WALTER KIRN ON FAKE NEWS

WHAT AWAITS TRUMP IN AFGHANISTAN

HARPERS MAGAZINE/FEBRUARY 2017 $6.99

A RESISTERS GUIDE
LET THE COUNTERATTACK BEGIN
ELEVEN WRITERS GRAPPLE WITH THE TRUMP ERA
 m a g a z i n e
FOUNDED IN 1850 / VOL. 334, NO. 2001
FEBRUARY 2017
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Letters 2
Red Herring James Lewis, Mariya Y. Omelicheva
Easy Chair 5
A Grim Fairy Tale Walter Kirn
Harpers Index 9
Readings 11
The Moods of Animals Cyrus Console
Public Display Eileen Myles and Jill Soloway transparently discuss their love life
Soul Check Stephen Colbert leaves his conscience with the doorman
Comeback City Nathaniel Mackey
And . . . Olive Ayhens, Janet Delaney, Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi,
and women take Donald Trumps pickup game to court
Forum 25
TRUMP: A RESISTERS GUIDE Tim Barker, Kate Crawford, Katrina Forrester, Nimmi
Gowrinathan, Lawrence Jackson, Valeria Luiselli, Corey Robin,
Sarah Schulman, Celina Su, Simone White, Wesley Yang
From the Archive 39
On Martin Luther King David Halberstam
Miscellany 41
LITTLE THINGS Alice Gregory
The outsized pleasures of the very small
Annotation 48
MISTAKEN IDENTITIES Jesse Hicks and Matt Stroud
The curious case of ICE travel documents
Letter from Kabul 51
THE PATIENT WAR May Jeong
What awaits Trump in Afghanistan
Essay 60
THE NUMBER THAT NO MAN COULD NUMBER Anthony Heilbut
Black Americas civil war over gay rights
Poem 68
REMAINERS Graham Foust, introduction by Ben Lerner
Story 73
JB & FD John Edgar Wideman
Reviews 81
NEW BOOKS Christine Smallwood
BLOOD AND SOIL Justin E. H. Smith
The rise of vindictive nationalism
LIFE CHOICES Sam Sacks
Paul Austers multitudes
Puzzle 95 Richard E.Maltby Jr.
Findings 96 Cover: Illustration by Steve Brodner
 m a g a z i n e
LETTERS
John R. MacArthur, President and Publisher
Editor
James Marcus
Managing Editor
Hasan Altaf
Senior Editors
Katia Bachko, Emily Cooke,
Giles Harvey, Betsy Morais
Editor Emeritus
Lewis H. Lapham
Editor-at-Large
Ellen Rosenbush
Washington Editor
Andrew Cockburn
Art Director
Stacey Clarkson James
Deputy Art Director
Sam Finn Cate-Gumpert
Poetry Editor
Ben Lerner
Web Editor
Joe Kloc
Associate Editors
Camille Bromley, Matthew Sherrill
Assistant Editors
Winston Choi-Schagrin, Matthew Hickey, Red Herring was, make up fictions about Russia?
Ava Kofman, Stephanie McFeeters,
Rachel Poser There was no need. Russia may be a
Assistant to the Editor Andrew Cockburns article was en- re vanchist basket case, but the
Adrian Kneubuhl
Editorial Interns
tertaining in a creaky, retro kind of country is exceptionally skilled at
Duncan Barile, Karen Raizen, way [The New Red Scare, Letter cybersabotage. Since Putin assumed
Jacob Rosenberg, Niya Shahdad
Art Intern
from Washington, December]. Any- power, he has worked to find tools
Gregory Morrison one who has been paying attention and tactics that can compensate for
Contributing Editors knows that Vladimir Putins regime is his countrys military weakness. Un-
Andrew J. Bacevich, Kevin Baker, Dan Baum,
Tom Bissell, Joshua Cohen, John Crowley, filled with KGB siloviki who murder der his doctrine of New Generation
Rivka Galchen, William H. Gass,
Gary Greenberg, Jack Hitt, Edward Hoagland, journalists and political opponents, Warfare, Russia has sought to weak-
Scott Horton, Frederick Kaufman, invade neighboring countries, inter- en opponents and reshape Western
Garret Keizer, Mark Kingwell, Walter Kirn,
Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, fere in Western elections, and rou- opinion in the battle for informa-
Clancy Martin, Duncan Murrell, tinely threaten other nations with tion space, using online trolls, brib-
Vince Passaro, Francine Prose,
Christine Smallwood, Zadie Smith, nuclear annihilation. The siloviki fear ery, and hacking, as well as the
Rebecca Solnit, Matthew Stevenson, democracy, human rights, and other government-controlled news net-
John Edgar Wideman, Tom Wolfe
Contributing Artists ideas that jeopardize the regime. Mis- work, Russia Today. Analysts in the
Olive Ayhens, Lisa Elmaleh, Lena Herzog, interpreting American hubris for co- intelligence industry call this hybrid
Aaron Huey, Samuel James, Steve Mumford,
Richard Ross, Tomas van Houtryve, herent policy, they believe that the warfarea blend of covert action,
Danijel eelj
United States has a grand strategy for propaga nda, a nd technolog y
Vice President and General Manager
Lynn Carlson world domination, which includes intended to circumvent a lumbering
Vice President, Circulation the destruction of Russia. Cockburn United States.
Shawn D. Green
Vice President, Public Relations ignores all that. Instead, he relies on Many politicians and journalists
Giulia Melucci technological mumbo jumbo to dis- dont want to accept that Putin is
Vice President, Advertising
Jocelyn D. Giannini miss the threat of Russian hostility, innately hostile and determined to
Barbara Andreasson, Assistant to the Publisher quoting a source as saying that its fight us online. Instead, Cockburn
Kim Lau, Senior Accountant almost impossible to confirm attri- and others argue that we are facing
Eve Brant, Office Manager
Courtney Joyal, Staff bution in cyberspace. Almost im- a new Red Scarethat the threat
Advertising Sales: possible, yes, if your understanding of Russian antagonism has been in-
(212) 420-5760; Fax: (212) 260-1096
Natalie C. Holly, Advertising Sales Representative of espionage comes from spy novels. flated to justify spending on F-35
Marisa Nakasone, Production and Advertising Why would the Obama Adminis- fighter planes. This is nonsense. We
Services Manager tration, timid and legalistic as it should reject conspiracy theories
Sales Representatives
New York City: Peter D. Kendall and work to develop new strategies
(212) 420-5772; peter@harpers.org Harpers Magazine welcomes reader response. for a new kind of conflict.
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2 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017


Cockburn is right that American
intelligence agencies have, at times,
deliberately overstated the threat
Russia poses to the national security
and democratic institutions of the
United States. What he calls the
art of threat inflation has created a
dangerous Russophobia within the
American political system that could
cause a military miscalculation or,
worse, a full-blown war. Just because
we dont want to exaggerate the
threat, however, doesnt mean we
should ignore it altogether. We
should be very clear that Putin is
trying to erode the principled inter-
national order, and that tanks and
missiles are not his main weapons in
this fight.
Putin has already demonstrated his
ability to cripple the liberal-democratic
project. Under his leadership, Russia
has strengthened authoritarian re-
gimes, supported nationalist move-
ments in Europe, and launched a so-
phisticated war of information, which
includes global surveillance, counter-
communications, and media manipu-
lation. Its true that the Kremlins
involvement in the recent cyberat-
tacks against the D.N.C. will be
impossible to prove, but we know
that Russian hackers have perpe-
trated similar attacks before, and
they fit with what we know of Mos-
cows cyberwarfare strategy.
I worry that this threat, though
real, has been misunderstood. Some
in the intelligence community claim
that Russia cannot be trusted be-
cause its policies escape any rational
interpretation; they imagine that Pu-
tins muscular foreign policy is de-
signed to relaunch the Cold War.
Such thinking is counterproductive.
As of now, Russia is a normal state
driven by practical considerations
and clamoring for the world to re-
spect its values and interests, espe-
cially in Eurasia. But that could
change. I fear that Russophobia in
the United States may push Putin to
embrace an explicitly anti-Western
ideology. If that happens, we will
have created a real Red Scare.
Mariya Y. Omelicheva
Department of Political Science,
University of Kansas
Lawrence, Kan.
USING ALTERNATIVE
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[With Child, Letter from South
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notes, the catalyst for such legisla-
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pass lawswithin limitsin the
daedanomical
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Relying on that ruling, South Da-
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gauntlet of harmful restrictions go-
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LETTERS 3
BOLD & ESSENTIAL Reading
From its first gripping anecdote
to its concluding reflections
about inequality, College
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Martha Nussbaum

These stories provide a

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COLLEGE IN PRISON
Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration
Daniel Karpowitz

MONSTROUS REEL INEQUALITY HOLOCAUST THE EXTRAORDINARY TOXIC EXPOSURES

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Robert P. Kolker

rutgersuniversitypress.org
 EASY CHAIR
S
o, it happened. Mythmaking
beat math. Drama put data in its
place. A candidate who styled
himself a renegade outsider has be-
come the forty-fifth president. Its al-
most as though a humble serving girl
were changed by the wave of a wand
into a princess, or a stranger in bright
rags put a pipe to his lips and played
so wonderfully that all the children
of the village. . . If a hallmark of en-
during fairy tales and folktales is an
outsized, vivid character who over-
comes impossible odds, this is one
that should endure. And if a feature
of such tales is diffuse, collective
authorshipthe way they seem to
well up from the countryside rather
than issue from a writers penthis
one qualifies on that count too.
Still, a folktale needs more than
magic. It needs a moralone that
any child can grasp and that end-
less imperfect retellings cant cor-
rupt. Another tale from last fall
certainly bore such a lesson. Its the
story of a girl of grit and gumption
who faced many enemies, devel-
oped guile to match her great ambi-
tion, and prevailed against an age-
old prejudiceor would have, if
things had turned out differently.
For long stretches of the Clinton
campaignparticularly during the
drowsy August of private banquets
in the Hamptons and Marthas
Vineyardthe moral was practical-
ly all the story had; the underlying
action had mostly ceased.
A Grim Fairy Tale
By Walter Kirn
For Trump, however, the action
never ceased, though its meaning
seemed uncertain. This air of uncer-
tainty remains. Even assuming a les-
son can be drawn from events so
magnificently bizarre, who is best
qualified to find it? The collective
who conjured the story into exis-
tence or the prestige press that failed
both to credit and comprehend it?
There is another form of folklore
that may be relevant here: conspira-
cy theories. They were everywhere
last year, organizing and shaping
confusing realities so as to make
them intelligible. In this function,
they compete with the editorial pag-
es, but from an unconventional posi-
tion. Sincere conspiracy theorists,
despite the slurs so often hurled
against them, really do believe in
facts and revere the truth; its their
notion of how facts and truth relate
to each other that differs from jour-
nalistic orthodoxy. Because they as-
sume that the truth is often veiled,
and that what veils it is, of course,
the factsthe apparent facts, the
agreed-on facts, i.e., the liestruth-
seeking, for conspiracy theorists, is
more a matter of knowledge destruc-
tion than of knowledge gathering.
Until the first is complete, the sec-
ond cant even begin. Quite often it
never does.
Take the assassination of JFK.
Many people continue to believe
that a shady conspiracy lies behind it
because the symmetry-loving human
brain cant fathom how an effect of
such enormitythe violent murder
of a young, dynamic president
could proceed from a cause as puny
as one mans nuttiness. Its too arbi-
trary, this scenario. Hence grander,
more serious plots. Castro did it. The
Cosa Nostra. A militaristic cabal
within the government. Before these
schemes could even be looked into,
though, the facts at hand had to be
nullified. Oswald was a lousy marks-
man. There were fewer shell casings
in the snipers nest than shots neces-
sary to inflict the wounds. And so
on, until it was a mystery ripe for
renovating into a tragedy, with vil-
lains whose stature was closer to the
dead heros and whose motives were
of proportional depth and darkness.
A
n honest literary history of
Election 2016 must include
all sorts of narrative threads,
an unusually high number of them
factually dubious. It was a story told
in many modes, whose creators were
often hidden from plain view and
distributed, folktale style, among the
multitudes. The unclassifiable con-
test between think-tanky expertise
and populist bombast, academically
sanctioned identity politics and neo-
Prussian bugle calls to duty, had
broadened my sense of what news
was, and conspiracy theories helped
me cope with the tension. Week by
week since the primaries had started
and day by day once the conventions
EASY CHAIR 5
 were over, I found myself supplement-
ing my normal regimen of reputable
publications with an assortment of
speculative, eccentric, and occasion-
ally flat-out wacky blog posts, Reddit
discussions, YouTube rants, and com-
ment threads.
One reason Id started roving so
far afield was that it no longer felt
very far. The distance from what
was formerly the center to what had
long constituted the fringes of opin-
ion and analysis had shrunk to no
distance at all. A click could take
me anywhere. I grew to enjoy the
rhythms of these weird hops, which
felt like the jump cuts in an action
movie and accurately reflected the
swerves and jerks of the campaign.
Zoom in on Paul Krugman, eminent
economist, discoursing on the bless-
ings of free trade; pan to Alex Jones,
sweaty unmasker of globalist in-
trigues, predicting uprisings and riots;
then over to someone on Twitter with
nineteen followers, whose jabs against
Trump supporters and Sanders die-
Sign up to
hards were redolent of Correct the
Record, the pro-Clinton social-media
gang. On to the amusingly scurvy
VOLUNTEER Drudge Report, then the old-time
hard-left CounterPunch. What cen-
ter? What fringe? Inside the black
hole of the new media universe,
space collapses to a singularity.
The elections atmosphere of in-
trigue contributed to my manic in-
vestigations. Puzzles and secrets were
everywhere; who could guess where
solutions might pop up? Trump was
refusing to release his tax returns,
and the executive editor of the New
York Times suggested that he would
risk going to jail if that were the pen-
alty for publishing them. There was
also the matter of Paul Manafort,
Trumps disgraced former campaign
chief, who may have had links to
Vladimir Putin. And Putin himself
was on the prowl, it seemed. The so-
called D.N.C. leaks from Guccifer
2.0 were the work of Putins minions.
Or maybe not. Certain blogs and
subreddits I visited held that the
leaker was an idealistic young Demo-
cratic Party insider, whod been privy
to tawdry machinations he felt
should be exposed. The theory went
that after the leak, he was murdered
in retribution on a dark street in
6 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
Washington, D.C. Julian Assanges
WikiLeaks offered a reward for infor-
mation about the killer.
Just as the press was declaring the
election over, the whistle-blowing
group unsheathed a dagger after
promising a mighty sword. I was spell-
bound nonetheless. Ive never much
relished reading things I should
college textbooks, quality bestsellers,
crinkly pharmaceutical inserts on
dosages and side effectsbut reading
what Im told I shouldnt has beguiled
me ever since I spied a copy of Valley
of the Dolls stashed behind my fathers
law books. When CNNs Chris
Cuomo implied on the air one day
that reading the WikiLeaks emails
was somehow illegal for average
citizensthough not, of course, for
journalistsI charged ahead with
extra zeal.
The first several batches of emails
were fairly boring. Most were petty
and procedural, revealing a fretful, in-
sular campaign obsessed with control-
ling its treatment by the media, many
of whose highest-profile members it
counted as friends in a way that
seemed untoward. But then came
what WikiLeaks teasingly called
Phase Three and the infamous Pizza-
gate scandal it unleashed, which is
still with usand will be, I guaran-
tee, throughout Trumps term. The
theory has just the strange juju our
new president attracts and appears to
enjoy consuming personally. Its
theme of organized ritual pedophilia
among the political illuminati is also
a perfect metaphoric vehicle for gen-
eralized suspicion of all insiders
which may have been its appeal to
the armed kook who showed up at a
D.C. pizzeria in early December pre-
pared to confront the mythical evil-
doers. That the scandal was re-
vealed around the same time as a
series of DDoS attacks that briefly
blacked out Twitter and silenced
WikiLeaks was an added bonus, the
sort of provocative coincidence that
devotees of far-fetched cover-ups
find dispositive.
W
hich brings me to late No-
vember, when I returned to
the web in search of mor-
ally trenchant explanations of Trumps
unanticipated win. I should say that
Id felt it coming. How? The gift of
distance, one might say. I live in rural
Montana, whose isolation from the
great opinion centers proved clarifying
in this year of hostility to great opin-
ion centersand the wealth and
power feeding them. That force might
not have seemed so propulsive, so
pounding, inside river-bound New
York, gridlocked L.A., or Beltway-
wrapped D.C., but out here in the
great wide open it boomed like thun-
der. The beanstalk was coming down,
and the giant would fall. The internet
dwellers expected this outcome, too;
their jumpy, overexcited state was like
that of gophers before an earthquake.
The only ones who didnt know what
was coming were those who believed
they were in the know already. Such
smugness is also annoying to watch
after a while, since nothing stirs re-
sentment like blithe mistakenness in
those who make a living correcting
others. Witness the story in the Wash-
ington Post from November 24, which
ended my search for postelectoral clo-
sure with the most disturbing theory
yetdisturbing because of its source,
not its content. (That prize still goes
to Pizzagate.)
America had been duped, the story
proclaimed, or at least enough of
America to swing things. Trumps
barely bar-clearing win had been a
trick, an act of cunning international
mischief. Spread by Russia, ostensi-
bly, using the World Wide Web, and
preying on an impressionistic elector-
ate in an inordinately distrustful
mood, fake news was a villainous
phenomenon well suited to outraged
moralizing. The article even linked
to a long list of the websites and blogs
where true conspirators had planted
their fraudulent conspiracy theories
to discredit Clinton and foment the
sort of anger and distrust supposedly
favorable to Trump.
The Drudge Report. CounterPunch.
Naked Capitalism. (How in my many
trips down the rabbit hole had I
missed Naked Capitalism?) It was an
extensive catalogue, with no ideologi-
cal coherence. And readers were
urged to take on faith that it cohered
at all. Whod compiled the list of
news sites? A sketchy-sounding outfit
called PropOrNot, whose members,
alas, would not be named so as to
shield them from foreign spooks.
Were the sites aware of the plot? Not
necessarily. Many of them were use-
ful idiots, as were their readers, the
Post implied. The article also gestured
toward a filter, potentially supplied by
Google and Facebook, that would
deny readers access to problem sto-
ries. That way the idiots couldnt be
used again.
When a free press starts eating its
own tail by opposing the freedom to
read as a means of fashioning a
moral for a story that it grasped
poorly to begin with, the Trump
win finally starts making sense: its
an old-fashioned anticlerical rebel-
lion. Not that the Posts fake-news
thesis lacked merit. I had proved as
gullible as anyone, at times, to
propaganda-tainted trash. But wasnt
that my right? To figure things out
for myself, even at the risk of being
misinformed? Wasnt that the right 0XVLFDOFKDLUV
of all Americans? Putin obviously
knew it was, or he wouldnt have at the highest
paid it tribute by exploiting it. And
Trump (whose own chronic bullying
of the media is itself a danger to
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press freedom) knew it alsodid he
ever. The man is a salesman, and The UKs leading provider of site-
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the nomination of a laughable, beat- you will never feel merely part of
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able Pied Piper candidate named
Donald Trump. Or CNNs belief in its
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EASY CHAIR 7
 HARPERS INDEX
Cost of a baby-stroller cleaning, with wheel detailing, at Tot Squad in New York City : $119.99
Percentage of Americans worth $25,000,000 or more who make at least $10,000 in charitable contributions each year : 65
Who spend at least that much on home improvement : 69
Amount Germany paid in November for Thomas Manns Los Angeles home, which was in danger of demolition : $13,250,000
Percentage of German garbage that is recycled : 47
Of Turkish garbage : 0
Amount invested by the Obama Administration in training former coal workers to operate drones : $2,200,000
Estimated percentage of Florida homes that will be underwater by 2100 : 13
Percentage by which a person reduces their paper consumption immediately after chopping down trees in virtual reality : 20
Net change, in acres, in the worlds forested land since 1990 : 319,000,000
In Chinas : +126,500,000
Percentage by which the global wildlife population has declined since 1970 : 58
Amount the United States will spend to train giant African rats to detect illegal shipments of plants and wildlife : $100,000
Number of federal agencies that conducted experiments on dogs during the 2015 fiscal year : 5
Portion of those experiments that involved significant pain and distress : 1/4
Percentage change since 2010 in calls to the Pet Poison Helpline about pets that have eaten marijuana : +448
Date on which the British government publicly confirmed the presence of animal fat in the new five-pound note : 11/28/2016
Number of British notes that were destroyed in 2015 for being chewed or eaten : 5,364
Portion of the Canadian military that is overweight : 1/2
That is obese : 1/4
Number of Canadian jobs that were abolished when the government launched a more efficient payroll system last year : 700
Of Canadians who then experienced payment delays because of system errors : 80,000
Percentage of Zimbabwean government spending that goes toward paying public employees : 97
Number of participants in a 2016 poll on North Koreans political attitudes, the largest such poll ever conducted : 36
Factor by which the number of Chinese students attending U.S. high schools has increased over the past ten years : 43
Percentage of college admissions officers who look at applicants social-media accounts : 40
Minimum portion of the fifty largest U.S. police departments that use predictive policing software : 2/5
Percentage change in downloads of Signal, an encrypted text and calling app, since the presidential election : +400
Value of donations given to the American Civil Liberties Union in the week after the election : $7,200,000
In the week after the 2012 election : $27,806
Number of Supreme Court decisions repudiating Korematsu v. United States, which legalized Japanese-American internment : 0
Rank of 2015 among years with the most reported hate crimes against U.S. Muslims : 2
Of 2001 : 1
Days after becoming the first Somali-American lawmaker that Ilhan Omar was harassed in a cab for being Muslim : 28
Minimum number of individuals whom Donald Trump has directly insulted on Twitter since he declared his candidacy : 160
Date on which Trump tweeted that the musical American Idiot was an amazing theatrical experience : 4/21/2010
Number of floors by which the Trump World Towers advertised height exceeds its actual height : 19
Minimum number of countries in which Trump has business interests : 25
Rank of corrupt government officials among Americans greatest fears : 1
Of climate change : 17

Figures cited are the latest available as of December 2016. Sources are listed on page 47.
Harpers Index is a registered trademark.

HARPERS INDEX 9
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 READINGS
[Essay]
THE MOODS OF
ANIMALS
By Cyrus Console, from Romanian Notebook, a
memoir that will be published next month by Far-
rar, Straus and Giroux. Console is the author of
two volumes of poetry. His poem A Man of Lim-
ited appeared in the December 2016 issue of
Harpers Magazine.
I
t is loneliness, or a panic brought on by
the acuteness of the loneliness, that drives
me to the pet store to purchase the mouse, a
tiny thing whose potential efficacy against
these feelings is plainly zero or close to zero,
the low expectations manifest in such a plan
classically symptomatic of the depression
that marks my third year at the University of
Kansas. There is an aspectlater to become
all too familiarof trying to cheer myself up
by means that would have worked only in
childhood, for example a trip to the pet store,
a place I now despise, though once I loved it
better than the zoo.
One rainy afternoon a week or some weeks
later, probably my last afternoon in the blue
apartment on Kentucky Street, I spend hitting
the bong and watching the mouse tremble in
my cupped palm. After that it goes into the ter-
rarium with the cedar shavings, the months
supply of water and food pellets, never again to
roam, though it travels with me when I move
home to Topeka, where, so caged, it abides on a
dark shelf in the garage.
I change the water a couple of times and
dump more food pellets into the maroon rame-
kin. I put a whole roll of toilet paper in the ter-
rarium, a stoned idea but not a stupid one. The
mouse shreds some of the paper and sleeps, I
believe, in a nest or bed constructed of this ma-
terial inside the cardboard tube. As winter ar-
rives I sometimes wonder if the mouse is cold. I
glance at the dark shelf beside me when I open
the refrigerator for beer.
Some winters later, against similar contingen-
cies of mood or affect, having recurred once more
to my parents house, I retrieve another Michelob
and try to remember when and how I disposed of
the mouses body, as I feel sure I must have done.
I make the old effort to reassure myself that what
the mouse really wanted, what it wanted most,
was to be left alone, something doubtless true in
its way. One night I leave the refrigerator door
ajar and the beer freezes, splitting its
R
fluted golden cans.
eaching middle agethe rare accom-
plishment in which I feel I am precocious
brings with it one change, namely that it seems
too much work to persist as a vegetarian now
READINGS 11
 that I have married a Romanian woman. I
sometimes suspect, without allowing myself to
investigate the suspicion, that this is slated to
be my lifes great moral failing: to say, yes, so
much suffering, an ocean of suffering to which
I contribute, whose tide I no longer make any
effort to stem; grief, pain, and dread that over-
whelm any love in the world and to which with
each meal I myself add fresh blood, though I
might choose otherwise.
There is a passage in John Cages Indeterminacy
in which, after a concert whose program notes
include a statement about there being too much
suffering in the world, Cage remarks to the com-
poser that in his opinion there is neither too
much nor too little, but just the right amount.
[Options]
CRASH-TEST DUMMY
From exercises presented by the Moral Machine, a
website developed by MIT. The exercises ask users
to decide which outcome a self-driving car should
choose in the event of sudden brake failure.
either one man, one woman, one boy, and one
girl are dead or three criminals and two babies
are dead
either two male doctors, one female doctor,
one male executive, and one female executive
are dead or five criminals are dead
either one elderly man is dead or five crimi-
nals are dead
either one elderly woman and four cats are
dead or five babies are dead
either five babies are injured or five cats are dead
either one male executive is dead or one female
executive is dead
either one man and one woman are dead or
one large man and one large woman are dead
either five homeless people are dead or five
criminals are dead
either five babies are dead or five babies are dead
12 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
I have a vision of myself as John Baldessari
standing in front of a boxy Seventies-era cam-
era and moving my arm minimally, first one
way, then the other, turning slightly to face
the camera with each gesture, and with each
announcing, I am causing pain, I
I
am causing pain.
n Romania, the urban roadway varies from
fresh asphalt to loose cobblestones to rocks
and dust, with most everything in between,
but the better ones are divided and subdivided
by a variety of dashed lines or medians, some-
times distinguished from one another by the
length or frequency of the dashes. As in the
United States, motorists drive on the right
side of the road, but in other respects traffic
dynamics differ.
Animals led, ridden, or driven, and horse carts,
of which there are many, composites of welded
steel and rough-hewn wood, are confined to the
rightmost lane. Faster vehicles move in the lane
an American would call the left lane, except
when passing another vehicle, a maneuver that
requires them to straddle the middle two lanes,
their own left lane and the left lane belonging to
oncoming traffic, so that despite the existence of
four lanes, vehicles traveling in opposite direc-
tions must frequently, if not constantly, occupy
the same two lanes, competing for space in a
game of chicken that I find upsetting.
My Romanian friend George is playing some
kind of very irritating and, to me, terrifying game
against his wife, Alice, who drives in front of us.
He speeds behind her, tailgating more and more
closely until the cars bumpers touch. George,
youre making me uncomfortable, I speak up. He
coughs or laughs. Why, he says. He says why as
if it were an unfamiliar word. Because if some-
thing happened, I say, we could have a very bad
accident this way. The children could be injured.
Wordlessly and after a slight delay that I experi-
ence as an affair of honor, George backs slowly off
the kodas bumper.
Then on the road from Iasi to Rotunda I
see a stray dog crossing, every part of whose
body communicates pain, shame, and un-
comprehending sorrow. To the base of his
tail some person or group of people has fas-
tened three two-liter plastic bottles partially
filled with pebbles.
I dont like this, George says in his laborious
English, gesturing toward the animal. And I dont
understand why just to make more evil. This is
why I dont like the hunting.
We are digesting a breakfast of pork chops,
George and I, but I decide not to air the radical
and probably disturbing view that industrialized
production of a pork chop is incomparably cru-
eler than shooting a deer through the lungs. Meat
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HEMPHILL FINE ARTS, WASHINGTON
Listen to My Song of Freedom, a painting by Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, whose work was on view last month at Hemphill Fine Arts, in Washington.
production in Romania is less industrialized, may-
be not at all industrialized; for the moment
George and I might agree that seeing this dog has
caused us more particular discomfort than any
idea of the fate awaiting faceless deer or pigs.
As Georges car manages the noisy transition
from asphalt to the gravel surface of the village
road, I try to ease the emotionswhich I am not
sure even how to nameprovoked by the sight
of the dog with the three bottles tied to his tail.
Pity and sorrow, if I can use such terms for a
bodily state significant chiefly because I find it in-
tensely uncomfortable, a discomfort I now try, as
I say, to alleviatethe only effort I make, as op-
posed to some effort to change the world. The
bottles are visibly abraded and battered, as
though attached in this manner they have trav-
eled long distances. I try to visualize the dog
finding shelter and with deft front teeth gnawing
the poly cord that binds them.
I try to visualize some kind person helping the
dog, tempting his approach with a piece of meat,
catching hold of him firmly but gently, and cutting
the mortifying bottles free. But of course the dog
has been tempted in this manner once before.
I visualize the tail blackening and falling pain-
lessly away at the ligature, the dog feeling relief or
joy at having been thus freed. But a sound like
thousands of plastic bottles scraping the ground
intrudes on the rumination and I find myself sur-
veying an infinite abandoned city of the Eastern
Bloc, a version of hell in which huge packs of dogs
run ceaselessly, dogs of all pedigrees, each trailing
a cluster of plastic bottles.
I observe that the discomfort of having seen the
dog is not so intense now as in the first moments
and it is this thought alone that brings me some
relief. The image is fading, I think, though I can
still see it vividly and painfully, the dog crossing
over and over with the three bottles tied to his tail.
The feeling is diminishing, I reassure
T
myself. The pity is going away.
he next night as I lie in bed, I notice that
it has been more than twenty-four hours since
Ive remembered the dog with the bottles tied
READINGS 13
 to his tail. Not even when I took my daugh-
ter across the street to see the neighbors cow
and pigs and we saw the chow mix thrashing
at the end of a chain just long enough to
reach fully into, or fully out of, the scrap-
lumber doghouse, onto the bare earth turned
continually by these exertions, did the dog
with the bottles tied to his tail come to
mind. I think of a German shepherd I saw
sometimes in Topeka, standing always on top
of her plywood doghouse, presumably since
that was at least something to do or some-
where to be.
Which dog suffers less? And how much less
is the suffering of the pigs in their dark pen, or
the cow in hers? What to these creatures are
light and freedom, weighed against security and
food? At least they will be spared the long and
terrifying ride in the stock trailer, the only
place I ever see American pigs, their loose stool
threading the wind, streaming out from the
[Remedies]
NO CHILD LEFT
BEHIND
Methods women have used to induce abortion at
times throughout history when clinical procedures
were illegal or unavailable.
Drink lye
Swallow acid
Brew tea made of manure
Take a wormwood-tea enema
Douche with chili peppers
Apply a leech to the vagina
Insert a coat hanger into the uterus
Puncture the uterus with a bicycle spoke
Blow air into the uterus with a turkey baster
Squat over a pot of boiling onions
Pull out a tooth
Starve oneself
Bind the waist
Knead the abdomen
Hit the abdomen with a meat pulverizer
Beat the stomach with a baseball bat
Have two strong men shake the body
Take a bath in boiling water
Spend the night in the snow
Apply electric shocks to the thighs and groin
Jump off the roof
14 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
punched aluminum sides, the animals so
crowded they cannot lie down, a percentage
dying in transit.
I think of the research animalsmice, dogs,
pigs, primateson whom our present comfort
depends, creatures who do not so much give up
their lives as accept living hells in order that
we might have toothpaste or shaving cream or
cell-free fetal-DNA studies.
The new thing is that the suffering does
not have to be also mine. I look away, figura-
tively and literally, from the dog on its chain
or the civilian with a blasted daughter in his
arms; I can acknowledge this pain without
choosing to feel it empathically, without feel-
ing any part of it after the very first shock of
its recognition, which is not even really palpa-
ble, more like drawing back from a hot stove,
a subcognitive neurological process that never
ascends higher than the spinal cord.
The worst feature of this lapse is the calculus
that I, too, will have a share in the suffering;
not in the distribution of it but in the receipt of
it, that my portion of suffering is to come, that
in the long view I will be one of the victims, no
meaningful distinction between me and the
other animals marked for slaughter, no slaughter
on my behalf.
What draws my thoughts again and again down
into the topic of suffering is not compassion so
much as fearful conviction that suffer-
I
ing is pure, unalloyed participation.
dont believe I ever gave the mouse a name, the
one I left to die in the garage, though lately in my
thoughts I refer to it as the depression mouse, as
contradistinct to the compost mouse living in the
bin behind our house in Kansas City, the happiest
genetically unmodified mouse in the world, who
presides over a network of tunnels in the kitchen
midden. Every day, sometimes twice a day, I dump
banana peels or mango seeds or stale tortillas. Fer-
ment keeps the compost warm all winter, not that
there is a winter to speak of anymore. When I lift
the lid I see the mouses hindquarters disappearing
into the mouth of one burrow or another.
It would be stupid to think of the new mouse
as compensating for the old one, even stupider
to think of it as atonement, but to catch sight
of her fills me with relief and even joy.
Eventually the compost mouse relocates to
the kitchen cabinet, where, with a noise like
icebergs calving, her gnawing keeps us up at
night. Then, foreleg pinned under the hammer
of the trap, she wakes us one last time with the
sound of thrashing and something like a
scream, more of a piping I guess. After a mo-
ment of eye contact, I break a wooden spoon
over her head. Small danger, I think to myself,
small mercy.
[Dialogue]
PUBLIC DISPLAY
From a conversation between Eileen Myles and
Jill Soloway that was held in October at the Ham-
mer Museum, in Los Angeles. Myles is the author
of nineteen works of poetry, fiction, and non-
fiction. Soloway is the creator of the television
show Transparent.
jill soloway: Should I start?
eileen myles: You start. I think youre talking.
soloway: We were going to talk about how we
met, right?
myles: We met very much like this, we met
onstage.
soloway: We met on a panel.
myles: So this is a continuation of that
experience.
soloway: We feel most comfortable on panels.
myles: One of the oddities we share is that
this is a comfort zone for both of us. To be
frank, this is an intimate space, and I think
were feeling that, and we hope youre feel-
ing that.
soloway: We were talking recently about the
intimacy of public love, and you were talking
to me about selling your papers.
myles: Part of the narrative of being a poet is
that you write for years in notebooks and
on pieces of paper, and at some point you
start to hear that theres a cash-in moment,
if you dont die young. (If you die young,
somebody else will cash in.) If anybody was
interested in your work, theres a point
where college libraries buy your papers. Ive
heard it said about other people that as
soon as they sell their papers, their letters
start to get a little weird. You know it when
you get a letter from this person. You feel
like theyre suddenly talking to the ages.
Ive started to get a new feeling when I
write in my journal; I feel like I have about
a hundred people looking over my shoulder.
Im not quite alone with my journal any-
moreIm sliding onto the shelf at Yale.
This stage gives me the same feeling. There
is this weird elision of public and private,
where the two become the same.
soloway: This is why we thought it would be
good to hash out some of our most difficult
moments with you guys. The first thing to say
is that were not actually dating anymore. No.
Yet to the blogosphere, to the five lesbian
blogs that care, were like Jay-Z and Beyonc.
We love being that. At one point, when I
was trying to be like you, I wrote a poem that
was called You Be Jay-Z, Ill Be Beyonc
myles: Actually you said, You Be Gertrude
Stein, Ill Be Beyonc. I was like, really?
Huh, thanks.
soloway: We keep reading that were in a rela-
tionship, but were not.
myles: Ill call Jill and ask, Are we in a rela-
tionship?
soloway: Were doing something, right?
myles: Were doing something right now with
you guys. I remember the conversation we had
before at the Jewish Museum in San Francisco.
soloway: Thats where we met.
myles: Jill said something, and I said, I think
you just sexually abused an entire roomful
of people.
soloway: What did you mean by that?
myles: I cant remember. The problem is, if you
do a public conversation that gets recorded
and goes on the web, youre the last person
who will ever listen to it.
[Testimony]
LOCKER-ROOM TALK
From accounts of incidents in which women allege
that they were sexually harassed or assaulted by
Donald Trump. The accusations were told to
journalists and lawyers over the past four decades.
Told her how special she was
Told her he would be dating her
Gave her his number
Asked her to call him
Called her for sex
Asked her to come into his office alone
Invited her to his hotel room
Walked into her dressing room
Led her into the bedroom
Embraced her
Kissed her colleagues
Kissed her friend without asking permission
Kissed her on the lips
Kissed her on the lips, aggressively
Forced his tongue down her throat
Pushed her against the wall
Grabbed her arm
Grabbed her ass
Put his hands up her skirt
Touched her breast
Touched her vagina through her underwear
Pulled out fistfuls of hair from her scalp
Raped her
READINGS 15

