Commentary

Love: A Rebuke, A Valentine’s Day Reading (February 10)

Featuring Colson Whitehead, Heidi Julavits, and Sam Lipsyte.

To coincide with St. Valentine’s Day, Harper’s Magazine presents “Love: A Rebuke,” a reading featuring selections from the magazine and new work by Harper’s Magazine contributors Colson Whitehead, Heidi Julavits, and Sam Lipsyte.

WHEN: Wednesday, February 10 at 7:00 P.M.

WHERE: Housing Works Bookstore Café, 126 Crosby Street, New York City

WHO: Sam Lipsyte is the author of Venus Drive, The Subject Steve, Home Land, and The Ask. He teaches at Columbia University.

Heidi Julavits is the author of three novels, including, most recently, The Uses of Enchantment. She is a founding editor of The Believer and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and Sag Harbor. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Additional selections will be read by the staff of Harper’s Magazine.

HOW: Admission is free. Attendees are asked to consider bringing a book to donate to the store. One hundred percent of the bookstore’s profits go to Housing Works, Inc., an organization committed to ending AIDS and homelessness.

View the event listing on the Housing Works website

Reply

1. NCIS special agents who investigated this case found no evidence to suggest that the three detainees died by means other than suicide. On the contrary, it was clear from interviews and forensic evidence that these detainees wanted to end their lives and methodically took steps to accomplish that goal. To hang themselves, they did not need to jump off the sinks as suggested by the author, but only had to apply the necessary pressure to the neck to cut off blood flow. The knots, which bound their hands (and in one case, the decedent’s feet), were not elaborate, but were indeed possible to make by each of the detainees who died. In addition, a short written statement declaring their intent to be martyrs was found in the pockets of each of the detainees. Lengthier written death declarations were also found. The rulings of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), which determined the cause and manner of death, were wholly consistent with the NCIS investigative findings.

This simply reasserts prior NCIS claims, all of which are noted in Harper’s Magazine, and with great fidelity to the language of the reports. Scott Horton found those reports to be unconvincing. You may dispute his analysis, but—as I am sure you must know—that is not the same as identifying a factual error.

You do make one factual claim, regarding the use of sinks. However, that claim itself is not in accordance with the NCIS report. Affidavits gathered by the NCIS assert that all three prisoners were found with their feet hanging from above the ground. As Scott wrote, the only obvious means by which a prisoner could achieve such a state is by climbing up on the only object available to him in his cell—the sink—and only then placing his head through the noose. A guard cited in the report makes precisely this assessment. If the office of the secretary has a new theory of the case, we would of course like to know more about it.

2. Regarding rags found in the mouth, there was only one rag lodged down the throat of one of the detainees. Rather than being “proof” of homicide, this was due to the detainee himself positioning the rag in his mouth in order not to make any noise so as to alert the guards. The rag was inhaled as a natural reaction to death by asphyxiation.

This is simply false. The NCIS report contains affidavits from several witnesses who saw rags in the throats of all three men. Our independent reporting supports those affidavits, as do the autopsies.

Your use of quotation marks around the word “proof” is of special concern. They suggest you are quoting Harper’s Magazine. To be clear: this quote is your own invention. It is a false quote. At no point has Harper’s Magazine claimed to possess “proof” that homicide occurred at Guantanamo. As we have noted repeatedly, what we do have is new evidence, from new witnesses, that contradicts the findings of the NCIS report.

3. Blankets and sheets had been used to obstruct the guards’ views and to create the appearance that the detainees were asleep in their cells. During its investigation, NCIS discovered that detainees were allowed to hang sheets for privacy; they were allowed to have extra linens and/or blankets; some of the lights in the detention facility were dimmed at night to permit better sleep. This explains how the detainees were able to obscure their actions and why the guards did not discover the deceased detainees right away. All available video footage was reviewed by NCIS, and nothing of evidentiary value was discovered.

This again fails to cite any factual errors. In addition, it fails to address one of the central mysteries of the NCIS report. How was it that these men could hang dead in their cells for more than two hours before anyone took note of them? As Harper’s Magazine reports, this would indicate a critical failure on the part of the guards on duty that night. And yet none of these guards was disciplined. Why not?

