````~d`````
~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~
HOMEBREW~ERASER
O~E~U~L~S~E~P~A
PILAF~ANTIQUITY
I~O~F~N~A~U~C~C
~INTANDEM~IRISH
S~~~L~~~P~R~N~A
IMPLODE~EYEWEAR
M~R~~~N~D~~~S~L
OVERBID~ENMASSE
N~F~O~E~~~U~~~S
PHLOX~ARTIFACT~
E~I~C~V~I~F~U~O
TAGSALONG~INBED
E~H~R~R~E~N~I~I
RETEST~TRASHCAN
Hints! Guidelines! Tips!
See Word Salad at thenation.com/blogs/word-salad.
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One Share, One Vote
Those with the largest stake in a company, get the most say. This
may be a reasonable way to run a publicly traded company, but it
should not be confused with actual representative democracy. This
confusion is at the heart of an attack on an important corporate
accountability tool the shareholder proposal.
Each year, publicly traded corporations issue proxy statements, asking their shareholders to elect the
board of directors and vote on a variety of matters, including any proposals offered by shareholders. If
you hold one hundred shares in a corporation, you get one hundred votes.
Social-issue shareholder proposals often present the concerns of those who are left out of the
corporate governance process, like employees and members of communities affected by corporate
activity. Ecosystems have no voice unless we speak on their behalf. Votes for these proposals have risen
dramatically over the past several decades, infuencing practices at thousands of companies.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful business lobby in the country, is asking the
Securities and Exchange Commission to reconsider its rules, and make it more diffcult for shareholder
activists to raise issues like climate change and human rights.
Most shareholders, the Chamber says, dont care about these issues. After all, they argue, these
proposals rarely receive a majority vote at corporate annual meetings.
The Chamber is confusing corporate democracy with real democracy. Remember that one share,
one vote principle? If a proposal receives a 10% vote, it does not mean that 90% of shareholders
opposed it. It means that 90% of the shares voted opposed it. Individuals arent counted. Only shares
are counted. And who controls the majority of those shares? Corporate executives, large mutual fund
managers and other institutional investors are voting on behalf of millions of individuals like you who
have never been asked their opinion.
It is simply false to say that most shareholders voted No
on proposals asking companies to disclose their political
contributions or report on their environmental impact when
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voicelessunless you speak up.
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