Hidden in the Shadows, a hand-altered daguerreotype by James Tylor, whose work is on view this month at the Art Gallery
of New South Wales, in Sydney.
soloway: We havent listened to it. But
somebody told me today that they did, and
they could hear the sound of us falling in
love in it.
myles: Like the sound of fairy dust falling.
soloway: We did fall in love on that stage.
myles: Can we talk about how we got into
this thing?
soloway: I was stalking Eileen. We were in
the writers room on Transparent and we
started creating the character of Leslie, who
is based on Eileen, while I was planning on
meeting Eileen and becoming her new girl-
friend. It was all happening at the same
time. I went to the San Francisco museum
planning to seduce you.
myles: But werent you styling a character? You
decide youre going to get this person, and
how are you going to get them? By being
yourself? No. Youre going to create a charac-
ter that they would like. You did something
like that.
soloway: I did. One of the things that were
still processing as a couple is that.
myles: As a post-couple.
16 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND STILLS GALLERY, PADDINGTON, AUSTRALIA
soloway: If youre close readers of our relation-
ship, you might have noticed that when we
broke up, that was the end of my femme pre-
sentation. I think I became the most femme
version of myself as I was imagining you fall-
ing in love with me.
myles: She was a nova of femme. Now youre a
black star of femme.
soloway: Ive turned a corner. Which is why
were in a new version of thingsa little more
brotherly, dare I say?
myles: Like a couple of cubs.
soloway: Maybe I just wanted to be you. That
happens a lot, right?
myles: When I loved boysand I loved boys
actively until I was around twenty-seven
so many of my crushes on men were on the
men whom I wanted to be. I dont know
how homosexual that is. Its the desire to
become the other.
soloway: But you can fall in love with some-
body whos quite your opposite. You had al-
ways dated younger women. I was the oldest
younger woman shes ever dated. There were
kneesocks involved.
myles: I was like, Why is she wearing knee-
socks? This is so interesting.
soloway: I imagined myself as Eileens girl-
friend, and that provided a space for the per-
son I became. I wanted to be smart enough
for you to think I was smart.
myles: You are such a brilliant person, I have to
say, but go ahead.
soloway: Being Eileens femme girlfriend let me
relax because it made me feel kind of dumb.
myles: An amazing performance.
soloway: I wasnt just her femme girlfriend, I
was her dumb femme girlfriend.
myles: One night we both had events in New
York and afterward there was a party at the
top of the Standard. One of the women that
I read with came over to Jill and asked,
Who are you?
soloway: I dont know what I said.
myles: You said, I am her dumb girlfriend.
soloway: Oh.
myles: I am her stupid girlfriend. It was amaz-
ing. It was totally kitsch. Nobody whos a stu-
pid girlfriend says, Hi, Im her stupid girl-
friend. You looked so happy. I had almost
never seen you so happy.
soloway: I was happy. Besides this idea of myself
as this kneesock-wearing, femme Eileen Myles
love-object, I really wanted to get into some po-
ems. I was like, I want to be in some poems.
myles: You were immediately in some. The
whole month of May was a poem about fall-
ing in love with you. The whole city of New
York was this incredible ad for my heart.
soloway: The gender thing is just one day at a
time. I remember when we were in Berlin and
somebody was doing my hair and makeup. I
was backed up against the wall in the bath-
room. I kept putting my head against the wall
as this guy was coming at me with eyeliner, and
I was like, stop it! I realized I couldnt stand the
amount of makeup that had to be put on me to
make me interesting to people on a press tour. I
started feeling like, why do I have to get anoth-
er face drawn on top of my face to make people
want to talk to me? I had to become pretty to
be able to express my ideas publicly, and that
started to feel awful.
myles: I remember that bathroom. It looked
like some place where you do weeks of
drugs. And then the guy came in with the
makeup case, asking, Where is there a
room light enough to do the makeup?
And for some reason I was being the help-
ful girlfriend, and I said, Oh, the bath-
room, which was where you would make
sure you didnt lose any cocaine. It was like
the brightest bathroom in all of Nazi Ger-
many, and so I led him in there where Jill
was being tortured.
soloway: It felt like a turning point. I came
home, cut off my hair, and started to feel
more comfortable, started to notice that
when I moved through the world butch, I
had a much better time. I was able to express
myself, I was able to have real conversations
and be present. That came first, not our
breaking up, but the slow realization that we
were sort of both butch.
myles: Ive only had two- or four-year relation-
ships in my life, Ive never gotten very far.
The point at which the couple becomes pub-
lic and everybody thinks of you as you and
that person is usually for me when the flow-
er starts to fade.
soloway: As we were coming out as a couple, we
could see that the relationship was also com-
ing to an end. Somebody was writing a profile
about me for The New Yorker, and I was ner-
vous about being out and coming out. I really
wanted to come out in the New Yorker font. I
[Instructions]
TO HAVE AND TO
HOLD
From the website of Finlands World Wife-Carrying
Championships. The competition has been held
annually since 1995.
T
here are four customary styles to carry
the wife: piggyback, dangling upside down,
thrown over the shoulder, and crosswise. You
may also create a new personal style. It is pref-
erable to wear clothes that wont be stripped
off while running. Tools known to be benefi-
cial are birch switches, swimming goggles, and
swimming slippers. The track consists of sand,
forested terrain, a water obstacle, and two log
hurdles. If your style is wife dangling upside
down, remember that in the pool the wifes
head is likely to go underwater.
The core of the race is a woman, a man,
and their relationship. Intuitive understanding
and becoming one with the partner are essen-
tial in both. Generally the best wife is ones
own. All the more if she is harmonious, gen-
tle, and able to keep her balance. It is possible
to train for the competition in daily routines:
the bath, the supermarket, the playground.
Wife-carrying is good for your relationship.
READINGS 17
 felt like that would protect me somehow. But
by the time the article came out, we kind of
knew that we werent together anymore.
I want to stay in this butch place for a
while. I feel like Im a much better parent
when I think of myself as gender-noncon-
forming than as a woman. Im a so-so
mother. Im a great father, a fantastic fa-
ther. Im so connected as a father. As a
mother, Im really busy. These thought ex-
ercises of Well, how would I be if I were a
male? How would I be if I werent consid-
ered female? Id be succeeding at so many
of the things that historically I think of
myself as a failure in.
audience member: I feel like an asshole ask-
ing you guys this, because its not important
at all. But I have to know why you broke up.
myles: We knew somebody was going to ask.
soloway: There were a few breakups, right?
myles: In a long-distance relationship you put
on a certain kind of show when you see each
other. And then you go back to your regular
life, and you think about that.
soloway: Ill take some of the blame.
myles: Thats crazy.
soloway: Okay, Ill take all the blame.
myles: No, some is good.
soloway: I remember a day when I had walked
across Los Angeles. I was so excited that we
loved each other that I walked from my
[Expressions]
ON FIRST THOUGHT
From a list of clichs that authors have used in more
than half their works. The list was compiled by Ben
Blatt and appears in Nabokovs Favorite Word Is
Mauve, which will be published next month by
Simon & Schuster.
Jane Austen: With all my heart
William Faulkner: Sooner or later
Donna Tartt: Too good to be true
Salman Rushdie: The last straw
Stephenie Meyer: Sigh of relief
J. K. Rowling: Dead of night
Jodi Picoult: Sixth sense
Dan Brown: Full circle
Tom Clancy: By a whisker
Suzanne Collins: Put two and two together
E. L. James: Words fail me
18 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
house in Silver Lake all the way to La Ciene-
ga. I felt so excited and alive. I was taking
pictures and texting you. That was a beauti-
ful day. I had been married for seven years
and heterosexual for fifty. Somewhere
around my turning fifty, my parent came out
as trans; I created a piece of culture that fi-
nally made me feel less starved for attention,
so I felt like I was a quote-unquote success;
my marriage ended; and I was questioning
whether I was straight or gay or queer. I felt
too unstable to be a good, kind, loving, re-
flective partner.
myles: You know, we were dating, loving each
other, and at some point, you have to get to
the next point.
soloway: Beyond the projection.
myles: And it wasnt possible. It didnt feel like
there was room for that to happen.
soloway: But we still do a lot of the fun things
of being in love, like talking on the phone,
and getting together.
myles: In many ways I feel closer to you than
anybody else in my life.
Were doing a little bit of a lesbian-style di-
vorce, in which you sort of break up, and then
you stay with each other forever. The car was
going faster than we could. The thing was
public, but we were breaking up, so then what
do we do with this public cartoon?
soloway: This is what we do with the public
cartoon.
myles: At some point I remember accusing
you: I think you want to have a public re-
lationship with me! You were outraged.
Like, How dare you say that! Then you
called me back in about a week and said,
Youre right. I do want to have a public re-
lationship. And I had to decide whether I
was going to go to the Golden Globes with
you. I was like, Of course I want to go. So
then we were all over the newswe had
just broken up, and we were all over the
fucking newspaper.
soloway: We were able to have fun, actually,
once we broke up and started doing things
together. Before, I was constantly riddled
with relationship questions, like, Is this
right? Is this forever? Is this working?
Theres the falling-in-love stuff where you
wear the kneesocks, and then there is the
real stuff.
myles: I guess when we got to the question of
Are we going to do this? we didnt stop
doing this. And honestly, I have to say, I
love you.
soloway: I love you, too, Eileen.
myles: So were doing something.
soloway: Were doing something.
myles: But were not doing that.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SCHILT PUBLISHING & GALLERY, AMSTERDAM
Mellarium #1, an infrared photograph from the series The Apiary, by Edward Thompson. His book, The Unseen, was published last year by
Schilt Publishing.
[Tutelage]
SOUL CHECK
From The Daily Show (The Book), which was pub-
lished in November by Grand Central Publishing. Elliott
Kalan was a writer on the show, and Rob Corddry, Ed
Helms, and Stephen Colbert were correspondents. Jon
Stewart was the host from 1999 to 2015.
elliott kalan: We were shooting a piece where
Rob Corddry had to walk down the street in a
Klan outfit. We were waiting for him in a
Dunkin Donuts, and he was like, I cant do
this bit. I can see the way people are looking
at me. Its too raw. So we rewrote it. He
dressed as Hitler. For some reason Hitler was
not as real, and people on the street could re-
act with What? as opposed to anger.
rob corddry: Dressing up as Hitler was still
bad. I was out there and realized that this
could get ugly. I came back to the studio and
Jon said, Aw, cmon, get back in the Hitler
costume. It was the one time I said no to
him. Colbert gave me two invaluable pieces
of advice for doing field pieces. The first was,
Check your soul at the door.
ed helms: When youre in the middle of an
interview, your instinct is to be kind and
gracious. You have to squash that instinct,
which often leads to significant discomfort
on the part of your interview subject and
yourself. But its all in the service of irony.
stephen colbert: I would say, Get a nice hang-
era wooden hanger, something with padded
shoulders. Take your soul off and hang it on
the hanger. Dont fold it up or leave it crumpled
on the floor or put it on a wire hanger. Dont
forget where you put it. Then go out on the
road and do these interviews. When youre in
the field, youre in the character of a correspon-
dent who has no interest other than getting
what he needs. Your relationship with the peo-
ple youre talking to is purely parasitic. You are
going to suck them like a lamprey until their
brain and their soul are as dry as a crouton.
That behavior has got to be cold-blooded.
When youre doing it you might get it on
youget the badness of what youre doing on
READINGS 19

San Francisco Ballet Performing on Opening Day for the Moscone Center, 1981, a photograph by Janet Delaney, whose retrospective, South of
Market, was on view in 2015 at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco.
youand you dont want that on your soul.
Take it off before you go, and put your soul
back on when you watch the footage. Because
then you have the opportunity to exercise your
ethics over what you did in the field and not
put on the air what you think is unethical or is
not comedy or is not fair to the subject. But
when youre out there you have to be able to
seize on an opportunity carnivorously. Youve
got one responsibility, which is to come back
with a story that you intend to tell no matter
what the truth is. Youve made a promise to Jon
and the other producers that you will go get
this story come hell or high water. So thats
why I would say, Take your soul off before you
go. Your soul will go, They seem like nice
people, stop making fun of bigfoot. No: youre
there to make fun of bigfoot.
corddry: Colberts second piece of advice was,
When youre traveling, make sure you spend
all of your per diem.
20 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND EQUINOM PROJECTS, SAN FRANCISCO
[Fiction]
COMEBACK CITY
By Nathaniel Mackey, from Late Arcade, which
was published this month by New Directions. The
book is the fifth installment in From a Broken
Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, a nov-
el that follows the activities of a jazz group. Mack-
ey is the author of more than a dozen collections
of poetry.
W
e got to Detroit around noon after an ear-
ly flight from L.A. It was the first time in the city
for all of us. After getting settled in the hotel and
resting up a while, we went out. We walked
around and took the bus for longer distances,
anxious to see all we could. Its hard to say what it
all added up to, could it be said to add up to any-
thing. What it was was random vantages, random
veils, no such disclosure as we might think a first-
time exposure to a city should yield. Detroit was
there but not there. Or was it that we were there
but not there, vantage indissociable from veil, red-
eyed as we were?
I quickly found our expectation to see and say
something about Detroit an irritant, any sum-
ming-up or desire to sum up an affront. Yes, the
monumental architecture seems to cry out for
comment, the massive, no-nonsense rectilinearity
of the General Motors Building bent on eliciting
reverence or ridicule. (One of us went so far as to
call it their new Parthenon.) The contrast be-
tween so blatant a claim on eternity and the auto
[Poem]
WHERE WINDOWS SHOULD BE
By Tongo Eisen-Martin, from Heaven Is All Goodbyes, which will be published this fall by City Lights Publish-
ers. Eisen-Martin is the author of Someones Dead Already (2015).
How did I miss that mans name?
said the sorriest man in the crowd
with candlelight on his face
Someone who looks just like you
came through earlier
said he was the devil
We stopped him before
he could crack his first joke
I cant wait to fall out the sky
on these suckers again,
he mumbled walking away
I guess greetings end
when the knife gets dull,
he also mumbled
Every once in a while
blood jumps back into the body
and the cosmos go home
(you know, easygoing art)
A woman stops to steady herself,
but her shoulder keeps walking
a man stops to tie his shoes,
but his tongue keeps walking
An infamous child
meets an infamous street
and pulls off an infamous miracle
A gambler came through earlier
looking just like you
industrys recent troublesnot to mention the
charred, burned-out neighborhoods, the aban-
doned houses overtaken by vines and other
growth, the naked foundations, the empty lots
makes cultural critics of us all. Yes, that obvious
contrast would appear to put words in our
mouths, easy words moreover, no matter how
stark what they report. Yes, them thats got, most-
ly white, mostly keep getting while them thats
not, mostly black, mostly dont. This is axiomatic
American cud we could chew for days.
We strolled up Woodward Avenue over to
the Detroit Institute of Arts. It was beautiful,
quite the promenade, with lovely buildings on
We put his head on a paintbrush
and got back to work
arguing with each other
What do you mean puddles dont smile?
And why cant jail bars un-bloom?
We call them crumbs! You call them crumbs!
Arm in arm
back alleys walk
after becoming people
Rights, baby! Even we get rights, too!
A man plays the trumpet next door
Then never no more
I whispered once
It didnt go well
Wine in my cup
They called it a yell
Dont make a scene
All friendships have dead people in them
You are the one folding up bottles like paper
and putting them under windshields!
Its only weird
when no one else plays along!
Candlelight on faces
The riot keeps walking
READINGS 21
 both sides of the street, the institute perhaps
the loveliest of them. The contrast between
epic, heroic dimension and postindustrial dimi-
nution came easily to ones lipstoo easily, I
thought. I had the sense there was an opaque
Detroit, a recondite Detroit, a secret Detroit
such observations dont even scratch
A
the surface of. I bit my tongue.
fter the Detroit Institute of Arts we took a
bus down Woodward to Greektown. At one of
the stops a man in his mid-sixties got on. He was
wearing a rumpled brown suit that had seen bet-
ter days, a white shirt that couldve used washing,
and dress shoes that were run down at the heels.
His hair was an unkempt salt-and-pepper Afro,
matted on one side from having been slept on, his
chin and jaws were covered with stubble, in need
of a shave. He headed for the back of the bus,
muttering under his breath and making a point of
looking at each passenger he passed. His eyes
were bloodshot, and one could smell that hed
been drinking, but he had a kind of elegance all
the same, no matter that his legs were a little
shaky and he bumped against the edges of the
seat backs as he made his way down the aisle. Af-
ter he and the other new passengers were seated
and the bus began to roll again, his muttering
slowly gained volume, until we heard him say,
loudly and a bit slurred, None of yall dont know
nothin about this! He repeated this again and
again, pausing between repetitions as if to let it
sink in throughout the bus or even, perhaps, to
assess and be newly schooled by it himself. None
of yall dont know nothin about this! His voice
was raspy, gruff, burning like whiskey.
The rest of us turned to look toward the
back of the bus, one or two at first and then
more and more, all of us eventually staring at
him as he continued to announce, None of
yall dont know nothin about this! He sat
alone on the back seat of the bus, dead center,
head up, back surprisingly straight given the
wobbliness of his walk down the aisle, feet
planted flatly and solidly on the floor, legs a
little bit akimbo, hands on his knees. He
stared back, panning the bus, intent, it
seemed, on making eye contact with each and
every one of us something of a taunt, a
challenge, a dare in the look he gave. None
of yall dont know nothin about this! he kept
insisting, or sometimes, Dont none of yall
know nothin about this!
It never became clear what he meant by
this, whether it referred to his condition in
some micro or macro way (his tipsiness or his
general disrepair, respectively) or to a more
general state of affairs, to life itself or to who
knows what, but his vehemence, if nothing
else, communicated; his adamance, if noth-
22 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
ing else, had a kind of articulateness, the
direness or the extremity from which he
spoke was affecting and true. It struck me
that this was nothing if not the entire edi-
fice, possession built on and put in place by
dispossession, the disrepair of the socially
dead. I thought this and I saw it all in a snap,
a flash, but no matter the truth of it, the his-
torical and present-day relevance or reso-
nance of it, I almost immediately lost pa-
tience with myself, guilty as I was of a deeper
negligence, a deep nonobservance of the hid-
den-in-plain-sight rite we were being offered,
the initiation into not knowing that the man
in the rumpled suit offered us. The simple
fact was that he was right: we didnt know.
We didnt know who he was, we didnt know
what this was.
I have to admit I found myself a little shak-
en, no matter that nothing untoward was hap-
pening. I felt somehow singled out. The fact
that what he said, what he kept insisting,
what he kept repeating, agreed so much with
the way Id been thinkingthe random van-
tage being the random veilis what shook
me. It seemed he spoke from some unreach-
ably occult place, a cautionary voice after my
own heart, chastening and affirming me at
the same time.
From time to time the bus driver glanced up at
his rearview mirror, checking out what was going
on in back. It had started off with everyone a lit-
tle on edge, apprehensive as to what this would
lead to, but after a while it seemed pretty clear
that the mans mania, if mania was what it was,
consisted solely of confronting us verbally and
with his bloodshot gaze. He kept to his own
space, which was clearly defined as the middle of
the back seat of the bus, and his hands never left
his kneesno flailing of arms, no gesticulation,
not so much as waving a finger. What little vio-
lence there was, if it can even be called that, was
confined to his face, a grimacing wince it got
from time to time as he registered the effort it
took to apprise us of our not knowing, a certain
exasperation, bordering on exhaustion it seemed,
with having to do so, with our not knowing and
with our not knowing we didnt know. Once it
was established that he posed no threat, everyone
in the bus relaxed. Everyone eventually went back
to what theyd been doing before. A group of
teenagers covered their mouths and giggled. The
man in the brown suit, unfazed by no longer hav-
ing everyones attention, continued his tirade. Af-
ter a while it simply blended in, background noise,
of a piece with the conversations going on in the
bus, traffic noise from outside, and whatever else
came into earshot. At the fourth stop he stood
up, went back to muttering, made his way up the
aisle, and got off the bus.
Oceans Rising, a painting by Olive Ayhens.

Courtesy the artist READINGS 23

 No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility,
peril and exuberance thats marked this new millennium.
REBECCA SOLNIT writes as independently as Orwell;
shes a great muralist, a Diego Rivera of words. Literary
and progressive America is in a Solnit moment, which
given her endless talent should last a very long time.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and author of Deep Economy

No writer has weighed the
complexities of sustaining
hope in our times of readily
available despair more
thoughtfully and beautifully,
nor with greater nuance.
Maria Popova,
Brain Pickings
A radical case for hope as a
commitment to act in a world
whose future remains uncertain
and unknowable.
The Antidote to Mansplaining.
The Stranger
Solnit tackles big themes
of gender and power in these
accessible essays. Honest
and full of wit, this is an
integral read that furthers the
conversation on feminism
and contemporary society.
San Francisco Chronicle
In an incisive follow-up to Men
Explain Things to Me, Rebecca
Solnit offers indispensable
commentary on women
who refuse to be silenced,
misogynistic violence, the fragile
masculinity of the literary
canon, the gender binary, the
recent history of rape jokes, and
much more. In characteristic
style, Solnit mixes humor, keen
analysis, and powerful insight.
Forthcoming | March 2017

Books for changing the world

 F O R U M

TRUMP:
A RESISTERS GUIDE
W e have a new president who is also a new kind of
president. Our previous chief executivesat least those of the postWorld War II erawere not in the
business of outright bigotry and misogyny. Nor did they make common cause with white supremacists,
boast about sexual assault, or threaten to jail their opponents. Nor did they openly deride and undermine
the traditions and institutions that it is the presidents duty to uphold. Donald Trump is different. Since
he was elected in November, many Americans have struggled to assimilate our changed reality, the radi-
cal discontinuity that his victory represents. It has been a long winter, a season of fear, grief, and, per-
haps above all, ragea feeling compounded by its seeming futility. Impotent hatred is the worst of all
emotions, Goethe said. One should hate nobody whom one cannot destroy. As a once-unthinkable
Trump presidency gets under way, it is time to recognize that we are not as impotent as we may have
feltthat even if we cannot destroy Trump, we can resist his primitive vision to the best of our abilities.
There are no guarantees that we will succeed, but, as the writers in this forum all make clear, not to try
would be a dereliction. A new kind of president demands a new kind of citizen.

contributors
Tim Barker is a doctoral student in his-
tory at Harvard and an editor-at-large
of Dissent.
Kate Crawford is a principal researcher
at Microsoft Research, a visiting pro-
fessor at MIT, and a senior research fel-
low at NYU.
Katrina Forrester teaches history at
Queen Mary University of London.
Nimmi Gowrinathan is a professor and
the director of the Politics of Sexual
Violence Initiative at the City College
of New York.
Lawrence Jacksons fourth book, Ches-
ter B. Himes: A Biography, will be pub-
lished this summer.
Valeria Luiselli is the author of the
novel The Story of My Teeth (2015) and
the essay collection Sidewalks (2013).
Corey Robin, a professor at Brooklyn
College, is the author of Fear (2006)
and The Reactionary Mind (2011).
Sarah Schulman is the author of eigh-
teen books, most recently Conflict Is
Not Abuse (2016).
Celina Su is the Marilyn J. Gittell
Chair in Urban Studies at the Gradu-
ate Center of the City University of
New York.
Simone White is the author of two
volumes of poetry, including Of Being
Dispersed (2016).
Wesley Yang is at work on his first book.

Illustrations by Taylor Callery FORUM 25

 THE DREAM OF
More than a decade later, weve for-
gotten how much the liberal imagi-

THE ENEMY
nation was seized by ethnic cleans-
ing and genocide and Salafist and
Saddamist terror. It was Michael Ig-
natieff, liberalisms action intellectu-
By Corey Robin al, who declared,

The idea of human universality rests

While I was fearing it, it came,
But came with less of fear,
Because that fearing it so long
Had almost made it dear.
Emily Dickinson
justice and rights and equality. In-
stead, they should raise their edific-
es of decency on the cold, hard
ground of humiliation. Negative ex-
periences provide sturdier founda-
tions for liberalism, he wrote, be-
less on hope than on fear, less on op-
timism about the human capacity for
good than on dread of human capaci-
ty for evil, less on a vision of man as
maker of his history than of man the
wolf toward his own kind.

G
azing back on the destruc-
tion of Sodom and Gomor-
rah, Lots wife is turned into
a pillar of salt. Why? Other charac-
ters in the Bible disobey God with-
out meeting the same fate. Perhaps
it is her irrepressible interest in the
destruction she has been spared
her sense that the evil she has left
behind is more real than the possi-
bilities that beckonthat dooms
her. Instructed to choose life over
death, Lots wife opts to find life in
death. The known past is more com-
pelling than the promised future.
cause it is ea sier to identif y
humiliating than respectful behav-
ior, just as it is easier to identify ill-
ness than health. Terrible as they
are, unhappy experiencesother
liberal philosophers of the era would
Liberalism has needed evil for some
time, at least since the end of the
Cold War. While the Obama years
saw the occasional reprieve from
these demandsthe 2008 election,
the Occupy movement, and the Ber-
nie Sanders campaign were all
marked by a sense that politics
might be a forward march rather
than a rearguard viewthe politics
of fear has now come home in the
form of Donald Trump. He is our
native 9/11.

Hence the salta substance that
suspends time, that preserves things
by drying them out.
As liberals and leftists confront
the reality of a Trump Administra-
tion, they will face a similar question
of orientation. Will they oppose
Trump in the name of a transforma-
tive vision that lies beyond hima
multiracial social democracy that
emancipates all men and women
from the fetters of caste and class? Or
will they look on Trumps America
with an apprehension, born of fear
and fascination, that its ravages are
realer, more in sync with the deep
and ugly truths of the world, than
whatever story of progress they can
muster in reply? Will they welcome
every act of Trumps brutality as a
revelation of our national whole?
Will they make of themselves a pillar
of salt?
Twenty years ago, the Israeli phi-
losopher Avishai Margalit argued
that liberals couldntand shouldnt
try toerect a decent society on
the foundation of positive ideals like
throw cruelty, suffering, and fear
into the mixare more intelligible
and thus more credible than the
traditional ideals of the left. It is
easier to huddle around the camp-
fire of our dread than to mass and
march toward a distant light. We
can believe in political atrocities in
a way that we cannot believe in
universal brotherhood and sister-
hood. Indeed, the beauty of atroci-
ties is that we need not believe in
them at all. Theyre just there, the
worlds fundament, waiting for us to
build on them.
So we have. In the 1990s and the
2000s, we assembled elaborate com-
plexes of liberal theory on the kill-
ing fields of Rwanda and the Bal-
kans and on the Eurasian plains.
A
liberalism that needs mon-
sters to destroy can never
politically engage with its
enemies. It can never understand
those enemies as political actors,
making calculations, taking advan-
tage of opportunities, and respond-
ing to constraints. It can never see
in those enemies anything other
than a black hole of motivation, a
cesspool where reason goes to die.
Hence the refusal of empathy for
Trumps supporters. Insofar as it
marks a demand that we not aban-
don antiracist principle and practice
for the sake of winning over a myth-
icized white working class, the re-
fusal is unimpeachable. But like the
know-nothing disavowal of knowl-
edge after 9/11, when explanations of
terrorism were construed as exon-
erations of terrorism, the refusal of
empathy since 11/9 is a will to igno-
rance. Far simpler to imagine Trump
voters as possessed by a kind of de-
monic intelligence, or anti-intelligence,
transcending all the rules of the estab-
lished order. Rather than treat Trump

26 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017

as the outgrowth of normal politics
and traditional institutionsit is
the Electoral College, after all, not
some beating heart of darkness, that
sent Trump to the White House
there is a disabling insistence that
he and his forces are like no political
formation weve seen. By encourag-
ing us to see only novelty in his mon-
strosity, analyses of this kind may
prove as crippling as the neocons as-
sessment of Saddams regime. That,
too, was held to be like no tyranny
wed seen, a despotism where the or-
dinary rules of politics didnt apply
and knowledge of the subject was
therefore useless.
Such a liberalism becomes depen-
dent on the very thing it opposes,
with a tepid mix of neoliberal mar-
kets and multicultural morals getting
much-needed spice from a terrifying
right. Hillary Clinton ran hard on
the threat of Trump, as if his pres-
ence were enough to authorize her
presidency. Where Sanders promised
AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
By Wesley Yang
T
he term meritocracy became
shorthand for a desirable societal
ideal soon after it was coined by
the British socialist Sir Michael Young.
But Young had originally used it to de-
scribe a dystopian future. His 1958 sa-
tirical novel, The Rise of the Meritocra-
cy, imagines the creation and growth of
a national system of intelligence test-
ing, which identifies talented young
people from every stratum of society
in order to install them in special
schools, where they are groomed to
make the best use possible of their in-
nate advantages.
In the novel, what begins as a strug-
gle against inherited privilege results in
the consolidation of a new ruling class
that derives its legitimacy from superi-
or merit. This class becomes, within a
few generations, a hereditary aristocra-
cy in its own right. Sequestered within
elite institutions, people of high intelli-
to change the conversation, to make
the battlefield a contest between a
multicultural neoliberalism and a
multiracial social democracy, Clin-
ton sought to keep the battlefield as
it has been for the past quarter-
century. In this single respect, she
can claim a substantial victory. Its
no accident that one of the most
spectacular confrontations since the
election pitted the actors of Hamilton
against the tweets of Trump. These
fixed, frozen positionshigh on
rhetoric, low on actionoffer an al-
most perfect tableau of our ongoing
gridlock of recrimination.
Clinton waged this campaign on
the belief that her neoliberalism of
fear could defeat the ethnonational-
ism of the right. Let us not make the
same mistake twice. Let us not be
addicted to the drug of danger, as
Athena says in the Oresteia, to the
dream of the enemy that has to be
crushed, like a herb, before [we] can
smell freedom.
gence marry among themselves, pass-
ing along their high social position
and superior genes to their progeny.
Terminal inequality is the result. The
gradual shift from inheritance to mer-
it, Young writes, made nonsense of all
their loose talk of the equality of man:
Men, after all, are notable not for the
equality, but for the inequality, of their
endowment. Once all the geniuses are
amongst the elite, and all the morons
are amongst the workers, what meaning
can equality have? What ideal can be
upheld except the principle of equal sta-
tus for equal intelligence? What is the
purpose of abolishing inequalities in
nurture except to reveal and make more
pronounced the inescapable inequalities
of Nature?
I thought about this book often in the
years before the crack-up of November
2016. In early 2015, the Harvard soci-
ologist Robert Putnam published a book
that seemed to tell as history the same
story that Young had written as proph-
ecy. Our Kids: The American Dream in
Crisis opens with an evocation of the
small town of Port Clinton, Ohio,
where Putnam grew up in the 1950sa
passable embodiment of the American
Dream, a place that offered decent op-
portunity for all the kids in town, what-
ever their background. Port Clinton
was, as Putnam is quick to concede, a
nearly all-white town in a pre-feminist
and pre-civil-rights America, and it was
marked by the unequal distribution of
power that spurred those movements
into being. Yet it was also a place of high
employment, strong unions, widespread
homeownership, relative class equality,
and generally intact two-parent families.
Everyone knew one another by their first
names and almost everyone was headed
toward a better future; nearly three quar-
ters of all the classmates Putnam sur-
veyed fifty years later had surpassed their
parents in both educational attainment
and wealth.
When he revisited it in 2013, the
town had become a kind of Ameri-
can nightmare. In the 1970s, the
industrial base entered a terminal
decline, and the towns economy de-
clined with it. Downtown shops
closed. Crime, delinquency, and drug
use skyrocketed. In 1993, the factory
that had offered high-wage blue-
collar employment finally shuttered
for good. By 2010, the rate of births to
unwed mothers had risen to 40 per-
cent. Two years later, the average
worker in the county was paid
roughly 16 percent less in inflation-
adjusted dollars than his or her
grandfather in the early 1970s.
Youngs novel ends with an editorial
note informing readers that the fic-
tional author of the text had been
killed in a riot that was part of a vio-
lent populist insurrection against the
meritocracy, an insurrection that the
author had been insisting would pose
no lasting threat to the social order.
Losing every young person of promise
to the meritocracy had deprived the
working class of its prospective leaders,
rendering it unable to coordinate a
movement to manifest its political will.
FORUM 27
Without intelligence in their heads,
he wrote, the lower classes are never
more menacing than a rabble.
W
e are in the midst of a glob-
al insurrection against rul-
ing elites. In the wake of the
most destructive of the blows recently
delivered, a furious debate arose over
whether those who supported Donald
Trump deserve empathy or scorn. The
answer, of course, is that they deserve
scorn for resorting to so depraved and
false a solution to their predicament
and empathy for the predicament it-
self. (And not just because advances
in technology are likely to make their
predicament far more widely shared.)
What is owed to them is not the lach-
rymose pity reserved for victims
(though they have suffered greatly)
but rather a practical appreciation of
how their antagonism to the policies
that determined the course of this
campaignmass immigration and free
tradewas a fully political antagonism
that was disregarded for decades, to our
collective detriment.
A policy of benign neglect of immi-
gration laws invites into our country a
casualized workforce without any le-
verage, one that competes with the
native-born and destroys whatever le-
verage the latter have to negotiate
better terms for themselves. The poli-
cy is a subsidy to American agribusi-
ness, meatpacking plants, restaurants,
bars, and construction companies,
and to American families who would
not otherwise be able to afford the
outsourcing of childcare and domestic
labor that the postfeminist, dual-
income family requires. At the same
time, a policy of free trade pits native-
born workers against foreign ones con-
tent to earn pennies on the dollar of
their American counterparts.
In lieu of the social-democratic provi-
sion of childcare and other services of
domestic support, we have built a priva-
tized, ad hoc system of subsidies based
on loose border enforcementin effect,
the nation cutting a deal with itself at
the expense of the life chances of its
native-born working class. In lieu of an
industrial policy that would preserve
intact the economic foundation of their
lives, we rapidly dismantled our indus-
28 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
trial base in pursuit of maximal aggre-
gate economic growth, with no concern
for the uneven distribution of the harms
and the benefits. Some were enriched
hugely by these policies: the college-
educated bankers, accountants, consul-
tants, technologists, lawyers, econo-
mists, and corporate executives who
built a supply chain that reached to the
countries where we shipped the jobs.
Eventually, of course, many of these
workers learned that both political par-
ties regarded them as fungible factors of
production, readily discarded in favor of
a machine or a migrant willing to bunk
eight to a room.
Four decades of neoliberal global-
ization have cleaved our country into
two hostile classes, and the line cuts
across the race divide. On one side,
college students credential them-
selves for meritocratic success. On
the other, the white working class in-
creasingly comes to resemble the
black underclass in indices of social
disorganization. On one side of the
divide, much energy is expended on
the eradication of subtler inequalities;
on the other side, an equality of im-
miseration increasingly obtains.
TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT
By Tim Barker
I
s there a German word for an argu-
ment everyone pretends to abandon
but keeps having? The American
lefts debate about race, class, and gender
is old: generations of radicals have asked
whether one structure of domination
holds the key to all the others. Almost
as old is the recognition that the ques-
tion is badly posed. Surely choosing a
single priority is not just difficult but
inadequate? Surely it would be better to
see the terms as dialectically inter-
twined, alternative approximations from
which to approach the imposing tangle
of social relations?
Yet the argumentwhich pits, in cur-
rent parlance, identity politics against
class analysisdoesnt stop. Its only got-
ten louder with the twin shocks of
Even before the ruling elite sent the
proletariat off to fight a misbegotten
war, even before it wrecked the world
economy through heedless lending,
even before its politicians rescued
those responsible for the crisis while
allowing working-class victims of all
colors to sink, the working class knew
that it had been sacrificed to the in-
terests of those sitting atop the meri-
tocratic ladder. The hostility was
never just about differing patterns in
taste and consumption. It was also
about one class prospering off the suf-
fering of another. We learned this year
that political interests that go neglect-
ed for decades invariably summon up
demagogues who exploit them for
their own gain. The demagogues will
go on to betray their supporters and do
enormous harm to others.
If we are to arrest the global descent
into barbarism, we will have to under-
stand the political antagonism at the
heart of the meritocratic project and
seek a new kind of politics. If we
choose to neglect the valid interests of
the working class, Trump will prove in
retrospect to have been a pale harbin-
ger of even darker nightmares to come.
2016Bernie Sanderss surprising suc-
cess in the Democratic primary, Hillary
Clintons surprising defeat in the general
election. Squint and you see one obvious
truth: the only way for the left to win is
a broad social-democratic appeal to the
entire working class, white people in-
cluded. Blink and something else is just
as clear: the prerogatives of white men
have been violently reasserted against
the legacy of Barack Obama and the
prospect of Clinton; even if some of
those racists are among capitalisms vic-
tims, we shouldnt give them an inch.
There is nothing more essential for
our political future than overcoming this
divide. But many sorts of inertiadeep
political commitments, contingent so-
cial alliances, personal branding, to say
nothing of the buzzing, blooming reality
that will continue to provide evidence
for many contradictory conclusions
will impede convergence. Everyone who
feels they have a stake in the dispute
about the relative importance of race,
class, and gender needs to advance from
their own chosen starting point toward
other people who share the same funda-
mental commitmentliberation from
oppression and dominationand, per-
haps more significant, the same enemies.
I want to propose two termsracial
capitalism and social reproduction the working classcould be complete.
that might be helpful.
S
outh Africa under apartheid may
be the starkest example of what
activists called racial capitalism.
There it was perhaps obvious that the
basic rules governing economic
relationshipswho could own things,
what it meant to own something, what
a boss could get away withcould not
be defined apart from categories of
racial subordination. It took an en-
semble of popular organizations
communists, African nationalists,
trade unionsmore than forty years
to overthrow the regime.
But in the United States as well, ra-
cial categories have their roots in numer-
ous regimes of unfree labor, from the
African slave trade to the guest-worker
program. A worker with nothing to sell
but her labor power is different from a
worker with nothing to sell but her labor
power and the family house. Given cur-
rent trends, it would take the average
black family 228 years to match the
level of wealth currently held by the
average white family. It should not be
difficult to see that race is, for non-white
people in the United States, a funda-
mental way of experiencing material
(class) inequality.
In Italy in the 1970s, at the high point
of class struggles between unions and
capitalists as well as between workers
and their unions, socialist feminists
found themselves making use of the
concept of social reproduction. How
does a society cultivate the conditions
of its future existence? Before wage
workers could produce things in facto-
ries, these theorists reasoned, someone
had to produce (i.e., give birth to and
raise, feed and clean up for) the work-
force. The people who performed this
labor were, by and large, women; that
they were not paid a wage only con-
firmed that their role came prior to, and
was indispensable for, the parts of com-
mon life that official statistics recognized
as economic. The Italian theorists who
proposed the term considered it vital not
because they wanted to assert the im-
portance of gender identity over other
identities but because without the in-
sight it provided, no understanding of
class struggleand no organization of
struggles. Even though we all have
B
esides these existing concepts,
which offer the terms for a more
fruitful future discussion, we must
recognize that the struggles currently
glossed as class and identity are
both capable of sketching broad, uni-
versalizing horizons or narrow, particu-
larizing ones: the causes can bring
people together or divide them to be
conquered. The partisans of class
politics are rightfully proud that the
history of socialist, communist, and
trade-union organizations contains a
wildly disproportionate share of the
most advanced antiracist struggles.
This is an index of the power that
shared interestsmore than good in-
tentions or painstaking languagecan
have in bringing people together for ef-
fective action. These achievements also
reflect the fact that labor radicals, with
a vision of industrial democracy, have
sometimes been able to see beyond the
shabby articles of faith that mainstream
politicians take for granted.
At the same time, it is trivially easy
to trace a line of exclusion through the
history of American trade unions and
the institutions of the white left. This
is a function of the limited ability
white workers and radicals have to
dissociate themselves from the racist
common sense that structures society
in general. (Think of the American
Communist Party, which greeted
World War II by expelling its Japanese
members and supporting their intern-
ment as enemy aliens.) The tendency
toward exclusion also illustrates some-
thing about the nature of economic
material needs, there is nothing about
a struggle that centers on a certain
workplace, targets economic elites, or
concerns issues like the wage that
automatically makes the struggle uni-
versal. To the contrary: in most in-
stances, they are parochialdefenses
of the conditions of life for a specific
group of workers.
The lines of inclusion and exclu-
sion can be drawn along many axes,
of which perceived racial identity is
merely one: there is also language,
religion, skilled versus unskilled la-
bor, and, most commonly, sector
against sector. When white strikers
beat up black strikebreakers, is it
about racism or economic anxiety?
Just asking the question reveals how
silly it is. But saying Of course its
both doesnt point the way toward a
natural solutionit simply suggests
that many conflicts, no matter how
they are understood, have no univer-
salizing logic.
Ultimately, the problem is not deduc-
tive but practical: how to overcome
mutual suspicion, probably well justified,
between people who cannot afford to
work at cross-purposes. We can disagree
about the exact ways that different
forms of oppression overlap, and about
the strategic implications of this analy-
sis. But since most of us predicted the
election wrong, and all of us face an
uncertain future, this disagreement
should be attended by generosity and
humility. We need constructive engage-
ment across the boundaries that cur-
rently exist. In the end, it is not a ques-
tion of winning an argument but of
defeating an adversary. It could not be
more important that we focus on the
real enemy.
FORUM 29
 LIBIDINAL POLITICS
By Katrina Forrester
T
he history of feminism is filled
with backlashes, but this one
looks to be especially bad.
Abortion rights are under threat
from the federal government. The
promised repeal of the Affordable
Care Act would strip many women
of health insurance and could se-
verely restrict access to affordable
contraception. Social services that
help low-income women (dispropor-
tionately immigrants and women of
color) will likely be cut. Its hard to
imagine that the gender wage gap
will improve under a Trump Admin-
istration, and easy to imagine both a
rise in sexual assault and a drop in
the number of assaults reported. That
glass ceiling now feels like the con-
cern of better days. Trump has li-
censed and unleashed a breed of
misogyny that goes far beyond the
soft conservatism we are used to,
with its rhetoric of mothers, wives,
and daughters, of women as the prop-
erty of men.
A backlash signals a new reality,
but of course that reality already ex-
isted. In the past decade, Republican-
controlled state legislatures have
forced abortion clinics across the
country to close. Women have be-
come the fastest-growing segment of
the prison population, and deporta-
tions have increasedupending the
lives and livelihoods of the immi-
grant and undocumented women
deported, as well as the many left
behind. The working-class women
of color who constitute nearly half
the low-wage female labor force
have suffered because of the cover-
age gap created by states that decid-
ed not to expand Medicaid. The ex-
tent of the backlash depends on
where you begin.
The Trump Administration will
require sustained opposition at all
levels. Organizations for womens
rights excel at the politics of safety,
and work is already being done by
hundreds of them. The National
30 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
Network of Abortion Funds, Wom-
en with a Vision, the Immigrant
Solidarity Network, and INCITE!
Women, Gender Non-Conforming,
and Trans People of Color Against
Violence are among the many that
provide crucial serviceswhether
its patient escorts at abortion clinics
or legal advice and sanctuary for
those at risk of deportation or vio-
lence. They need your money and
your time.
Yet feminist and progressive poli-
tics cant survive on defensive strate-
gies alone. Focusing only on safety
sets our sights too low, and also risks
handing Trump an easy victory: if he
controls the violence that his cam-
paign stirred up, by that measure at
least he can claim success. A vision
of a better life matters just as much.
The coming years will see a new
wave of local legislative and political
battlesfor sick pay, child care, and
minimum-wage laws, and against
housing and employment discrimi-
nation. All are feminist issues that
should be fought for, through unions
or groups like the Working Families
Party. These fights will take place in
an ever-harsher climate, but they are
vital. They are also a crucial part of
any strategy for winning over the
women whom feminists can tend to
ignorefrom the working-class
women of color whose votes the
Democrats take for granted to the
majority of white women who stuck
with the G.O.P. Maybe they were
used to Trumps type of vulgarity,
thought they could tame it, or liked
it. Maybe they believed that other is-
sues were more important.
T
he return of class concerns to
national politics in the United
States and Europe has thus far
worked to the rights advantage. But
local progressive groups are already
organizing successfully across class
and identity lines: it is up to us to lis-
ten to them. They know it is harder
to get an abortion if you are poor,
and that the working class is not
composed solely of white men in old
factory towns but also includes
black and brown and indigenous
and white women in the care sector
the fastest-growing sector of the
economy. To take the fight to the new
administration and limit the damage
it can do, feminists must be relentless
in showing that there is no contradic-
tion between protecting womens
rights and providing an alternative
economic vision for America.
The potential victims of Trump-
ism will need to be defended at every
stage, but in a way that does not
overstate his power or enhance his
appeal. The challenge is how to ac-
complish this amid a backlash in
which the idea of feminism itself has
suffered lasting harm. Was Clintons
pantsuit feminism to blame, or was
she simply the most recent in a long
line of women who asked for too
much? The D.N.C. must bear some
responsibility: it weaponized repre-
sentational politics but made little
long-term commitment to tackling
inequality, a divorce of feminism
from material concerns that has
done it no favors.
The pressing question now is how
to confront the new politics of ven-
geance. Trump has tapped into a vis-
ceral, libidinal politics that centers
on the identity of those who feel
themselves to have been wronged.
He promises redress, to return to his
supporters what was stolen from
them, to give back what they are
owed. Such politics does not bode
well for whoever is blamed, especially
when Trumps outlandish promises
are inevitably broken and his sup-
porters betrayed. Where redress fails,
retribution is often the next step: the
idea, put forward by Trump last
March, that women who have abor-
tions might be punished signals the
possibility that it may be violent.
Threats like these make resistance
hard, but the immediate difficulties
lie elsewhere. To protect the rights of
women, and everyone else, we must
strike a delicate balance. On the one
hand, we should refuse to normalize
white supremacy and racism, or to al-