4. According to the Harper’s article, Sergeant Hickman was stationed on the exterior perimeter of the Camp, including Tower 1, the night of the detainees’ deaths. From this location, he had no visibility into the cellblock and cells where the deaths occurred, a fact confirmed by FBI and DOJ investigators who were specifically tasked to look into Sergeant Hickman’s allegations. NCIS conducted over 100 interviews during the first three days of the investigation, including interviews with all the guards who worked in the cellblock that day and all the detainees who were housed there. None of those interviewed told of any detainees being taken away or alleged homicide.

This is false. Harper’s Magazine never reported that Staff Sergeant Hickman witnessed events in Alpha Block on the evening of the deaths. His testimony, in a sworn affidavit, concerns the removal of prisoners from Camp Delta altogether. His position at Tower 1, and later at ACP Roosevelt, provided him a perfect vantage from which to witness that removal.

The failure of the office of the secretary to understand this crucial distinction is disturbing, and suggests the review of these matters has not been performed to the standard one might ordinarily expect of officials charged with national defense.

I again ask: Is it the position of the office of the secretary that Staff Sergeant Hickman has filed a false affidavit?

5. AFIP sent a senior medical examiner to Guantanamo to perform the autopsies. In addition, an independent, state-level, senior medical examiner flew to Guantanamo to observe the autopsies, standard operating procedure for AFIP in high profile cases.

This addresses no errors. Harper’s Magazine has never disputed the claim that autopsies took place. It is worth noting, however, that the names of the doctor or doctors who performed the autopsies have been redacted. The Pentagon has yet to advance a serious justification for withholding this information.

6. All the materials released to date have been highly redacted. While Seton Hall students may have done the best they could with what they had, the fact is they only had available to them a small fraction of the reports.

This again addresses no errors. If the office of the secretary believes the redacted documents will shed important light on the events of June 9-10, 2006, then I strongly encourage the secretary to order that they be opened to public scrutiny.

In the end, the theory of a “grand conspiracy”—the participants of which include the Obama and Bush Administrations as well as the Army, the Navy, U.S. Southern Command, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, NCIS, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA—is not supported by the facts.

As I previously noted, Harper’s Magazine has never suggested a “grand conspiracy.” What we reported, with great fidelity to the facts, is that the available evidence suggests the NCIS report is incoherent, that previously unreported eyewitness accounts suggest that the prisoners did not die in their cells, and that various investigators have failed to address this new evidence.

You note in closing that Harper’s Magazine has done “a serious disservice to the honorable men and women who serve at Guantanamo Bay and in the U.S. military.” In fact, it is the office of the secretary that is performing a disservice, both to the soldiers who came forward, and to the people of the United States, who are owed the truth.

You may of course make airy claims about the “speculative and unfounded” nature of our reporting. But I must insist that you immediately cease making false claims that the story contains factual errors. On the evidence of your own error-riddled rebuttal, that simply is not the case.

As I noted, we have a great many other questions about these matters, and so I again ask: Will the Pentagon make Carol Kisthardt or other officials available for interviews?

All best,

Luke Mitchell

Senior Editor

Harper’s Magazine

Reply

Next, you expand your vague concern about Camp No’s accessibility into an accusation that Scott has designs to “lull” his readers, who are “gullible,” into thinking that Camp No not only exists, but is used as a torture site. As I mentioned, Scott does report many facts that support the proposition that Camp No exists. He also reports many facts that—and here I use the word Scott uses throughout the piece—suggest torture took place there. I think most readers understand the difference between “suggest” and “prove.” I assume you do as well, and so it’s not clear to me what sort of Mephistophelian game you think is afoot.

Your next complaint has to do with the illogical nature of the proceedings of the night of June 9. First, you envision a nutty scenario—“if you were going to torture prisoners to the point of death in interrogations, would you really draw three prisoners from the same cell block, inside the same hour, for that punishment”—and then you knock it down by noting how nutty it is. Perhaps it is nutty. But that scenario is your own invention.

It is worth noting that Human Rights First and others have reported many cases in which prisoners have died in connection with the use of Justice Department-sanctioned “harsh interrogation techniques.” Last summer, General Barry McCaffrey expressed this quite forthrightly. “We tortured people unmercifully,” he said. “We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.” So the phenomenon is hardly unknown.

Nonetheless, and contrary to your implication, Scott does not advance a clear theory as to how the deaths occurred. He questions the validity of the official government narrative, and he points to significant new evidence that suggests that the deaths occurred at another location and in other circumstances. But too few facts are available to say for certain what happened that night, which is precisely why Scott does not attempt to do so.

Your next complaint brings your larger concern into focus. You suggest that, even if “the CIA is capable of such a crime,” readers should not be asked to believe that “the entire U.S. government—across two administrations—is willing to devote its energies to a cover-up.” And with that suggestion—again drawn entirely from your own imagination—we have reached the dread conspiracy moment. I say dread because calling a news report a conspiracy theory is the press critic’s version of comparing a politician to Hitler. It’s less than a straw man. It’s not even an argument, and so it is nearly impossible to refute.

Still, let’s be clear: Scott has not posited a grand conspiracy. What he has reported is that there is strong evidence to suggest that some—perhaps even many—government officials are not telling the truth about what happened on June 9, 2006. Now perhaps your life experience has taught you that it’s just la-la crazy to think government officials would ever lie about anything. But I hope you can at least recognize that there is some precedent for an alternative view.

Finally, taking your leave with a somewhat unpersuasive “I could go on,” you recite many other elements of the piece, but rather than dispute them, you simply bracket them with dismissive terms like “Horton seems to believe,” and “as Horton puts it,” and—inevitably—“allegedly.” This is just a mockery of serious criticism.

It’s fun to knock down stories, and when the stories are false, it’s important to knock them down. But Scott’s story is not false. You may think he has put too much spin on the presentation. Fine. But your attempt to transform a stylistic concern into a factual concern is a disservice to your readers.

As Scott wrote, “Nearly 200 men remain imprisoned at Guantánamo. In June 2009, six months after Barack Obama took office, one of them, a thirty-one-year-old Yemeni named Muhammed Abdallah Salih, was found dead in his cell. The exact circumstances of his death, like those of the deaths of the three men from Alpha Block, remain uncertain.” These facts alone create a certain urgency about this case that is belied by your normally welcome insouciance.

Scott does not claim to know precisely what happened at Guantánamo in 2006. But we believe he has made a strong case that the NCIS narrative is contradictory on its own terms, that new witnesses have presented compelling new testimony, and that this new testimony cries out for further investigation.

We stand by his story.

You obviously are welcome to quote from this, or to write or call with any follow-up questions.

All best,

Luke Mitchell

Senior Editor

Harper’s Magazine

Yearly Review

Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States and ordered the detention center at Guantanamo Bay closed within a year. George W. Bush gave his final press conference. “Abu Ghraib was a huge disappointment,” he said. “Not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment.” A federal appeals court in Texas ruled to permit the sacrifice of goats. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele announced an “off the hook” Republican publicity campaign, targeting “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.” “We need to uptick our image with everyone,” Steele said, “including one-armed midgets.” When asked about the state of the Republican party, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty said, “It’s kind of like asking whether the stock market has bottomed out.” Thirty-nine million Americans were on food stamps, 54 percent of graduating U.S. business majors lacked job offers, and two gunmen robbed a man of one dollar in the parking lot of an Ohio Wendy’s. A top Pentagon official said that “cutbacks at Best Buy” made it easier to recruit better-qualified young people for the military. The war in Iraq turned six; the war in Afghanistan turned eight; SpongeBob SquarePants turned ten. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban threatened to chop off the fingers of anyone who votes, the government passed a law allowing men to starve wives who refuse sex.

Sea levels continued to rise, and a 40-yard-wide asteroid just missed the earth. The Mediterranean Sea was plagued by blobs. Pope Benedict XVI visited Africa; in Angola he warned against witchcraft, corruption, and condoms. Papal archaeologists in Rome authenticated the bones of Saint Paul the Apostle, and Jesus Christ was dismissed from jury duty in Alabama. Toxic-mining wastes in Idaho were killing tundra swans; a man in Munich received a two-year suspended sentence for beating another man with a swan. Highly aggressive supersquirrels were menacing gray squirrels in England, where the Law Lords were replaced with a new Supreme Court whose justices wear no wigs, and where cosmetic nipple surgery was increasingly popular. A London taxi driver tied one end of a rope around a post and the other around his neck and drove away, launching his head from the car. Anglican hymns were sung at Darwin’s tomb. Two Yellowstone National Park workers were fired for peeing into Old Faithful. Sarah Palin published a book, and Sylvia Plath’s son hanged himself in Alaska. Scientists in San Diego made a robot head study itself in a mirror until it learned to smile.