low the memes of the rightlike its
critique of identity politicsto seep
into progressivism in a way that mar-
ginalizes feminism and anti racism.
On the other, we have to find a way
to do this alongside the new libidinal
politics. That politicsa product
both of the crisis of masculinity that
has accompanied economic decline
and of the white-nationalist alt-right
that drives the backlashis com-
plex, and it takes every expression of
liberal outrage as an opportunity.
Here lies the difficulty for those
committed to resisting it. Outrage
at sexism, racism, homophobia, trans-
phobia, take your pickenergizes
Trumps core supporters, just as Clin-
tons feminism alienated the women
who voted for him. Both Trump and
the G.O.P. will make use of this en-
ergy, for an excited base is also a dis-
tracted one. A certain kind of indig-
nation is precisely what will keep
him from having to acknowledge his
larger betrayals.
Too little attention to this new
politics would allow it to permeate
the culture. Too much would dis-
tract us; we risk overestimating the
strength of Trumps baseor ignor-
ing those within it who can be con-
vinced that there are better alterna-
tives. Meanwhile, the agenda to roll
back not only reproductive and mi-
nority rights but also the welfarist,
regulatory, and economic capacities
of the state would go unchallenged.
If the fight against this particular
backlash is to be successful, we will
need to aim high.
HYMN TO HARM CITY
By Lawrence Jackson
A
round the time that Ronald
Reagan was elected president,
my dad lost his job as the
branch director of a manpower center
in Baltimore. Reagan ended urban
public-employment programs, accel-
erated mass incarceration, prompted
massive disinvestment in black and
Latino regions of the country, re-
newed the governments friendly
relations with South Africas apart-
heid regime, and covertly sponsored
wars in Central America. His do-
mestic warthe war on drugs
produced a new and magnificently
exculpatory idea for the rest of the
nation: black-on-black violence. I
was in eighth grade then, and I re-
member finding it odd that my public
school was now considering ketch-
up a nutrient-rich vegetable. (The
actual color of the ketchup also
changed, from bright red to a kind
of maroon, and the packages went
from foil to plastic.)
Reagan came to office on the
promise of returning America to
the era of Generals Patton and
MacArthur, which is to say around
1944, the year World War II turned in
favor of the Allies. That allianceor
at least its North Atlantic members
is what people mean when they say
the West: the United States, the
U.K., and France. The most arrogant
inhabitants of these nations (sadly,
often those who were leading) un-
derstood themselves to be the or-
dained directors of human beings
across the globe, across space and
time. They were committed to civi-
lization by the sword. Yet not even
Reagan was mighty enough to rein-
stall the American militants who
ached to battle the Russians and
the Chinese.
Reagan took to politics for what
he couldnt achieve in his original
profession, acting. He stood in the
shadow of John Wayne, a cultural
hero who embodied American eth-
ical values and social mores and
whose work in front of the camera
had deep political impact. In 1972,
in an interview with Life magazine,
Wayne declared that the problem
wasnt that the Vietnam War was
folly, it was that the values of white
rule werent being exported vigor-
ously enough. Waynes films gave
audiences a steady dose of what the
historian Richard Slotkin calls re-
generation through violence. Both
civilization and capitalist bonanza
depend on violent encounters and
imperial expansion. If the country
is to be healthy, it needs some
frontier populated by some brand
of enemy.
Donald Trump ably splits the dif-
ference between the Duke and the
Gipper. He admires the strongman
and instinctively maneuvers the
world of the camera and the tweet.
In a way that makes genuine elites
cringe, Trump is known for his gar-
ish splendor, which acknowledges no
possibility of excessno volume too
high, no light too bright, no gilding
ever enough.
Trumps politics first became
plain in 1973, when the Depart-
ment of Justice sued him and his
father for systematically preventing
black people from renting units in
their buildings. In 1989, shortly af-
ter a jogger in Manhattans Central
Park was reported to have been
raped by black and Latino teenag-
ers, Trump bought a full-page ad-
vertisement calling for the return
of the death penalty. The convict-
ed rapists were later proved to have
been bullied by the police into giv-
ing false confessions; perhaps they
were also victims of salivating ad-
vertisements. Trumps apparent en-
thusiasm for extraordinary state
force and his suggestion that the
nations legal structure needs vigor-
ous goading to carry out deadly
business is what endears him to
some and makes him so terrifying
to others.
FORUM 31
I
ts worth remembering now, as we
face down the next four years,
that in the 1980s, the national
governments failures with respect to
employment, AIDS, public educa-
tion, drug rehabilitation, and racial
justice were balanced by a ground-
swell of countervailing activity. Not
least among that activity was the
cultural movement that came to be
called Afrocentrism. Afrocentrists
organized protests in response to the
deaths of Eleanor Bumpurs, a New
Yorker who was wrongfully killed by
police, and Yusef Hawkins, who was
killed by a mob in Bensonhurst. They
created Ph.D. programs in African-
American studies, excavated thematic
and sonic resources to create the gold-
en age of hip-hop, proposed the dynas-
tic names that people gave their chil-
dren, resurrected Malcolm X, and
brought Kwanzaa cards to CVS. At
the movements forefront were un-
heralded scholars like John Henrik
Clarke, but the milieu also fostered
the success of better-known black
academics like Henry Louis Gates Jr.
and filmmakers like Spike Lee. Afro-
centric bonhomie served up leather
craftwork medallions as an answer to
jewelry made from South African
mined gold and laid terra firma be-
tween professional community or-
ganizers like Barack Obama and the
people in hard places like Chicagos
South Side that those organizers
sought to mobilize.
The robust opposition to Reagans
dawn had nineteenth-century prec-
edent in Baltimore, where I still live,
a town that Trump likes to insert as
a refrain in his litany of municipal
heretics that he intends to convert to
the true religion by way of the Third
Army or the Seventh Fleet. In Balti-
mores history we can actually glimpse
a more wonderful future. Recall our
homeboy Frederick Douglass. Doug-
lass was a dreamer and a brooder and,
for the most part, had a hard time
connecting with other black people.
But in Baltimore he learned the skills
he needed to escape slavery. The ide-
als of collective mobilization that
thrived during Douglasss tenure in
Charm City, in institutions such as
the Sharp Street United Methodist
32 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
Church, where there was an antebel-
lum school, and the East Baltimore
Mental Improvement Society, which
gave him an early opportunity for
debate, have rooted here with some
force. Almost two hundred years
later, the same soil is nourishing a
legislative-reform group called Lead-
ers of a Beautiful Struggle. Founded
by a group of inner-city debaters who
wanted to work inside poor black
communities, L.B.S. figured out the
kinds of policing reforms that were
desired, built the coalitions necessary
to create legislation, and started
backing the progressive politicians
willing to charge ahead. After the
death of Freddie Gray, they took the
lead in organizing marches and pro-
tests at City Hall.
A new generation of Baltimore
intellectuals, activist writers, and
college professors draws its members
from Morgan State Universitys
public-health department and the
Africana Studies program at Johns
Hopkins University. New coalitions,
including Equity Matters, a non-
profit that emphasizes the relation-
ship between poverty and poor
TERRORIST AND ALIEN
By Nimmi Gowrinathan and Valeria Luiselli
terrorist: On 11/9 you and I both
felt a kind of paralysis; we needed
a pause to protect our raw nerves.
And yet it had already begun. It
started with hateful stares. A rela-
tive who voted for Trump told me,
Just dont wear a scarf, for your
own safety. I almost said, The
scarf was on my neck, not my
head, but stopped myself; I wasnt
ready to enter the realm of the ab-
surd. But this is the new reality:
we are all, suddenly, exposed.
alien: I feel I should have foreseen all
this. I am a novelist: my mind is
trained to be paranoid, to read the
world like a plot in which seeming-
ly trivial events foreshadow the cli-
max. And there were so many
health, and the Right to Housing
Alliance have spoken out against a
corporate, profit-driven, implicitly
racist program to redesign the south-
ern part of the citys waterfront as a
hygienic white space. The Liberation
Institute, a debate camp named after
Eddie Conway (a Black Panther who
was incarcerated for more than forty
years), emphasizes black cultural
identity and social justice, and helps
to rear articulate leaders who wont
knuckle under. Out for Justice, an
organization of ex-offenders, coun-
sels parolees on the expungement of
their records and how to invest as
citizens in the communities that
need them. Even the federal govern-
ment plays a part, with the youth-
mentorship program My Brothers
Keeper. And then there are the black
businesses on 25th Street and the
bookstore at Everyones Place.
All this is to say that when Trumps
legions rise from their podiums in
Philadelphia, Mississippi, and wave
banners emblazoned with welfare
queens, we will meet them in the
field. Our response will be direct and
sufficient. And we will win.
signs. Maybe you remember what
happened to me on the day that
Trump launched his campaign:
One of my neighbors approach-
es me as Im locking my bike to a
pole on the corner. He asks me
what I make of Trumps accusation
that Mexican migrants are crimi-
nals and rapists. I say the man is
an ignorant clown who under-
stands nothing of the lives of
Mexican migrants.
He says: Maybe Trump has a
point?
A point?
And he says something about not
all Mexicans being like you guys.
So I ask: Like us guys?not
sure Ive heard him correctly.
 The rest of the conversation is
hazy. His argument spins between
classist and racist: skilled versus
unskilled labor, inherent world-
views and the unwillingness to
assimilate. There is always a point
at which aspirants to the Ameri-
can dream meet the concrete wall
of racial and cultural bias.
terrorist: This story made everyone
feel less lonely when you told it
over dinner a few months ago. We
were drinking wine; the conversa-
tion moved easily into sarcasm, sat-
ire. We believed our foundational
assumptions were on firm ground.
We discussed common perceptions
of immigrant writers, demobilized
female fighters, the difference be-
tween rights and liberties. All
while our children moved quietly
through a forest of adult legs, barely
seen or heard yet overhearing us.
Now it feels like were sitting
next to our children, under the ta-
ble, looking up.
alien: May I remind you that your
six-year-old son later told me that
my novel The Story of My Teeth
seemed like the silliest book in the
world. He suggested I write about
more important things, like politi-
cal violence. He has it pretty clear.
terrorist: The course I teach looks
at violence through the lens of
gender. Womens individual expe-
riences with violence are differ-
ent, but common to all is the fact
that the state and society are ulti-
mately responsible. What does a
black woman facing police brutal-
ity in the Bronx have in common
with a Tamil refugee woman liv-
ing under military occupation in
Sri Lanka? The lines we draw ex-
tend beyond identity.
alien: This reminds me of a night-
mare I had: I assign a group of
creative-writing students to read
something greatsay, Kafka, or
Sei Shonagon.
When they come
to class, and I ask them what they
think, the only answer is not re-
latable. End of nightmare.
I heard that word, relatability,
for the first time a few years ago. It
took me a while to understand that
it was the direct opposite of empa-
thy: a piece of writing is not relat-
able when it doesnt talk about me
or reflect my experience. The point
of literature is precisely to force us
out of ourselves, to expand our un-
derstanding of the world by allow-
ing us to see it through the mind of
another person.
Im done with relatability. Now
when I teach any course on litera-
ture or creative writing, I go out of
my way to choose texts and topics
that are totally un-relatable, so as
to teach my students how to make
the effort that empathyemotional
and intellectualrequires.
terrorist: The problem is that each
group has learned to protect the
small political space carved out for
it by identity politics. On the after-
noon after the Paris attacks in 2015,
a student of mine from Egypt de-
clared that those who posted the
French flag on Facebook were anti-
Islam. In a tearful, confused defense,
her French classmate was at once
grieving and apologizing for an
Islamophobia she didnt feel.
I often ask my students why
theyre interested in taking my
courses. The answer always comes
easily: Because I am trans/queer/
Native American/Mexican/black.
The who is easily substituted for
the why.
alien: And that who is often an im-
posed category. I learned that I
was a woman of color when I ar-
rived in the United Statesas if
the new identity were part of my
welcome kit.
terrorist: You are a Mexican wom-
an and I a TamilSri Lankan
American woman. What we have
in common isnt so much our iden-
tity as women of color as our rage
at structures of discrimination.
This is what we should be trying to
do in class and in writing: disman-
tling those structures so that we
can actually see each other.
alien: If only because speaking from
inside a box is rarely an effective
way to have your point heard any-
where outside it.
Your son was told, by someone
in his first-grade class, that his
skin was the color of poo.
terrorist: And he worries about
the exter mination of your
daughter, his best friend, because
shes from Mexico.
alien: And she wonders if our oth-
er friends, who are lesbian, or
her ArgentineAfrican-Ameri-
can friend, will have to relocate
to another country.
terrorist: And my son doesnt al-
ways like the idea of resisting:
Cant Trump just send the mili-
tary and police to get us, Mom?
alien: And my daughter suggests, as
a solution, that we not speak
Spanish in the street, so nobody
knows were actually mexicanos.
terrorist: Were back to dealing
with very basic, random acts of
racism. It will surely affect us in-
ternally. Can we draw on peoples
individual, identity-based experi-
ences with violence to create a
collective political movement?
alien: I have no idea. How does one
remain politically active in a
world that strives to deny our
presence within the political
sphere, that wants to make peo-
ple like us invisible by relegating
us to identity categories: immi-
grants, women of color, brown,
black, Mexican, Asian, Muslim
all you whatever-minority oth-
ers, raus! I say this without an
ounce of self-pity. I dont even say
it with rage. I say it with just a lit-
tle regret, and I wonder: when
were separated like this, how do
we remember that we still have
collective responsibilities?
FORUM 33
 Maybe we should just spend
the next decades calmly rereading
Hannah Arendt on a sofa; or in-
vent new gods, make candles, and
pray to them; or stop writing nov-
els and articles, stop teaching,
and instead focus on perfecting
our handwriting for posters well
LESSONS FROM THE
LAST FIGHT
By Sarah Schulman
I
was twenty-two when Ronald
Reagan was elected. Gay cancer
was recognized seven months lat-
er. For the first half of his presidency,
Reagan never said the word AIDS,
in accordance with his administra-
tions dehumanization of queer peo-
ple, poor people, and people of color.
Over eight years of governmental in-
difference and neglect, years marked
also by the greed of the pharmaceuti-
cal industry, the crisis escalated. To-
day, there are nearly 37 million in-
fected people on the planet. In the
United States, 75,000 people have
died. I am still here, but many of my
friends are not. The mass death of the
young forever transformed my gener-
ation. I know all too well that what
lies ahead for us, under a Trump re-
gime, is more suffering.
Yet I am strangely calm. I was
trained in the political movements
ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power) and the Lesbian
Avengers, organizations that taught
me that the key to maintaining
ones sanity is action. The strate-
gies of ACT UP, one of the most
successful social movements in re-
cent American history, are espe-
cially helpful to examine as we pre-
pare for what may come. Against
all odds, a despised population,
abandoned by their families and
government and facing a terminal
disease for which there was no
treatment, joined together and
forced this countr y to cha nge
against its will. Activists won laws
34 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
hold up in street protests for the
rest of our lives.
Or we swallow the mierda and
carry on. My students often para-
phrase something you said to
them one day: Gotta turn all
our emotional shit into political
capital, yo!
against discrimination, instigated
policy changes that increased so-
cial services, and inf luenced re-
search for treatments. Their efforts
drastically changed the lives of
people who have H.I.V.
One of ACT UPs most impor-
tant principles was simultaneity of
action. ACT UP never worked by
consensus, never demanded the full
agreement of all its members for any
individual action to go forward. If
you wanted to get arrested doing
needle exchange as a way of bring-
ing attention to the necessity of
clean-needle programs, you could do
that. If someone else wanted to in-
terrupt mass at St. Patricks Cathe-
dral in order to protest the Catholic
Churchs campaign to keep con-
doms out of public schools, she
could do that. As long as the ges-
tures were concrete, members didnt
try to stop one another from ad-
dressing the crisis however they felt
was right.
The Lesbian Avengers were equal-
ly focused on doing. The group
aimed to empower a constituency
who had spent their lives being
grossly disrespected by and excluded
from social institutions often in-
cluding their own families. We
needed guidelines that would help
people emerge from a position in
which the only power they had was
the power to refuse and into a posi-
tion of vision and agency. For ex-
ample, one rule was If you have an
idea, you have to carry it out. No
one could passively sit back and say,
Someone should . . . Second was
the principle If you disagree with
something, propose a better solu-
tion. We understood that criticism
alone was unhelpful. These organi-
zational frameworks supported us in
taking responsibility for ourselves
and solving problems. Nothing in-
creases panic in the middle of an
emergency like theoretical discus-
sion without applicationit is both
paralyzing and polarizing. When
you act directly, the Avengers liked
to say, the theory emerges.
The stakes were high for both
ACT UP and the Lesbian Avengers;
we badly needed change, and we
needed it fast. So we operated with
the understanding that if a tactic
had not worked in the past, we
shouldnt try it again. This precept
may sound logical, but it is difficult
to obey; there is a tendency to gravi-
tate toward the known even when its
problems are apparent.
Our creative approaches acted as
correctives to more common but less
effective strategies. Passive demon-
strations, for instancein which
people stand out in the cold listen-
ing to speakers, sayare rarely very
powerful. Far more potent are point-
edly symbolic actions, organized
and performed by people trained in
nonviolent civil disobedience and
accompanied for safety by legal ob-
servers and trained marshals. Con-
sider the genius and bravery of the
black students who took seats at
segregated lunch counters. In break-
ing the color bar, they createdfor
a momentan image of the world
they wanted to live in.
Despite this countrys endless
celebration of the heroic individu-
al, progressive change happens al-
most exclusively as a result of coali-
tion. These alliances depend on
the flexibility of their members, a
shared commitment to concrete
action, and an ethic of mutual
recognition. Our desperation for a
solution mustnt delude us into
thinking any single strategy is ap-
propriate for every circumstance.
Its in listening to others that we
will find out what works.
 DEMOCRACY HOW?
By Celina Su
T
he results of this election are,
among other things, a devastat-
ing consequence of almost six
decades of declining political participa-
tion in America. In 2016, almost half
of those eligible to vote did not exercise
their right to do so. This is due not to
historic highs of apathy but to historic
lows of trust in government. According
to Gallup polls, 71percent of Ameri-
cans had a great deal or a fair the undocumented. When P.B. was
amount of confidence in Congress in
1972; in 2014, that figure was just
28percent. People are deeply and right-
fully disillusioned with the ability of
electoral politics to bring to power of-
ficials who represent the interests of the
communities they serve. The Electoral
College, the limited choices available
in a two-party system, voter suppres-
sion, gerrymandering, and the disen-
franchisement of more than 6million
citizens (including many no longer on
probation or parole) all contributed to
the election of a racist demagogue sup-
ported by a minority of Americans.
Political participation is essential
to a robust democracy, but we cannot
rebuild trust in government without
rebuilding government itself. The re-
form of electoral politics is necessary
but insufficient. Equally important is
the development of democratic insti-
tutions that rely on direct participa-
tion rather than representation.
First adopted in t he United
States in 2009, participatory bud-
geting is one such answer to repre-
sentative politics. Typically, budget
allocationsgrants for computer
labs in library branches, or meal
programs for homebound seniors
are made by elected officials at vari-
ous degrees of remove. P.B., as its of-
ten called, brings constituents into
the process, allowing them to articu-
late the problems they see in their
neighborhoods, deliberate over solu-
tions, and draft the policies that will
govern them.
In a moment of bigotry and auto-
cratic opposition to free media and dis-
course, such processeswhich require
us to consider our public priorities with
people unlike ourselvesare radical.
They force us to broaden our definition
of whose voice counts. Where the
electoral system has engaged the usual
suspectsolder people of higher
incomeP.B. would give voice to peo-
ple often marginalized, including the
young, the formerly incarcerated, and
service to community involvement.
first tried in New York City in 2011,
young people were not allowed to vote,
but they could develop proposals, and
their contributions impressed adults
enough that the voting age has been
lowered almost every year since.
This expansion of the political
community happened partly because
P.B. enables participants to draw on
lived experience and wisdom that
does not depend on formal schooling.
If a question is raised, for example,
about which areas feel unsafe at
specific hours, local knowledge carries
as much weight as technical exper-
tise, and its harder for elites to domi-
nate the conversation. Participants re-
port that P.B. deliberations allow
them to inhabit more than one as-
pect of their identitiesfor exam-
ple, their lives as African Ameri-
cans, as parents, as sports fans, as
city dwellers, as Midwesterners
and connect with people they might
otherwise assume they have nothing
in common with.
The goal is not consensus, which
can often serve as a mask for domi-
nation, but generative conf lict.
Neighbors focus on changing the
policies that shape their lives rather
than, say, getting rid of the people
down the street. The practice com-
bats what Henry Giroux, a theorist
of critical pedagogy, calls civic
illiteracythe inability to see out-
side of the realm of the privatized self.
The challenge lies in ensuring that
P.B. experiments achieve countervail-
ing power and do not simply pay lip
For P.B. to be effective, communities
must have authority over a substantial
portion of public budgets, certainly
more than the governmental equiva-
lent of the crumbs from a P.T.A. bake
sale. When austerity economics dom-
inates budget debates, officials can use
P.B. to make citizens themselves
choose cutbacks, forcing them to de-
cide whose school gets a playground
upgrade and whose doesnt. And if
P.B. is to make a dent in Trumpism, it
must take account of the way budgets
can reinforce racial inequality, and
vice versa. One solution is to work to-
ward public control over tax revenues
as well as spending allocations.
Should local governments in places
like Ferguson, Missouri, earn signifi-
cant portions of their budgets by
overpolicing populations of color?
In a racially and economically seg-
regated society, these sorts of local
democratic experiments can reinforce
existing inequities, especially in the
short term. What happens at a meet-
ing, for example, when a bully shows
up? Yet in contrast to conservative
movements organized around local
control, P.B. aims to remake govern-
ment, not weaken it. Ideally, partici-
pation prompts people to turn their
attention from their plight as individ-
uals to the conditions of their com-
munity and, in turn, to the govern-
mental, corporate, and institutional
powers determining those conditions.
It shows us what democracy looks like
as an everyday social practice, rather
than as an institution to be visited
once every fourth November.
FORUM 35
 IN END TIME
By Simone White
F
or some time, Ive been experi-
menting with the possibility of my
work becoming polyglot. The po-
ems tap out from various sources an ar-
rangement of words that are encircled
by the facts of living. I had a child. I
separated from my husband. I sank into
a depression that did not feel like de-
pression, that felt like revelation or
the end of time or the end-time. I
didnt have enough money. I thought
long and seriously about the music of
Future (and superstardom constituted
by a narrative of slow black death), I
thought about Kanye West (not the
first among rappers to anoint himself a
prophet: Jesus-ish Yeezy, St. Pablo), I
thought about this black art while liv-
ing with and through crisis, and it was
a comfort to me; it helped me to under-
stand. I changed my life, not for the first
time. I felt love again and then again. I
had many jobs. I had no sex at all. I, I, I,
I, I, I, I, I: I wrote as a black woman, as a
single mother, as a person who is called
to speech.
Nothing happens in my poems.
They are not histories. Im not in the
business of telling people what to do.
I think storytelling as a contemporary
poetic act gives off an odor of death.
(My life, my work, is counternarra-
tive.) I push my art toward language
that affixes itself to the energetic flux
of events. The poem must ride the
moment of danger.
For all these reasons, because I am
struggling to survive the conditions
of my lifea charmed life, in which
I am free to exercise the right of
imagination, to have pain and dis-
turbance and loss and lackI could
barely acknowledge the political as-
cent of Donald Trump. This was not
because I take no interest in elec-
tions or political processes or law. I
trained as a lawyer because there is a
part of me that believes freedom is
structurally achievable, although
that part is always fighting the part
that believes it is impossible to eradi-
cate hatred of black people, hatred of
36 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
difference, fear of being different. As
I struggled to maintain my health,
my capacity to work two full-time
jobs, my self-respect as a black moth-
er entering into the narrative thicket
of a failed marriage to a white man, I
refused to watch Trump slither his
way into a position of terrifying pow-
er on this, our only earth.
I began MESSENGER, the poem
I have been writing for the past year,
as a record of rededication during cri-
sis to the calling of poetry, which is
the practice of radical, transformative
acts of imagination. I wrote in the
light of the flashes of what I under-
stood about the gap in time and lan-
guage that experience had pushed me
into. In my poem, which is not reli-
gious because I have no faith as such,
a message is given by a figure who is
variously a child, a lover, an angel, a
punisher, a redeemer (whom I refer to
as , the evangelist). The was has been evacuated in your arms
writing has been a mode of communi-
cation, a lifeline, a gift, a refuge when
the exterior world bore down with ex-
treme and unbearable force.
I consider the president-elect of
the United States an enemy of all
that has made my life possible. But
his election does not change my
work, which is now and always has
been imagining the possibility of
un-bossed thought and life. There
LETTER TO
SILICON VALLEY
By Kate Crawford
D
ear Technologists:
For the past decade, youve
told us that your products will
change the world, and indeed they
have. We carry tiny networked com-
puters with us everywhere, we control
are no words yet for what is happen-
ing, but I listen for them gathering.
The work is to wedge some lan-
guage into the gap while the great
change happens, to keep the space
for language open. I will not be gov-
erned like that, I will not be gov-
erned by them.
 addresses the mother
with no mate the mother who panics
the mother who watches the others
with dread and wonder the careless
pleasure of other mothers in the pres-
ence of their children the hours spent in
fear the isolation of motherhood the
metempsychotic deprivation of sleep
nothing you have is yours not even de-
posits of fat you are the nothing toward
which the man nods in acknowledg-
ment of your motherhood which is
grand which is prostration which is the
deactivation of all known powers
which is the evacuation of power your
share in the speechless condition of
your baby speech rushes you freeze in
the weakness of joint potentiality you
cannot share yet you share you have no
faith yet you must have faith this is a
test this is not a test everything that
someone has fainted someones got a
mote in her eye someone is pricked by
, hunter.
I write books that few people
read in a language that some people
claim not to understand. I try to put
my self and my work into the ser-
vice of understanding the incom-
prehensible, which is, regardless,
happening. I think it is possible to
go crazy.
smart home appliances at a re-
move, we communicate with our
friends and family over online plat-
forms, and now we are all part of the
vast Muslim registry known as Face-
book. Almost 80percent of American
internet users belong to the social net-
work, and many of them happily offer
up their religious affiliation. The faith
of those who dont, too, can be easily
deduced with a little data-science mag-
ic; in 2013, a Cambridge University
study accurately detected Muslims
82percent of the time, using only their
Facebook likes. The industry has only
become better at individual targeting
since then.
Youve created simple, elegant
tools that allow us to disseminate
news in real time. Twitter, for exam-
ple, is very good at this. Its also a
prodigious disinformation machine.
Trolls, fake news, and hate speech
thrived on the platform during the
presidential campaign, and they
show few signs of disappearing now.
Twitter has likewise made it easier to
efficiently map the networks of activ-
ists and political dissenters. For every
proud hashtag#BlackLivesMatter,
#ShoutYourAbortion, the anti-
deportation campaign #Not1More
there are data sets that reveal the
identities of the influencers and
joiners and offer a means of track-
ing, harassing, and silencing them.
Advertisers, meanwhile, have de-
veloped precise algorithms to under-
stand our tastes and desires. These al-
gorithms are used for everything from
determining the demographic most
interested in pumpkin-spice lattes to
setting a drivers car-insurance rate on
the basis of how many exclamation
marks they use. Combined with Twit-
ter data, these tools can be deployed
to identify and round up political
organizersa prospect of particular
concern under a president who has
suggested that protesters should be
imprisoned and said that he would di-
rect his attorney general to investigate
the Black Lives Matter movement.
The data trails required to build a
list of dissenters already exist; they
are public and permanent. Past com-
ments that had seemed ephemeral
will haunt the future. Our search
queries, posts, and hashtags will be-
come the most brutal of informants.
Youre working on other tools al-
ready. Machine-learning techniques
are being tested for use in predictive
policing, in the criminal-justice sys-
tem, and in tracking refugee popula-
tions around the world. What will
you do if you are asked to modify your
new facial-recognition app so that it
can help identify and incarcerate un-
documented people? Or if your
community-mapping tool is acquired
by a security company that appre-
hends activists? Or if the Series A
funded drone service that you de-
signed to deliver packages is offered a
government contract to patrol the
border? After all, what need is there
for a brick-and-mortar wall to separate
us from Mexico when a GPS-enabled
drone zone with high-resolution cam-
eras and tear gas can do the job? Its a
short, slippery slope from disruptive
innovation to the panoptic police
force in the sky.
You may intend to resist, but some
requests will leave little room for refus-
al. Last year, the U.S. government
forced Yahoo to scan all its customers
incoming emails, allegedly to find a set
of characters that were related to ter-
rorist activity. Tracking emails is just
the beginning, of course, and the FBI
knows it. The most important encryp-
tion case to date hinged on the FBIs
demand that Apple create a bespoke
operating system that would allow the
government to intentionally under-
mine user security whenever it imped-
ed an investigation. Apple won the
fight, but that was when Obama was in
office. Trumps regime may pressure the
technology sector to create back doors
in all its products, widen surveillance,
and weaken the security of every net-
worked phone, vehicle, and thermostat.
There is precedent for technology
companies assisting authoritarian re-
gimes. In 1880, after watching a train
conductor punch tickets, Herman Hol-
lerith, a young employee of the U.S.
Census Bureau, was inspired to design
a punch-card system to catalogue hu-
man traits. The Hollerith Machine
was used in the 1890 census to tabu-
late markers such as race, literacy level,
gender, and country of origin. During
the 1930s, the Third Reich used the
same system, under the direction of a
German subsidiary of International
Business Machines, to identify Jews
and other ethnic groups. Thomas
J. Watson, IBMs first president, re-
ceived a medal from Hitler for his ser-
vices. As Edwin Black recounts in
IBM and the Holocaust, there was both
profit and glory to be had in providing
the computational services for round-
ing up the states undesirables. Within
the decade, IBM served as the infor-
mation subcontractor for the U.S. gov-
ernments Japanese-internment camps.
W
ith this history in mind, we
must all ask ourselves what
we will and will not do. Gin-
ni Rometty, the current CEO of IBM,
was the first to make her position clear,
in an open letter in which she congratu-
lated Trump on his victory and offered
to work together to achieve prosperi-
ty. Peter Thiel, the chairman of Palan-
tir and a board member of Facebook,
offered advice, as well as his own em-
ployees time, to assist the president-
elect on defense. Many leading technol-
ogy CEOs were summoned to Trump
Tower, and duly attended. Not everyone
has been so quick to cooperate, though.
Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitterwho
was not invitedswore to use his posi-
tion to speak truth to power and to work
for the common good. Such statements
may be easier made than maintained,
but its wise to articulate your convic-
tions before the ground begins to shift.
We, the subjects of your data do-
minions, have limited options. If
weve used your services, a record of
our personal and political behavior is
already yours. Yes, we can download
Signal, an app that offers better secu-
rity for phone messaging. We can use
Tor, a browser that allows people to
FORUM 37
MY LIFE IN THE
SERVICE
search the web and chat anonymous-
ly. But our actions as individuals
arent sufficient to protect us from the
vast turnkey surveillance system that
THE WORLD WAR II DIARY OF the Trump Administration will in-
GEORGE MCGOVERN herit. So you, too, have a job to do.
One step is to provide end-to-end
encryption in as many of your services
as possible. WhatsApp has done so,
and the feature has become a selling
MY LIFE IN THE SERVICE point. The creators of Signal have gone
a step further, collecting only the mini-
FEATURES A FACSIMILE OF mum data necessary to operate. When
THE DIARY GEORGE MCGOVERN
KEPT FROM HIS FIRST DAYS OF
BASIC TRAINING TO THE END OF
the company was served a government
order last year, it could hand over no
more than the dates people had joined
the service and the dates they last used
THE WAR. HASTILY JOTTED IN it. The case is a reminder of the risks
HIS EXACTING HAND (A TYPED created by the current practice of stor-
ing all possible datathe risks for you
TRANSCRIPTION IS INCLUDED), and for us. Particularly dangerous is the
THE PAGES CONVEY THE information that people have deleted
and believe to be gone; you know that
IMMEDIACY OF MCGOVERNS
sometimes it remains.
WARTIME EXPERIENCES. None of these choices will be easy:
technically, economically, ethically. It
is difficult to take a public stand, and it
INTRODUCTION BY can come at a cost. Yet the decisions
ANDREW J. BACEVICH made by individual engineers and de-
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR velopers matter. An IBM employee has
already quit in response to the compa-
OF HARPERS MAGAZINE nys support of the Trump Administra-
tion. And some tech workers have
signed a public pledge to refuse to
STORE.HARPERS.ORG build tools that could be used to assist
mass deportation. If this gesture seems
FRANKLIN small, its worth remembering that
SQUARE
PRESS back in the early 1940s, when every-
thing looked hopeless, the Resistance
leader Ren Carmille sabotaged the
Hollerith infrastructure in occupied
Distributed by
Midpoint Trade Books
38 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
France by leaving the eleventh col-
umn of the punch cards, which indi-
cated Jewish identity, blank. Carmille
has been described as one of the first
ethical hackers.
You, the software engineers and
leaders of technology companies, face
an enormous responsibility. You know
better than anyone how best to pro-
tect the millions who have entrusted
you with their data, and your knowl-
edge gives you real power as civic ac-
tors. If you want to transform the
world for the better, here is your mo-
ment. Inquire about how a platform
will be used. Encrypt as much as you
can. Oppose the type of data analysis
that predicts peoples orientation, reli-
gion, and political preferences if they
did not willingly offer that informa-
tion. Reduce the quantity of personal
information that is kept. And when
the unreasonable demands come, the
demands that would put activists, law-
yers, journalists, and entire communi-
ties at risk, resist wherever you can.
History also keeps a file. Q
arpers Magazine is accept-
H ing applications from col-
lege students and gradu-
ates for its editorial and art internship
programs.
Editorial interns serve full-time for
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takes part in the creation of the
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tion, call (212) 420-5720. Please specify
which program you are applying for.
 F R O M
ON MARTIN LUTHER KING
By David Halberstam
H e is perhaps the best speaker in
America of this generation, but his
speech before the huge crowd in the
U.N. Plaza on that afternoon in mid-
April was bad; his words were flat, the
drama and that special cadence, rooted
in his Georgia past and handed down
generation by generation in his family,
were missing. It was as if he were
reading someone elses speech.
There was no extemporizing; and
he is at his best extemporaneously,
and at his worst when he reads.
There were no verbal mistakes, no
surprise passions. When he fin-
ished his speech, and was embraced
by a black brother, it seemed an
unwanted embrace, and he looked
uncomfortable. He left the
U.N.Plaza as soon as he could.
On that cold day of a cold spring
Martin Luther King Jr. made a
sharp departure from his own past.
He did it reluctantly; if he was not em-
bittered over the loss of some old allies,
he was clearly uneasy about some of his
new ones. Yet join the peace movement
he did. One part of his life was behind
him, and a different and obviously more
difficult one lay ahead. He had walked,
marched, picketed, protested against
legal segregation in Americain jails
and out of jails, always in the spotlight.
Where he went, the action went too. He
had won a striking place of honor in the
America society: if he was attacked as a
radical, it was by men whose days were
past. In the decade of 1956 to 1966 he
was a radical America felt comfortable
to have spawned.
But all that seemed long ago. In the
year 1967, the vital issue of the time
was not civil rights, but Vietnam. And
in civil rights we were slowly learning
From The Second Coming of Martin Luther King, which appeared in the August 1967 issue of Harpers Magazine. The complete essay
along with the magazines entire 166-year archiveis available online at harpers.org/fromthearchive.
T H E A R C
1 9 6 7
some of the terrible truths about the
ghettos of the North. Standing on the
platform at the U.N. Plaza, he was not
taking on George Wallace, or Bull
Connor, or Jim Clark; he was taking on
the president of the United States,
challenging what is deemed national
security, linking by his very presence
much of the civil-rights movement with
the peace movement. Before the war
would be ended, before the president
and King spoke as one on the Ameri-
can ghettosif they ever wouldhis
new radicalism might take him very far.
On both these issues there had
been considerable controversy and de-
bate within the King organization, es-
pecially among those people who care
most deeply for King, and see him as
the possessor of a certain amount of
moral power. On the peace issue none
of Kings associates really questioned
how he felt; rather they questioned
the wisdom of taking a stand. Would
it hurt the civil-rights movement?
Would it deprive the Negroes of
Kings desperately needed time and re-
sources? And some of these peace peo-
ple, were they really the kind of peo-
H I V E
ple King wanted to play with? On the
ghettos there were similar problems.
No one is really going to accomplish
anything in the ghettos, goes the argu-
ment, until the federal government
comes in with massive programs. In the
meantime, King can only hurt and
smear his own reputation; he will get
dirt on his hands like the other
ward heelers if he starts playing
with practical day-by-day politics in
the North. In the North, in addi-
tion to the white opponents, there
are all the small-time Negro opera-
tors who will be out to make a
reputation by bucking Martin
King. Yet the ghettos exist, and to
shun them is to lose moral status.
A fter the New York peace
rally, I traveled with King
for ten days on the new paths he
had chosen. It was a time when the
Negro seemed more than ever rebellious
and disenchanted with the white; and
when the white middle classdecent,
uprightseemed near to saturation with
the Negros new rebellion. The Negro in
the cities seemed nearer to riots than
ever; the white, seeing the riots on TV,
wanted to move further away from the
Negro than ever before. A terrible cycle
was developing.
One sensed him struggling to speak
to and for the alienated while still
speaking to the mass of America, of
trying to remain true to his own, while
not becoming a known, identified, pre-
dictable, push-button radical, forgotten
because he was no longer in the main-
stream. The tug on him was already
great, and there is no reason to believe
that in the days ahead it would become
any less excruciating. Q
ARCHIVE 39
 RE AD
INGS
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"Fo zenith."
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 M I S C E L L A N Y

LITTLE THINGS
The outsized pleasures of the very small
By Alice Gregory

L
ori DeBacker drives a Mini
Cooper, owns a runt dog, and
lives with her husband, a
model-train enthusiast, in a twelve-
room Victorian house whose tea-
room is outfitted with three-quarter-
scale furniture. A woman can sit in
Alice Gregorys most recent article for
Harpers Magazine appeared in the August
2015 issue.
it, but a man would never dare, she
told me. I just like everything tiny.
Ive just liked tiny all my life. In the
second grade, bothered by the unre-
alistic food offered for Barbies,
DeBacker decided to make her own
out of clay. Her parents country-club
friends were impressed and began
commissioning meals for their own
daughters dolls. Today DeBacker, who
wears +300 reading glasses and a ring
on every finger, enjoys creating mi-
nuscule cakesfaux gteauxand
humorously altered, miniaturized
versions of famous paintings. I love
to spoof the masters, she smirked,
showing me a postage-stamp-size re-
production of The Scream in which
the central figure was replaced with
an extra-agonized ghost. Making