Newspaper circulation in the United States declined to its lowest level in 70 years. It was revealed via Twitter that President Obama called Kanye West a “jackass” and that a coyote ran off with Jessica Simpson’s maltipoo. The Taco Bell chihuahua died of a stroke, and Sonia Sotomayor was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice. Walter Cronkite, Merce Cunningham, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy died, as did Michael Jackson. Ariel Sharon was still alive. Hamas and Fatah held peace talks in Cairo. Israel approved the construction of 900 more settler homes in East Jerusalem, and ten Florida middle schoolers were suspended for participating in Kick a Jew Day. Chicago rats fed a diet of bacon, cheesecake, pound cake, Ho Hos, and sausage began to behave like rats addicted to heroin, and a Minnesota man pleaded guilty to driving a La-Z-Boy while intoxicated. China created a small black hole, and NASA revealed that a mysterious streak of light spotted by onlookers in the night sky above North America was a fortnight’s worth of astronaut urine. Physicists said that the aural jitters picked up by a German gravitational-wave detector may indicate that we all live in a giant and blurry cosmic hologram. The United States, searching for water, bombed the moon.

Correction

Because of an editing error, “The Less You Know” [Readings, June], an abridged transcript of a December 19, 2005, telephone conversation between Bernard Madoff and executives of the Fairfield Greenwich Group (FGG), mistakenly suggested that FGG permitted Madoff to remove funds directly from its accounts. The edited transcript also erroneously implied that Madoff was operating FGG’s fund. Furthermore, the Fairfield Greenwich Group has advised Harper’s Magazine that it was at the time of the conversation fully cooperating with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and that it notified the SEC about the phone call and all aspects of the conversation with Madoff. We regret the errors.

“The Crisis in American Medicine” Redux

In his speech before the American Medical Association on June 15, 2009, Barack Obama noted that there is nothing new about the challenges facing would-be health-care reformers:

The other day, my friend, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, handed me a magazine with a special issue titled, “The Crisis in American Medicine.” One article notes “soaring charges.” Another warns about the “volume of utilization of services.” And another asks if we can find a “better way [than fee-for-service] for paying for medical care.” It speaks to many of the challenges we face today. The thing is, this special issue was published by Harper’s Magazine in October of 1960.

Members of the American Medical Association—my fellow Americans—I am here today because I do not want our children and their children to still be speaking of a crisis in American medicine fifty years from now.

Readers interested in how little has changed in the last fifty years can read “The Politics of Medicine” from that issue, or Bernard DeVoto’s “Letter to a Family Doctor,” from 1951–or my own take on the matter, “Sick in the Head: Why America won’t get the health-care system it needs,” which I invite future presidents to consider with equal rue.

Six Questions for Cynthia Smith on the Legality of Force-feeding at Guantánamo

Guantánamo force-feeding kit. Pentagon photo.

Correction, June 11, 2009: Scott Horton writes in to point out that Ward Casscells’s term as assistant secretary of defense ended April 28. I had written that my interview took place in May, but of course the interview took place in April, before Casscells left office, as corrected below. Interestingly, the Pentagon has yet to announce a permanent successor.

The apparent suicide Monday of thirty-one-year-old Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, who had been protesting his long imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay by refusing to eat, has brought U.S. force-feed policy back into the news. Many human rights organizations have called for an end to force-feeding, which as practiced at Guantánamo amounts to torture. In MayApril, for an article to be published in the July Harper’s Magazine, I attempted to query Dr. Ward Casscells, then the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, about how he might modify that policy since Barack Obama had become president. Cynthia Smith, a Pentagon spokesperson, responded to my written queries (which I have edited here for length) under the requirement that I attribute the answers to her and not Casscells. At the time of the interview, at least thirty prisoners at Guantánamo were being restrained and fed via enteral tube.

1. U.S. Circuit Judge Gladys Kessler found in February that her court lacked jurisdiction to determine the legality of force-feeding procedures at Guantánamo. She wrote, “Resolution of this issue requires the exercise of penal and medical discretion by staff with the appropriate expertise, and is precisely the type of question that federal courts, lacking that expertise, leave to the discretion of those who do possess such expertise.” This decision would seem to give Dr. Casscells, who sets the policy at Guantanamo, considerable authority. Is it his personal determination that force-feeding, including the use of restraint chairs, is within the bounds of U.S. and international law?

DoD’s policy regarding treatment of hunger strikers is consistent with that used by the Federal Bureau of Prisons under U.S. law. The principle of using appropriate medical intervention, when necessary to sustain the life or health of a hunger striker in U.S. custody, has been upheld in Federal Courts.

2. Judge Kessler also declined to grant an injunction against force-feeding on grounds that forbidding the use of restraint chairs would make prison personnel “vulnerable to concerted efforts by detainees to use the forced-feeding as an opportunity to inflict harm on medical and military personnel.” Many observers have noted that this claim presents a logical quandary. If the prisoners are in danger of imminent death, one must assume that, by definition, they would lack the strength to present a threat to medical or military personnel. And yet if they are in fact strong enough to present a threat to medical or military personnel, then the claim of “imminent death” no longer carries legal or ethical relevance. How do you address this seeming paradox?

Involuntary treatment may be authorized when, in the opinion of the attending physician, continued refusal of food or water would pose a significant threat to life or health of the hunger striker. This does not mean that the hunger striker would necessarily be unconscious or so weak that assaultive behavior could not occur. Moreover, one could expect that the strength and vitality of the hunger striker would begin to return once enteral feeding is started. Use of appropriate restraints protects both the hunger striker and medical professionals performing medical procedures from possible injury.

3. In 2007, Dr. Casscells told a military reporter that he has “not seen anything that suggests the feeding policy is wrong.” Since then, Dr. Paul Bouvier, a senior medical adviser for the International Committee of the Red Cross, told me that he has spoken with Dr. Casscells about these issues, and though he declined to characterize the nature of the conversation, he did note that many human rights organizations have called for an end to force-feeding, as have the American Medical Association, the World Medical Association, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Have such calls changed Dr. Casscells’s views?

The Department of Defense respects and values the opinions and advice of the International Committee of the Red Cross. However, the Department also takes very seriously its obligation to sustain the life and health of those in its custody. We view the current policy to preserve the life and health of detainees engaging in hunger strikes, attempted suicide, or other attempted serious self-harm as consistent with that obligation and U.S. law.

4. Dr. Casscells also told the military reporter, “Tube feeding is a complicated issue because the detainees are not American citizens, they are not prisoners of war, nor are they criminals in the usual sense. They have this controversial status, which makes the circumstances difficult.” Has he revised this opinion in light of the January 22 executive order requiring that all Guantánamo detainees be treated in accordance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which specifically forbids “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment”?

Dr. S. Ward Casscells, M.D.

Common Article 3 provides guidance that detained personnel shall be treated humanely. It also states that “The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.” DoD takes very seriously its obligation to provide humane treatment, which includes protecting detainees’ physical and mental health and providing appropriate treatment for disease, guided by professional judgments and standards similar to those applied to personnel of the U.S. Armed Forces. DoD’s policy of providing care to sustain the life and health of hunger strikers is consistent with Common Article 3.

5. The World Medical Association’s Malta Declaration unambiguously forbids doctors from force-feeding competent prisoners on hunger-strike. It says, “Forcible feeding is never ethically acceptable. Even if intended to benefit, feeding accompanied by threats, coercion, force, or use of physical restraints is a form of inhuman and degrading treatment.” Does Dr. Casscells believe that the WMA is incorrect that using physical restraints is a form of inhuman and degrading treatment?

We do not believe that use of physical restraints, as needed, to protect the safety of both the detainee and medical professionals in accomplishing an appropriate medical intervention to preserve the life and health of the detainee is inhuman or degrading. The use of appropriately monitored restraints in the administration of enteral feeding protects hunger strikers from possible injury and medical professionals from the risk of physical assault.

6. The International Committee of the Red Cross recently commented on the Walsh Report, saying it “disagrees” with “the report’s recommendation supporting forced-feeding of detainees.” Similarly, Bernard Barrett, a media spokesperson for the ICRC, told me, “The ICRC is opposed to the forced feeding of hunger strikers.” And Dr. Hernan Reyes, an ICRC specialist on the medical aspects of detention, wrote more specifically in 1998 that doctors “should never be party to actual coercive feeding, with prisoners being tied down and intravenous drips or esophageal tubes being forced into them. Such actions can be considered a form of torture, and under no circumstances should doctors participate in them, on the pretext of ‘saving the hunger striker’s life.’” Is it your position, in this light, that Guantánamo policy is consistent with the requirements of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions?