Photographs of miniatures by Lori DeBacker by Thomas Allen MISCELLANY 41

miniatures focuses DeBacker. My
mother always said this would drive
her to drink, she said, but I think it
keeps me from it.
I met DeBacker in April at an
airport-adjacent Marriott. She had
traveled to suburban Chicago for three
overlapping miniaturist conventions.
The fairs had attracted hundreds of
vendors and makers and thousands of
lifelong enthusiasts and collectors,
who assembled for a weekend to ad-
mire all things miniature.
It seemed, in the three days I
spent in Chicago, as though I en-
countered every material object I
had ever known. There was pro-
sciutto, each translucent slice small-
42 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
er than a dime; a pill-size bottle of
bleach. I saw tiny eggs in tiny egg-
cups and tiny CliffsNotes on Don
Quixote. There were pinkie-size ar-
cade games and rubber-band-size
diamond necklaces set with poppy-
s e e d-si z e s t o ne s. T he r e we r e
L.L. Bean boots and Etruscan ru-
ins, rolling luggage so small a dog
could swallow it without incident.
In one hand I could easily hold a
gumball machine, a hamster in a
chip-lined cage, a Shaker chair, a
jar of preserved pears, a tiger-skin
rug with the head still on, and a
Giacometti-style bronze.
The items were sometimes far
more expensive than their full-
scale inspirations. A roll of receipt
paper was $25, a birdbath $300. I
saw a bergre sofa for $1,250 and a
stocked pantry for $1,525. I heard
about, but did not see for myself, a
piano supposedly going for $9,000.
Other items, such as a pea-size
glass elk blown in Brazil ($64),
lacked, as a real-estate agent might
say, relevant comps. DeBacker once
m ade a replic a of Rut her ford
B. Hayess house that fit in her
palm. When I asked her why, she
looked at me like I was crazy. To
see if it could be done, she said.
Like the dozens of others that
su r rou nded it, t he su r face of
DeBackers table was congested
with what from a distance looked
like clutter but became on closer
scrutiny a miscellaneous three-
dimensional tapestry of intention.
Dogs and hedgehogs crowded pot-
ted ferns and crystal balls; pies
rested beside spiderwebs suspended
between artificial branches. Each
item was ludicrously small, but
there were so many that almost
none of the tabletop was visible.
The room itself was similarly filled
to capacity. The conspicuous abun-
dance of delicate, easily losable ob-
jects forced everyone into a state of
collective submission. One lady
would smile at another and ginger-
ly move aside. No, you go, shed
say, and receive an immediate nod
of gratitude.
I stood at DeBackers booth for a
good hour, squinting at jack-o-
la nter n s, holding Cheerio-size
doughnuts up to the f luorescent
light. A woman approached and
began talking about her fair y
gardenslittle landscapes built
outdoors, with bitsy fountains and
elfin furniture. Inclement weather
had ravaged the gardens in recent
years, she said, and so this last win-
ter her husband had constructed
for her a more durable topography
out of cement. DeBacker listened
attentively. The two women spoke
of mosses and broken pine needles,
compared notes on which petite
species were the hardiest. I asked if
either of them ever incorporated
bonsai trees into her designs. They
turned to me simultaneously and
raised their eyebrows in dismay.
Way too big, DeBacker said.
Way, way too big.
I
t is difficult for me, in the pres-
ence of miniatures, not to feel
like a pervert. Tiny things have
always filled me with a devious and
urgent covetousness. Delight is
too casual a word to describe it,
and not at all physical enough. The
first and last thing I ever stole was
a Sudafed-size doubloon from a
friends pirate-themed Lego set. I
needed it. More than twenty years
have since passed, but preventing
myself from buying Polly Pocket sets
on eBay is a feat of near-constant
diligence. Sometimes I slip up,
though, see a tiny thing I simply
must own, and breathlessly buy it.
The lining of my purse was once
destroyed by the tines of several
miniature forks that I kept stashed
away for almost a week; on my
the recycling bin chained outside
mantel sit lead soldiers and ceramic
seals, a single reduced radish, and a
U.S. passport smaller than a Chi-
clet. They gather dust and puzzle
friends. I dont see myself as a trin-
kets person, and yet when I heard of
a woman at the fair who hid her ex-
tensive miniatures collection at her
sons house so that her husband
would never learn of it, I thought to
myself, Good idea, and made a
mental note to maybe one day do
the same.
It feels gluttonousand good
to hoard so much sensual detail at
once. Miniatures are the most con-
centrated form of extravagance I
know, a decadent combination of
ontological and visceral attraction.
There is wickedness to it, a pleas-
ant brand of self-disgust. The mas-
ochistic ecstasy of seeing myself as
a monster when next to a miniature
is unshakeable. A hand never ap-
pears more sun-ravaged than when
cradling a ticking grandfather clock
that is the height of a stick of
chewing gum and carved from an
especially fine-grained pearwood.
Nothing compares more favorably
to a hangnail than a christening
gown for a dolls doll, made of em-
broidery thread so thin it must be
sewn with acupuncture needles.
The tacit philosophy of miniatur-
istscelebrate all entities, neglect no
detailsis at once ambitious and
laughable. To mimic the known uni-
verse as it is, not with imagination but
with rigor, allows for an uncommon
kind of pleasure: one notices, with
some sadness, how rare it is to be pure-
ly impressed. No fan or collector of
miniatures would describe their enthu-
siasm as soothing (the heart in fact
races), but there is something emotion-
ally restorative about an enjoyment
uncomplicated by interpretation.
Why should it be so fulfilling to
see the detritus of everyday life
made small? I dont look twice at
my apartment building, but dimin-
ish itwhile re-creating the rusty
patina and scuffs and peeling mu-
nicipal labelsand Ill admire it,
entranced, for what can feel like
hours. The sensation isnt unrelat-
ed, I think, to the thrill one expe-
r iences when t a sti ng a ca ndy
whose synthetic flavor matches ex-
actly that of the fruit it imitates. It
is the accuracy, the rightness, that
is so rewarding. Miniatures disap-
point only when they lack exacti-
tude. If executed with even a hint
of impressionism, the most ornate
itemschess sets, spinning carou-
sels, leopard-skin coatswill fail
to elicit admiration. Better a flaw-
less broom than a crudely carved
cuckoo clock.
And exactitude is something
were seldom given permission to
relish. Weve even been taught to
distrust it. When we say a painter
has technical skills, we mean
that her work is not creative; when
we say an actor is a good mimic,
we mean that his performances
lack soul. It is a relief, then, to be
in the presence of precisionand
be allowed to like it.
W
ith the glaring exception
of a sheikh from Qatar
he is rumored to come to
Chicago each spring to amass hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars worth of
miniaturesmost of the fairs attend-
ees were women, long since retired.
They wore inexpensive clothing and
carried faux-leather handbags; their
cars, which filled the hotels parking
MISCELLANY 43
lots to capacity, were mostly Ameri-
can in make and old in model. And
here they were, spending their money
on tiny objects modeled after full-size
items they could never afford, select-
ed to decorate houses that, if they
were of habitable dimensions and
well located, would sell for millions.
I bought a little bench for four
thousand dollars last night, and I drive
an eighteen-year-old RAV4, one
woman confessed to me. Priorities!
I always wanted to inflict my
view on society, and now I do it in
miniature, Keith Bougourd, a Brit-
ish architect living in France, said. I
examined his display of trophy fish
and Regency-era tea caddies. Like
most of the miniaturists I met, Keith
used jewelers tools and instruments
designed for repairing watches and
musical instruments. He pointed out
a microscope carved from scrap
piano-key ivory and mentioned a
44 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
pair of commodes, recently sold,
made of mammoths tooth. You can
own everything you cant afford in
full size, he said, and you escape
into a world most people couldnt
otherwise occupy. The sentiment
struck me, like the miniatures them-
selves, as a perspective plausible only
when examined up close. As long as
I was in Bougourds company, sur-
rounded by his tiny things, his ex-
planation made senseminiatures
were an elegant solution to an un-
wieldy dilemma. But later, when I
was by myself in the ordinary-size
world, it seemed tragic.
Jason and Jacqueline Getzman,
of Palatine, Illinois, had a rare ea-
gerness to consider the metaphysi-
cal implications of the peculiar way
in which they spent their time. The
couple, who have been making min-
iature metalworks for more than for-
ty years, are among the most prolific
and respected manufacturers of
working miniature Swarovski-crystal
chandeliers in the world: she builds
them, he wires them. The Getzmans
used to go to dozens of fairs every
year, all across the country. When I
spoke to them, they had a light-
hearted rapport, a collaborative way
of answering questions. They both
wondered aloud about the psycholo-
gy of it all. As we chatted, they took
turns flicking on tiny lights and
demonstrating kitchen appliances.
It encompasses life, Jacqueline said,
gesturing toward the room. How
people live their livesand how
they wish they lived their lives.
T
he best aesthetic experiences
are those that permanently
heighten our standards of
beauty and private feelings of exalta-
tion. They possess a painful brutali-
ty, forcing us to acknowledge how
often in the past we accepted medi-
ocrity. Things we once enjoyed fade;
things we once paid no mind be-
come intolerable.
I suspect that under other circum-
stancessay, a continental breakfast
eaten quickly before a domestic
flightI might not have noticed the
hotels wall-to-wall carpets. But over
the course of the three days I spent
walking atop them, their garish colors
and enlarged paisleys enraged me.
The sloppy swirls took on a signifi-
cance they didnt deserve. They be-
gan to announce themselves as the
antithesis of why I was there. They
tormented me.
Ugliness and squalor arent limit-
ed to floor coveringswe settle for
it all the time. Stale sandwiches
w rapped in cellopha ne. Ty po-
ridden blog posts. Polyester under-
wear that melts in the dryer. Elect-
ed officials who speak inarticulate
falsehoods. Outside the magnani-
mous moods that occasionally be-
fall all of us, it usually feels as
though everyone is bad at their job
and nobody tries. To spend time in
the company of miniaturists is to
be granted a reprieve from the
worlds general shabbiness. Here is a
group of people, objectively talent-
ed and daring to bother: allergic to
good enough, dissatisfied with the
generic, confident that time and at-
tention will indeed yield something
better than it reasonably needs to
be.1 Their effortfulness elicits vicar-
1
On Saturday, Barbara Ann Meyers
plan for the night was to go home and
chop a clay dachshund in half. She fash-
io n s wh at sh e ca ll s mutt b utt s
elevated rears of tiny dogs that create the
illusion of the animal digging. She makes
sure to include with each purchase a gel-
atin capsule filled with tea leaves that
can be sprinkled around the figurine to
approximate dirt.
ious pride. It is easy to imagine the
artisans held-breath focus and ex-
hilarated satisfaction, and in bear-
ing witness to the fruits of their la-
bor, one cannot help but absorb
some of the myopic gratification.2
Besides the odd minutes I spent
fixated on the carpets, this was the
overwhelming feeling I had that
weekenda chest-swelling sense of un-
earned self-respect. Miniatures have the
power to improve the sensibility of those
who encounter themnot just once,
but seemingly more with each moment
2
Not only were the objects of his strenu-
ous art pleasing to look at but the pleasure
and astonishment increased as the observer,
bending closer, saw that a passionate care
had been lavished on the smallest and least
visible details, writes Steven Millhauser in
In the Reign of Harad IV, his 2006 story
about a court-appointed miniaturist. It
was said that no matter how closely you ex-
amined one of the Masters little pieces you
always discovered some further wonder.
MISCELLANY 45
THE
SIXTIES
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE DECADE
FROM HARPERS MAGAZINE
of sustained attention. They issue a kind
of perceptual debt: as with frescoed
churches and brocaded clothing, one
wants to feel worthy of them.
I
trembled those three days, and em-
pathized, in a bodily way, with the
childs urge to put small things in
her mouth. I wanted to consume. The
impulse, like its object, seemed infan-
tile. A psychiatrist once told me chil-
dren like elephants and dinosaurs but
also small things because children live
in a world built by and for adults, so
they appreciate other things that are
out of scale, Suzie Moffett, a retiree
from Indiana, told me. But there is
something distinctly grown-up about
being attracted to tiny thingsan as-
MCGINNISS sertion of omnipotence and posses-
sion, a respect for accuracy, a desire to
understand completely and all at once.
A good miniaturedizzyingly precise,
scrupulously proportionateis an exer-
cise of dispassion no child could endure
or appreciate.
And real children are, unsurpris-
ingly maybe, rare in the miniatures
world: the objects are too fine, too ex-
pensive, too labor-intensive to entrust
to anyone inclined toward anything so
reckless as play. I saw few kids at the
fairs, and the ones I did come across
were closely supervised.
I feel sorry sometimes. I see children
come in with their mothers and grand-
mothers and of course they would like
these things for their dollhouses, said
Lars Mikkelsen, a retired I.T. technician
turned miniature-furniture maker. But
this is not the place to buy that.
J
ust a few miles from the fairs, in
the basement of the Art Insti-
tute of Chicago, one can visit
the Thorne Miniature Rooms. Com-
missioned during the Depression by a
Midwestern socialite, the rooms are
LOMAX historically accurate dioramas of Euro-
pean and American interiors. In one, a
spindly hunting dog sleeps in front of a
medieval hearth. In another, half-full
glasses of wassail are left abandoned on
a banquet table. To their owners speci-
fications, the rooms were constructed
ORDER TODAY FROM at the now-standard 1:12 scale, mean-
ing that a foot-long item in real life is an
STORE.HARPERS.ORG inch when miniaturized. Its the same
scale used for Queen Marys dollhouse,
FRANKLIN
SQUARE
PRESS
which was built in the early 1920s and
Distributed by Midpoint Trade Books
46 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
has working elevators, hot and cold
water, flushing toilets, dovetail-jointed
drawers in the maids quarters, and a
cellar filled with real wine.
Almost every miniaturist I met used
this scale. Its just the right size, Greg
Madl, the promoter of one of the shows,
told me. If you go smaller, you lose
something. A retired teacher named
Arlene Finkelstein agreed. She dissects
flowers to ascertain their shapes and
then re-creates them in Japanese silk-
crepe paper that she purchases by mail
from a man in Atlanta. Her roses are
more expensive than her tulips because
they have more petals; to achieve a
saturated-enough blue, her hydrangeas
must be pigmented with ink; she out-
sources the spider mums, which are so
delicate that their spikes must be cut
with a laser. The smaller the scale, the
more imagination you have to use to
interpret them, she said. If a flower is
too small, its really just the suggestion
of a flower.
For the people who make and admire
miniatures, suggestion is worthless. I
met an archaeologist who made minute
ferns because blight and bugs destroyed
her real garden; I met a retiree who
relished in her ability to put white rugs
in a dollhouse bathroom, something
shed never get away with at home. The
hobby is gratifying to the degree that it
solves real problems, however small
they might be to begin with.
The Getzmansthe couple who
make chandeliershad urged me to
rewatch an episode of The Twilight Zone
that stars Robert Duvall in one of his
earliest roles. I downloaded the show at
the airport the following day. Duvall
plays Charley Parkes, a Bartleby-like
virgin who lives with his mother. During
his lunch break one day, he wanders
into a museum near his office and
glimpses a miniaturized nineteenth-
century Boston town house. Its roof is
gabled, the drapes are plush, and inside
the tiny marbleized parlor sits a doll,
posed on the bench of a fist-size grand
piano. Charley peers in, and as his gaze
settles, the doll begins to subtly sway,
music tinkles out, and the figurine be-
comes a real, though teeny, woman.
Charley is transfixed, and he returns to
the dollhouse day after day. He loses his
job, then his appetite. Eventually, he is
institutionalized. After being released,
he seems, for a time, restored, but soon
 Because you deserve the finest.
enough he retreats back to the museum.
We see him crouched in the shadows,
craning his neck around the dissected,
diminutive vestibules. Dr. Wallman
says it happened because I needed a
simple world I could understand, he
whispers into the shrunken rooms, but
your world isnt simple, is it? No world
with people in it is. And then he van-
ishes. The last shot shows him perched
inside the house on a pencil-length set-
tee, chatting lovingly with his new girl-
friend, in whose world he finally fits.
The fantasy is irresistible: if only all
lifes challenges were questions of
scale, if only they could be made man-
ageable through literal reduction. So
many of the people I met seemed to
believe such a thing was possible. I
went to Chicago with the idea that
miniatures could charm, seduce, sup-
ply short-term distraction for those
who wanted it. I left with the notion
that they were, for some at least, a
form of pain managementbrilliantly Swan House Miniatures
literal and apparently effective.
And perhaps there is value, more now
than ever, in specificity. At a time of
www.swanhouseminiatures.com
vague promises, blunt-force sloganeer-
ing, and unfounded factual claims, a
person who spends two weeks making a
fastidiously measured and proportion-
ately diminished salt shaker can seem,
to me at least, like a sage. Q

February Index Sources

1 Tot Squad (Los Angeles); 2,3 Spectrem
Group (Lake Forest, Ill.); 4 Coldwell Banker

Make Love
Previews International (Beverly Hills, Calif.);
5,6 O.E.C.D. (Washington); 7 The White
House (Washington); 8 Zillow (Seattle); 9 Tobin
Asher, Stanford University (Stanford, Calif.);

DELICIOUS!
10,11 Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations (Rome); 12 World Wildlife Fund
(Washington); 13 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
(Falls Church, Va.); 14,15 U.S. Department of
Agriculture; 16 Pet Poison Helpline (St. Paul,
Minn.); 17,18 Bank of England (London); Indulge your Valentine
19,20 Department of National Defence and the
Canadian Armed Forces (Ottawa); 21,22 Public with gourmet brownies.
Services and Procurement Canada (Gatineau);
23 Stephen Chan, SOAS, University of London; Pure bliss in every bite.
24 Center for Strategic and International
Studies (Washington); 25 U.S. Department
of Homeland Security; 26 Kaplan Test Prep
(N.Y.C.); 27 Upturn (Washington); 28 Signal
(San Francisco); 29,30 American Civil Liberties
Union (N.Y.C.); 31 David Alan Sklansky,
Stanford Law School (Stanford, Calif.); 32,33
Federal Bureau of Investigation; 34 Ilhan
Omar for State Representative (Minneapolis);
35,36 Harpers research; 37 New York City
Department of Buildings; 38 Harpers research;
39,40 Chapman University (Orange, Calif.).
ORDER NOW:
VermontBrownie.com 18007458333
MISCELLANY 47
 A N N O T

MISTAKEN I
The curious case of IC
By Jesse Hicks a
In May 2013, Gabin MBogning Tonfack was issued a single piece of paper bearing the seal
of the Republic of Cameroon. The travel document, called a laissez-passer, declared him a
Cameroonian citizen whose previous identification had been lost or destroyed. U.S. Immigra-
tion and Customs Enforcement (ICE) requires countries to provide these documents to
confirm a deportees citizenship and grant them reentry. In Tonfacks case, the document
allowed him temporary passage to return to his home in Cameroon. But the details didnt
add up. An accompanying photo appeared to be of an unidentified male who looked nothing
like him; the document also listed his date of birth as April 23, 2013, making the twenty-six-
year-old man a newborn. The most disconcerting of these mistakes was that Tonfacks home
was not in Cameroon. In fact, he insisted, hed never even been there. Tonfack first entered
the United States on a student visa in 2006, and he was handed over to immigration au-
thorities in January 2013, after having been convicted of credit-card fraud. In August 2013,
he challenged the travel documents validity in court and provided his Cte DIvoire birth
certificate as evidence. The content was so wrong, Tonfack recalls. He was nonetheless
deported to Cameroon.

Abraham Paulos, the executive director of Families for Freedom, a human-rights

group, says that he has come across several similar cases in which a laissez-
passer appears to have been fabricated. He sees these disputed documents as ev-
idence of ICEs cavalier attitude toward detention and deportation. The ap-
proach at ICE, he says, is Weve got these criminals, and these countries wont
take them. In 2013, after federal fraud convictions, Jason Akande was removed
to Lagos despite telling ICE agents that he was not a citizen of Nigeria. Accord-
ing to a forensic document examiner with the Nigerian police, markings on the
laissez-passer issued by ICE agents indicated that Akandes name had been cut-
and-pasted over another mans. It has not been determined how ICE obtained
Akandes travel documents. To deliver Tonfacks, the agency had contacted Dr.
Charles Greene, a Texas minister whod been appointed an honorary consul of
Cameroon in 1986, at the behest of the Shell Oil Company. Greene later testi-
fied that he assumed he was providing travel documents for a Cameroonian de-
tained in Texas. (An ICE spokesperson did not respond to questions about the
cases and said the agency does its due diligence to verify citizenship and ac-
quire travel documents.)

Deporting people like Tonfack and Akandeimmigrants with nonviolent criminal

recordswasnt always such a high priority. The shift began in 1994, when Zapatista
fighters seized five villages in southern Mexico to protest the North American Free
Trade Agreement. The subsequent northern flight of companies and investor capital
left Mexicos economy in crisis, and workers took off for the United States. With an
election on the horizonand as a way to placate RepublicansPresident Bill Clinton
took a hard line on securing the border. We are increasing border controls by fifty
percent, he said during his 1996 State of the Union address. That year, Congress
passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA),
which lowered the sentencing threshold for immigrants convicted of crimes. An im-
migrant could now be thrown out of the country for aggravated felonies such as
filing a false tax return, stealing, and failing to appear in court.

48 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017

 A T I O N

IDENTITIES
CE travel documents
and Matt Stroud
Between 1995 and 2000, the average daily population of immigration detention
centers increased from less than 7,500 to nearly 20,000. In 1999, a Justice Department
report found that nearly three quarters of those detainees were considered criminal
aliens based on IIRIRA criteria, which led to an unforeseen problem: what to do
with immigrants who violated the law under IIRIRA but would not be accepted
into a foreign country? The Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged
that while most North and Central American countries willingly accept deportees,
other countries have been less accommodatinga hurdle that has resulted in in-
definite detentions. By 2000, as many as 5,000 people were being held without a re-
lease date. The problem came before the Supreme Court in Zadvydas v. Davis: Kestutis
Zadvydasa German-born man with Lithuanian parents whose wife held Domini-
can citizenshipwas ordered deported, but neither Lithuania, Germany, nor the
Dominican Republic would accept him. He was detained for three years. In the
majority opinion, issued on June 28, 2001, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that indefi-
nite detention raises a serious constitutional problem. But the court balked at in-
stituting an outright ban and suggested that detentions be reevaluated if deportation
did not seem likely after six months.

While Zadvydas v. Davis reduced the number of immigrants held

indefinitely, it did not eliminate the practice. As a result, the average
daily population in ICE detention centers has quietly risen to 41,000.
Throughout his term, Barack Obama deported more undocumented
immigrants than any president in U.S. history. Since he did not boast
about these numbersit might have been awkward for a self-de-
scribed progressive to signal that hed deported more than 2.4million
immigrantshe gave Donald Trump an opportunity to call Demo-
crats weak on immigration and advocate increasing strength along
an already militarized border. If were to believe what Trump has
promised, it appears hes going to take perhaps the most robust im-
migration-enforcement regime in American history and expand it
significantly, Bradley Jenkins, an attorney at the Catholic Legal
Immigration Network, says.

Jesse Hicks lives in Detroit. Matt
Stroud lives in Pittsburgh.
Jenkins sees a familiar pattern emerging. Over the past twenty years, he says, legis-
lators and presidents have doubled the size of the Border Patrol multiple times over.
But they have done so without a similar investment in due process. The immigration
system has almost 6,000 enforcement agents, but only 296 judges. The result is pre-
dictable. Half a million people are waiting for their day in court, and the average case
takes nearly two years to complete. Paulos believes that the pressure to clear the
backlog has resulted in corner-cutting: in the cases of Tonfack, Akande, and others,
its led to the use of documents that violate international norms. Deportees are arriv-
ing without valid identification in countries that are not their own. Two years after
his deportation, Tonfack remains in Cameroon. He says he didnt know anyone when
he arrived. ICE shouldnt be telling people where theyre from, Paulos says, in order
to deport them. Q

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 L E T T E R F R O M K A B U L

THE PATIENT WAR

What awaits Trump in Afghanistan
By May Jeong

H
aji Din Mohammed met with Din Mohammed, who is in his ear- prefers green tea, considering the
the Taliban for the first time ly sixties, has a white beard and Pakistani variety too sweet, so his
on the public record on July 7, rheumy eyes. That evening, he wore a cup went untouched.
2015, in the town of Murree, Pakistan, lungi, a turban that indicated his It was already ten in the evening
just outside Islamabad. It was Rama- elite social status, and a shalwar ka- when the discussion began, though
dan, the Muslim month of fasting. Af- meez, an elegant tunic and trousers. in a sense the participants had been
ter sunset, he and his colleagues He and his delegation were ushered waiting fourteen years, as no one
delegates from the High Peace Council, into a sparsely appointed room and could agree on who was fighting
the Afghan governments official nego- seated along one side of a long table. whom. The Afghan government
tiating bodysat down for a custom- Facing them were three Taliban en- viewed the enduring conflict within
ary iftar dinner at their hotel before voys. On their left were the Pakistani its borders as an undeclared war be-
heading over to a nearby golf resort. hosts; on their right, three observers tween Afghanistan and Pakistan;
from the United States and China. Pakistan saw it through the prism of
May Jeong lives in Kabul, Afghanistan. Her For this historic occasion, the resort a threat from India; the Taliban were
work on this article was supported by a grant served milk tea and summer fruit. resisting American intervention;
from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Like most Afghans, Din Mohammed America was battling Al Qaeda.
Rubble at the site of a truck bombing in eastern Kabul, August 7, 2015. The blast killed at least fifteen
and injured hundreds of civilians; the target was believed to be a nearby military base. Two more major
attacks occurred in the Afghan capital over the next twenty-four hours Andrew Quilty/Oculi/Redux LETTER FROM KABUL 51
 That night, the aim was modest:
set an agenda for a follow-up meeting.
The group eased in with niceties, as
some of the adversaries on either side
of the table had once been allies and
neighbors. Din Mohammed was the
first to address the room. He took in-
ventory of the advances that Af-
ghanistan had made over the past
decade: the improvements to educa-
tion, health care, and the national
economy. Then he made his case for
ending the war. A death is a death is
a death, he said. If friendly forces
were murdered, the deaths were
mourned, and when Taliban fighters
were killed, he insisted, We cry for
them too. He went on, War will
destroy you. War will destroy us all.
But the dialogue soon buckled.
The Taliban emissaries seemed to
have arrived already angry, Din
Mohammed said when he recount-
ed the meeting to me. Abdul Latif
Mansour, a member of the Taliban
delegation, told the Americans, his
temper rising, We had our own
government, but you pushed us
out. Then he erupted at the High
Peace Council. You let them do night
raids. You are nothing! We should be
leading the country, not you. We are
not tired. We can continue fighting
for longer! This was not an idle
threat: The Taliban have an operat-
ing budget of around $500million for
some 30,000 fighters. Its not much
compared with the $3billion that the
U.S. Department of Defense will
spend in 2017 on the 352,000-strong
Afghan National Defense and Secu-
rity Forces, but the groups benefactors
are unhindered by a legislature or
recalcitrant public, and a steady
stream of money comes in from drug
revenues and zakat (religious taxes).
Anatol Lieven, a global-terrorism
scholar based at Georgetown Univer-
sitys campus in Qatar, told me, They
can outlast us all.
Din Mohammed called for a tea
break. During the recess, he urged his
delegation to stay focused: this was
their opportunity to engage, and all
they needed was a plan for the next
talk. The alternative, he reminded
them, was unceasing violence.
When everyone returned to the
table, the Taliban negotiators were
noticeably less acerbic, more deferen-
52 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
tial, addressing Din Mohammed
with the honorific mujahed. The
group worked steadily into the night,
forgoing the resorts offer of a break-
fast at two-thirty in the morning
the last victual before resuming the
fastso they could keep talking. A
few hours before sunrise, they bade
one another farewell, promising to
meet again at the end of the month.
The following week, Din Moham-
med flew from Kabul, where his of-
fice is based, to Mecca, to build
goodwill with other Taliban repre-
sentatives. He was told that senior
Taliban officials approved of the
peace meetings, and returned home
glowing with optimism. Days later,
the annual Eid al-Fitr message of
GHANI PUSHED TO GET PEACE
TALKS STARTED BEFORE THE
TALIBAN BEGAN THEIR OFFENSIVE.
BUT HE DIDNT MAKE IT IN TIME
Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Tali-
bans leader, was released. If we look
into our religious regulations, it
read, We can find that meetings
and even peaceful interactions with
the enemies is not prohibited. The
president of Afghanistan, Ashraf
Ghani, praised Mullah Omars con-
ciliatory tone in his own Eid address.
But a couple of weeks later, two
days before the second meeting was
to be held, an announcement was
made on the news: Mullah Omar
was dead. Not only that, he had died
back in 2013. Din Mohammed was
shocked, and then filled with ques-
tions. Who had written the Eid mes-
sage? Who had been leading the
group for the past two years? And
with whom had the High Peace
Council really been negotiating?
He learned that the Talibans peace
delegates were in Islamabad awaiting
instructions. They, too, had been
stunned by the report of Mullah
Omars death, which had been kept
secret by the organizations top brass.
(According to one account, he had
died of tuberculosis at a hospital in
Karachi, Pakistan; others reported
that he was buried in the southern
Afghan province of Zabul.) Yet Din
Mohammed was determined to carry
on as planned, and convened his
team at their office to review the
agenda. The discussion had just got-
ten started when a secretary inter-
rupted with an update: in light of re-
cent events, Pakistan was canceling
the meeting. Everyone got up, gath-
ered their things, and left.
That evening, the Taliban Supreme
Council in Quetta, Pakistanknown
as the Quetta Shuramet to install a
new leader. Most were in favor of elevat-
ing Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Man-
sour, Omars deputy, who had been run-
ning daily operations since 2010. But
Mansour, a portly man in his late forties,
was a drug baron from Kandahar with
business interests in Dubaino revo-
lutionary folk hero. There was an
attempt to block his appointment,
but by midnight, he managed to win
a majoritys consent.
Din Mohammed woke to this
news, along with the disquieting
revelation that the Taliban envoys
he had met with in Murree had
likely been sent against their will by
the Inter-Services Intelligence, Paki-
stans spy agency. As the confusion
mounted, however, he perceived an
opportunity. Perhaps the Taliban, with
the surprise of a new leader, would be
amenable to peace negotiations. Per-
haps the United States, after a decade
of halfhearted efforts, would put its
weight behind ending the civil war. It
would be a time of trying all things.
But first, a coronation: in Quetta,
thousands of supplicants turned out
to swear allegiance to the new Amir
al-Muminin (commander of the
faithful). They hardly could have
imagined that within a year, as if in a
cosmic test of Afghanistans nerve,
Mansour would be dead, and the
world would be watching the ascent
of Donald Trump.
P
eace requires patience. It took
Vietnam negotiators five years to
sign a ceasefire agreement. Re-
solving the war between Iran and Iraq
took eight. The Good Friday Agree-
ment of 1998, which halted hostilities
between Northern Ireland and the
United Kingdom, was built on the
failures of three attempts going back
to 1973.
 In Afghanistan, peace has long
been elusive. After the American in-
vasion in 2001 and the rapid collapse
of the Taliban regime, international
stakeholders met in Bonn, Germany,
at the end of the year to choose a
new leader for the country. Absent
was anyone from the Taliban, who
were running around trying to
avoid being killed by the Ameri-
cans, Barnett Rubin, who partici-
pated in the meeting on behalf of
the United Nations, told me. The
dignitaries settled on Hamid Karzai,
a forty-four-year-old mujahed, as in-
terim president.
The same day, Karzai went to
meet senior Taliban officials in
Shah Wali Kot, a town in southern
Afghanistan. While he was on his
way, a 2,000-pound bomb, guided
by satellite from a U.S. B-52 flying
north of Kandahar, missed its tar-
get, killing three Americans and
five Afghan fighters, and wounding
many more. When Karzai arrived
in Shah Wali Kot, he recalled to
me recently, he found a fifteen-man
Taliban delegation waiting, with a
letter surrendering power to him
and asking nothing in return. I
asked how he had felt. It was an
eventful day, he said.
The letter was read aloud to the
nation on the radio that night. Karzai
never saw the document again, but its
Member of the High Peace Council Maulvi Qayamuddin Kashaf, then governor of Kabul province Haji Din Mohammed,
and member of Parliament Ustad Abdul Rab Rasoul Sayyaf (from left to right) listen to then president Hamid Karzai during
a press conference at the Presidential Palace in Kabul on September 22, 2011 Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images
effects were immediate. In exchange
for a public truce, he promised to
grant the Taliban total amnesty.
As he was ironing out the details,
however, Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S.
secretary of defense, declared that
there would be no such agreement.
Night raids began around that time,
with U.S. Special Operations Forces
going after Taliban officials, harass-
ing them, attacking their houses,
stealing their motorbikes and cows,
creating the impression that there was
no room for them in the new order,
according to a report from the Open
Society Foundations. For the Taliban,
the lesson was clear: Karzai was unre-
liable, and America wished only to
impose revenge on its vanquished ene-
my. Some continued to work on rec-
onciliation, but many more opted to
rebuild their movement into the for-
midable militant group we know.
When Barack Obama took office,
in 2009, interest in peace talks was
revived. The Taliban were consistent
in their demandsthey wanted to
open an office, see imprisoned mem-
bers released from Guantnamo Bay,
and have their names removed from
the U.N. sanctions list. Over years of
faltering, informal conversations and
trade-offs, many of their requests were
eventually granted: a political office
was permitted in Doha, Qatar; five
Taliban prisoners were released; and
fourteen of 137 names were crossed
off the list, allowing those members
to travel freely.
On June 18, 2013, six months into
Obamas second term, those watching
the news in Kabul would have seen
two major stories: in the morning,
Karzai gave a speech marking the of-
ficial security handover from NATO
to the Afghan military; in the after-
noon, the Talibans political office
opened in a diplomatic enclave of
Doha. The Taliban flag, inscribed
with the shahada, the Islamic declara-
tion of faith, flew high in a courtyard,
as if designating the embassy of a sov-
ereign state. Karzai had only reluc-
tantly consented when American ne-
gotiators arranged for the office; now
he was livid. Within a month, the
place was shuttered, and the peace
agenda stalled once again.
Karzais second term ended in Sep-
tember 2014. Ashraf Ghani, his suc-
cessor, made clear in his inaugural ad-
dress that reconciliation would be a
renewed priority. We are tired of war;
our message is peace, he declared,
and went on, For stability, security,
and economic development, we will
try to reach a regional cooperation
pact with all our neighbors. Two
months later, he visited Pakistan to
court military leadership at their base,
in Rawalpindi, and decided to offer
substantial concessions: cadets would
fly there for training, weapons orders
from India would be canceled. This
was a cop to Pakistans pride; the only
way to secure cooperation between
Afghanistan and Pakistan, many ob-
servers believe, is by pandering to Pak-
istans insecurity over its conflict with
India. Back home, however, many of
Ghanis countrymen were horrified.
Karzai publicly called the arrangement
an atrocious betrayal. He told me,
Pakistan was allowed to harbor the
Taliban leadership and to train them
and to equip them. They made serious
mistakes that cost them so much and
they cost us so much.
Ghani pushed to get peace talks
started before the Taliban began
their spring offensive, but he didnt
make it in time. However receptive
Mullah Mansour might have been to
negotiationshe gave a nod to the
Political Commission, the Talibans
diplomatic wing, to continue their
LETTER FROM KABUL 53
workwhen he took over as leader,
he needed first and foremost to con-
solidate his power. On August 7,
2015, a truck bomb went off in cen-
tral Kabul, killing fifteen people and
injuring hundreds. Within hours, a
U.S.Special Forces base was attacked,
and ten died. Three days after that,
an assault on the Kabul airport killed
five and wounded seventeen. In Oc-
tober, the northern city of Kunduz
became the first provincial capital to
fall to the Taliban since their regime
had lost control of the country four-
teen years earlier.
This past spring, the violence esca-
lated. On the morning of April 19, a
blast ripped through central Kabul.
Taliban militants had driven a truck
full of explosives into the headquar-
ters of an elite security team. When I
arrived a few hours later, the street,
normally full of vendors selling ciga-
rettes and biscuits, was deserted and
littered with the detritus of the
bombing: husks of cars, a sullied
prayer rug. Where there once stood
walls were sheets of metal contorted
like Richard Serra sculptures. The
thirty-eight arched windows of the
Eid Gah Mosque, where Afghanistan
declared its independence from Brit-
ain in 1919, were entirely shattered.
Broken glass glinted in the sun. A
NATO blimp hovered in the sky.
By afternoon, residents began to
put the pieces of their lives back to-
gether. Stalls reappeared, selling the
last strawberries of the season. Com-
muters were heading home, disks of
still-warm bread under their arms. A
man carrying a flower passed the
bomb site without a glance. Livery
cabs slowed to collect passengers.
The next day, the Ministry of Inte-
rior Affairs announced the toll: sixty-
four killed, 347 injured. Later, more
deaths were counted, bringing the of-
ficial number up to sixty-eight. This
was the deadliest attack to date since
2001, a statement from the Taliban to
Afghans that their government could
not protect them. The chief execu-
tive officer and foreign minister lost
bodyguards in the bombing, and the
vice president lost a nephew. Ghani
gave a rare speech before a joint ses-
sion of parliament, broadcast on
television, in which he called ele-
ments of the Taliban the enemy.
54 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
Soon after, the government hanged
six Taliban militantsprisoners of
war or political prisoners, depending
on whom you asked. A Taliban offi-
cial tried to persuade me that it was
unlikely the men sentenced to death
had any connection to his group, but
said, This execution blocked the way
for peace. When I visited Waheed
Muzhda, a political analyst, to talk
about the peace process, he shook his
head. After the last attack, he said,
everything is finished.
A
ccording to the theory of
conflict resolution developed
by I. William Zartman, a
scholar of international politics, there
are four conditions that must come
together in order to achieve peace: (a)
a mutually hurting stalemate, (b)
awareness that it is mutual and that it
is hurting and that it is a stalemate,
(c) united leadership, and (d) a belief
that you may get from negotiating
what you have not gotten from fight-
ing. Afghanistan at the start of 2017
meets one of these: (a) both sides have
suffered losses, yes, but (b) neither be-
lieves that it has, (c) the Ghani Ad-
ministration and the Taliban leader-
ship are unstable, and (d) factions on
both sides persist that indulge the
fantasy of a military triumph.
Conservative estimates by the
U.S. military put the Afghan govern-
ment in control of more than 60per-
cent of the country and the Taliban
at 10 percent, with the rest contest-
Kabul newspapers report on the death of Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Mansour, the leader
of the Afghan Taliban, in a U.S. drone strike on May 21, 2016 Rahmat Gul/AP Photo
ed. When I read these numbers to a
former high-ranking Afghan security
official, he laughed and guessed that,
if anything, the figures were likely
the reverse, and the expanse of con-
tested territory is really much larger.
Over the past fifteen years, check-
points, district centers, roads, fields,
and aqueducts have been fought over,
falling into government control,
wrested back by the Taliban, and
won again by soldiers. These advanc-
es and retreats have not amounted to
anyones victory. In the meantime,
essential services cant be delivered,
as some areas switch loyalties back
and forth overnight.
And what of the countrys leader-
ship? Ghani came into the presiden-
cy after a protracted election that
threatened to plunge Afghanistan
into deeper chaos. The so-called Na-
tional Unity Government, a power-
sharing coalition brought about by
Secretary of State John Kerry, in-
stalled Ghanis opponent, Abdullah
Abdullah, in a prime-ministerial po-
sition. The administration has, of
course, been beset by infighting, and
some ministers continue to defer to
Karzai. Abdullah, addressing a crowd
in his office garden, called Ghani un-
fit to govern. Last April, when whis-
pers began of a coup, Kerry made a
return trip to quell any mutiny.
Apart from deficient governance,
the High Peace Council has been
hemorrhaging money. In recent years,
members salaries and stipends for lux-
ury cars, airfare, and security have re-
portedly run up a bill of as much as
$700 million. Last summer, rather
than propose a new budget strategy,
the council burned through its emer-
gency fund. In response to accusations
of corruption, members said it wasnt
their fault that peace eluded them.
At the same time, the disclosure of
Mullah Omars death had precipi-
tated the biggest leadership crisis in
the Talibans history. Many fighters
questioned the legitimacy of an orga-
nization that had been lying to its
members. The Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan, which for more than a
decade had fought alongside the Tali-
ban, broke away to join the Islamic
State. Its exasperated leader, Uth-
man Ghazi, wrote in a public an-
nouncement that the only com-
munication he had received from
his supposed leader in recent years
was two fabricated letters that
were typed off on the computer
which didnt have his signature!
Mullah Mansour responded by
requesting a fatwa that would offer
justification for targeting Islamic
State fighters. In December 2015, ru-
mor spread of a violent altercation
within the Taliban leadership, and
Mansour, it was said, was badly in-
jured in a shoot-out. He allowed his
delegates to continue to meet on un-
official terms with peace negotiators,
but even as the Taliban gained ground,
it had become harder to tell what con-
stituency the Political Commission
could really speak for.
The discord of Mansours reign
came to a sudden halt last May, when
an American drone struck a taxi
across the Pakistani border in Balo-
chistan. The driver and his passenger,
Mullah Mansour, were killed. Man-
sour had been traveling on a fake
Pakistani passport. The strike, a high-
ranking Afghan government official
told me, was a hunting call to the
Taliban. There is no option that is
open to you, he said. Americans
will kill you anywhere you go.
The Taliban quickly chose Maulvi
Haibatullah Akhundzada, a religious
scholar, as Mansours replacement.
Maulvi Haibatullah, a preachers
son from Kandahar, had risen with-
in the organization thanks to his
talent for resolving disputes. His
promotion would soon enable the
Taliban to reset their operations
with new force.
I
nto this mire comes Donald
Trump. When his win was an-
nounced, Ashraf Ghani sent him
a staid note of congratulations. It
breaks my heart to have to say this,
but the Republican government is go-
ing to be better than the Democrats
for Afghanistan, Scott Guggenheim,
an American friend of Ghanis who
advises him on policy, told me. The
Democrats would have said, They are
still squabbling, this is a waste of time,
lets just go home. The Republicans
WILL THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING IN
AFGHANISTAN? I DOUBT IT, BUT
THEY WONT GO HOME
will say, These guys are fighting the
radicals; we have to stay engaged with
them. Does that mean the Trump
Administration is likely to accomplish
anything in Afghanistan? I doubt it.
But they wont go home.
Trump maintains that his guiding
political philosophy is America
First. As a foreign policy, this has
generally been interpreted as isola-
tionism, yet he also speaks aggres-
sively on the Islamic StateTheir
days are numbered, he has said. His
policies on the campaign trail were
so mutually contradictor y and
changeable that he is much harder to
predict than an orthodox president-
elect would be, Stephen Biddle, an
adjunct senior fellow at the Council
on Foreign Relations, told me.
Trump has expressed interest in
extracting the United States from its
nation-building commitments in
Afghanistanthe Obama Adminis-
tration had already begun to reduce
the number of troops there, though
8,400 remainbut he has also sug-
gested the possibility of providing
American forces abroad in exchange
for cash. In December, during a con-
gressional review of troop caps led
by Vicky Hartzler, a Republican of
Missouri, House members and mili-
tary experts sifted out the merits of
repealing set limits on the number
of forces deployed. The next day,
General John Nicholson, the top
military commander in Afghani-
stan, told reporters at the Pentagon,
We have adequate resources.
Trump was not caught listening to
either consultation, though with the
aid of a friendly Republican Con-
gress and expanded executive privi-
leges, he will be wielding greater
power than either George W. Bush
or Barack Obama to contend with a
conflict that stumped both of them.
Over the years, Trumps comments
on Afghanistan have been rare. In
2011, he told Fox News, In Af-
ghanistan, they build a school.
They blow up the school. They
blow up the road. We then start all
over again. When asked about the
conflict directly, he invariably piv-
ots to a diatribe against Pakistan.
He talks about Afghanistan only
if hes cornered, and when cor-
nered, he has said that he simply
wants to get out, Biddle observed.
On the other side of the ledger, some
of his national-security appointees
have been very hawkishand more-
over, they are particularly hawkish in
what they see as a global war against
Islamist militancy. Trumps pick for
national-security adviserMichael
T. Flynn, a lieutenant general who
ran military intelligence in Afghani-
stan from 2009 to 2011 and has per-
sistently characterized the country as
a threat to the United Stateswill
have a formidable influence on his
decision-making. With the defense
secretary James Mattis, who led the
first Marine force into Afghanistan
in September 2001, and who Trump
called the closest thing we have to
General George Patton, the Ameri-
can military could become ever more
entrenched on the battlefield.
Trumps selection for secretary of
stateRex Tillerson, the chief execu-
tive of ExxonMobil, who has a close
relationship with Vladimir Putin
could mean that Russia, which nearly
thirty years since its withdrawal from
Afghanistan has been investing in
housing and factories there, may
seize this opportunity to muscle back
in. Last year, Putins envoy told state
LETTER FROM KABUL 55
media of peace talks, Honestly speak-
ing, were already tired of joining any-
thing Washington starts, and days lat-
er Russia sent the Afghan security
forces ten thousand automatic rifles,
hoping to strengthen direct ties
with Kabul. Meanwhile, It is openly
known that Russia is reaching out to
the Taliban, Jodi Vittori, a senior
policy adviser for the organization
Global Witness, told me. Tillerson,
answering to Trump, appears promis-
ing for Russia as it grasps at regional
dominance. And this would free up
Trump to focus on the domestic prior-
ity, Making America Great Again.
Distressing as the virulent anti-
Muslim sentiment among many in
Trumps inner circle may be, the
extent of their Afghanistan experi-
ence thrills the Kabul elite. We
know and everybody knows how
heated campaign rhetoric becomes,
Hila Alam, who is second in com-
mand at the Afghan Embassy, told
me. She had attended the Republi-
can Convention, where she met
with several Trump advisers. There is
this rhetoric out there that concerns
people who say there is a tendency to
be Islamophobic, who see that rhetoric
among certain groups in the U.S. But
I dont see this having a hard spillover
effect on policy decisions in Afghani-
stan. She went on, You have a real
partner to work with here.
The United States and other for-
eign donors have already committed
$800 million annually to Afghani-
stan through 2020. But when the
author of The Art of the Deal is con-
sidering a course of action, the deci-
sion may not come down to honoring
contracts so much as his tempera-
ment. He is going to have much less
patience for less-effective leadership,
Christopher Kolenda, a former se-
nior Pentagon official who is writing
a policy brief on Afghanistan for
the Center for a New American Se-
curity, told me. And he is more
likely to question why we are spend-
ing more on security assistance in
Afghanistan than we do in any oth-
er country in the world.
T
he first recorded peace agree-
ment in Islam is from seventh-
century Arabia, when the
Prophet Mohammed negotiated the
56 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. The treaty
granted pilgrimage rights to Muslims
living outside Mecca. According to Is-
lamic scholars, talks almost broke down
because Meccans objected to the
prophet being called the messenger of
God. Mohammed, who could neither
read nor write, asked for his hand to be
guided to the clause in dispute, and
struck the mention from the page.
That the prophet himself was the
original peacemaker has drawn many
to compromisethe sophisticated
and charlatans, some selfless and oth-
ers hubristic. In the spring and sum-
mer of 2016, I wandered in and out of
the offices of well-known businessmen
and tribal elders, only to bump into
I UNDERSTAND HOW RADICALS
THINK, PAOLO COTTA-RAMUSINO,
THE HEAD OF PUGWASH, TOLD ME.
I WAS ONE MYSELF
emissaries from insurgent groups. Un-
derneath the subcutaneous layers of
officially sanctioned activities, I came
upon scores of small gestures, olive
branches extended to former col-
leagues, inmates, classmates, and fam-
ily members. The Taliban Political
Commission was said to be meeting
quietly with representatives from thir-
ty to forty countries. The troubled
High Peace Council was involved,
too. There is hardly a political group
in Afghanistan that is not in contact
with them, a high-ranking security
official told me. Over time, conversa-
tions had been taking place in Kyoto,
Dubai, Chantilly, Mecca, and Oslo.
The hope was to arrange another for-
mal meeting like the one that Din
Mohammed had led in Murree.
Even deeper below the surface, I
found academics and former officials,
informed enough about their coun-
trys positions to serve as messengers
without the weight of political office.
In negotiation parlance, these most
casual talks are called Track 2. Be-
cause the participants tend to be non-
governmental, the conversations that
began during the Obama years can
continue during Trumps presidency.
Perhaps the most prolific organizer
of Afghanistans Track 2 initiatives is
Khalilullah Safi, a tall, spindly man
who wears his hair in a square flattop.
He is a habitual texter, and at all
times carries five cell phones with as
many chargers. He gives different
numbers to different groups, and of-
ten appears distracted, scrolling
through the alerts coming through
his Skype, Emo, and Viber accounts.
Because there is no Pashto keyboard
for the iPhone, he types messages to
his Taliban contacts in English.
Safi grew up in an affluent land-
owning family in eastern Afghanistan,
where his father was an elder in their
tribe. He was a small child when the
Soviet-backed communist government
stormed into power, in 1979, and his
family was displaced across the bor-
der to Pakistan. There, he enrolled
at Dawat al-Jihad, a fundamentalist
university where his classmates
were future Taliban revolutionaries.
Later, he began working with some
of them in his capacity as a media-
tor, which twice landed him in
prison, as he was ensnarled by Af-
ghanistans legal ban on illegitimate
contact with the Taliban. In 2011, he
was fully acquitted, and hired to serve
as the U.N.s Taliban whisperer.
Safi is now working for Pugwash
Conferences on Science and World
Affairs, a conflict-resolution organi-
zation, and continuing his informal
meetings with high-ranking Taliban
officials in Saudi Arabia and else-
where in the Gulf. Officially, the Af-
ghan government and foreign digni-
taries disapprove of Safis efforts,
considering him a meddler. Nicholas
Haysom, who led the U.N. in Af-
ghanistan, told me that the Taliban
use Track 2 exercises as a way of
avoiding formal negotiations. The
world is saying to the Taliban, You
have to come to direct talks. They
are saying, No, we dont need to
come to direct talks. We will go to
Track Two. We are saying, Thats
not talking to the government.
Thats just laying out your propagan-
da. But Safi told me that, in the
past year, he and his colleagues had
made more headway with the Tali-
bans delegates than any formal ne-
gotiations could have.
One morning this past spring, Safi
invited me to attend a Pugwash
meeting in Kabul. The central dra-
ma was seating. Pugwashs office had
twenty-one comfortable chairs, but
he was expecting at least twenty-five
guests. Afghanistan is a highly cod-
ed society, with rules governing
where you sit, your gait, how you
serve tea, and the note of your
laughter. When a person of higher
standing walks into a room, you are
ex pected to po sition you r sel f
accordinglyit is not uncommon to
have an entire room rearrange itself
to accommodate a newcomer.
After Safi was satisfied with the
placement of the chairs, the doors
opened, and everyone entered: former
government ministers, tribal leaders,
and people identified as Taliban
sympathizers. Taking their carefully
assigned seats, the participants went
through a peace proposal sketched
out by Paolo Cotta-Ramusino, the
head of Pugwash. The discussion last-
ed hours. The group covered pros-
pects for federalism (intimidating),
religious plurality (contentious), con-
stitutional reform (inevitable), and a
ceasefire (yes, but how?). In the end,
successive meetings were arranged,
hands shaken, and cheeks kissed.
They had a rough draft. Everyone
stepped out to the street, past concer-
tina wire and armed guards.
T
he following Thursday, the
start of the Muslim weekend,
Safi called to ask if I would
like to accompany him and Cotta-
Ramusino to Jalalabad. They had in-
corporated the feedback from the
meeting and were shopping the pro-
posal around. Safi wanted to leave that
night. The KabulJalalabad highway
extends across a narrow gorge where
travelers regularly crash down rock
cliffs to their deaths. The sun had
been setting by six, which was also
when the police guarding checkpoints
along the route went home for the eve-
ning, and I preferred to travel in day-
light, I told him. A compromise was
struck: we would leave at three in the
afternoon and arrive just before the
sun set.
We rode east. Cotta-Ramusino
told me about his time as a member
of the Avanguardia Operaia, the
Trotskyist student group in 1970s Ita-
ly. Cotta-Ramusino, who now teach-
es functional analysis at the Univer-
sity of Milan, has the build of a
jumbo egg. He was squeezed uncom-
fortably into the front passenger seat,
next to a hired driver. Like many
leftists of his time, he explained, he
once supported the Cultural Revolu-
tion in China. I regret it, he said,
and sighed.
Safi, without glancing up from his
phone, gestured out the window.
Okay, Paolo, from here until where
you can see is Taliban area, he said.
We passed vertiginous hills set
against a cornflower-blue sky.
Cotta-Ramusino looked at the
landscape. I understand how radicals
think, he said. I was one myself.
As the sun dipped behind palm
fronds, we arrived at our first meet-
ing, with peace activists at the home
of a local elder. Sugarcane juice was
served. Cotta-Ramusino took notes.
Consultative democracy, it turned
out, is a small nightmare. There was
nothing to inoculate the process
from tangents, and much got lost in
translation. Forecasting is particu-
larly difficult, especially concerning
the future, Cotta-Ramusino said,
borrowing the line from Niels Bohr.
When no one laughed, he added,
Its a joke. Nothing still. The con-
versation began to coalesce around
blaming Pakistan, a conversational
bog from which there is no escape,
and yet Cotta-Ramusino exhibited
the same patience with illiterate vil-
lagers as he did with high-ranking
Taliban members. Afghanistans
shoes-on, shoes-off custom was
tough on his bad right knee, but he
did not complain.
The next day, Safi introduced us
to two men who understand the sit-
uation very wellcode for linked
to the Taliban. This can mean any-
thing from I sat next to one of
them in Koran-reading class once
to I am an active fighter. These
men were from Bati Kot and Achin,
areas farther east that had fallen to
the Islamic State. Over a lunch of
fried fish and watermelon, they said
that they approved of the drafted
peace proposal but remained upset
at Ghani for the hangings in April.
To them, it was proof that the presi-
dent was not serious about reconcil-
iation. Why else, they wondered,
would he do something that would
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alienate the base he was trying to
make nice with?
The proposal-shopping continued
the following week, this time in
Doha, where we were to meet with
the Talibans Political Commission at
a five-star hotel. When we arrived,
Cotta-Ramusino headed upstairs to
sort out the seating. I waited for the
Taliban. I was wearing a black, tent-
like abaya and a scarf around my
head. Out of habit, Id put on red lip-
stick, but when I caught my reflection
in the stainless-steel elevator doors, it
seemed too much, and I wiped it off.
The Taliban delegation arrived
eight minutes late, with mea culpas
about the traffic. There were three of
them, wearing taqiyah caps, beards,
and shiny metallic watches. The old-
er men were avuncular, the youngest
handsome. I led them up to the
meeting room. After everyone sat
down, Cotta-Ramusino and the head
of the Taliban delegation discussed
whether they should eat the cookies
that had been put out on the table.
They were both watching their sugar,
they said, and decided against it.
For the next two hours, the men
wrangled over the same subjects they
always talked about: reopening the
Doha office, releasing the last of the
Guantnamo prisoners, and remov-
ing the remaining Taliban members
from the sanctions list. Cotta-
Ramusino urged the delegation not
to get hung up on the specifics of the
proposal. Dont make this into a
wish list, he warned. Otherwise we
will get nowhere. You have to think
about what is essential for you and
what is not essential for you.
Cotta-Ramusino contended that
both sides agreed, roughly, on the
outlines of peace: everyone knew
that foreign troops could not remain
in Afghanistan forever; a ceasefire
needed to be negotiated; and power,
however bitterly, had to be shared. It
should be within the framework of
Islamic rule and Afghan tradition,
one of the Taliban members said.
Sure, sure, sure, Cotta-Ramusino
replied, with the wave of a hand. Then
he added, Tradition is one thing, but
we have to improve on that tradition.
The Taliban representatives sug-
gested that they were open to prog-
ress. When the subject of womens
58 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
rights came up, one of the men point-
ed at me, and said, You can receive
education. You can hold positions.
As Cotta-Ramusino walked them
through the proposal, the delegates
would stop, discuss each point
among themselves, and then ask him
to explain. Everyone is working on
your return to political life, he as-
sured them. They did not appear
convinced. The Ghani Administra-
tions hangings, they complained, de-
fied any understanding. They only
raised slogans of peace, but in prac-
tice, they oppose peace, one of the
older men said.
Still, they agreed to convene again
soon. To have a normal life, its a
very strong feeling, another Taliban
delegate said. Nobody wants the
war anymore. As they took their
leave, I looked down at the plate of
cookies. Despite the earlier promise,
all had been eaten.
H
ow can the war end? The best-
case scenario may be a negoti-
ated settlement, reached with
or without Donald Trumps help. Like
other nations of the world, Afghans
also have the right to elect their own
leadership and to decide about their
future without the interfering of for-
eigners, Safi told me when we spoke
after the election. He was glad that
Trump had won, viewing him as an
isolationist. On the other hand, per-
haps the new U.S. president could
give an interventionist nudge: It will
be great if he bombs all these ele-
ments and groups who are anti-
peace, Safi said.
The Taliban are similarly looking
forward to the arrival of Trump. He
should withdraw all U.S. troops from
Afghanistan, and unlike other for-
mer U.S. rulers, he should neither
seek any more titles of ignominy for
himself and American generals nor
worsen the American prestige, econ-
omy, and military by engaging in
this futile war, Zabihullah Mujahid,
a Taliban spokesperson, told me.
Let the Afghan people as an inde-
pendent nation build an autonomous
system that has interaction with one
another and with the world.
Trump may be amenable to satisfy-
ing the Talibans request. There is a
willingness on his part to entertain
all options, and a total pullout is one
of those options, Kolenda told me.
But, he warned, A total troop with-
drawal will encourage the Taliban to
keep fighting.
Haysom, who was the U.N.s man
in Afghanistan, said he was profes-
sionally obligated to be an opti-
mist, and that he still believed in
the Afghan peace process, because
the dueling sides were more similar
than they cared to admit. The
problem, Safi told me, is that they
do not see each other for what they
are. The Taliban believes the pow-
er is in the hands of the Ameri-
cans, he said. The Afghan gov-
ernment accuses the Taliban of
being spies of the Pakistani Inter-
Services Intelligence.
Many Taliban leaders remain bit-
ter over Washingtons strike against
Mullah Mansour. At a meeting in
September, the Political Commis-
sion fumed at Americas apparent
lack of sincerity. We have doubts
whether the U.S. is honest about
the peace process, the minutes
from the meeting read. They are
not taking any initiative since the
past ten years to show they are gen-
uine. Safi suggested that the novel-
ty of Trump might encourage his
contacts to return to talks.
But when I called Din Mohammed
at the High Peace Council to ask
about his outlook, he said of the at-
tack on Mansour, When he died, ev-
erything ended with him. Slowly,
slowly, we were going to the point of
speaking with the Taliban. He did
not know when their next chance
would come. These days, few bother
showing up at his office.
Over the years, some local com-
munities have taken matters into
their own hands. Tribal elders, tired
of the fighting that destroys their vil-
lages, set out to resolve conflict on
their ownwithout the High Peace
Council, the U.N., or NATO. Medi-
ation is a part of Afghan culture,
Barnett Rubin, who is now a senior
fellow at New York Universitys Cen-
ter on International Cooperation,
told me. In the Dand-e Ghori dis-
trict, in the north, a feud between
the Pashtuns and Persian speakers
broke out over a proposed power line
but soon became about other, an-
cient grievances. Over five trips last
spring and summer, a twenty-eight-
year-old Afghan American named Ali
Wardak met with tribal leaders and
managed to negotiate an electricity-
sharing agreement. Fighting subsided.
Wardak has since continued working A contributing editor of Harpers Magazine for eleven
to expand his success to the rest of years before his death, Walter Karp was a journalist
the province.
The grassroots progress was en- and political historian whose incisive commentary on
couraging, but insufficient as the government evokes a fierce love of democracy.
broader conflict lurched to its next
turning point. So far, Maulvi Hai-
batullah, the new Taliban leader,
has been unburdened by the contro- THE POLITICS OF WAR:
versies of his predecessor and more The Story of Two Wars Which
effective at consolidating power,
which has meant a diminished in- Altered Forever the Political
terest in peace. The fracturing ob- Life of the American Republic
served under Mansour has, in places,
led to alliances between militants af- (18901920)
filiated with the Taliban and other Paper, $16.95
insurgent groups, including the Is-
lamic State. In the north, the co-
operation threatens hard-fought Karps book is angry and
territory and places the capital at
risk. The National Unity Govern-
cynical. It should be. The
ment has fallen into greater disar- guardians of our security
ray, with ministers being fired en
masse. In the fall, Ghani signed a
have nasty plans in store for
peace agreement with Gulbuddin us. Reading The Politics of
Hekmat yar, the leader of the histor-
ically violent Hezb-e-Islami (Islamic
War will be helpful in com-
Party), who has for twenty years re- bating them. Alan Wolfe,
mained in exile after commanding
the slaughter of some 50,000 Af-
The Progressive
ghans; this was meant to demon-
strate the possibility of domestic ac-
cord with groups designated by the
United States as terrorist organiza-
tions, yet its effects were merely the-
oretical, as there has been no relief BURIED ALIVE:
from bloodshed.
On July 23, two suicide bombers Essays on Our
struck Kabul, killing at least eighty, Endangered Republic
injuring more than 260, and usurp-
ing the title of the wars deadliest Paper, $14.95
attack. Now, each day, fifty Afghan
soldiers are killed, and 180 are lost
to injuries and desertions. A high-
The best of Karps essays
ranking Afghan security official scrutinizing American political
told me that the annual casualty
rate at the end of 2016 was the
and social issues. Preface by
highest ever recorded in Afghani- Lewis H. Lapham.
stan, with more than 10,000 soldiers
dead, and thousands more civilians
have lost their lives.
The survivors of the conflict, await-
ing the next chapter of diplomacy,
have no choice but to be patient. Q Order online at store.harpers.org
Dont have access to the Internet? Call (212) 420-5754
LETTER FROM KABUL 59

THE NUMBER THAT NO
MAN COULD NUMBER
Black Americas civil war over gay rights
By Anthony Heilbut
O
n the morning of
June 26, 2015,
barely two hours
after the Supreme Court
handed down its decision
to uphold same-sex mar-
riage, Barack Obama de-
livered the eulogy for nine
murder victims at the
Emanuel African Meth-
odist Episcopal Church in
Charleston, South Caro-
lina. With impeccable
timing, he moved from
word to song, invoking
grace and then singing of
its sweetness and redemp-
tive power. To some prac-
ticed ears, the president
resembled an earnest col-
lege boy trying to mimic
a field recording. But
whether his performance
was improvised or not,
the product of spirit feel
or political instinct, it was
a rhetorical coup, almost without prec-
edent. Obama knew that the black
churchs most famous leaders had ex-
pressed rigid opposition to gay rights.
But with Amazing Gracewhose
reference to dangers, toils, and snares
makes it a kind of secret gay anthem
he preempted their complaints. Pleading
Anthony Heilbuts most recent book is The
Fan Who Knew Too Much. His article
Aretha: How She Got Over appeared in
the April 2012 issue of Harpers Magazine.
60 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
E S S A Y
the blood at Mother Emanuel, he robbed
them of their song.
Many black politicians have sup-
ported gay rights, of course. But the
fact is that the leaders of the mega-
churches, the men who draw thou-
sands every Sunday, have been stark
reactionaries. Pastors and worship-
pers alike consider gay rights an
oxymoron, tastelessly equating fall-
en women and perverts with people
of color.
To insiders, mean-
while, the churchs war
on gay people is a case of
massive bad faith. For
the reality is that they
all know better. Every
megachu rch pa stor,
black or white, is aware
that religion is one of
the gay arts, along with
ballet, gymnastics, and
lyric poetry. Just think.
Without gay men, no
Sistine Chapel, no Last
Supper, no Ave Maria,
probably no Hallelujah
Chorus. And without
gay people, gospel music
would shrivel and die. It
would be (as I have writ-
ten elsewhere) like Ger-
many without the Jews.
To expand on that
last point: its generally
accepted that the mas-
ters of modern German
prose are two Jewish writers, Franz
Kafka and Joseph Roth, and Thomas
Mann, with his Jewish wife and six
half-Jewish children. The editors and
publishers of all three men were Jew-
ish, as were their most informed read-
ers. The parallel to the black church,
whose despised subculture is also the
jewel in its crown, is impressively ex-
act. Wherever the church has flour-
ished, in New York or Chicago, Phila-
delphia or Detroit, Oakland or
Illustration by Shonagh Rae
Atlanta, gay men have been the lead-
ing musicians, soloists, and choir sing-
ers. (As one famous female evangelist
pointed out, You all cant have church
without some sissy pumping out the
organ.) They have also swelled the
ranks as Sunday-school teachers, mis-
sionaries, treasurers, elocutionists, and
usher-board captains.
Even when they havent been the
preachersand they sometimes are
they have constituted the pastors
inner circle and praetorian guard.
Music dominates the traditional black
church; the minister is as much cantor
as village explainer. In particular, a
good Mississippi whoop, or melodic
growl, has been the making of many
a preacher. And when the minister
growled, the gay organist would
accent his every moan, while the
gay choir members made their joy-
ous noise, and the gay saints (i.e.,
members of the flock) jumped to
their feet, clapping and dancing in
the spirit. The whole experience
was orchestrated and annotated by
gays and lesbians. This is one reason
why many straight men have shunned
the churchwhy, for example, the
Reverend Jesse Jackson was ashamed
to tell his mother that he had joined
a choir.
C
hurch has long presided over
African-American culture as
the one place where parishion-
ers could kick off their shoes and be
real. For intellectuals like Richard
Wright and James Baldwin, it was
the site of great art and wretched
politics, a noisy quietism combined
with provincial bad taste, all of which
could be redeemed by the ritual. And
in our era, when we talk about the
black church, were mainly talking
about Pentecostals.
This was not always the case. For a
very long time, most working-class
blacks were either Missionary Baptists
or Methodists (which is to say, Afri-
can Methodist Episcopals). But in
the early twentieth century, the Pen-
tecostal saints marched in and even-
tually swept all before them. Charles
Fox Parham, a Kansas evangelist
who made glossolaliaspeaking in
tonguesthe centerpiece of a new
faith, is usually identified as the
movements father. In September
1900, Parham installed his congre-
gation in a rambling house on the
outskirts of Topeka, where they
prayed incessantly for the Holy Spir-
it to descend and speak through
them. A few months later, a break-
through came. As a Chicago news-
paper summed it up: occupants of
topeka mansion talk in many
queer jargons.
Parham and his followers were
white. But the next great Pentecostal
explosion, known as the Azusa Street
Revival, originated in a black church
in Los Angeles. The pastor of the
ramshackle structure at 312 Azusa
Street, William Joseph Seymour, had
earlier been one of Parhams acolytes,
FOR INTELLECTUALS LIKE WRIGHT
AND BALDWIN, THE CHURCH WAS
THE SITE OF GREAT ART AND
WRETCHED POLITICS
studying at his Bible school in Texas.
His impact, however, far surpassed
that of his mentor. The Azusa Street
Revival began in 1906, and the ec-
static worship continued in waves for
several years. Azusa drew believers
from all over the globe, who proceed-
ed to colonize the world for a Jesus
who could heal the sick, raise the
dead, and unmistakably signal his
presence with the gift of tongues.
Glossolalia was not unknown in
America: Quakers and Mormons had
been speaking in tongues for years.
Likewise, the old-time religion goes
back much further than 1906. The
term holy rolling dates from at
least the 1840s, and during that cen-
turys frontier revivals, pioneers fre-
quently boasted of getting drunk in
the spirit. Azusas distinction was its
array of races and nationalities: its
worshippers arrived from Memphis
and Oslo, Alabama and Ukraine.1
Indeed, a 1906 article in the Los An-
1
Little more than a century after the Azusa
Street Revival, Californias antigay Proposi-
tion 8 united African-American funda-
mentalists with a colony of Ukrainian and
Latvian Pentecostals who had settled un-
comfortably in Sacramento, which they re-
garded as nothing less than the New
Worlds Sodom.
geles Times recoiled at the disgrace-
ful intermingling of the races at
Azusa, an extraordinary sight in
America at the zenith of the Jim
Crow era.
But there were other objections as
well. Parham went to his grave dogged
by accusations of pederasty, mostly on
the basis of his arrest in San Antonio,
Texas, in 1907 for what appears to
have been the crime of Sodomy.2 To
this day, many black people also as-
sume that he and Seymour were lov-
ers, simply because no other such close
association of black and white men
was imaginable, then or for decades to
come. To complicate matters further,
Parham was a racist; he would later
deplore Azusas spiritual miscegena-
tion, complaining that
a white woman, perhaps of wealth and
culture, could be seen thrown back in
the arms of a big buck nigger, and
held tightly thus as she shivered and
shook in freak imitation of the Pente-
cost. Horrible, awful shame!
Perhaps because of their extravagant
piety, Pentecostals were seen as less
than manly. For many years, Baptists
and Methodists looked askance at
them, even as they were unable to resist
their music, the rollicking rhythms that
would ultimately seduce the world. And
eventually, rituals that were considered
comical, if not half-mad, became com-
monplace in all the denominations.
Long before the charismatic movement
enabled white Anglicans and Catholics
to speak in tongues and gyrate in the
spirit, black Baptists and Methodists
had gotten on board.
There is an additional reason for
the special if often subterranean re-
lationship between gay men and
women and the Pentecostals. It was
not only the drama, the spectacle,
that drew them to the church: it was
class. For generations, poor gay boys
have flocked to Pentecostalismthe
2
The phrase supposedly appears in a con-
fession that Parham made, which has since
been lost. The evidence is fragmentary, but
a statement of Parhams reprinted in the
Zion Herald, a Pentecostal newspaper of
the day, is enough to give contemporary
readers pause: I never committed this
crime intentionally. What I might have
done in my sleep I can not say, but it was
never intended on my part. Apparently the
angels had not anointed his dreams.
ESSAY 61
denomination of the working class,
along with Roman Catholicism
because worship therein allowed an
intensely expressive devotion that
would be frowned on anywhere else.
The outside world shamed or spurned
them. In the church, they were wel-
comed, and their talents applauded.
A boy could sing like a lyric soprano
and not be dubbed a punk but in-
formed that his rare voice denoted a
special anointing. The pastors would
praise and the mothers (especially the
mothers) would rejoice.
Its always been that way, says
the Reverend Carl Bean, a former
Motown and disco performer
who founded the Unity Fellow-
ship Church Movement in 1982.
The straight boys who play
around with girls and make ba-
bies and break their mamas
hearts, they live in the streets. The
well-behaved boys, the sensitive,
quiet kids, the ones we now call sis-
sies and nerdstheyve always land-
ed in church. Church or street, take
your pick.
T
he church has often respond-
ed to these sissies in its bosom
by reasserting its masculine
character. This tendency goes back
to the nineteenth century, when the
abolitionists and Transcendentalists
were dismissed as effeminate and the
vigorously aerobic movement known
as Muscular Christianity flourished,
first in England and then in the
United States.
To some degree, though, these fel-
lows have fought a losing game. Pente-
costalism in particular prizes its wom-
en. The first member of Parhams
Kansas congregation to speak in
tongues was a woman, Agnes Ozman,
which created an enduring archetype:
the male prophet and his perfected fe-
male vessel. Pentecostal women have
also been among the faiths most fa-
mous evangelists, in both black com-
munities (from Elder Lucy Smith to
Prophetess Juanita Bynum) and white
(from Aimee Semple McPherson to
Katherine Kuhlman). The church may
have been the first institution to dem-
onstrate a lasting truth: whenever
women assume power in an emanci-
pated, nonsexual way, gay men will be
their most ardent supporters.
62 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
Nowhere has this truth been
proved more consistently than in the
world of gospel music. As I have not-
ed before, gospel has long been a gay
genreone in which male singers
would mock (that is, copy) every
vocal habit of the female singers
they worshipped. The exchange
worked both ways, allowing men and
women, gay and straight, to draw on
each other for inspiration, creating a
music filled with male sopranos and
female basses.
WITH TONGUES, YOU COULD
SPEAK DIRECTLY TO GOD OR,
EVEN GRANDER, HAVE HIM
SPEAK THROUGH YOU
Mahalia Jackson was early and al-
ways the queen of the gay singers
and groupiesthe Children, as they
were called. But her only rival, Mar-
ion Williams, may have been more
instrumental in bringing this cross-
dressing style to the masses. She in-
vented a startling mix of growling
syncopation and ecstatic falsetto,
her high Cs derived more from field
hollers and electric guitar than the
opera stage. And her greatest imita-
tors were men. Little Richard, the
so-called architect of rock and roll,
copped his style from her. And his
acolytes included James Brown, the
Isley Brothersand, just a few years
later, the drag queens of Stonewall,
strutting through Greenwich Vil-
lage with an approximation of Wil-
liamss generous hips, greeting the
straight world with her patented
whoo-hoo.
Thats an awful lot of American
culture changed for the better by
the union of strong women and
their gay disciples. And within the
black church, nobody complained,
since they were too busy rejoicing.
The great world, however, was
sometimes less welcoming. Remem-
ber the hostility toward disco, a
music dominated by gospel-lite di-
vas and their gay fans, who had
adapted their church dancing for
the club.
Or think of Billy Prestons hard
times. He was a superb musician, who
cut his teeth with Sam Cooke and
Ray Charles, and was temporarily
dubbed the Fifth Beatle during the
Let It Be sessions. But when the gay
Preston danced his way through
Thats the Way God Planned It
during his tours with the Rolling
Stones, one rock critic grumbled
that he was a showboat. (So much
for Mick Jagger and his Tina Turner
moves!) Such critics willfully ig-
nored that Preston was gospels am-
bassador to the world of British rock,
which couldnt have existed in
the first place without the church
and its gays.
I
t was, in any case, the Pente-
costals who won the sectari-
an battle. For years, they had
been ridiculed as the lowest of
the low, the crazies who spoke in
unknown tongues and held them-
selves aloof from this world and its
woes. (They cant even dress right
was a familiar complaint.) But by the
1970s, the leading black Pentecostal
denomination, the Church of God
in Christ, was outdrawing the Bap-
tists and Methodists, many of whom
had begun tongue-talking and faith-
healing themselves. Some who had
once mocked the saints now started
calling themselves Full Gospel Bap-
tists; others invented a telling port-
manteau, Bapticostals.
With tongues, you could speak di-
rectly to God in your own private lan-
guage or, even grander, have him
speak through you. No earthly power
could contend with that. Yet some
pastors were not quite so oblivious of
the world: they wanted a piece of that
power for themselves. Jimmy Swag-
gart, Pat Robertson, and Jim Bakker
became the ascendant figures in the
white Pentecostal church, and merged
the faith with conservative politics.
On their television shows, such as The
PTL Club and The 700 Club, viewers
were exposed to a continuous stream
of right-wing boosterism. Swaggart be-
came an advocate of Pinochets Chile,
while Robertson, who seldom encoun-
tered a dictator not to his taste,
formed a special friendship with the
Guatemalan leader (and Pentecostal)
General Efran Ros Montt.
These mens politics didnt hurt
them at all in the black church. This