We believe that providing life sustaining care to hunger strikers, even involuntarily if necessary, is consistent with the obligation under Common Article 3 to treat detainees humanely. A commonly stated belief in discussions of the WMA guidelines for treatment of hunger strikers is that most hunger strikers do not intend to harm themselves or to die. DoD experience with hunger strikers over several years, however, suggests that at least some would be very willing and even anxious to take their hunger strike “all the way” (to death). It is also extremely difficult for clinicians to judge whether individual hunger strikers are making autonomous decisions or are under orders from superiors to participate in a hunger strike. DoD’s policy provides assurance for those detainees acting under orders from superiors that medical personnel will seek authority to act to prevent physical harm or death from hunger striking. This is no “pretext.” The policy does save lives. Idly watching detainees for whose care we are responsible engage in self-starvation to the point of permanent damage to health or death is not required by U.S. law, Common Article 3, or medical ethics.

Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in Memory of I.F. Stone Awarded

Jones (left) with MacArthur.

This year’s Harper’s Magazine Scholarship in Memory of I.F. Stone was awarded to Jonathan Jones, a post-graduate fellow of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Endowed by Harper’s Publisher John R. MacArthur and friends, the scholarship is awarded by the Overseas Press Club, which says of Stone:

In a career that spanned more than 65 years, Stone, a veteran Washington reporter, is best known for publishing I.F. Stone’s Weekly from 1953 to 1971, a newsletter that printed the news that was overlooked in the mainstream press. His work almost single-handedly revived investigative reporting. He is remembered as a tough-minded but pacifist gadfly, a tireless examiner of public records, a hectoring critic of public officials, and a pugnacious advocate of civil liberties, peace, and truth.

Winners of the I.F. Stone Award of the Overseas Press Club receive a stipend of $2,000. Jones intends to continue his research on the role that Bridgestone Firestone, LLC, plays in Liberia, a country still recovering from a devastating war. As Firestone seeks to resurrect its rubber plantation to fill the world’s need for latex medical supplies, Jones views its impact as a “cautionary tale about the successes and shortcomings of global capitalism.”

Harper’s Index Turns 25: Now free for searching and browsing

“Numbers can be made to tell as many stories as a crooked lawyer or an old comedian.” — Lewis H. Lapham, Harper’s Magazine National Correspondent and creator of the Index

“As has been suggested, the charm of the Index is that its items so often beg for answers.” — George Plimpton

In celebration of its 25th year, the Harper’s Index–12,058 lines spanning 300 issues–is now open to all for searching and browsing, with more than one thousand linked categories. Some starting points: Adultery, China, Beer, Vegetables, Sweets, American Men, American Women, Cats, Dogs, Frogs, Bears, and Pandas.

Žižek on Chomsky: Black, white, and red all over

The German culture magazine Lettre International, true to its name, publishes writing from around the world. Their Winter 2008 issue includes translations into German from Swedish, Italian, Hungarian, French, Spanish, and Greek. It also has an article, translated from the English, by the Slovenian philosopher and social critic Slavoj Žižek. The German title is “Hoffnungszeichen” (“Signs of Hope”). This is a longer version of “Use Your Illusions,” an essay published November 14 on the website of the London Review of Books, responding to Obama’s victory.

Readers who know Žižek’s work will be struck by the uncharacteristic earnestness of the English essay. It begins with a quote from a recent interview with Noam Chomsky, who had called for the left to vote for Obama but “without illusions.” Žižek shares Chomsky’s doubt that real change is afoot, he says, but he also adds that we should not deny or simplify the symbolic value of the victory. “Whatever our doubts,” he writes, “for that moment each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity.”

The German version in Lettre International includes this entire passage, but it has a different opening sentence:

Die zynischen Lesarten von Obamas Erfolg gipfelten in Noam Chomskys sarkastischer Bemerkung, Obama sei ein Weißer, der dadurch schwarz geworden sei, daß er sich ein paar Stunden in die Sonne gelegt habe.