shouldnt have been a surprise: the
churchs politically progressive wing,
represented by Martin Luther King Jr.,
had collapsed in the wake of his assas-
sination in 1968. After his death, his
spirit was occasionally invoked with
the anodyne command Dont let the
dream die! But a larger perspective
was slow to evolve. And if black Bap-
tists tolerated the icons of the religious
right, black Pentecostals treated them
like heroes. When Robertson ran for
president in 1988, he was immediately
endorsed by the Church of God in
Christ, just as George W.Bush would
be endorsed in 2004 by the kings of
Detroit gospel, Bishop Marvin Winans
and Pastor Donnie McClurkin. What
these gentlemen admired most was
Bushs opposition to gay rights, which
they probably hated more than he did.
And they were nothing if not consis-
tent: in 2012, Winans advised his flock
not to reelect President Obama be-
cause he had by then endorsed same-
sex marriage.3
The Pentecostals continue to de-
light in their holy boldness, defying
sense, sensibility, and their own peo-
ples history. Thus, a black Chicago
pastor has boasted that he would ride
with the Klan if it opposed gay
rights. A black Florida evangelist
with a taste for exorcising the demon
out of gay people praises God for
slavery, since it proved the conduit
to her salvation: Without slavery, I
would have died a wretch undone.
James Meeks, a state legislator and
pastor whose Chicago church was
once regularly visited by Senator
Barack Obama, used to rage against
Hollywood Jews for bringing us
Brokeback Mountainand, during
an unsuccessful political campaign,
this black preacher declared that he
was the only true white conserva-
tive in Greater Chicago. And there
is Carol M. Swain, a professor at
3
To give the devil his due: Winans de-
clined to endorse Donald Trump. But the
Republican candidates victory on No-
vember 8 was hailed by an impressive as-
sortment of black pastors and evangelical
politicians, such as Ken Blackwell, the
former Ohio secretary of state who has
declared homosexuality a transgression
against Gods law, Gods will. Return-
ing the favor, Trump selected Blackwell
to handle domestic-policy issues on his
transition team.
for your valentine...
Vanderbilt and vigorous opponent of
Black Lives Matter, which she has Everlasting
denounced as a Marxist plot. When
this ardent Pentecostal booster of Love
Donald Trump was asked about Da- a Celtic knot
vid Dukes endorsement of her candi-
date, she described it as a nonissue. design symbolizing
It should be noted that the world- two people united in
wide triumph of Pentecostalism is indi- everlasting love
visible from the success of the prosperi-
ty gospel, a trope invented by the
Reverend Kenneth Hagin. Very sim- #3385N Sterling Necklet with 18" chain $48 .........
ply, it proposes that God wishes abun- #3385E Sterling Earrings, leverback $60 ...........................
dance for his flock, and that it is theirs
for the askingand for the tithing.
(How do you get more? asks the local Hummingbird Hearts
bishop, followed by laughter. Baby,
Washington State artist Cavin Richies
you give more!) In other words, to
exquisitely detailed bronze castings are
paraphrase Milton, they also gain who
brought to life with hand applied patinas.
only stand and wait. That the prosper-
ity gospel doesnt seem to workthat
African Americans today have failed
to make those promised financial
gainshas not yet sunk in, and may
not for years to come.
Virtually all the mega-pastors sub-
scribe to the prosperity gospels tenets,
revealing themselves as arch-capitalists
even if the rewards come by faith (and
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drously named Creflo Dollar. And per-
haps because the pursuit of wealth may
seem shallow, the prosperity crowd has
found one sure way to keep firing up the
congregation: the antigay passages in
Leviticus and Romans have become
almost more popular than John 3:16.
T
he Pentecostal Church was
never completely welcoming
to the Children, of course.
(Neither, for that matter, were the Bap- Items shown full size. Made in USA.
tists or the Methodists.) But it wasnt Add $9 handling per order.
entirely blind. You couldnt call it a
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Even the satirizing of gay congregants,
frequently by themselves, was almost a #N32080N
family jokethe equivalent of joshing
your obese aunt or balding uncle, with
no harm intended. #1622 #1648
But first AIDS decimated the
church, killing its icons left and
right. And then the best-selling On Wildife in Bronze Jewelry
the Down Low (2004) revealed that a
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ESSAY 63
became almost obligatory for mega-
pastors to deplore gay people. It was
hard not to be astonished by the
punishing vulgarities, the trash talk,
the endless recycling of Yeatss cos-
mic joke about love and shit being
next-door neighbors.
No sympathy or compassion was
extended, no acknowledgment of
the immense contributions of gay
people. Even as the inevitable song
in black congregations became I
Wont Complain, nobody men-
tioned that it had been popularized
by the Reverend Paul Jones, killed
at the age of thirty after a date gone
terribly wrong. Instead the ho-
mophobia flowed like holy wine, fre-
quently observed without critique
by outsiders.
Thus Kelefa Sanneh could write in
a 2004 New Yorker profile that al-
though Creflo Dollar was unswerving
in his denunciation of homosexuali-
ty, he was also careful to avoid the
kind of inflammatory language that
potential followers might find
offensiveas if his homophobia
were simply something to be fi-
nessed. The churchs most torment-
ed self-hater, the unabashedly ex-gay
McClurkin, nearly cast a pall over
Obamas campaign in 2008 when
his record of attacks on gays (vam-
pires, he called them, in their pursuit
of black children) was revealed. Yet
Nate Chinen responded equably in
the New York Times that McClurkin
overcame great adversity to become
a role model.
Of course, white Pentecostals have
held their own when it comes to the
mangling of history and spiritual de-
corum. Lou Engle, a white televange-
list pastor, has urged Gods people to
rise up the way Robert E.Lee rose up
against Lincoln. Lee had an anoint-
ing or something, Engle declared
during the Christian Broadcasting
Networks 2012 Week of Prayerand
he also invoked Stonewall Jackson as
an inspiration to antigay crusaders,
who were exhorted to raise up a
stone wall to restrain the agenda that
is coming out of D.C. His black al-
lies didnt chastise him.
Nor did they object to the looniest
and most lethal of these revisionists, a
white man named Scott Lively, who
argued that Nazism was actually con-
64 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
ceived by homosexuals. Lively went on In the face of such cycles of hypoc-
risy, a good laugh could prove redemp-
to become among the first to colonize
Uganda for the international war on tive. After Bishop Long was outed and
accused of sexual assault by five of his
gays. He has dwelled at great length,
young parishioners in 2010, spandex-
and with a kind of lip-smacking obses-
siveness, on the connections betweenclad selfies of the buff pastor appeared
on the internet. Was this how Muscu-
homosexuality and coprophilia, illus-
lar Christianity would enddethroned
trating his lectures with visual aids.
by a cell phone? There were rumors of
Thus do we have the likely inspiration
for that piquant line uttered by thea multimillion-dollar payout, and Long
Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa: The stepped down from his duties. But he
gay people, they eat the poo-poo. returned in early 2012, welcomed back
to the pulpit by a self-styled Messianic
W
hen it came to contempo- rabbi who wrapped the penitent in a
rary gay-baiting, nobody Torah scroll.
was as persistently on the You could say that Long had forgot-
rhetorical prowl as Bishop Eddie Long ten the Bibles warning that if you
of Atlanta. He was a new-breed Bap- cover your head, your feet will show.
ticostal, known for looking smart, Ben Carson, the erstwhile candidate
smelling fresh, and showing off his for president and at this writing a pro-
gym-toned body. Asserting a twenty- spective member of the Trump Cabi-
first-century form of Muscular Chris- net, may have overlooked that lesson
tianity, he hailed his butch parishio- as well. His homophobic pieties are
ners, the shorties and sporties, delivered in a gentle murmurbut his
adviser Armstrong Williams is a
more strident figure, the Eddie
S
UNDAY IS WHEN THE ANOINTEDS Long of business consultants. Wil-
THE MOST STRIDENT liams is a devout conservative and
antigay warrior, who was nonethe-
FUNDAMENTALISTS, BLACK AND less sued in 1997 for hitting on a
male colleague and attempting to
WHITE ALIKEACT IN CONCERT climb into bed with him during
business trips. The suit was settled
while perpetually damning his gay out of court, but other men have made
congregants. In 2004, he led an anti- similar claims about Williams, includ-
gay rally at Martin Luther Kings ing the G.O.P. apostate David Brock,
grave with Kings daughter Bernice, who was reportedly asked by Williams
who claimed to channel her slain fa- whether he was dominant or submis-
ther: I know from the depth of my sive in bed.
sanctified soul that he didnt take a At least one part of the Pentecostal
bullet for same-sex marriage. war on gays shows some sign of flag-
When Coretta Scott King died in ging: 2013 saw the collapse of Exodus
2006, homophobia haunted her fu- International, a group of charismatic
neral too: there was Bernice conferring Christians (i.e., middle-class Pente-
with Bishop Long near the altar while costals) who had long proclaimed that
her siblings, whove supported gay prayer and psychological counseling
rights, sat in the congregation. (An could break the yoke of homosexu-
outraged Julian Bond refused to at- ality. After thirty-seven years of such
tend the service.) A similar claque curative efforts, they finally concluded
dominated the funeral of Whitney that 99.5percent of gays would never
Houston six years later. The singers change. Now they admitted, half-
mother, Cissy Houston, recruited the sheepishly, that they had betrayed
churchs biggest homophobes to offici- thousands of innocent lambs. Though
ate: T.D.Jakes, McClurkin, Winans. he apologized for any hurt feelings,
Meanwhile, Aretha Franklin was not the organizations leader, Alan Cham-
present. She chose during her concerts bers, refused to acknowledge the tor-
to have the deceased commemorated ments unto suicide that the group had
by Carlton Pearson, the prophet of an induced. Nor did he offer any retroac-
inclusive ministry in which gays and tive comfort to the flock, who were
lesbians do not end in a fiery hell. expected to lead sexless livestheir
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particular cross, the old hymn having
assured us that everybody needs at
least one.
Still, many of the hardcore Pentecos-
tals remain committed to this mission.
(Mike Pence, our new vice president,
has also expressed his enthusiasm, at
least in the past, for organizations
providing assistance to those seeking
to change their sexual behavior.)
Gays, such believers insist, are only a
few prayers away from complete deliv-
erance. To catch these Yoke Breakers
at their most raw, watch the YouTube
video of a revival held at a youth cen-
ter in Alabama called the Ramp. It
features a young pastordressed,
comme il faut, in the style of a Seven-
ties rockerexcoriating the medias
embrace of those diabolical gay peo-
ple. He commands all those struggling
with same-sex attraction to rise and be
healed. Down the aisles they run, girls
and boys, demonstrating how many
gay kids must fill those Southern
churches. They fall on the altar, weep
and collapse, slain in the spirit, des-
perately awaiting the one touch that
will never come.
I
t is a glib fallacy to say that Sunday
is the most segregated day in Amer-
ica. If anything, thats when the
Anointedsthe most strident funda-
mentalists, black and white alike, each
of them confident that God speaks to
and through themact in concert.
Church is church is church. The
dynamics I have addressed above ob-
tain anywhere and everywhere. In the
1930s, Father Charles Coughlin terror-
ized the nation with his right-wing
politics. Viewing his rallies in old news-
reel clips, you see a glowingly confident
performer, speaking directly to a flock
of tough, handsome youthsits an
uncanny anticipation of an Eddie Long
revival. And sure enough, Coughlin
was silenced only when the FBI threat-
ened to reveal his homosexuality.
The white Pentecostal church is as
quietly queer as the black. In Nashville,
it is assumed that country gospel can-
not exist without gay pianists and com-
posers; awards ceremonies are celebrat-
ed all over town with Pink Nights.
Lonnie Frisbee was indeed the original
Jesus Freak, as T.M.Luhrmann noted
in a 2013 article for this magazinebut
he was also a gay man, completely os-
66 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
tracized by his own congregation as he
lay dying of AIDS.
Ted Haggard, of course, was the
most important Pentecostal in Amer-
ica until his public disgrace in 2006.
Several critics unfamiliar with the
tradition thought that Haggard was
an outliera naf who might well
convince himself that God wouldnt
call him gay simply because he paid
men to have sex with him. But that is
a patronizing view of human beings
and of their most intimate knowledge.
Haggard was no more a naf than
Matthew Clark, the pastor of the
Blessed Assurance Temple in Bar-
tow, Florida. A glance at any video
clip of the churchs services will car-
ry the viewer straight back to the
nineteenth-century Great Awaken-
ing, in which pioneers dashed
through the woods, barking the devil
up a tree. While the simply dressed
and generally obese parishioners at
Blessed Assurance run, dance, and
speak in tongues, one muscular lad
literally hops around the church.
Clark presides, looking like a cross
between Burl Ives and Andy Devine.
Yet he knows all about the local
cruising grounds at the Peace River
Park, where he was picked up during
a police sting in 2012.
I
t would be a sign and a wonder if
gay people, the churchs most de-
voted members, would prove the
means of its destruction, or at least its
irrelevance. But that presumes the
disappearance of the Anointeds. In-
stead they congregate in amazing di-
visions, a little like the individual
nations contained within the Haps-
burg Empire. Catholics once despised
Protestants, and Pentecostalism is the
most extreme version of Protestant-
ism, with each saint a pope. Now, in
Catholic strongholds like Brazil, the
populace is prone to dance and
tongue-talk in mass assembly, praying
for prosperity and the disappearance
of homosexuality.4
4
It is no surprise that C.Peter Wagner, the
evangelical guru of the New Apostolic Ref-
ormation, should put in a good word for Gi-
rolamo Savonarola, who called for the burn-
ing of sodomites along with cosmetics,
books, art, and other fripperies. If the Pente-
costals were obliged to acknowledge a Cath-
olic, Savonarola would be their kind of guy.
Equally striking has been the rap-
prochement between Pentecostals
and ultra-Orthodox Jews. But it
makes a certain kind of sense. Pente-
costals think that fifteen hundred
years of Catholicism was a terrible ab-
erration, and that they are the true
descendants of Christs disciples. Mes-
sianic Jews share this conviction. If
they infuriate their families by declar-
ing themselves completed Jews, they
simply honor Christs command to
forsake ones houses, or brethren, or
sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or
children, or lands, for my Names
sake. Orthodox Jews sit shiva for
their lesbian daughters, just as Pente-
costals drive them away from home.
And since God Dont Never Change
(as Blind Willie Johnson put it in
1929), the Old Law is as eternal as the
New, meaning that gays are indicted
by both testaments.
Sanctified homophobia knows no
borders. The legislator and gay-
hating evangelist Eduardo Cunha
was set to dominate Brazilian politics
until money-laundering charges
drove him out of office. Many East-
ern Europeans have been quick to
join the same international chorus
homophobia seems to have replaced
anti-Semitism as the great bridge-
building passion among Ukraines
Pentecostals and Russias Orthodox
believers. Indeed, the Orthodox
prelates love for Putin recalls the
ardor of, say, the pastor John Kil-
patrick, who was so uplifted by
Trumps victory that he spoke in
tongues on camera.
There remain some brilliant
peopleMarilynne Robinson is a
familiar examplewho dont want
to forfeit the splendors of their
faith. They deplore the Holy Ghost
fascists but consider them ultimately
irrelevant to the kind of thinking
that animates their lives. But how
do a hundred thousand Unitarians,
or even 3 million Congregational-
ists, speak power to half a billion
Pentecostals? One thinks of all
those Marxist intellectuals who de-
plored Stalinism but were invariably
tarnished by association with the
grinding actuality of Communism.
For the most part, the Anointeds
have now commandeered the word
Christian. For a progressive be-
liever, the very name has become a
burden, another cross to bear.
But even without the Anointeds,
the enlightened believers have a
most problematic text to live down.
Im always caught up short by
thoughts of the vast throng John saw
on the Isle of Patmos, described in
gospel parlance as the number that
no man could number. For me, that
includes the many millions of ruined
gay lives, along with the countless
armies of men slain as punishment
for their nature. I came late to this
knowledge, and only after I produced
my first album, a 1973 salute to the
gospel songs of Thomas A. Dorsey. I
had hired three musicians for the ses-
sions, including Dorsey himself. I
heard later that both of the younger
pianists were killed by their trade. Af-
ter that, it was a constant themea
musician would miss a session, disap-
pear, invariably followed by the
bland report: Somebody killed
him. These black gay corpses may
far outnumber the four thousand or
so lynching victims, scandalous as
that figure remains. The deaths
unreported, unlamented, often
unnoticedoccur throughout the
world, easily dismissed as a minor
sort of collateral damage.
Who could have forecast the re-
versals, the echoes, the cross-racial
patterns that have distinguished
this dismal history? But just as right-
wing black pastors contemplate
marching with the Klan, black and
white proponents of gay rights have
made some unlikely alliances of
their own. In Georgia, shortly after
Bishop Longs disgrace, a white Pen-
tecostal pastor named Jim Swilley
outed himself, tormented by the
idea of gay boys bullied to death by
his coreligionists. When the Mary-
land legislator and pastor Emmett
C. Burns Jr. attacked a black foot-
ball player named Brendon Ayan-
badejo for defending gay men, he
was called out in turn by a white
player, Chris Kluwe. Perhaps the
most amazing alliance was Jason
Collinss identification with Mat-
thew Shepard, heartbreaking in its
affiliation of a top jock with a desig-
nated faggot.
Some of the boldest voices were
themselves former members of the
Pentecostal flock. In February 2012,
a Marine sergeant named Brandon
Morgan became a YouTube sensation
when a bystander photographed him
rushing off a plane from Afghani-
stan to embrace his husband-to-be.
Morgan, as he later revealed, was
raised in the church. He had previ-
ously married a lesbian, dreaming
that both had been delivered from
the demonic Jezebel, that Old Testa-
ment vixen about whom the gospel
quartets used to sing:
Nine days she lay in Jerusalems streets,
Her flesh was too filthy for the dogs
to eat.
E
ven more remarkable, espe-
cially in the face of contin-
ued resistance from the Pen-
tecostal multitudes, is the liberation
being achieved by African Ameri-
cans themselves. In 2012, it was noted
that black people identified them-
selves as L.G.B.T. at a higher rate than
whites or Latinos. (One recent survey
indicates that as many as 50percent of
millennials consider themselves not
totally heterosexual, which suggests
that the church has been suppressing a
number truly beyond number.) If you
attend New York Citys annual gay-
pride march, you will see thousands of
black women and men who look ex-
actly like the choir members they
probably once were, or still are. They
are the ones now holding the fort
the ones who sang the hymns and
learned the score.
But the most thrilling instance of
young gay people speaking truth to
power occurred in 2013, when the
Black Lives Matter movement was
largely conceived and directed by
lesbians and gay men. It was by no
means inevitable that B.L.M. would
become the focal point of an entire
nations outrage over racial injustice.
In Baltimore, after Freddie Grays
death, some of the loudest cries of
outrage came from a Bapticostal
reverend, Jamal Harrison Bryant. I
dont know how you can be black
in America and be silent, he told
an impassioned crowd at Grays fu-
neral. With everything weve been
through, aint no way we can stand
to be silent. Yet Bryant had already
forfeited some of this moral high
ground with his antigay sermons,
which have racked up tens of thou-
sands of views on YouTube.
Instead, the movements male voice
became DeRay Mckesson, who has
made it very clear that black lives mat-
tering means that black gay lives mat-
ter, too. He would include his own.
After Mckessons sexual preference was
reported, he received a large number of
murderous tweetsand went on to
block some 16,000 users, as if to say, Get
thee behind me, Satan. Recently, he
came up with a new formulation: Some
people are coming out of the quiet, not
the closet. Simply because you did not
know did not mean they were hiding.
He could have been describing genera-
tions of the Children, always in plain
sight, even when the church they built
turned so viciously against them. Their
songs had been heard, if not their sto-
ries. Even Billy Preston, who died in
2006, showed his hand toward the end.
No longer able to rise and shout, he
would announce from his Hammond
organ, Thats the way God wants me
to be, the italics audible for all those
with ears to hear.  Q
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ESSAY 67
 P O
REMAINERS
By Graham Foust
Introduction by Ben Lerner
W hen I read Graham Foust, Im put in
mind of both Wallace Stevens and Johnny
Cash. (Foust, who was born in Tennessee, enti-
tled one poem Nuances of a Theme by Ste-
vens; Or, Why I Love Country Music.) Like
Stevens, Foust writes intricate poems that ex-
plore a world from which meaning has depart-
ed; the poet seeks to restore it, however tenta-
tively, through the powers of artifice. The
challenge, as with Stevens, is to call up after-
noons / that in their moments had meaning
without suffering a relapse into god-talk. But
Foust is at his best describing the moments hes
just missed. A fed-up blue jay having fled it, / a
branch perfects its shakethe keenness of his
attention to the wake, the instant after depar-
ture, transforms absence into presence. In so
many still lifes / the sense that someone was just
there / is mostly what is felt.
It is Fousts wry, dark, plainspoken lyricism
that makes me think of Cash. (Listen to record-
ings of Foust reading his poems and youll hear
another reason why I evoke Cashs baritone.) In
Remainers, the combination of Fousts unpre-
dictable syntax and his short, angular lines
(usually alternating between six and eight sylla-
bles) imparts a kind of musical drama to the
phrasing: songs rush darkly through my in-
sides / as any disease might. We hear the stag-
ger, the twang, the occasional slurred rhyme.
In an insightful review of A Mouth in Cali-
fornia, a collection Foust published in 2009,
Ange Mlinko describes how his work partakes
of the collective American imaginary and
vernacular concision of country music, but
68 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
E M
cuts it with literary influences ranging from
Stevens to Susan Howe. Fousts echoes and
borrowings feel less like modernist literary al-
lusion and more like covers, or misremem-
bered lyrics, tracking the daily, demotic ways
that language passes through us, only very
briefly ours. Some of what I feel or see / sails
out to where its heard.
Even when Foust uses found language, it
sounds unmistakably like him. (Remainers be-
gins with a line lifted from James Wrights Saint
Judas.) In other words, he makes us hear how ev-
ery voice is a composite of other voices. The most
notable instance of this recycling of remainders in
Remainers is the headline and subhead of a
1919 New York Times article about Einsteins the-
ory of relativity. The news-speak, now archaically
lyrical, appears in its unaltered entirety (I
checked). Yet it reads exactly as if Foust had writ-
ten it, then broken it into lines: lights all
askew in the heavens / Stars Not Where They
Seemed. In the context of the poem, the news-
paper clipping is discovered shoved between / two
pages of some tome / about Minnesota plant life.
I get the sense that after the opening sec-
tion, the speaker of Remainers is no longer
Foust but an older person, a woman who ad-
dresses him, perhaps from the non-place of a
nursing home: Ive coughed the halves of
Mondays pills / from the spoon of my hand. As
youll see, this persons speechor Fousts
imagination of itblooms into a powerful
meditation on how an approaching end makes
living waver. Under unfixed stars, the poem
perfects its shake.
 REMAINERS

Dont you remember being young, when language

was magic without meaning?
Toni Morrison

Do we possess Thursday?
Keston Sutherland

When I went out to kill myself

I thought only the world
could possibly be more thorough
hear me out miracle,
my first first sentence in a year
and soon thereafter felt
not loved exactly, but dreamt of,
and called up afternoons
that in their moments had meaning,
along with some others
that had only vague presence,
and then, having looked death
in the forehead and fetched the mail,
used a gently used book of a boat half run aground,
(The Bereaved Parent, a volume and veiled so as to be seen, all dreams
mistakenly sent me are first last looks around.
by a bookstore in Omaha New instincts (no doubt speech was one)
instead of Short Letter, must feel at first like smears
Long Farewell, which I had wanted along the length of any sense.
to give to my brother) Bird noise, bird noise, backspace
to move some dog shit from my lawn the laziest activist wraps
into a Safeway bag himself in caution tape
that had snagged in a nearby tree, and walks into the evening-orange
the small cough of a broom disorders of the surf.
along concrete a few doors down, What is it with the end? It moves
one of the many sounds from mouth to mouth, a word.
my life gives off, and whats useful Theres not much else to do but fall
is realor so I thought or fuss about subjects
but having now flown many miles and objects, as in what if when
to say my poetry I close these eyes, all light
in a kind of corporate rec room, has been extinguished or
I quarter-heartedly just hasnt yet been devised?
reach for a pint glass in the dark And peopleour looks and feelings
of an old friends guest room and thoughts; the things our thoughts
and spill cold water onamong produce, and the things that neither
other guest thingsmy phone, we nor what we think
my good shoes, my duffel. . . have anything to do with making
fuck it: can I start this over (e.g., the range of any morning);
with someone elses throat? and lastly, if not finally,
that drabbest of mysteries:
Was that vomit or a speech scroll, the block on offering content,
a tractatus or scraps? any content at all,
Less is the same; a fossil gives to being one person, on pain
good sample and is dead. of a relapse into god-talk
There at the hole in everything, all this the poem threatens
I wont have what Id known: to put to music and/or worse.
the filth of light a city seen To breathes not chosen, mostly,
from air at midnight is, though theres another way
the nouns you thought to use because to look at it, which is to say
Im very close to gone. that its the only thing
Anothers mind is like the bottom we nearly always choose to do,

Polaroids by Mike Slack, whose book Walking in Place 1: New Orleans was published last year by The Ice Plant/Perimeter Editions POEM 69
 except when were swimming
underwater or feigning death
or, for awful or else,
when we decide to drop ourselves.
Back to from where I came,
my having been here is behind
my having headed that way,
so why not call me eternity
with a chance of Thursday
with a chance your scare paragraph
will adhere to the grid?
Eyes unaware of one another,
each with somewhere to be,
Id like to think it wasnt me
who went vertiginous,
but rather some six-year-old girl
who of her own accord
began spinning in a scorched-out yard
and never really stopped.
I might get to February,
the hard lake like a field,
the field like the last shred of Earth.
A shadows no object,
a shadows a situation,
just one weightless facet
of moving out into a day.
Your skull is beautiful
doesnt mean I feel peculiar,
although it points to what
seem like passed catastrophes,
lenses cleaned back to grit.
But first I was and all that blood
a whole orchard of blood
or something very much like it
slow liquid ignoring
my reflections in its motions,
which passed and then collapsed
immediately into feeling
70 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
and then really away,
the way the whole way of us will.
Nows an age Im of two minds
not to praise, even and especially as
Im praising it for real,
as real, all hell coalescing
just like it always has,
like a house Id need keys to leave.
Night in, night in, night in,
songs rush darkly through my insides
as any disease might
a point is that which has no part,
a line is breadthless length
while some of what I feel or see
sails out to where its heard.
Nothing, poem or otherwise,
is of such quality
that theres no one who could hate it
down to normal only dead.
Labor and happenstance, times glass,
and maybe thought hates me
as it moves about what makes it,
though Im not a person
on whom the many occasions
that go by the name of
what it is Ive turned away from
make little impression,
a far-off flock resembling smoke,
for one; the null feeling
Happy New Year is a question.
Explosively lonely
as though my head were made simply
to weigh my tongue and teeth
because a doctor in the hall
pushed past me in anger
(so maybe I got in her way),
Im ninety-nine years old,
the only of my friends to not
have ceased and disappeared.
Kindnesss numerous sorrows
keep me almost honest,
and gray with life, adrift among
all evidence, I know
how to know Im still here: a schedule
crumpled on a bus seat,
words hurled weatherwardthese are news
from a collective place,
or at the very least theyre news
from a place we could share,
although no notarized paper says so,
nor does any chiseled stone.
A fed-up blue jay having fled it,
a branch perfects its shake,
and Ive the right to look at light
that reflects off your teeth.
The fraught way a thinking body
eats into its clear need
to fail with thoughts of tomorrows
not proof of existence
(that said, the facts of failure are)
and this is where I claim
that I dont fear disappearing,
but only my being here
dying, not really following
any of anything
going once, going, and thats it.
Empire fades like a taste
or many tastesand brutally
its spoken-for glamour
crossing over into quiet
thats as spent as spent gets
this verdigris non-century,
not necessarily
to anyones ears, you hear me?
(Ill never grasp so much
as I assume Im saying now.)
Write something sometime
in my cremains with your finger,
a vague line youd like, like
Made as if unremarked as air.
Today, though, sit with me,
I want to give you this bookmark,
print from years ago shoved between
two pages of some tome
about Minnesota plant life
(or placed there with much care
who am I to say, as Idve
been only a small child
at the time, and hardly compelled
by states or their flora):
lights all askew in the heavens
Stars Not Where They Seemed or
Were Calculated to be but
Nobody Need Worry.
The sky the sky in theory, jest,
I struggle to be glad,
and in the other other hand,
your poem for no good
reason, in itself confounded
skip past the end: youll find
Ive died and do many dead things
it makes living waver.
Ahead of days informations,
you speak your every sentence
both warily and carelessly,
as one might grip a fish
that one has planned to gut and eat.
Their first designs feel right,
but somehow there isnt enough
hard crying in their sounds,
so you mouth on as if talking
were not its own drawback,
which it is when done the wrong way
or when done very well.
(Ive coughed the halves of Mondays pills
from the spoon of my hand.)
Red sky on bad TV tonight
on furniture, on skin
Ill memorize it like it was
yesterday somewhere else,
like I was a different woman
whod done time in a park
where pink repeating petals were
birthed at the crowd and were
transferable from mind to mind
as patched contrivances.
(She liked Old Fitzgerald bourbon
and was legally blind.
I remember she tried to read.)
The single return on
becoming adult, the one
justice in forgoing
a sphere of possibility,
is the reception of
realityat once the pain
and balm in the only fact
of the onliest realm:
that it exists, and I in it
this Thursday afternoon.
Everythings coming down ruptures,
awry, very much like
when I pretend money cant buy
sordid excellence as,
say, Sarasota or Vegas
or Ashland, Oregon.
Life, like shock, is temporary,
and even near its close,
this life had best pass for itself,
although Ive nothing much
with which to menace it today,
June rain going the way
of handwritten letters, low clouds.
Heavy now, I barely feel it,
and there are rumors that
Ill hold this posture, the loose sense,
POEM 71

in other words, that thought
rid of texture, as what I said
was mirrored on water
begins and ends as needed.
Put yet another way,
consciousnesss heel on thoughts wing
one doesnt learn its there
until its made its way elsewhere,
forever not knowledge
and certainly never a thing.
All the worlds a warning
it just goes away to show you
theres no paltrier year
than the year you think you get good.
(Go ahead, compare death
to rest one last timeit cant hurt.)
In a place devoid of
or made wholly of novelty
(watch me brighten over
to a garden now and void this)
the hearts ramparts chorus,
all sociology explodes,
as if Id known thousands
of dialects, but not the sounds
of water over ice,
and whatever I have to say
for myself, Ill soon hand over,
at prolonged last, to you.
Credible thrones are few,
I get that, and architectures
gift for fictions as true
as a days being paraphrased,
necessarily so,
so I know Ive had done with it.
Waking threatens the dream
with materialthat champagne
I sipped from a Ziploc
never was, though it could have been
72 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
and could yet be the case.
Face facing down, sun on the ground,
some otherworldly wind
here I can infiltrate, for now,
the ready emptiness
through which all vision has to swim.
I used to think my eyes
would feel like something close to new
when I could see for myself
the pictured floors of distant rooms,
but so does everyone
(rows of dots in dust on those floors
they were all there before,
and yet only in a story;
and in that story was
an orchid, and in that orchid
dust, and in that dust
still one more story with an orchid
et goddamn cetera)
and in the first known photograph
in which humans appear,
one person shines anothers shoes.
In so many still lifes
the sense that someone was just there
is mostly what is felt,
yet one piece of fruit seems to have
come open of itself
for some reason, many, or none.
When there cease to be
or there are only pleasant weathers,
love poetry, so called,
will be the only poetry,
and it will have to be
enough for us, while also not
being nearly enough
so as to still be poetry.
I hear it forand from
my memory, that heavy limb
that promises its way
around history, the problem,
disappearing the halls
where it sets up its lamps, its beams,
its impromptu mirrors
(crosses opposite one another
for one weird example)
some difficult to see as such,
and why not dwell on that,
or better yet rehash belief?
I may have days still to live,
but theres a trouble under mind,
some combination of
irrational variety,
interest, and faint alarm.
About to be unfeasible,
an acrobat of ash,
I am become how Im ending:
slowly; it becomes me
the game that all these remnants are,
this negligent triumph
like a sleep. Q

(1)
T
o need his glasses
and be struck by an
awareness that they
are not at hand, an ordi-
nary enough circumstance
for Frederick Douglass, ex-
cept sometimes its accom-
panied by a flash of extraor-
dinary dread. If not quite
panic, certainly an unease
disproportionate to a sim-
ple recurring situation.
Dread that may be imme-
diately extinguished if he
locates his horn-rimmed,
owlish-eyed spectacles ex-
actly where he anticipated
they should be.
He sees them and al-
most sighs. Nearly feels
their slightly uncomfort-
able weight palpable on his nose.
Finding the glasses enough to reas-
sure him that he remains here among
the living in this material world
where he depends on glasses to read,
glasses to help him negotiate stub-
bornly solid objects he cannot glide
through. Enough to remember that
hes able to recall or backtrack, any-
way, and understand how the present
John Edgar Wideman is a contributing editor
of Harpers Magazine. His most recent book
is Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till
File (Scribner).
Illustrations by Matthew Richardson
S T O R Y
JB & FD
By John Edgar Wideman
moment connects to moments pre-
ceding it, a trail of hows and whys
causing him to wind up where he is
now, at this particular moment,
stretching out a hand to pick up eye-
glasses because he is the same person
who placed them on the desk, beside
a stack of three books at the desks
upper-left-hand corner so he wouldnt
forget, and there, here they would be
when he needed glasses.
Sometimes dread does not vanish
when he locates his glasses. They turn
up where he thinks they should, his
fingers curl, prepare to reach
out for them. But glasses are
not enough. Not convinc-
ing enough. They do not
belong to him. Not glasses.
Not hand. He vaguely rec-
ognizes both. Glasses too
heavy to lift. Or hand too
heavy. Hes observing from
an incalculable distance,
and sometimes that detach-
ment is a gift, sometimes it
dooms him. He cannot ani-
mate or orchestrate what he
desires to come next. John
Brown spreads his ancient,
musty wool cloakcloak
the brown color of his
nameover glasses, books,
desk, study, house, wife,
him, and when John Brown
snatches the cloak away,
nothings there. Douglass
has fled to the mountains, the woods
to join him.
(2)
A
h, Frederick, my friend. Look
at you, Fred Douglass. I knew
after a single glance you could
be the one. Your manly form and
bearing left no room for doubt. And
today these dozen hard years later you
still stand tall, straight, gleaming. I
see Gods promise of freedom in you.
Yours. Mine. Our nations. A man
STORY 73
who could lead his people, all people,
out of slaverys bondage. Your beard
dark that day we first spoke and now
tinged with spools of gray, but you
gleam still, my friend. Despite the
iron cloud of suffering and oppression
slavery casts over this land.
Douglass remembers no beard.
Not wearing one himself, nor a
beard on Browns gaunt face. Cer-
tainly not the patriarchs thicket of
white flowingno, a torrenttoday
halfway down John Browns chest.
He misremembers me.
But if God ignites a man to be-
lieve himself a prophet, if visions
burst upon him and seize him, as an
ordinary man is seized by a roiling
gut and must rush behind a bush to
squat and relieve himself, if such ur-
gency is the case, I suppose, Douglass
instructs himself, a prophet can be
forgiven for mistaking petty details.
Prophecies forgiven for confusing
time and place, for compounding
truth and error, wisdom and foolish-
ness, for mixing wishful thinking
with logic. John Brown forgiven for
believing that ignorant, isolated
slaves, cowed into submission by a
masters whip, will grasp the purpose
of a raid on Harpers Ferry and flock
instantly to his banner. Enraptured
by his vision, Brown foresees colored
slaves armed with sticks and stones
prevailing against cannons, Sharps
carbines, the disciplined troops of a
nation dedicated absolutely to up-
holding the principle that color
makes some men less equal than
others. I embrace the fiery justness
of John Browns prophecies, his un-
flinching willingness to sacrifice
himself and his sons, yet I cannot
forgive my friend for untempered
speech, demagoguery, the impetuos-
ity and rage that grip him. That
transform dream to madness.
(3)
D
ouglass watches himself step
out from behind the curtain
and stride to the bunting-
draped podium. They will welcome
him. He is famous. Broad chest be-
medaled, gold baton, field marshals
crimson sash decorating his resplen-
dent uniform, veteran of a terrible
war, though he never fired a shot in
74 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
anger. Fine figure of a man still. Af-
ter seven decades on earth. After a
protracted, blood-drenched conflict
settling nothing. Certainly not set-
tling his fate. Nor his colors fate.
Nor his nations.
A drumroll of applause greets him,
deepening as he moves step by step
across the stage, a thunder of hands
accompanying him. In the front rows
his new white wifes white women
friends. When a journalist asked
Douglass to speak about his mar-
riage, seeking details to spice the sto-
ry he intended to write about newly-
weds whose union scandalously
ignored great disparities of age and
race, Douglass replied, My first wife
the color of my mother, second the
color of my father.
Tonight in this hall where hed spo-
ken once before, where once hed been
property, a fugitive hosted by aboli-
tionists, a piece of animated chattel
curiously endowed with speech, to-
night in this hall he would address
The Woman Question. Proclaim ev-
ery womans God-granted entitlement,
like his, to all the Rights of Man.
A born orator. Born with that gift
and many glorious others, his mother
assured him in stories told at night,
whispering while she lay next to him
in the darkness, their only time to-
gether, half hours she stole from her
master, slipping away to walk an
hour each way, plantation to planta-
tion, to earn their half hour.
Second rumble of applause when
he concludes his remarks. Head
bowed, he waves away the noise and
stirs it, conducts it, loves it even as
his gesturing arm seems dismissive,
seems modest, a humble man, a vet-
eran tempering, allaying the crowds
enthusiasm just as he strokes and
soothes and quiets and fine-tunes his
new young wifes pale hair and pale
skin, her passion that makes him
tender, wistful, as often as aroused.
These happy newlyweds. Her fero-
cious coven of female friends among
the loudest of clappers.
The evening will be a success, and
he will return home to drop dead.
Douglass dead as suddenly as Lin-
coln felled by an assassins bullet.
Except the president lingered. Doug-
lass wont. Dead. He sees this as
surely as he sees his old face in the
vanity mirror in their freshly pa-
pered bedroom. As surely as old man
Brown saw blood. Only pools, rivers,
an ocean of blood, John Brown
swore, would cleanse the sin of man-
stealing. No. Not cleanse. Not ex-
punge or redeem or expiate. No.
Blood must be shed. No promises.
No better, cleaner South or North.
Only a simple certainty that blood
must be shed. Douglass read that
dire text in Browns distracted gaze,
his stare. Same fire in himself as a
boy who struck back, no fear of con-
sequences, at bullying slave driver
Covey. Same fire fanned by waves of
hands striking hands that primes
him, guides, draws him as he crosses
to a podium. Fire in the young wom-
an hes taken after forty years with
his colored first wife, this second
wife who will discover him lying
comfortably on the floor as he would
have been lying comfortably across
their canopied bed awaiting her had
his heart not stopped and dropped
him like an ox, Douglass lying there
on the Turkish carpet he sees so
clearly now and never will again.
Wont see it when he falls, when the
abyss blackens suddenly and his
head slams down into the rugs elab-
orately woven prayers.
(4)
T
hrough a smallish window
in a small motel I watched
snow falling, a heavy snow,
probably more than enough coming
down to transform in a couple of
hours the unprepossessing landscape
framed within the motel window.
Big white flakes dropping effortlessly
from the sky as Id hoped all morning
words would materialize on the page
while Id sat here in this unprepos-
sessing room attempting to imagine a
boy alone on a wilderness trail who
drives his fathers cattle along the
shore of Lake Erie, perhaps a hundred-
mile-plus trip there and back, to sup-
ply a military encampment during
the War of 1812, the boy on a horse or
a mule, I assume, although its possi-
ble he may have been on foot, armed
with a long stick or a cudgel to pro-
tect himself and prod the stream of
cattle along whichever edge of Lake
Erie he advancesnorth, south, east,
westfrom Hudson, a small, new
town in Ohios Western Reserve,
where the boys family lives, to a base
on the Detroit front occupied by a
General Hull and his troops.
I had never been a white teenager
with a strict, pious Calvinist father
named Owen Brown whom I had ac-
companied often on cattle drives, never
punched cows alone, never a slave like
the boy his age John Brown
immediately would befriend
and never forget, the colored
boy encountered in an iso-
lated cabin located some-
where along his route. Very
likely John Brown himself
couldnt say exactly where,
disoriented by an unexpect-
ed snowstorm that erased
the usual familiar terrain
and forced him for cautions
sake to seek shelter for his
animals and himself before
nightfall, before he found
himself lost completely, not
sure how far he may have
drifted from the trail, not
even clear in which direction
the trail might lie after hours
of thick, swirling snow, cer-
tain of nothing but snow,
wind, chilling cold, and the
necessity to keep track of the
cattle, perhaps round them
up, count them, maybe drive
them into a tight circle for
warmth, cows huddled,
hunkered down in a ring,
and maybe him or him and his horse
or mule bedded down close enough to
share the heat of three, five, seven
large beasts in a heap, a dark snow-
drift in the middle of nowhere. Or
perhaps drawn by the sight of a cabin
ahead, you keep the animals moving
as best you can and ride toward it,
then dismount, or youve been plod-
ding on foot and you reach a door and
knock, share the unhappy story of
your plight, the errand your father
entrusted to you, his livestock, his
livelihood, delivering beef for Gen-
eral Hulls soldiers to eat so the Brown
family can eat, so theres food on the
table back in Hudson. Not army
beefcornmeal mush his mother
measures, spoons out to John Brown
and his siblings Ruth, Salmon, Oliver,
and Levi Blakeslee, an orphan who,
thanks to Owen Browns charitable
heart, was adopted and traveled as
part of the Brown family to Hudson
from New York State. Taut, hungry,
lean faces at home, and now John
Browns duty to feed them.
Night deepening. Storm embolden-
ing him, a shy twelve-, thirteen-year-
old boy, to seek assistance, refuge,
only or at least till daylight and he
can relocate trail or landmarks and be
on his way.
John Browns storm does not sub-
side but intensifies, lasting through
the next afternoon perhaps, so he
stays a night and half the following
day in a cabin with a settler and his
family, stranded here in a strangers
cabin for far too long, too far away
from accomplishing his task, Owen
Browns cows outside maybe wander-
ing off, lost in blinding snow. How
many of them? Count them, band
them together, search for strays, coax
up the slovenly ones who otherwise
would be content to die where they
kneel, sunken into the snow.
These people pioneers of sorts, like
his, hovering at the edge of raw wilder-
ness, a question arising daily, as pre-
dictable as the sun: will they survive
for another twenty-four hours on this
not-quite-civilized frontier, prayers
each time they awaken, each time
they break bread. The bread coarse,
dark, hard, a little milk on occasion or
water to soften it, a rare dab of honey
to sweeten, or its cornmeal porridge
or cornmeal fried in grease to make a
square of hot mush on his dish like
John Brown receives that night in a
cabin familiar to him from
home, the wooden plates
and heavy mush no strang-
ers, nor the wife who smiles
twiceJohn Brown notices,
countsduring the hours of
his stay.
She reminds him of his
motherbusy without a
pause, quiet as a shadow, a
kindly shadow, she lets you
know without saying a
word, nor could you say
how you know that deep
kindness and deep fear hide
inside her busyness, her
mouth like his mothers a
tight line, lips nearly invis-
ible even when she unseals
them to address briskly, not
often above a tight whisper,
her three tiny girls or the
man who is her husband,
whos quite impressed by
any youngish boy a father
would trust to drive cattle
along miles and miles of
wilderness trail, a man who
offers encouragement to
John Brown to linger longer, though
the boy and perhaps the host know he
must refuse and he will, politely, this
well-spoken boy. The boy understands
his mission. Hes determined, as long
as he can draw breath into his body,
to reach his destination and dis-
charge his responsibilities. Then
walk, ride, or crawl back to Hudson,
money collected in hand, hurry,
hurry, not a moment to spare, since
so many crucial hours consumed,
lost, wasted already.
Not a problem for me to imagine
his anxious state of mind, his
despondency and disappointment
with himself, his sense he could,
should have been better prepared for
any emergency that might sap pre-
cious time. His sister Ruth would not
understand why her bowl is empty.
STORY 75
Her big eyes, severe even when a
very young child, hold back tears
she knows better than to shed, not
because she fears being disciplined
for weeping at the dinner table
her parents love her, teach her,
pray over her and with her every
day. She doesnt cry because she
doesnt wish to disappoint or hurt
them, tears would vex her mother,
worry her father, tears might cause
them to think she is blaming them
for no food or, worse, blaming the
Good Lord when she knows He is
always watching over her, His grace
abounding, more precious than
thousands of earthly platters heaped
with food.
John Brown imagines Ruth inside
him and peeks out at himself with
her deep, famished eyes, the way the
slave boy looks at him, speaking with
eyes, gestures, a silent conversation, a
wordless friendship struck up with
the first glances they exchange, fel-
low outsiders, alien presences in the
cabin, raw boys of similar size, age.
John Brown winces but holds his
tongue, his tears, when the dark boy
cowers under a sudden f lurry of
blows, many thuds, cracks across his
back, shoulders, arms, not ducking
or fleeing, hands not thrust up to
protect himself from a series of blows
delivered by a stout stick that must
have been leaning against the head
of the rough log table, stationed
there at the mans hand, John Brown
immediately perceives, for exactly
this purpose. Rapid, loud strikes,
blows that areis it fair to sug-
gest?as painful in John Browns
mind as they are on the slave boys
body, fair to say the sting of this
not-uncommon beating cools soon
and is forgotten by a black boys
tough flesh, but a white boys shock
endures. What a surprise to John
Brown the evil in the heart of this
grown-up man who has been noth-
ing but kind to him, offering succor
from a storm to one of his kind, a
stranger, a mere feckless boy who let
down his father, his family. A father
like his father but unlike too, as
John Brown feels himself alike and
unlike the black slave boy his age
who serves them, who eats and
sleeps under the same roof with this
family, with him that night, but in a
76 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
corner. Eats over there, sleeping
there under rags, rags his bedding,
clothes, roof, walls, floor all nothing
but rags, a dark mound of rags the
wind has blown into the house per-
haps when the door opened to let
John Brown enter or leave or when
the man whos father of the house
passes in and out to piss or the slave
boys endless chores drive him into
the storm to do whatever hes or-
dered to do until hes swept by a fi-
nal gust of wind one last time back
into the cabin, a piece of night, ash,
cinder trying to stay warm in a cor-
ner where it lands.
(5)
S
pring rains swelled the rivers
the year my sons John and Jason
set off to join their brothers in
Kansas and be counted among anti-
slavery settlers when the territory
voted to decide its future as a free or
slave state. They left Ohio with their
families, traveling by boat on the
Ohio, then Mississippi Rivers to St.
Louis, Missouri, where they bought
passage on a steamer, the New Lucy,
to reach the camp at Osawatomie
that the family had taken to calling
Browns Station.
A long, cold, wet journey to Kan-
sas, Douglass, and on the final leg
God saw fit to take back the soul of
my grandson, four-year-old Austin,
Jasons elder son, stricken during an
outbreak of cholera on board the
steamer. When the boat docked at
Waverly, Missouri, the grieving fami-
lies of Jason and John, despite a
drenching thunderstorm, disem-
barked to bury young Austin. The
boats captain, a proslavery man sur-
rounded by his Southern cronies, the
same ruffians who had brandished
pistols, bowie knives, swearing oaths,
shouting obscenities, swaggering,
and announcing their bloody intent
to make Kansas a slave state, the
same brigands who had terrorized
their fellow passengers night and day,
singling out my sons whose accent
and manner betrayed them as
Northerners, all those devils must
have laughed with the captain at the
cruel joke he bragged he was playing
on the bereaved families, dumping
their meager baggage to soak and rot
on the dock, steaming away from
Waverly before the distraught
mourners returned from their errand,
abandoning them during a down-
pour in a slave state though they had
paid fares to Kansas.
No simple business to slaughter
men with broadswords. To hack and
slice human flesh with less ceremony
than we butcher sheep and pigs. Dark
that late night, early morning in
Kansas when we descended upon
homesteads of the worst proslavery
vigilantes and fell to killing along
Pottawatomie Creek. I was in com-
mand. Ordered the guilty to come
out from their homes. Ordered execu-
tions in the woods. I knew the men I
condemned had assaulted and mur-
dered peaceful settlers, and among
their victims were members of my
family. Still, I stood aside at first, ap-
palled by the fury, blood, screams,
the mayhem perpetrated by weapons
wielded by my sons Owen and Salmon
and our companions. Though I enter-
tained not the slightest of doubts,
Frederickthe awful acts committed
that day were justified, even if they
moved the clock only one minute clos-
er to the day our nation must free itself
from the sin of slaveryyet I stayed
my hand until the quiet of dawn had
returned. Then, in silence broken
only by his pitiful moans, I delivered
a pistol shot to the brain of a dying
James Doyle.
(6)
H
ere is a letter (some histori-
ans call it fiction) written by
Mahala Doyle in the winter
of 1859 and delivered to John Brown
awaiting execution in his prison cell
in Virginia:
I do feel gratified, to hear that you
were stopped in your fiendish career
at Harpers Ferry, with the loss of your
two sons, you can now appreciate my
distress in Kansas, when you . . . en-
tered my house at midnight and ar-
rested my Husband and two boys, and
took them out of the yard and shot
them in cold blood, shot them dead
in my hearing, you cant say you done
it to free slaves, we had none and nev-
er expected to own one, but has only
made me a poor disconsolate widow
with helpless children. . . . Oh how it
 pained my heart to hear the dying
groans of my Husband & children.
(7)
O
n the road between Cleve-
land and Kansas, gazing up at
the stars, John Browns son
Frederick said, If God, then this. If
no God, then this.
John Brown remembers the won-
der in Fredericks voice, how softly,
reverently his son spoke, so many
stars overhead in the black sky, re-
members the wagon wheels jolt,
yield, bounce had spun a seemingly
unending length of rough fabric from
the roads coarse thread, then a
seamless, silky ride for John Brown
lasting until Fredericks words re-
turned him to an invisible chaos of
slippery mud, rocks, craters that
snatch them, tumble them, rattle
their bones. Any moment a sudden,
unavoidable accident might pitch
both men overboard or smash the
wagon to splinters as it traverses this
broken section of road between
Cleveland and Kansas, and there is
no other road except the one spun for
a few minutes during John Browns
forgiving sleep, his forgetful sleep.
How many minutes, hours, how
much unbroken silence of sleep be-
fore he awakened abruptly to hear
his son Fredericks voice asking how
many miles covered, how many more
miles to go to Kansas, Father. His
poor, half-mad, feeble-brained son,
the one of all his children, people
agree, who resembles him most in
face and figure, Fred loyal and un-
complaining as a shoe. Tall, sturdy
Frederick, who will die in a few
weeks in Kansas. Dead once before
as an infant, then reborn, rebaptized
Frederick in remembrance of his lost
little brother. Fredericks second
chance to live cut short by ruffians
in a border war, my second perished
Frederick. Then a third chance, a
dark son or dark father or mysteri-
ously both, bearing the same name
my sons bore, Frederick, and John
Brown trembles after his sleeping
eyes pop open when he hears his
sons declaration, Fredericks soft
blasphemy revealing his wonder at a
thought he had brewed all by himself
while he drove the wagon transport-
ing father and son to the killing
fields of Missouri and Kansas, driv-
ing through this great holy world,
this conundrum, John Brown thinks,
far too perplexing, too fearful for a
father to grasp or explicate.
In his cell in Virginia John Brown
will remember riding in a wagon at
night with his dead son Frederick on
the way to rejoin family in the camp
in Kansas. His arm stiffens, his fist
grips the hilt of an imaginary broad-
sword, and he mimics blows he wit-
nessed in predawn darkness, blows
his sons Salmon and Owen inflicted
on outlaws they attacked on Pot-
tawatomie Creek. This stroke for a
dead grandson, Austin. This one for
dead baby Frederick. This for Freder-
ick who shared his lost brothers
name and died too soon, twenty-six
years old, in those Kansas Territory
wars. And more blows struck for
other, darker Fredericks, all of them
his children, Gods children, Brown
almost shouts aloud as he presses
again a revolvers actual barrel
against the skull of whimpering,
murdering night rider Doyle. An act
of mercy or vengeance? he will ask
God in his cell, to end the suffering
of a nearly dead evil wretch when he
pulls the trigger.
(8)
1856
M
rs. Thomas Russell wrote:
Our house was chosen as a
refuge because no one would have
dreamed of looking for Brown therein. . .
John Brown stayed a week with
us, keeping his room almost always,
except at meal time, and never com-
ing down unless one of us went up to
fetch him. He proved a most amiable
guest, and when he left, I missed
him greatly. . .
First time that I went up to call
John Brown, I thought he would nev-
er open his door. Nothing ensued but
an interminable sound of the drag-
ging of furniture.
I have been finding the best way
to barricade, he remarked, when he
appeared at last. I shall never be tak-
en alive, you know. And I should hate
to spoil your carpet.
You may burn down the house, if
you want to, I exclaimed.
No, my dear, I shall not do that.
Mrs. Russell goes on to record that
John Brown
had the keenest possible sense of
humor, and never missed the point
of a joke or of a situation. Negroes
long words, exaggerations, and gran-
diloquence afforded him endless
amusement, as did pretentiousness
of any sort. . .
He was acute in observing the
quality of spoken En glish, and
would often show himself highly di-
verted by the blunders of uneducat-
ed tongues. He himself spoke some-
what rustically, but his phrases were
well formed, his words well chosen,
and his constructions always forcible
and direct. When he laughed he
made not the slightest sound, not
even a whisper or an intake of
breath; but he shook all over and
laughed violently. It was the most
curious thing imaginable to see
him, in utter silence, rock and
quake with mirth. . . .
1858
J
ohn Brown thinks of it as
molting. His feathers shed. A
change of color. Him shriven.
Cleansed. Pale feathers giving way
to darker. Darker giving way to pale.
Not seasonal, not a yearly exchange
of plumage as God sees fit to ar-
range for birds or for trees whose
leaves alter their hue before they
drop each fall. His molting occurs
in an instant. He stands naked. A
tree suddenly stripped of leaves. Emp-
ty branches full again in the blink of
an eye.
I see such alterations in myself,
Douglass, in my dreams and often
in Gods plain daylight, and won-
der if others notice my skin falling
away, turning a different color, but
I do not ask, not even my wife or
children, for fear I will be thought
mad. One more instance of insani-
ty my enemies could add to dis-
credit me. Old Brown changes col-
ors like a bird or a leaf. Pure
insanity to believe a man sheds one
color and becomes another. Or
worsethose in league against me
would avermuch worse if Brown
doesnt believe the falsehood yet
would propagate a dangerous lie to
lead weak minds astray. Proof posi-
tive that Brown is an emissary
STORY 77

from Hell busy per forming the
Devils work.
Free slaves, mad Brown shouts.
Free the coloreds, as if color simply a
removable outer shell, as if color
doesnt permanently bind men into
different kinds of men. As if feathers,
leaves, fur, skin, fleece, all one sub-
stance, and all colors a single color.
Yet I believe they are the same in
Gods eye.
I thank you again for the kindness
and generosity you and your wife
have extended toward me. I arrived
here weary, despondent, exhausted
by the Kansas wars, and you offered
shelter. A respite from enemies who
pursue me as if theres a price on my
head here in the North as well as in
the South. Your welcoming hand
and spirit have revived me. I have
been able to think. Write my Con-
stitution. When not occupied by my
pen, I have benefited from your will-
ing ear, your thoughtful responses to
my poor attempt to draft a docu-
ment that protects every American
instead of a privileged few. I am
eternally indebted to you for the
sanctuary you provided, for your
unceasing hospitality these last
three weeks, and to demonstrate
my gratitude, Im ashamed to ad-
mit, I ask for even more from you.
Not for myself this time, but for the
grand cause we both are destined
to serve. You must join us in Vir-
ginia, Frederick Douglass.
W
hy are you certain that my
enslaved brethren will
hive to you, as you put
it? Why certain that a general in-
surrection will follow the Harpers
raid and topple the Souths slave-
holding empire, free my people from
bondage? I agree with much of your
reasoning and share your sense of
urgency, but do not share your cer-
tainty. Envy it, yes, but do not share
it. You cite Toussaints successful re-
volt in Haiti and Maroons free in
the hills of Jamaica. Yet Virginia is
not Jamaica, not Haiti. I believe
there must be better ways than
bloody rebellion to end the abomi-
nation of slavery. Why are you so
certain God looks with favor on your
plan? What if, despite your fervor
and good intentions, you are wrong?
78 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
W
rong, you say. Wrong. In
this nation where a mans
color is reason enough to
put him in chains. Where cutthroats
in Kansas murder settlers whose only
offense is hatred of slavery. Where a
senator is caned in the halls of Con-
gress for condemning man-stealers.
Why, in a nation where every citizen
compelled by law to aid and abet
slave-masters who seek to recover es-
caped property, is it difficult to sep-
arate right from wrong?
I tremble as I utter this chilling
thought, Frederick Douglass, but
what if no God exists except in the
minds of believers? Would it not be-
hoove us more, not less, to bear wit-
ness to what is right? To testify? To
manifest, in our acts, the truth of our
Gods commandments?
I make no claim to be Gods cho-
sen warrior. I have studied an assault
on the Virginia arsenal for a very
long while. Devised a strategy I be-
lieve will exploit a powerful enemys
weaknesses. Recruited and trained
good men to fight alongside me and
my sons. Weighed both moral and
practical consequences. Asked my-
self a thousand times what right do I
have to commence such an under-
taking. Still, I would be a fool to
think Im closer to knowing Gods
plan. We serve Him in the light or
darkness of our understanding.
Stand with us. You would be a
beacon, Frederick. Let Southerners
and Northerners, freemen and the
enslaved, see the righteous power,
the fierce, unquenchable spirit I rec-
ognized in you the first time we
met. Let the world know that you
are aroused, aggrieved. That you
will not rest until your brethren are
free. Teach your fellow countrymen
there can be no peace, no forgive-
ness as long as slavery abides. Ac-
company us to Virginia. Strike a
blow with us.
1859
I
must die one day, John Brown,
sure enough. But I feel no need
to hurry it. I dont reckon that
ending my life in Virginia will make
me a better man than one who
chooses to survive and dedicates
himself to serving God and his peo-
ple. I shall continue my work here in
the North. Offer my life, not my
death, to my people.
I
respect your well-known courage
and principles. Nevertheless, I must
speak bluntly, and say that I believe
you quibble. You speak as if a mans
time on earth is merely a matter of
hours, days, years.
In this business we cannot afford
to bargain. To quibble about more
time, less time, a better time. We are
not accountants, Fred. Duty requires
more than crying out against slavery,
more than attempting to maintain a
decent life while the indecencies of
slavery are rife about us. To rid the
nation of a curse, blows must be
struck. Blood shed. I am prepared to
shed blood. Mine. My sons.
A
nd my blood. And the blood
of young Green here, fresh
from chains, who, after listen-
ing to us debate not quibble, chooses
to accompany you to Virginia.
Some days, I assure you, my feet,
my mind rage. Yet a voice intercedes:
do not give up hope for this intolera-
ble world. Change must come. Like
you, I believe the Good Lord in
Heaven has grown impatient with
this Sodom. Soon He may perform a
cleansing with His glorious, stiff-
bristled broom. I will rejoice if He
calls me to that work.
I have made up my mind as you
have made up yours, John Brown.
And this man, Green, his mind.
Godspeed to you both.
(9)
M
y name is John Brown and
I want my son to hear the
story of my name so I will
talk the story to this good white
lady promises to write down every
word and send them in a letter to
my son in Detroit on Pierce Road
last I heard of him and his wife and
three children, a boy and two girls,
dont know much else about them,
must be old by now, maybe those
three children got kids and grand-
kids of they own and I never seen
none them with my own two eyes,
these old eyes bad now dont see
much of anything no more, wouldnt
hardly see them grands nor great- W I N N ER of th e
grands today they standing here
right beside this bed so guess I nev- M A N BOOKOK ER PR I Z E
er will see them in this life and that
fact makes me very sorry, son, and
old-man sorry the worse kind of sor- NATIONAL
ry, I believe, and let me tell you, my
son, dont you dare put off to tomor-
BESTSELLER
row because tomorrow not prom-
ised, tomorrow too late, too late, GIDDY, SCATHING
but dont need to tell you all that, and DAZZLING.
do I, son, you aint no spring chick- THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
en, you got to be old your ownself,
cause I comes into the world in [An] OUTRAGEOUS,
eighteen and fifty-eight just before riff-strewn satire on race in
the war old John Brown started and
seems like it wasnt hardly no time America... but its most
before here you come behind me, arresting quality is the lively
me still a boy myself, but I want to humanity of its characters.
tell you the story of my name not THE NEW YORKER
my age and how you supposed to
know that story less I tell it and this BRILLIANT... unlike
nice lady write the words and may-
be you read them one day to my anything else Id read before,
grands and great-grands, son, then at once side-splitting and
they know why John Brown my thought-provoking. PICADOR
name and why John Brown a damn THE ATLANTIC AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER, PAPERBACK, AND E-BOOK.
fine name, but listen, son, dont you
ever put off to tomorrow trying to
be a good man, a honest man, hard-
working, loving man, dont put it off
cause that gets a man in trouble,
deep-down trouble, cause time is
trouble, time full of trouble, and SOLUTION TO THE
time on your hands when your JANUARY PUZZLE
hands aint doing right fills up your T I
time with trouble, then its too late, NOTES FOR E A N B
your time to do right gone, you in SPELL WEAVING: U C H G I N
the middle of doing evil or trying R S A L V A G I
not to or trying to undo evil you
R E S T O I S E N O
done and time gone, too late, like Note: * indicates an anagram.
me in a cage a dozen and some years R E S T E S C A R G O T
locked up behind bars for killing a N O V A S C O T I A A S S O
Correction: In the solution to
fella didnt even know his name till the December puzzle, Replace- F E R E A R O L F D E T R
I hears it in the courtroom and ments, the diagram included an S E R T E R E T S I W
lucky he black everybody say or you incorrect answer for clue 18A.
wouldna made it to no damn court- The correct answer was soars, S M L A S D E B M
room, no jail, crackers string your not sours. The answer is R A E L B R U
correct in the Notes. We regret
black ass up, the other prisoners say, the error.
S N O O N
you lucky nigger, they say, and cack- I L W
le, grin, and shake they heads and L
moan and some nights make you
want to cry like a baby all them
long, long years when if I aint slav-
ANSWERS: 1. Nova Scotia*; 2. assorted (hidden); 3. florae*; 4. re(fore)st;
ing in the fields under a hellfire sun 5. es(car go)ts*; 6. twi(s)ter; 7. etre (rev.); 8. s-Everest; 9. Oise (homophone);
Im sitting in a cell staring at a 10. no(o)se; 11. i(m-bed)s; 12. [p]alms; 13. eras-E.R.; 14. sa(l)vaging; 15. [he]ads;
mans blood on a juke-joint floor, 16. burble*; 17. ar(m)rests; 18. su(rev.)-ch; 19. ginger, (hidden); 20. afternoons*; 21. Alta[r]; 22.
never get time back once I yanks a cet*-a-[o]cean; 23. [ti]bias; 24. ailed*; 25. bow-line, pun; 26. aerosol*; 27. hating*; 28. VI-C-tors;
bowie knife out my belt and he wav- 29. LOL-L.
ing his knife and mine quicker finds

STORY 79
 his heart, the very same bowie knife
my father Jim Daniels give to me
and John Brown give to him, said,
Use this hard, cold steel, Mr. Jim
Daniels, on any man try to rob your
freedom, same knife old John Brown
stole from the crackers like he stole
my daddy, mama, my sister and
brother, and a passel of other Ne-
groes from crackers down in Kansas
and Missouri, its too late, too late,
knife in my hand, I watched a man
bleed to death inside those stone
walls every day year after year, hard
time, son, you wait too long to do
right its too late and you cant do
nothing, cant change time, and
thats that, like the fact I never seen
my grands, never seen you but once,
one time up there on the Canada
side in all that cold and snow and
wind, your mama carried you all
them miles, had you wrapped up
like you some little Eskimo or little
papoose. It was only once only that
one time I ever seen you there you
was with your mother, she come
cross with you on the ferry, and me
and her talked or mize well tell it
like it was, she talked and I kinda
halfway listened but I didnt want
to hear nothing I wasnt ready to
hear, nodded my head, smiled,
chucked you under your chubby
double chins, patted her shoulder,
smooched her beautiful brown
Indin-color colored cheek a couple
times, always liked your mama, but
the problem was I didnt know then
what I know now, son, or excuse me,
yes I did, I knowed it just as clear as
day, course I did, just didnt want to
hear it cause I had other plans,
knucklehead, young-blood plans, what
New York Revisited Ima do with a wife and baby, it was
rough up there, barely feed myself,
BY HENRY JAMES keep a roof over my head, if you
could call a tent a roof, so how am I
First published in Harpers Monthly supposed to look out for you all,
Magazine in 1906 anyway, it was only that once I seen
you, then same day shes back on
With an introduction by the ferry shes gone, you gone,
Lewis H. Lapham nothing, no word for lots and lots
of years cept a little tad or tidbit
FRANKLIN the way news come and go in pris-
SQUARE
PRESS on or hear this or that happened
from people passing through up
there in Canada, me asking or
somebody telling tales they dont
even know my name who I am or
Order online at store.harpers.org
80 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
know you or know who your mama
and who you is to me or who my
peoples is, but Id overhear this or
that in somebodys story and so in a
manner of speaking I kept up, knew
you still alive, then your mama
dead and you married living on
Pierce Road in Detroit, three
grandkids I aint never laid eyes on,
never will now. . .
Excuse me, Miss, you got that all
down so far or maybe I should slow
up or maybe just go ahead and shut
up now, stop now cause how you
think this letter find him anyway
even if I say it right and you catch
every word I say on paper it still
dont sound right to me hearing
myself talk this story, it just makes
me sad, and its a damned shame, a
mess anyway, too late to tell my
son my daddy, his granddaddy, Jim
Daniels, give me John Browns
name because John Brown carried
us out from slavery fall of 1858, my
brother and sister, mama, and Jim
Daniels, my father cross seven
states, 1,100 miles, eighty-two days
in wagons, railroad trains, on foot,
boats, along with six other Negroes
John Brown stole from slavery in
Kansas and Missouri and Daddy
say one them other six, a woman
slave, ask John Brown, How many
miles, how many days, Captain
Brown, we got to go before free-
dom? and John Brown answer her
and the lady slave say back, Thats
a mighty far piece you say, Cap-
tain, Sir. Ole Massa pitch him a
terrible conniption fit we aint
back to fix his dinner, and then
me born on one them last couple
days before they cross the river to
freedom, so my daddy Jim Daniels
named me John Brown, he told me,
and if Ida been more than half a
man when you and your mama
come up there I woulda took care
of you all and passed my name on
to you and you be another John
Brown whatever else my sweet Ella
called you youd be John Brown,
too, and if you knew the story of
the name, son, maybe you would
have passed the name on, too,
John Brown, and maybe not, Miss,
what do you think, Miss, is it too
late, too much time gone by, Miss,
what do you think? Q
 R E V I E W S

NEW BOOKS
By Christine Smallwood

G
eorge Saunders is the most
humane American writer
working today. He need not
ask, as Sheila Heti did in the title of her
novel, how a person should be. He
knows. A person should be courageous
and hopeful, generous and kind. A
person should sacrifice herself for the
good of those who are more vulnerable.
A person should live in the knowledge
that life is suffering, and that the most,
or least, she can do is attempt to ame-
liorate the suffering of others. And
this is where it gets interestinga
story should be as compassionate as a
person. A storys posi-
tive virtues are not dif-
ferent from the positive
virtues of its writer,
Saunders noted in an
essay called My Writ-
ing Education. A story
should be honest, di-
rect, loving, restrained.
In the wrong hands
this would be a recipe for
treacle. But over four
story collections, two
novellas, and a chil-
drens book, Saunders
has shown that a moral approach to the
writing of fiction neednt preclude aes-
thetic panache. Nowfinally, the
Brobdingnagians will sayhe has pub-
lished a novel. It is a good one. LIN-
COLN IN THE BAR DO (Random
House, $28) is the story of a single
night in 1862, when the homely, griev-
ing, long-legged sixteenth president of
the United States visits Oak Hill Cem-
etery, in Washington, D.C., to com-
mu ne w it h
Willie, his de-
ceased eleven-
year-old son.
In some sec-
tions, sentenc-
es culled from
sources real
and imaginary
explain the political scene; in others, boys led him, as a youth, to slash his
characters speak in short bursts. The own wrists, and Hans Vollman, a
collaged, choral form allows Saunders heavyset printer with a body like a
to preserve his usual clipped rhythms, dumpling and an outsized sexual or-
frank pronouncements, and pregnant gan who cant stomach the thought of
silences while managing the large cast his much younger wife remarrying.
and wartime context. (Something about the bardo makes
Most of the people bodies mutate: Bevins has a surfeit of
we meet are ghosts eyes and noses.)
unchained conscious- Most children pass through this
nesses clinging to the limbo state in a matter of minutes, but
limbo of the graveyard, Willie is detainedfirst by his fathers
delaying the judgment visit, then by a whirl of demons. They
that will determine their wrap him in tendrils and form a cara-
final resting place. (In pace of thousands of writhing tiny
Tibetan Buddhism, the bodies, none bigger than a mustard
bardo is the state be- seed, twisting minuscule faces up at
tween physical death us. It is a powerful image, sugges-
and rebirth.) They spend tively akin to a scene in the recent
their days inside their television series Stranger Things, in
decaying, wormy car- which a little boy is held captive in a
casses and their nights flying free. Like parallel dimension by alien vines. Our
living skeptics convinced that they are notion of child endangerment must
the dreams of an evil demon, these dead be wrapped up in this idea of a dan-
souls do not know, or refuse to believe, gerous embrace, a fatal womblove
that they are dead. turned to smothering. It is fitting that
In summary, it sounds pretty crazy, Willies fate hinges on his, and his
but ghosts, zombies, the supernatural fathers, ability to let go of each other,
and the Civil War, for that matterare which in turn depends on recognizing
long-standing features of Saunderss the truth of what has transpired. Ab-
work. This time our guides are Roger sent that spark, Abe finally admits,
Bevins III, whose predilection for other this, lying here, is merely. . . meat.

Top: Crescent Moon over the East End Cemetery, by Elizabeth Fraser. Courtesy the artist. Bottom: Photograph of
Abraham Lincoln, June 3, 1860, by Alexander Hesler. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division REVIEWS 81
 Oak Hill is a chattering place, a
society of cliques and gossip and
wretched solipsism that mirrors the
world of the living. The visual artist
Nick Cave recently asked if there is
racism in heaven; I dont know, but
there sure is racism in Saunderss
bardo. When the African-American
ghosts emerge from a common grave
to tell their stories, they are driven
back by a violent white patrol. Before
they go, we meet a traumatized
young slave whose life on earth was
hell; she was repeatedly raped, things
done to her as if no one else were
there, only him, the man doing it,
she nothing more than a (warm, si-
lent) wax figure. Another slave,
named Thomas Haden, recalls a gen-
tler arrangement. He was never beat-
en, and was allowed to live with his
wife and children:
I had my moments. My free, uninter-
rupted, discretionary moments.
Strange, though: it is the memory of
those moments that bothers me most.
The thought, specifically, that oth-
er men enjoyed whole lifetimes com-
prised of such moments.
Over the course of the novel,
Saunderss ghosts discover an ability
to enter into one anothers minds
and into Abes as well. From inside,
they can listen to the guilt-stricken
fathers thoughts, think and feel with
him as he tries to reconcile his sorrow
with the sorrow of the parents of the
fallen soldiers he has sent into battle.
At times, the empathy plot is heavy-
handed, as when Hadens ghost enters
Lincoln, which seems to suggest that
only such a psychological identifica-
tion could explain the presidents fu-
ture embrace of the abolitionist
cause. But this being Saunders, senti-
mentality is leavened with squalid
sensualitya crouched, defecating
body here; a casual orgy among
friends there; and a simple dick joke.
As Abe sits on the ground near the
tomb of one dear departed Belling-
wether, Husband, Father, Shipwright,
Hans Vollman enters his body:
The two now comprised one sitting
man, Mr. Vollmans greater girth
somewhat overflowing the gentleman,
his massive member existing wholly
outside the gentleman, pointing up at
the moon.
82 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
In My Writing Education, Saun-
ders said that writing was about
finding and accessing and honing
ones particular charms. This image
of Mr. Vollmans oddly corporeal
spirit overflowing the unknowing
Lincoln is charming in all of Saun-
derss particular waysdirty, and
comforting, and sad.
A
rather different view of mor-
tality, consciousness, and the
spark and meat of life is to be
found in Mark OConnells TO BE A
MACHINE: ADVENTURES AMONG
CYBORGS, UTOPIANS, HACKERS,
AND THE FUTURISTS SOLVING
THE MODEST PROBLEM OF DEATH
(Doubleday, $26.95). Adventures
might be overstating it a bit, but
OConnell, an Irish journalist with a
literary bent, does have fun. He visits
a cryonics lab, a house of biohackers,
a robotics competition sponsored by
the Pentagon, and various tech confer-
ences. He learns about the dangers of
artificial intelligencehow do you de-
sign a robot that doesnt wind up eradi-
cating humankind?and the attrac-
tions of mind uploading. He meets
many hyperrational white men who
are united by their belief that the uni-
versal trajectory of birth, aging, and
death is basically unsatisfactory. Or
worse: inhuman. Ask anyone whos
transgender, explains Tim Cannon,
a so-called grinder who experiments
with implanted biometric devices.
Theyll tell you theyre trapped in
the wrong body. But me, Im trapped
in the wrong body because Im
trapped in a body. All bodies are the
wrong body.
A body, of course, is hardly a
neutral category. Philosophers since
forever have divided the world into
rationality (masculine, good) and em-
bodiment (feminine, bad). Its a famil-
iar, boring dichotomy, but remarkably
resilient, like some horrible discursive
Whac-A-Mole. If only we could be
free of our desires, our addictions, our
irrationalities, and those disgusting
female bodies; lets hear it for the pu-
rity of information and clean, metal
machines! OConnell spends a chap-
ter with Zoltan Istvan, whose third-
party campaign for president on the
Transhumanist Party line in 2016
largely consisted of his driving a bus
across the country with a coffin
strapped to the roof. I would have
liked to hear more about Istvans wife,
who is a gynecologist. Obviously
shes a little resistant to transhuman-
ist ideas, he says, because in the
near future her entire profession will
be obsolete. What with actual child-
birth becoming a thing of the past.
You know, with babies being pro-
duced by ectogenesis and whatnot.
Istvans young friend and campaign
volunteer, a calorie-restricted virgin
named Roen, clarifies what hes look-
ing forward to in the future: sexbots.
A real girl could cheat on you, sleep
around. You could get an STD. You
could maybe even die.
Of course there is no natural, pre-
technological state to which humans
can return; of course our smartphones
have become prostheses. That doesnt
mean that much transhumanist think-
ing isnt silly and specious, or frankly
immature: Laura Deming, a leading
antiaging scientist, is still recovering
from the blow she received at eight
years old, when she learned that her
grandmother would die. But, as
OConnell makes clear, this is difficult
material to argue aboutless a debate
over ideas than a clash of worldviews.
My skepticism was more tempera-
mental than logical, he writes. Maybe
his subjects really do experience their
brains as functioning like computers.
His own, he admits, is a profoundly
inefficient device, prone to frequent
crashes and dire miscalculations and
lengthy meanderings. For OConnell,
the meaning of life is its finitude. For
the transhumanists, death is another
problem to be disrupted. Their proj-
ects, he suggests, are ultimately Ror-
schach teststhe way we respond
reveals nothing more than our own
values, fantasies, and psyches.
A
fter reading Damion Searlss
THE INKBLOTS: HERMANN
RORSCHACH, HIS ICONIC
TEST, AND THE POWER OF SEEING
(Crown, $28), I should know better
than to lean on such a tired clich. A
Swiss psychiatrists 1918 invention be-
came, by the 1960s, a metaphor for
freedom, seeing what you want to see,
and a culture without authority. But
this image of the test wholly mischar-
acterizes its origins. The diagnostic
power of Rorschachs cards resides the blots, and what she sees there, are
in their being neither arbitrary nor reflective of how she organizes her
meaninglessthere is a structure experience more generally. While pre-
within which interpretation occurs. vious inkblot tests measured how
The swirls, smears, and smudges re- much imagination patients had by
ally do look like bats or butterflies tallying the number of their responses
or bears, though I cherish the re- to each image, Rorschach asked about
sponse of one depressed farmer in the meaning of what they saw. His
a study about ten years ago, who saw premise was that seeing does not pre-
in one card a tragically misunder- cede thinking; it is thinking. His test
stood piece of cauliflower. was supposed to reveal it alla per-
This excellent book begins as a bi- sons grasp on reality, cognitive func- Bringing the
ography and becomes, when the doc- tioning, susceptibility to emotions.
tor suddenly dies of a ruptured appen- Scoring protocols note the follow- Independent
dix at the age of thirty-seven, a ing elements: symbolic content Bookstore
cultural history of his creation. As (Thats a demon is the kind of
Searls explains, the inkblots are not answer that gets you in trouble), at-
Experience
in fact blots. Rorschach, the son of an tention to the whole and the detail, to your door.
art teacher and himself a gifted drafts- response to color, and, critically, re-
man, designed and painted the ten sponse to perceived movement. Are
images, which have proved to be un- the bears cavorting, the fairies danc- Each month
cannily accurate: again and again, ing, the waiters kissing? It matters. If
therapists who see only a patients
Rorschach answers
Rorschach cared only about the un-
conscious, he could
receive a
have arrived at the
same diagnosis as
have used Freudian
free-association or
curated book,
those who meet the
patient in person. At
word-association
games to excavate
gift-wrapped,
its midcentury peak, his patients latent
the Rorschach test desires. But he want- and delivered
was given a million ed to combine psy-
times a year in the choanalysis with with a
United States alone, physiological aes-
used by assessment thetics. His disserta- handwritten
specialists as well as tion was about the
by military doctors,
anthropologists, and
dy namic mental
processes that un-
letter.
lawyers. Fundamen- dergird the experi-
tally open- ended ence of einfhlung bookculture.com
and exploratory, it (feeling-in), which
had a hard time we now call empa- /selects
adapting to a tech- thy. Originally, ein-
nocratic culture of fhlung did not have
standardized testing, anything to do with
what Searls refers to seeing the world
as a new data-driven from someone elses
era of American point of view. It was
medicine, in which a way of explaining
the operative ques- the human capacity
tions were guilty or to be moved by form.
innocent, sane or Why does something
insane. He estimates as abstract as a land-
that in America to- scape have the power
day the test is administered to no more to make us feel so much? Because we
than one or two hundred thousand have entered the world and allowed it
people a year. to enter us. Our selves, refound in the
The Rorschach test seems to have world, are what we respond to, Searls
the greatest therapeutic benefit when explains, feeling outward things as
it is used as an experimenta way to parts of us. If that isnt transhuman, Januarys
show the patient that her approach to I dont know what is. Q New & Noteworthy
Fiction Selection
Draft inkblots from 1917 or 1918, made as Hermann Rorschach was developing his test
The Hermann Rorschach Archives and Collection, University Library of Bern, Switzerland REVIEWS 83

BLOOD AND SOIL
The rise of vindictive nationalism
By Justin E. H. Smith
Discussed in this essay:
Age of Anger: A History of the Present, by Pankaj Mishra. Farrar, Straus and
Giroux. 416 pages. $27.
I
am writing from Germany, the
worlds last major stronghold of
liberal democracy. The United
Kingdom fell to Brexit in June; the
United States fell, with the election
of Donald Trump, in November. We
can dispute whatever the West
was for as much time as humanity
has left, but that it collapsed on
Tuesday, November 8, 2016, seems
to me beyond question. Perhaps An-
gela Merkel, the German chancellor,
is the heart still beating faintly with-
in its brain-dead body, but the pre-
Justin E. H. Smith is the author, most re-
cently, of The Philosopher: A History in
Six Types (Princeton).
84 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
diction here is that the plug will
soon be pulled.
It is remarkable how much of the
present global order can be traced to
identities that were forged in East Ber-
lin and Dresden in the 1980s. Merkel
passed her formative years in Protes-
tant youth groups and emerged after
1989 as a sort of postideological cipher,
a politician with impressive manage-
rial gifts but little in the way of strong
convictions. Vladimir Putin, mean-
while, was working as a KGB agent in
one of the German Democratic Re-
publics second-tier cities when the
Wall came down. Loyal to the empire
he served, he later described the So-
viet Unions collapse as the greatest
catastrophe of the twentieth century,
and has since dedicated his life to
slowly, steadily rebuilding it.
Putin, for whom Trump has repeat-
edly expressed his admiration, is also a
cipher. The man may flirt with Russian
Orthodoxy and pan-Slavism, but his
depths, or lack thereof, can be more
accurately sounded by watching his
notorious performance of Blueberry
Hill at a charity gala in 2010: terrify-
ing in its dullness, in its passionless
submusicality, it is exactly how you
might imagine a karaoke night for
teetotal on-duty spies. Trump himself
is not an ethnonationalist ideologue;
he is a trashy New York real-estate
baron who has been thrust by the dis-
tortions of the mass media into a role
for which he is supremely unsuited.
This has not prevented sincere ethno-
nationalists such as Steve Bannon, a
far-right media executive who has be-
come Trumps chief strategist, from
riding his coattails to power.
Putin, Merkel, and Trump are all
empty vessels into which the blind
forces of history have flowed. None of
these leaders chose the forces they have
come to embody; Trump doesnt even
understand the currents he has been
channeling. He still seems to believe
that he is simply making deals for
America, and knows so little of geo-
politics that he is unable to grasp that
what he in fact has done is capitulate
to the ideology of Eurasianisma
global configuration in which Russia,
the planets sole remaining hegemon,
tolerates the continued existence of the
United States as a white-nationalist
vassal state. To see how much world-
historical significance these figures
have acquired is astounding, and yet
such unlikely elevations have become
a hallmark of the current moment.
I
have been hanging around Berlin
since 1990long enough to re-
member when punk concerts in
the eastern part of the city were held
in church basements, when sites of
faith were also sites of resistance,
places where the young would gather,
out of view of the state, to mosh
against Communism. We tend to
assume that moshing is the very op-
posite of submission to authority, but
Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishras inci-
sive new book, suggests a more com-
Illustration by Nate Kitch
plicated view. Although moshers
arent bowing down to the band be-
fore them, their behavior is not en-
tirely different from that which oc-
curs at a church service or a mass
rally. Understanding how exactly the
one phenomenon morphs into the
otherhow individuals move from
an ebullient expression of their indi-
viduality to a transcendence of the
self in a supercharged collectiveis,
Mishra argues, crucial for explaining
the recent rise of vindictive nation-
alism around the world.
We know that many young people
who have enjoyed dancing under the
influence of psychedelic drugs and
music have shortly thereafter fallen
under the influence of psychopathic
cult leaders; we now also know that
self-identified libertarian ranchers in
the great American West will vote
an autocrat into office. Age of Anger,
which was completed after the Brex-
it vote but before Trumps victory,
reminds us that the dialectical
movement bet ween t hese t wo
polesbetween a desire to be one-
self and a desire to belong to some-
thing larger than oneselfhas been
a feature of Western political life
since the Enlightenment.
Mishra sees a paradigmatic ex-
ample of this dynamic in late-
ei g hte e nt h-c e nt u r y G er m a ny,
where a rebellion against what was
perceived as the narrow intellectu-
alism of the French Enlightenment,
led by the philosopher Johann Gott-
fried Herder and popularized by
Goethe and Schiller,
turned into the movement known as
Sturm und Drang, stress and strain,
the essential precursor of the Roman-
tic Revolution that transformed the
world with its notion of a dynamic
subjectivity. Many of its adherents
were studentswith their rakish
dress, long hair, and narcotic and sex-
ual indulgences, they were prototypes
for the counter-cultural figures of our
age. These young men upheld feeling
and sensibility against the tyranny of
reason, natural expression against
French refinement, and a determina-
tion to find and enshrine a uniquely
German spirit.
As Herder implored in his poem To
the Germans: Spew out the ugly
slime of the Seine / Speak German,
O you German! At the time, such
an appeal was not a declaration of
German superiority over the French;
Herder was merely insisting on the
integrity, indeed the equality, of a
nation that did not accept the sup-
posedly universal terms of imported
French galit.
Mishra, who was born in India in
the late 1960s, says that he is most
drawn to German writers and think-
ers, an inclination that
has much to do with my upbringing
in a country that, like Germany
once. . . is a latecomer to modernity;
and whose own nationalists, long ac-
cused of being perpetual laggards
and weaklings, now strive to fabri-
cate a proud New Hindu. It cannot
seem coincidental to me that some
of the most acute witnesses of the
modern era were Germans, who, gal-
vanized by their countrys fraught at-
tempts to match France and Britain,
gave modern thought its dominant
idioms and themes.
How strange it is, in our era of ahis-
torical racializations, to think that
Germany, recently the paragon of
whiteness, was once considered
subordinate and peripheral, a late-
comer to modernity.
But surely the same cannot be said
of the contemporary United States.
According to Mishra, Trump has
led an upsurge of white nationalists
enraged at being duped by globalized
liberals, who, they feel, have their
own interests at heart and identify
only with members of their elite
class. Does this show that anti-elite
political mobilizations, such as the
Hindu nationalist movement in
Mishras homeland, are not confined
to the so-called global periphery? Or
does it show instead that the United
States is less central than we had
thought? It could be argued that
America is, in its way, a latecomer, a
backwater. It is part of the North
Atlantic, but it also includes an en-
tire continent that extends to the
Pacific, which had to be subdued,
ethnically cleansed, repopulated by
paupers, and built up on the backs of
slaves. It is not surprising that the
descendants of this incalculable his-
torical violence should now appear a
bit dizzy in their attempts to articu-
late what is best for them politically.
And what about Britain? Surely if
there is a nation that is not on the pe-
riphery it is this one, which through
its imperial expansion defined the
very distinction between the center
and the margin that has held for cen-
turies. Yet it is the British who voted
to leave the E.U. and, it seems, set
this great unraveling in motion.
For Mishra, the Brexit referendum
and the rise of Trump are part of a
broader crisis of legitimacy facing
liberal democracy; the decline of la-
bor unions and government protec-
tions, he argues, has turned workers
in the developed world into an alien-
ated precariat and the national cul-
tures of the United States and Europe
into insurrectionist forces, rising
up and unleashing havoc. In their
ressentimenta word that Nietz-
sche used to define a whole tremu-
lous realm of subterranean revenge,
inexhaustible and insatiable in
outburstsAmerican voters have
elected a self-styled antipolitician, who
is openly contemptuous of American
political institutions and traditions. In
December, he embarked on a victory
tour throughout the country. His
supportersrugged individualists now
ready to bow down to Trump as their
God Emperorfeel that it is their
victory, too. Victory, triumph, and
vanquishment are all that is left.
T
he spectrum that has indi-
vidualism and collectivism at
its extremes is only one axis
of a Cartesian plane that also in-
cludes the opposition between what
we have called, since the French
Revolution, the left and the right.
In reality, of course, there is signifi-
cant pendular motion between the
two. The Maoist peasant rebel hurl-
ing himself toward death in a cultic
frenzy may have felt much the same
as the Japanese pilot who read
Goethe while preparing for a kami-
kaze mission. More recently, Steve
Bannon has confessed that his
strategies for advancing the desid-
erata of the radical right are funda-
mentally Leninist. Lenin wanted
to destroy the state, Bannon told a
reporter in 2013. And thats my
goal, too. I want to bring everything
crashing down, and destroy all of
todays establishment.
REVIEWS 85
 Mishra is keenly attuned to this
ideological cross-pollination; he
points out that violent mass move-
ments, whatever their differences,
frequently share a hatred of bour-
geois liberal complacency. Many of
the political thinkers and agitators
he discusses shifted their allegiance
from one extreme to the other, a
move that often did not require a
total overhaul of their worldview
but only a small step. In Gabriele
DAnnunzio, for instance, the aristo-
cratic adventurer and author who
abandoned socialism for Fascism and
led the Regency of Carnaro, a short-
lived Italian state-within-a-state,
Mishra sees a model for the violent
radicalism that would later attract
the 9/11 hijackers and the suicide
bombers of the Islamic State.
DAnnunzio and Osama bin Lad-
en are kindred spirits: larger-than-
life zealots who, had they chosen,
could have whiled away their lives
as apolitical playboys. The men they
managed to enlist, in turn, were
typically not the poorest of the
poor, or members of the peasantry
and the urban underclass but edu-
cated youth, often unemployed,
ruralurban migrants, or others
from the lower middle class. The
poorest of the poor are so alienated
that they are only dimly aware there
is something they are being exclud-
ed from; Italian Fascists, Saudi ji-
hadis, and American Trump voters
are driven by a longing for upward
mobility, even if it is coupled with a
self-annihilating impulse that is
hardly compatible with the pursuit
of a better life.
There are, certainly, a variety of
types who might sign up for fascism,
from the struggling worker frustrated
about sinking wages to the giddy intel-
lectual hoping to transvalue all values.
Trump supporters could be arranged
along the same spectrum, from those
who feel betrayed by the loss of the
American dream to those who think
that the American dream is for foolish
normies and want to summon a new
world into existence by making meme
magic with Pepe the Frog, the cartoon
avatar of the white-nationalist alt-
right. For the latter, as for the publish-
ers of the Islamic State propaganda
rag Dabiq, politics is primarily spec-
86 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
tacle. Even when it appears to be pro-
ceeding according to normal parlia-
mentary means, it is still just a play of
forces, and in the most stable of times
laws are meaningful only to the ex-
tent that they are respected or, when
not respected, enforced. When and
where laws are enforced, to whose
advantage and to whose disadvantage,
is as much a part of the theater as a
terrorist attack that takes over the
front pages. So, the terrorists and
other antipolitical political actors
think, we might as well make good
theater, be bold and visionary.
This kind of boldness is difficult to
sustain, so it tends to erupt at dis-
crete moments: the Islamic Revolu-
tion in Iran in 1979, the Trump revo-
lution in the United States in 2016.
These events provide onlookers, who
themselves would like to appear
bold, with the opportunity to signal
their rejection of the complacent lib-
eral West by offering their support
for the radical change suddenly un-
der way. Michel Foucaults moment
to look bold came with the Iranian
Revolution, which he called the first
great insurrection against global sys-
tems, the form of revolt that is the
most modern and the most insane.
A generation later, before last years
U.S. election, Slavoj iek, the Slo-
venian thinker who has made a ca-
reer out of the performance of a sort
of Slavic minstrelsy, brought leftist
Trumpism out into the open when
he told a journalist that he was more
afraid of Hillary Clinton than of her
opponent.
M
ishra makes a compelling
case that the first modern
Western thinker to con-
struct his intellectual identity on
the rejection of the Western piety
of normalcy was none other than
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Genevan
social-contract theorist has of course
by now been fully normalized and
canonized, such that this central
revolutionary tradition inaugurated
by Rousseau is scarcely even a memo-
ry today. It remains to be seen, how-
ever, now that the global abandon-
ment of the hopes and promises of
liberal democracy has begun, wheth-
er we will continue to view the ex-
plosive violence that we have until
recently attributed to the special na-
tures of jihadis as something foreign
to our own natures here in Europe
and North America.
Our efforts to get things in order,
to banish extremism and lead com-
fortable quiet lives within a society
constructed on the principles of rea-
son, were probably doomed from the
start. It seems that every earnest at-
tempt to rationally rebuild society at
some point crosses over, as if by nat-
ural law, into irrational violence. At
present, we may be witnessing the
beginning of an irreversible break-
down of American democracy. A
form of authoritarian demagoguery is
in the course of replacing the old
hard-won system, and it is coming as
an expression of the popular will of
people who do not think of them-
selves as enemies of American politi-
cal traditionon the contrary, they
wish to restore its greatness. It is a
movement that gleefully rejects facts
and arguments in favor of feeling,
passionate group identification, and
the titillating prospect of violence.
There is, one hesitates to acknowl-
edge, a certain honesty of vision in
those who find bold political explo-
sions to be desirable in themselves,
an honesty that is missing in those
who would like to use violence in-
strumentally to bring about, per im-
possible, a comfortable and peaceful
future built on the principles of rea-
son. Nowhere is this contrast better
illustrated, Mishra shows, than in
the bitter disagreement in the 1760s
between Rousseau and Voltaire over
the best way forward for the nations
of Eastern Europe.
Voltaire had enriched himself as
the favored courtier of Catherine
the Great. With his help, Russia be-
came a great luminary pole of the
Enlightenment, a center of learning
and culture, but it did so in the
most top-down manner: by decree
of the sovereign. What Catherine
achieved, Rousseau could see, was
what the cultural theorist and his-
torian of religion Ren Girard
would later call appropriative mim-
icry. Russian Enlightenment was
largely formal, an imported style
that was all the rage among the ar-
istocracy of a country whose econo-
my was still based on serfdom.