The editors of Lettre International provided me with the English original:

The cynical reading of Obama’s success culminated in Noam Chomsky’s biting remark that Obama is a white man blackened by a couple of hours of sun-tanning.

Because this seemed to me to be an odd thing for Noam Chomsky to have said, and also because it seemed suspiciously like a famous remark by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who had greeted the news of Obama’s win with an off-kilter joke about the president-elect being “handsome, young, and suntanned,” I wrote Žižek an email asking for his source. He replied that the statement was “widely reported in the media.” I searched widely in the media. There was nothing. I checked the quote with Chomsky, who denied that he said it and also told me that someone else had written him to say that Žižek had published the same claim in the liberal Slovenian journal Mladina.

By Googling “Obama,” “Chomsky,” “Žižek,” and setting “language” to “Slovenian,” I found this article, as well as a Slovenian-language comment board with a link to it.¹1. I don’t speak Slovenian, but the emoticon seemed to convey the sense of the comment: “Chomskega pa ni zbudila take medijske pozornosti in licemerskega žurnalističnega zgražanja,” user “hopcefizelj” wrote, “kot izjava S. Berlusconija.”

A Spanish translation of the essay, with error, had also been published on the website of the cultural review Ñ; the essay was published as well in the December Le Monde diplomatique, at least in the Norwegian edition. An alleged Italian version in Internazionale does not seem to be available online.

I emailed Žižek again, telling him I was sure that the quote was wrong and asking if he might have confused Noam Chomsky with Silvio Berlusconi. In emails and in a phone interview, he apologized for the error but denied that it was possible for him to have confused the two men. He remembered with “absolute certainty” that he had seen the quote attributed to Chomsky in “Slovene media.” It was not possible, he said, that he had confused the two quotes, for several reasons.

First, he had written the essay before Berlusconi’s remark. He had confirmed this, he said, by checking the dates on his computer. Berlusconi’s joke was made two days after the election; it would have to be very fast writing on Žižek’s part, but he does seem to write very fast. Second, he remembered clearly the quote as he had written it, with a syntax completely different than Berlusconi’s. And, finally, he emphatically condemned Berlusconi’s remark, while considering Chomsky’s “totally permissible to say.”

I asked Žižek if he would be willing to send me a brief statement on the matter. He wrote.

In attributing to Noam Chomsky the statement that Obama is a white guy who took some sun-tanning sessions, I repeated an untrue claim which appeared in Slovene media, so I can only offer my unreserved and unconditional apology.

I would like to add that, even if the statement I falsely attributed to Chomsky were to be truly made by him, I would not consider it a patronizingly racist slur, but a fully admissible characterization in our political and ideological struggle. There are African-American intellectuals who allow themselves to be fully co-opted into the white-liberal academic establishment, and they are loved by the establishment precisely because they seem “one of us,” white with a darkened skin. This is why, I think, the statement I falsely attributed to Chomsky does NOT amount to the same as Silvio Berlusconi’s misleadingly similar characterization of Obama as beautiful and well tanned: Berlusconi’s remark dismissed Obama’s blackness as an endearing eccentricity, thus obliterating the historical meaning of the fact that an African-American was elected President, while the remark I falsely attributed to Chomsky, if accurate, would point towards the ambiguous way Obama’s blackness can be instrumentalized to obfuscate our crucial political and economic struggles.

Yearly Review

The United States marked the five-year anniversary of the war in Iraq. Over four million Iraqis had fled the country or been internally displaced, and the total cost of the war, currently about $650 billion, was expected to rise to $2 trillion over the next five years. Oil rose above $147 a barrel, and Abu Dhabi bought New York City’s Chrysler Building for $800 million. Somali pirates stole a Saudi supertanker. President George W. Bush announced that North Korea was no longer a state sponsor of terrorism. The CIA expanded its covert operations in Iran. Bozo the Clown died, as did Jesse Helms, William F. Buckley Jr., Paul Newman, Heath Ledger, Indonesian dictator Suharto, comedian George Carlin, didgeridoo master Alan Dargin, and, at age 110, Louis de Cazenave of the Fifth Senegalese Rifles, one of the last two living French veterans of World War I. “War,” he once explained, “is something absurd, useless, that nothing can justify.” Ariel Sharon was still alive, and Israel bombed Gaza in retaliation for ongoing rocket attacks. Tom Jones insured his chest hair for $7 million.