This did nothing to curb Voltaires
enthusiasm for Catherines efforts. In
fact, he believed she ought to spread
Enlightenment further, by force, and
exhorted the empress to teach Euro-
pean Enlightenment at gunpoint to
the Poles and Turks. For Rousseau,
this approach was both wrong and
futile. In The Social Contract (1762), he
laid the blame on one of Catherines
predecessors, Peter the Great, who
wished to produce at once Germans
or Englishmen, when he should have
begun by making Russians; he pre-
vented his subjects from ever becom-
ing what they might have been, by
persuading them that they were what
they were not.
Mishra calls this the tsars painful
self-division, which is bad enough
when imposed by a sovereign on his
own nation; when imposed by an
outsider through imperialism, the
only appropriate response is resis-
tance. As Rousseau wrote, if the
Poles see to it that no Pole can ever
become a Russian, I guarantee that
Russia will not subjugate Poland. A
distinctive cultural identity is al-
ways an unbreakable barricade
against foreign domination.
Voltaire and Rousseaus disagree-
ments over the meaning of moder-
nity for backward peoples in the
East, Mishra writes, have the pro-
foundest implications. Voltaire
wrote the urtext for the neoconser-
vatives who conspired to invade Iraq
in 2003 and attempt to export West-
ern democracy; Rousseau anticipated
the jihadis who took over amid the
chaos left by the failed invasion.
Who was right? Mishras wide scope
makes clear how ridiculous it is to
take sides here. Voltaires universal-
ism, wherever applied, is always a
blind and destructive juggernaut;
Rousseaus resistance from below al-
ways grows dark eventually, if it does
not start out that way.
T
his was already evident during
the early German counter-
Enlightenment. When Herd-
er called for his countrymen to spit
out the slime of the Seine, German
breasts swelled with pride. In the
work of Herders successor, the poet
Ernst Moritz Arndt, the rejection of
Americas Longest Running Catalog
French universalism begins to sound
like a martial drumbeat: Let this ha-
tred [of the French] smolder as the re- Hammacher
Schlemmer
ligion of the German folk, as a holy
mantra in all hearts, and let it preserve
us in our fidelity, our honesty and
courage. In Heinrich von Treitschke, Offering the Best, the Only and the
writing under Bismarcks Second Unexpected for 168 years.
Reich, in the 1870s, we discern a fur-
ther element, an entrancing melody
piped over the drumbeat. Treitschke
complained that Heinrich Heine, the
great German Jewish poet, never
wrote a drinking song. Heine had
esprit, he said, which was by no
means Geist in the German sense.
Heine himself understood the con-
nection between the rising spirit of
German national particularism, on
the one hand, and hatred of the Jews,
on the other. The French-devourers,
he wrote, like to gobble down a Jew
afterwards for a tasty dessert. Mishra
puts it more bluntly: Francophobias
flip side is anti-Semitism. Soft na-
tionalism, defense of the particular
against the encroachment of the uni-
versal, always threatens to cross over
into hard nationalism, ethnic cleans-
ing, persecution, genocide.
It did cross over in Germany. We
know that. Heine already knew it, too.
A play will be performed in Germa- The Neck and Shoulder
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REVIEWS 87

LIFE CHOICES
Paul Austers multitudes
By Sam Sacks
Discussed in this essay:
4 3 2 1, by Paul Auster. Henry Holt. 880 pages. $32.50.
phine Baker, Jerry Lew-
is, Woody Allen, Jim
Harrison. Its a peculiar
subset, encompassing
the sublime and the ri-
diculous, often both in
the same figure.
Paul Auster is a case
in point. On the basis of
the postmodern myster-
ies that make up The
New York Trilogy, pub-
lished in 1985 and 1986,
Auster joined a short
list of living writers
whose place in the con-
temporary canon (and
on the university sylla-
bus) seems secure. The
man himself is almost
iconographic of serious
literaturethe black
clothing, the sunken
eyes and penetrating
gaze, the smokers growl,
the ready quotations
from Beckett and Blan-
chot. (One of Austers
college classmates re-
called that he would
wander around in his
I
s there a more equivocal legacy for long overcoat clutching French poems
an American artist than being and translations of Tristan Tzara. Aus-
loved by the French? As reputa- ter was Auster before it was cool.) But
tions go, theres something suspect what to make of him, really? Is he a
about it. Maybe it means that such major writer or does he just dress the
artists operate at a level of sophistica- part? Has his secret merely been to
tion that eludes the booboisie. Or import the gimmicks and poses of the
maybe its just that they represent some French avant-garde to the streets of
gimcrack Gallic notion of American New York, or has he absorbed and
authenticity. Edgar Allan Poe, Jose- transformed those influences in such
a way as to become a true American
Sam Sacks is an editor at Open Letters original? Theres something taunt-
Monthly and writes the Fiction Chronicle ingly indeterminate about Austers
for the Wall Street Journal. His most
recent article for Harpers Magazine, books. Cover one eye and what had
First-Person Shooters, appeared in the seemed innovative suddenly looks
August 2015 issue. like imitation, and vice versa.
88 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
Auster began his writing career as
a poet, but the place to start if you
want to try to figure out where you
stand with him is The Invention of
Solitude (1982), his first published
work of prose. The books two parts
reflect the double nature of Austers
writing. The first assembles his mem-
ories of his estranged father, a real-
estate speculator who had recently
died of heart failure. The portrait of
this miserly, emotionally stunted
man forms an American tragedy in
miniature, a succinct, devastating
outline of repressed trauma and the
soul-emptying wages of capitalism.
The second part is more conceptual.
Auster confines himself to his tenth-
story studio in downtown Manhattan
to compose a series of third-person
meditations on solitudesolitude as it
relates to his upbringing, to his role as
a new father, and to his vocation as a
writer. Meshing stray recollections
with excerpts from touchstone au-
thors, the essay moves irresistibly to-
ward the conclusion that it is impossi-
ble to fully understand a persons
lifeand therefore impossible to write
about it in any traditional way. At his
bravest moments, Auster writes of the
Auster who is writing, he embraces
meaninglessness as the first principle.
The Invention of Solitude an-
nounces all the themes that have
preoccupied Auster throughout his
career: his issues with his father,
his Jewish-American origins and
suburban child hood, his deep-
seated feelings of alienation and
his compensatory enthusiasm for
baseball and books, and his fasci-
nation with uncanny coincidences.
But most important, it introduces
the image of the solitary writer in-
side a locked room, ransacking his
mind and his favorite texts to simu-
late the kind of plenitude he might
evoke if he were out describing the
world. In a locked room, the only
observable action is the writer sitting
at a desk, and in this stripping away
of the elements that typically furnish
a scene, the distance between think-
ing and composing contracts.
The result is the first instance of
the archetypal Auster sentence, the
sentence that watches itself being cre-
ated: He lays out a piece of blank pa-
per on the table before him and writes
Paul Auster Horst Friedrichs/Writer Pictures
these words with his pen. It was. It
will never be again. Later, in Travels
in the Scriptorium (2007), we find:
Without another thought he picks up
the pen with his right hand and opens
the pad to the first page with his left.
Or again, from Man in the Dark
(2008): The night is still young, and
as I lie here in bed looking up into the
darkness, a darkness so black that the
ceiling is invisible, I begin to remem-
ber the story I started last night.
This claustrophobic self-awareness
receives its purest expression in The
New York Trilogy. The books belong
to the lineage of metaphysical detec-
tive stories by nouveau roman authors
such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Mi-
chel Butor, who subverted the genre
by devising unsolvable crimes, and by
Patrick Modiano, who used it to in-
vestigate historical amnesia. But Aus-
ters open-ended detective tales are
really extended metaphors about the
agonies of writing. His gumshoes
doggedly follow their marks, waiting
for them to reveal their importance
to the drama. (It never happens.)
They stumble upon arcane patterns
and allusive clues that they try to
force into larger meanings. (That
never happens, either.) Inevitably,
they wind up alone in a room with a
journal full of notes that add up to
nothingexcept, that is, the circular
story youve just read.
Auster is sometimes celebrated
as a chronicler of New York, but in
the trilogy the city is flattened to
the two dimensions of paper. Even
the system of gridded streets is lik-
ened to the quadrille-ruled note-
books favored by Auster and his
fictional stand-ins. Indeed, one of
the most obnoxious things about
Austers locked-room fables is that
they fetishize writing parapherna-
lia, as though the art of writing
were identical to the physical act of
doing it (or pretending to do it). In
book after book, stationery is en-
dowed with ludicrous talismanic
properties. The hero of Ora cle
Night (2003) effuses:
The Portuguese notebooks were espe-
cially attractive to me, and with their
hard covers, quadrille lines, and
stitched-in signatures of sturdy, un-
blottable paper, I knew I was going to
buy one the moment I picked it up
and held it in my hands.
The summa of this posturing may be
The Story of My Typewriter (2002), a
series of paintings of Austers Olym-
pia portable typewriter (by Sam
Messer) alongside a chin-stroking
homage to the device.
Its stuff like thisbullshit, in a
wordthat casts so much suspicion
on Auster and his work. The self-
mythologizing, portentous symbol-
ism, and murmured cod philosophy
conjure an ageless overcoat-wearing
undergrad, a Peter Pan of pretentious-
ness. Yet Austers zealous productivity
challenges this impression: for de-
cades, he really has gone into small
rooms and come out with intellectu-
ally searching manuscripts. He pos-
sesses an apparently inexhaustible
need to immerse himself in the mate-
rial of his youth. Much like Modiano,
Auster is essentially writing the same
book again and again, and these end-
less variations lend his writing its
haunted intensity. The ghosts of ear-
lier books are always knocking
around inside the walls of the new
ones, and the more he writes, the
louder their banging becomes. The
power of his best work is largely due
to repetition and accumulationto
his faithful pursuit of the mission
proposed in The Invention of Solitude,
to explore the infinite possibilities of
a limited space.
A
t nearly nine hundred pages,
4 3 2 1 tests this proposition
at greater length than ever
before. Austers new novel imagines
four versions of the life of Archie
Ferguson, a Jewish boy growing up
after World War II in the working-
class boroughs of New Jersey (his
goyish surname is the result of an
ancestors mix-up at Ellis Island),
where his father, Stanley, runs an
appliance and furniture store and his
mother, Rose, works at a portrait-
photography studio. After a prologue
about their marriage and Archies
birth, the novel splices its four paral-
lel story lines, following its hero to
early manhood.
The book uses the CatchWillie
Mayss legendary over-the-shoulder
grab of Vic Wertzs fly ball in the
1954 World Seriesto propel Fer-
gusons lives along their forking
paths. In part 1, Lew, one of Stan-
leys brothers, makes a killing bet-
ting on Mayss Giants, which tempts
another brother to make his own
fortune by robbing the furniture
stores warehouse. Stanley forfeits
the insurance money by refusing to
prosecute his brother, which con-
signs him and Rose to a lifetime of
difficult but self-respecting eco-
nomic struggle and instills in Fer-
guson a pragmatic professional am-
bit io n t h at c o m pleme nt s h i s
natural artistic bent.
In parts 2 and 3, Lew bets against
the Giants, falls into debt with
gangsters, and puts in motion a plan
to burn down the family store for
the insurance. In part 2, Stanley
goes along with the arson but be-
comes so ashamed of his collusion
that he shutters the business. In
part 3, he tries to stop the scheme
and is killed in the fire, and Fergu-
son and his mother move to Man-
hattan, where she remarries and he
grows up to be more solitary, vul-
nerable, and prone to anguish than
his other incarnations.
Part 4 skirts the problems with
Fergusons feckless uncles altogether.
Stanley buys out their shares of the
store, which allows him to grow rich,
join a country club, and move his
family to the swank outer suburbs.
His rise in station, however, makes
him vain and tightfisted, planting
the seeds for a divorce from Rose and
a falling-out with his disaffected son.
This Ferguson is marked by a defiant
rejection of his fathers materialism.
Its hard not to notice that the
Stanley of part 4 has a lot in com-
mon with the father depicted in
Austers memoirs. The new novel
may sound like a high-concept, for-
mally pyrotechnic book, yet Austers
approach to his material is hardly
out of the ordinaryhe draws on
his own life experience, tweaking
details and outcomes as it suits him.
The pleasures 4 3 2 1 offers are fairly
traditional as well. As a time cap-
sule of New York and New Jersey in
the Fifties and Sixties, it is consis-
tently engrossing. The backdrops of
Fergusons early lives are filled with
sports events and news items, TV
REVIEWS 89
Turning
Toward
Home
REFLECTIONS
ON THE FAMILY
FROM HARPER'S
MAGAZINE
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most difficultrelationships are
with our parents, children,
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and our lives: they define our
past, give us hope for the future,
teach us to get along with
others, and, often, provide
excellent examples of how not to
behave. The moving essays in
Turning Toward Home, all of
which were originally published
in Harpers Magazine, gracefully
explore these dynamics. Authors
include David Mamet, Donna
Tartt, Richard Ford, Sallie
Tisdale, Louise Erdrich, and
many more. Introduction by
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shows and pinup girls and product
logos. (In one thread, his first stir-
rings of sexuality are kindled by the
drawing of the topless goddess
Psyche on the White Rock seltzer
bottles.) There are fond evocations
of the Thalia, the beloved Upper
West Side art house, and of the
Horn and Hardart automats; of
New Jerseys poky Erie Lackawanna
commuter train, with its antiquat-
ed wicker seating, and of shabby-
chic Gauloise cigarettes, over-
strong, brown-tobacco fat boys in
the pale blue packages with no cel-
lophane around them. Fergusons
branching lives take him to Colum-
bia University, Princeton, and Par-
is, and these settings, too, are docu-
mented to an encyclopedic degree.
The bygone hazing ritual for in-
coming Columbia freshmen? Wear-
ing powder-blue beanies during
Orientation Week. The cost of air-
mailing a package from France to
London in 1966? More than ninety
francs, or around twenty dollars.
Austers late writing has shown
something of a mania for inventories
his recent non-fiction works Winter
Journal (2012) and Report from the In-
terior (2013) are free-associative cata-
logues of bodily sensations and men-
tal images, respectivelyand in
4 3 2 1 at times this tendency metas-
tasizes into unwieldy historical
checklists. (The wall going up in
Berlin, Ernest Hemingway blasting a
bullet through his skull in the moun-
tains of Idaho, mobs of white racists
attacking the Freedom Riders as they
traveled on their buses through the
South.) But more often the surplus
description is born of generosity and
exuberance. Auster has radically re-
cast his prose, stretching the clipped,
oracular style of his early books into
unbuttoned run-on sentences like
this one, about the weekend trips
Ferguson number 4 makes with his
stepsister to see the citys museums:
The most memorable experience
they shared together didnt happen
in a museum but in the more con-
fined space of a gallery, the Pierre
Matisse Gallery in the Fuller Build-
ing on East Fifty-seventh Street,
where they saw an exhibition of re-
cent sculptures, paintings, and
drawings by Alberto Giacometti,
90 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
and so pulled in were they by those
mysterious, tactile, lonely works that
they stayed for two hours, and when
the rooms began to empty out, Pierre
Matisse himself (Henri Matisses
son!) noticed the two young people
in his gallery and walked over to
them, all smiles and good humor,
happy to see that two new converts
had been made that afternoon, and
much to Fergusons surprise, he
stood there and talked to them for
the next fifteen minutes, telling
them stories about Giacometti and
his studio in Paris, about his own
transplantation to America in 1924
and the founding of his gallery in
1931, about the tough years of the
war when so many European artists
were destitute, great artists like
Mir and so many others, and how
they wouldnt have survived without
help from their friends in America,
and then, on an impulse, Pierre
Matisse led them to a back room of
the gallery, an office with desks and
typewriters and bookcases, and one
by one he took down from the
shelves of those bookcases a dozen
or so catalogues from past exhibi-
tions by Giacometti, Mir, Chagall,
Balthus, and Dubuffet and handed
them to the two astonished teenag-
ers, saying, You two children are the
future, and maybe these will help
with your education.
If Auster finds freedom in verbal
profusion, he also finds it in concep-
tual restraint. Its impressive how
rarely he indulges in his usual brand
of gimmickry, given that 4 3 2 1s
premise would seem worrisomely ripe
for it. Perhaps hes realized that the
mainstream by now has co-opted
most of the novelties of postmodern-
ism. The idea that time can be
cleaved in two is the stuff of roman-
tic comedies like Sliding Doors. A
character who continuously repeats
his existence gives the impetus to
Kate Atkinsons thrilling (if incoher-
ent) page-turner Life After Life. Ian
McEwan and Haruki Murakami
have forged book-club-friendly ca-
reers by playing cute games with nar-
rative artifice.
In 4 3 2 1, Auster goes easy on the
metaphysics. The resonances be-
tween his four Fergusons rarely feel
overdetermined; they are glancing,
circumstantial. To be sure, there are
some gently ironic instances when
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the Fergusons muse about the role of
chance or the variable nature of
identityOne of the odd things
about being himself, Ferguson had
discovered, was that there seemed to
be several of him. But such
thoughts are natural to an intellec-
tually rambunctious teenager, and
Auster lays no more emphasis on
them than he does on Fergusons has a message to convey about the
flights of fancy about baseball, classi- instability of labels and signifiers
cal music, and sex.
This marks a significant change
from The New York Tr ilog y, in
which the connections are forged
by cryptic coincidences. Volume 1,
for instance, introduces a mysteri-
ous character with the initials
H.D.; in volume 2, a detective
comes upon a copy of Walden pub-
lished by a company that shares
the name of the man he is investi-
gating; in volume 3, the narrator
mentions a friend named Dennis
Walden. You can parse these clues
as much as you like, but because
they dont correspond to anything
except other inscrutable symbols,
the only meaning they enforce is
their fundamental non-meaning.
The point is to screw with you.
Nothing was real, Auster warns,
except chance.
Heres how Thoreau appears in
4 3 2 1, from the point of view of Fergu-
son number 4, an aspiring novelist:
the thrill of reading such prose was
never knowing how far Thoreau
would leap from one sentence to
the nextsometimes it was only a
matter of inches, sometimes of sev-
eral feet or yards, sometimes of
whole country milesand the de-
stabilizing effect of those irregular
distances taught Ferguson how to
think about his own efforts in a
new way, for what Thoreau did was
to combine two opposing and mu-
tually exclusive impulses in every
paragraph he wrote, what Ferguson
began to call the impulse to control
and the impulse to take risks. That
was the secret, he felt. All control
would lead to an airless, suffocating
result. All risk would lead to chaos
and incomprehensibility. But put
the two together, and maybe youd
be on to something.
Austers tilt away from the sti-
fling control of locked-room mys-
92 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
teries toward the hail-mary risks of
interwoven shaggy-dog coming-of-
age stories is rejuvenating. He re-
turns to many of his old hobby-
horses in 4 3 2 1, but here they are
restored from the level of abstract
metaphor to their rightful place in
the real world. He plays around
with pen names, not because he
but because Ferguson is embarrassed
to go by the comic-book name of
Archie. (He chooses A. I. Ferguson
in one version and Isaac, his middle
name, in another.) Puns are plenti-
ful, but theyre jokes Ferguson tells
when hes goofing around with
friends, not indicators of recondite
linguistic connections. And note-
books, rather than being some kind
of sacred regalia, are just notebooks.
Theres even a clever adaptation
of Austers recurring locked room.
While at Columbia, Ferguson num-
ber 1 is trapped in his dormitorys el-
evator during a thirteen-hour city-
wide power outage. Its a revealing
scene, in which Ferguson takes
stock of his life, the Vietnam War,
and his ambitions as a student
journalistall while trying not to
piss himself. It also produces an ee-
rie feeling of disassociation:
So dark in there, so disconnected
from everything, so outside the world
or what Ferguson had always imag-
ined to be the world that it was slowly
becoming possible to ask himself if he
was still inside his own body.
Grounded in the real, his captivity
regains its metaphoric possibilities.
The sensation of possibility is
t he most satisf ying feat ure of
4 3 2 1. Of the many quotations
that the four Fergusons single out
from their extensive reading, one
from John Cages Silence captures
the novel best: The world is teem-
ing: anything can happen. Be-
cause Auster takes each of Fergu-
sons lives seriously as a vessel for
experience a nd mea ning, they
build on one another rather than
canceling one another out. The ef-
f e c t i s a l m o s t c u b i s t i n it s
multidimensionalitythat of a sin-
gle, exceptionally variegated life
displayed in the round.

A
nything can happen, but what
actually does? Though the
books plots are by and large
little more than scaffolding for Austers
lavishly appointed memory theater,
theyre still fairly lively. Rose is one of
the few constants in Fergusons life,
and the vicissitudes of her various ex-
istences are rich and intriguing
particularly in the story that sees her
transform into a highly regarded pho-
tographer with Paris gallery shows.
Fergusons foil is the passionate, politi-
cally active Amy Schneiderman,
whose grandfather employed Rose at
the photography studio. In one story
the two fall in love in high school, and
Fergusons maturation is directly tied
to the ups and downs of their relation-
ship; in another, because of Roses re-
marriage to Amys uncle, they become
on-again, off-again kissing cousins; in
a third, Roses divorce and remarriage
makes them stepsiblings, devoted con-
fidants, and museumgoing companions.
But the main developments have
to do with becoming a writer: these
are all portraits of the artist as a
young man. The Ferguson of part 1
pursues journalism while translating
French poetry on the side. The tor-
tured, bisexual Ferguson of part 3
writes dark, confessional memoirs
from a garret in Paris. The fellowship
student at Princeton in part 4 is at-
tracted to metafiction:
A book about a book, a book that one
could read and also write in, a book
that one could enter as if it were a
three-dimensional physical space, a
book that was the world and yet of
the mind.
That nearly all these forms draw
on aspects of Austers own career is
not surprising, given the novels
sources in the authors life, but it
does begin to hint at the books ma-
jor limitation. For a while, Fergu-
sons futures are unrestricted; then it
quickly grows clear that he will be a
writer, of one kind or another, and
the task of the novel is to track the
different routes to this destination.
These latter portions flag. This is
perhaps symptomatic of all coming-
of-age stories, which address the
process of relinquishing cherished
attachments; the arc they describe
moves toward loss and isolation.
But its especially true for an author
as single-minded as Auster. As the
Fergusons become increasingly pre-
occupied with the written word,
the books side charactersRose,
Amy, a motley cast of friends and
relativesfade from importance.
Politics comes to the fore of the
narrative but doesnt fill the space.
Like Austers memoir Han d to
Mouth (1997), 4 3 2 1 depicts the
student demonstrations that beset
Columbia in 1968. (Amy is a mem-
ber of Students for a Democratic
Society, a radical protest group, and
takes part in the occupation of Low
Library.) The account is thorough
but bloodless because Ferguson re-
mains a bystander. His friends are
starting a revolution, he thinks, but
he is only watching it and writing
about it.
Ferguson, in all of his guises, has
begun to look at the world as a writ-
er does, from a cool, self-conscious
distance. Hes observing what hap-
pens, but most of all hes observing
the way he thinks and writes about
it. The blank sheet of paper has
taken primacy over the landscape
of experience. In each version, Fer-
guson manages to avoid being draft-
ed into the war, even though such a
turn would have taken the novel to
wildly new terrain. It feels anticli-
mactic to see the boundaries of
Austers imagination impose them-
selves quite so clearly. After all, he
didnt go to war; he became a scrap-
py, impoverished writer, and so, too,
must Ferguson. Auster believes in
the randomness of the universe, the
contingent nature of fate, and the
abundant possibilities of livingup
to a point.
A familiar sense of inevitability
gathers over the novel as it draws
to a close. The paramount lesson
of Austers books is that writers
experiences stop at the end of
youth, the moment they embrace
their vocation and settle down to
work. Its at this point that this im-
pressively ambitious novel, which
begins with the broadest of vistas,
retreats to the place in which so
many of Austers books begin and
enda closed room with a man,
alone, writing the words that you
are reading. Q TO RESPOND TO AN AD: Harpers Magazine
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LETTERS way I found disappointing [Sepa- ing for them. Descriptions such as
Continued from page 3 rated at Birth, Essay, December]. those in the article omit the core
Although Rose introduces the oth- substance of lives, ignoring accom-
Ashleys story is not unique to er characters in his article without plishments and celebrations and joy,
South Dakota. In Texas, for example, reference to skin color, he quickly flattening people and places to fit
the number of reproductive-aged makes it clear to the reader that the stereotypical narrative of black
women living more than 100 miles Parry is black. Even before men- life in America. It is upsetting that
from an in-state abortion clinic more tioning it explicitly, Rose commu- an otherwise admirable essay would
than doubledfrom about 400,000 nicates her race through his choice rely on these reductive tropes.
to more than 1 millionwhen a re- of words. He quotes Parry as saying
strictive abortion law known as H.B. Hm, hm, hmmm, Im telling you, Henry Shull
2 was passed, in 2013. As part of my in a singsong voice, which I cor- Cambridge, Mass.
research with the Texas Policy Evalu- rectly interpreted as a white man
ation Project, I interviewed women signaling that he is conversing
like Ashley, who had been left with with a black woman. As a Brooklyn native, born at the
few options when their nearest clinic W he n Ro s e a r r ive s i n t he former Madison Park Hospital in
closed. Traveling to a more distant Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood 1949, I certainly feel that I am part
clinic required both time and money, of Brooklyn, where Parry lives, he of a lucky generation, although re-
so women were forced to delay the is afraid to walk alone, and asks a cent events have called our legacy
proceduresometimes into the sec- passerby whether its safe. The into question. This year has remind-
ond trimesteror to carry an un- passerby begins his reply with a ed me of 1968, when we were faced
wanted pregnancy to term. Many vernacular Aw, man, even though with two despised candidates, our
journalists have observed that the to- speech fillers are dropped for other heroes were murdered, our cities
tal number of abortions performed in interviewees in the article. were on fire, and thousands were be-
Texas declined after the passage of On his way, Rose comments on ing killed and maimed in a senseless
H.B. 2, but its also true that the the African hair-braiding salons, war. Nearly half a century later, we
number of second-trimester proce- an old synagogue that had been are still fighting for equality and
dures actually increased. converted into a pawnshop, and a justice. But our generation has always
As an obstetrician-gynecologist, I derelict a rc ade u ndoubtedly had a sense of optimism, which could
know that unplanned pregnancies are omitting scores of buildings that be heard in the love songs that
part of life. About a third of Ameri- are neither ethnically marked nor topped the charts in the Fifties and
can women choose to have an abor- ramshackle. Roses choices are tell- Sixties. Despite decades of disap-
tion at some point in their reproduc- ing because they show the neigh- pointment, Im still moved when I
tive years. For that reason, safe, legal borhood as he perceives it. hear the Rascals: All the world over,
abortion must remain an option for Rose goes on to portray Parry in so easy to see! / People everywhere just
women across the country; banning a harshly negative light. He writes wanna be free.
abortion does not make it go awayit that she is whippet-thin and
just makes the procedure less safe. seems to withdraw into herself as Mike Rosenberg
they talk. We are told that she of- Bedford, Mass.
Daniel Grossman, M.D. ten played hooky from school,
Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology dropped out in the eleventh grade,
and had a son out of wedlock. Correction
and Reproductive Sciences, Univer-
sity of California, San Francisco Her birth at Brooklyn Jewish, he
San Francisco assumes, was a result of the hospi- Because of an editing error,
tals charity policy. Standing Rock Speaks [Easy Chair,
Perhaps Parrys life has not been December], by Walter Kirn, misstated
Aging Out as easy or successful as those of the the year of the American Indian
other birth mates, but Rose surely Movements occupation of Wounded
Daniel Asa Rose describes one of could have found hopeful elements Knee. This event occurred in 1973,
his birth mates, Nicole Parry, in a in her storyif he had been look- not 1972. We regret the error.
Harpers Magazine is owned and published monthly by the Harpers Magazine Foundation, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. Tel: 212-420-5720. Robert Volante,
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94 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017

 PUZZLE
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15

16 17 18

BY THE NUMBERS 19 20
By Richard E. Maltby Jr.
21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

T
31 32

he unclued entries at certain numbered locations have 33 34 35 36 37

something appropriate in common.
38 39 40
Clue answers include six proper nouns, two foreign words,
and one common abbreviation. 11D, 33A, 36A, and 43A are 41 42 43 44
uncommon words. As always, mental repunctuation of a clue
is the key to its solution. The solution to last months puzzle 45 46
appears on page 79.
47 48

49 50

ACROSS DOWN
1. Quietly solicit designs for party planning? (8) 1. See instructions (5)
8. See instructions (6) 2. Theme-park performer in Florida or round about (4)
13. A large space is, for many, not available (5) 3. See instructions (7)
14. Head first, I ram, then cut down trees? (9) 4. Die Hards quality is disturbingfix it by line 51 inside (13)
15. See instructions (7) 5. Entering without alias, she was Adrian (5)
16. Picnic or tea breaks (3) 6. Lovers time is ephemeral (4)
17. Is game for using lanolin initially on not very good 7. See instructions (6)
shavers (5) 8. E.g., snipe, bait Reds, even ones missing (4)
18. Cooking so lord can get mouthwatering experiences! (6) 9. Sunfish? (3)
19. Like leftovers? Get open-hearted, put a little energy into 10. Bean that causes laughter, or a member of the family (5)
it (8) 11. Noble gases elevated in heavy weights (6)
20. Cannot, cannot end with number for a shot-putter? (6) 12. Zloty are exchanged for passion projects! (8)
21. Amateurish, poorly made: entire umbrellasten pence (8) 20. See instructions (5)
23. Tapas, exotic food (5) 21. Listing that can get nixed (5)
26. Spanish girls playing sitar (5) 22. Scratching head, close to audience (3)
29. Napkin folded back, squared (6) 23. Latin country promoting atmosphere and access to
31. Deceased tribesman smearedlegally its a tragedy (10) water (6)
32. Irish singer given Yardbirds covers (4) 24. A friends left outand kind of patient (9)
33. Years of schooling taking place in India, uninitiated (4) 25. See instructions (6)
35. Youre out when youre in this companyto a degree (4) 27. Root for sailor who has nothing (4)
36. Make an adjustment to alter a wild animal (5) 28. Emulate a hippieit makes an effect onstage (8)
38. Hey, see this iglookeeps being out of bounds (6) 30. See instructions (5)
40. See instructions (4) 34. Tanning? Out of sight! (6)
41. Descent is edgier, exercising in gym (8) 35. See instructions (5)
43. California Congress comes back with metallic residues (6) 37. Around university, detox processes cover for parties (6)
45. See instructions (8) 39. Wind up, reach, and throwin Puerto Rico (5)
47. Record company takes on a girl from Russia (5) 41. Sit, suppose: have dinner out (4)
48. Oppressed Latin port in the Mideast (5) 42. Mobile home wont start? Is there a point to this? Yes (4)
49. Segregate ingredients, tossed with a bit of butter: whats 44. First name in risking, even when it doesnt begin (4)
needed to whip up a meal (10) 45. Common enclosure? Its so Scottish! (3)
50. See instructions (4) 46. Prime requirements for rainwearalso gospel music (3)

Contest Rules: Send completed diagram with name and address to By the Numbers, Harpers Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. If
you already subscribe to Harpers, please include a copy of your latest mailing label. Entries must be received by February 3. The sender of the first correct
solution opened at random will receive a one-year subscription to Harpers Magazine (limit one winner per household per year). The winners name will
be printed in the April issue. The winner of the December puzzle, Replacements, is Alfred Backiel, Ridgewood, N.J.
PUZZLE 95
 FINDINGS
D onald Trump called for a standard protocol dedi-
cated for acquiring adjacent nonneoplastic tissue that
minimizes neoplasm contamination and concluded that
outcomes following robot-assisted cystectomy were better
with optimal rather than with suboptimal neoadjuvant
chemotherapy. A study found that during the final three
months of the U.S. presidential campaign, the media
portrayed both major-party candidates as unfit for office
87percent of the time. Folie deux was described in a
pair of seventy-year-old twins. Linguists proposed that
Neanderthal grammar was nonhierarchical. Doctors re-
ported the case of a man who experiences dj vcu every
time he watches the news. U.S.men have experienced no
net increase in median pretax income since 1962, and
between white and black U.S.men the wage gap has
widened to a level not seen since 1950. Over the past two
centuries, the preference for positive words, which is
linguistically universal, declined in America. In 2014,
more white people died than were born in seventeen U.S.
states, compared with four states a decade earlier. Archae-
ologists announced the recovery, from a mass grave of
people murdered by Fascists during the first year of the
Spanish civil war, of forty-five intact brains and one intact
heart. An astronomer concluded that the planetary align-
ment observed by the Magi at Christs birth will not occur
again for at least half a million years.
T he Spiritual Science Research Foundation found that
homosexuality is due in 5percent of gay men to hor-
monal imbalances, in 10percent to formative same-sex
experiences, and in 85percent to possession by female
ghosts. Sri Lankan doctors described the first reported
case in the forensic literature of a man being pronounced
dead with an artificial vagina in situ. A nineteen-year-old
Italian woman complaining of dry mouth while in treat-
ment for schizophrenia died while ingesting a sole (Solea
The Wildebai and The Watchmen, paintings by Adam Lee, whose work is currently on view at STATION, in Melbourne, Australia.
Courtesy the artist and STATION, Melbourne, Australia.
96 HARPERS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2017
solea) whole. Of 307 male Istanbullus undergoing court-
ordered paraphilic evaluation, 8.1percent exhibited exhi-
bitionism. A fifth of pedophiles fantasize that they are the
same age as their objects of desire. Asexual men are almost
as likely as sexual men to masturbate at least monthly. The
World Journal of Clinical Pediatrics published a dubious
pro-circumcision article, then refused to retract it. Inde-
pendent raters found that a mans mixture of perfume and
body odor is significantly more attractive when the per-
fume is chosen by his sister than when chosen by the man
himself or by his girlfriend. The presence of cheering
spectators increases mens but decreases womens com-
petitive consumption of chicken wings.
W arming oceans were causing rabbitfish to overgraze
kelp forests, 102million trees had died in Californias
drought, and Earths technosphere had come to weigh
33trillion tons. The shortening of the snow season in
northern Sweden by two months over the past thirty years
has harmed the practice of reindeer herding. Reindeer were
shrinking. Species whose males possess ostentatious orna-
ments may be more vulnerable to climate change. His-
torical rates of temperature adaptation by various species
were found to be 200,000 times slower than the projected
rate of temperature change in the near future. A king tide
caused by a supermoon stranded an octopus in a Miami
parking garage. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet continued
to disintegrate from the inside out. A temperature increase
of 1 C will likely release an additional 60billion tons of
stored carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating the feed-
back effect. Plans to cool the planet by reflecting the sun
back into space are too risky for aggressive implementation.
Authorities admitted that over the summer a man dis-
solved in a Yellowstone hot spring. A 95percent complete
dodo skeleton sold for 280,000. Lost sleep is costing the
United States $411billion annually. Q
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