Australian police tasered a ram. France banned TV shows for babies. Pope Benedict XVI toured the United States, and the Vatican released a list of seven “social” sins–including littering, genetic tampering, and creating poverty–to complement the seven cardinal vices. The World Health Organization announced that virtually untreatable drug-resistant tuberculosis could now be found in 45 countries. Japanese men began to wear bras. The cost of rice increased by 30 percent, and food riots broke out in 30 countries. The United Nations expected the number of starving people in the world to rise to 950 million. North Korean hunger scientists announced a new noodle. In an expanding thousand-square-mile low-oxygen zone growing along the coast of Oregon and Washington, every fish, crab, and sea worm was dead. A 7.9-magnitude earthquake centered in China’s Sichuan Province left tens of thousands of people dead and millions homeless. The Summer Olympics were held in Beijing, heralded on television by fake, computer-generated fireworks. Structures built for the 2004 Athens Olympics were falling into ruin. A man in Swansea, Wales, died from eating too much fairycake, and an elderly German woman filed a lawsuit against a hospital in Bavaria after she went in for a leg operation and was instead given a new anus. Paddington Bear turned 50; both the cubicle and the assassination of Martin Luther King turned 40; Viagra turned 10. One in 100 American adults was behind bars.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that detainees held as “enemy combatants” by the United States at Guantanamo Bay have a constitutional right to challenge their detention through habeas corpus petitions in federal courts. Scientists located the part of the brain responsible for understanding sarcasm. Global stock markets lost $3.1 trillion in four days, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below 10,000 for the first time in five years. The real estate boom in Dubai slowed. Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul declared that there are “no more great writers,” and Bob Dylan won a Pulitzer Prize. Illinois Senator Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. Gunmen terrorized Mumbai, and inflation in Zimbabwe reached 23 million percent. Iceland went bankrupt. Zookeepers across the United States put their animals on diets, feeding gorillas according to a Weight Watchers point system and offering polar bears sugar-free Jell-O. The thoughts of a monkey in North Carolina controlled the actions of a robot in Japan. New York researchers used carbon nanotubes to create the darkest material known to man. Two teams of physicists, one in Calgary and the other in Tokyo, successfully stored nothing within a gas in the form of squeezed vacuum composed of uncertainty.

Talking with Suki Kim

After Torture: A Forum on justice in the post-Bush era (December 4)

Harper’s Magazine & The Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law invite you to:

After Torture: A Harper’s Magazine Forum on justice in the post-Bush era

Thursday, December 4, 2008: 6:00 p.m.–7:30 p.m.

Lipton Hall

New York University

108 West 3rd Street

New York, NY 10012 (view map)

Upon publication of contributing editor Scott Horton’s report, “Justice After Bush” in the December issue of Harper’s Magazine, a panel of legal experts will discuss the methods available to a democracy for reckoning with a legacy of human rights abuses.

Participants:

• Elizabeth Holtzman, Author of “The Impeachment of George W. Bush”
• Scott Horton, Contributing Editor, Harper’s Magazine
• Jerrold Nadler, Chairman, House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties
• Burt Neuborne, Legal Director, Brennan Center for Justice, New York University
• Michael Ratner, President, Center for Constitutional Rights
• Antonio Taguba, Major General (U.S. Army Ret.)
• Moderated by Luke Mitchell, Senior Editor, Harper’s Magazine

This event is free and open to the public. To RSVP, please email CLS@juris.law.nyu.edu or call 212-992-8854.

John Leonard

All PDFs are freely available via the link or by clicking on the thumbnail image of the page.

83-84	November 2008 New books/Review New Books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: A mercy (Book); Biography; Grossman, David; Bishop, Elizabeth; French, Patrick; Lowell, Robert; Hamilton, Saskia; The world is what it is: the authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul (Book); Travisano, Thomas J.; Morrison, Toni; Naipaul, V.S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad); Words in air (Book); Writing in the dark (Book) PDFTEXT
79-80	October 2008 New books/Review New Books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Blue genes (Book); Lukas, Christopher; Filkins, Dexter; Indignation (Book); Updike, John; Barnes, Julian; Letters of Ted Hughes (Book); Nothing to be frightened of (Book); Hughes, Ted; The forever war (Book) PDFTEXT
85-86	September 2008 New books/Review New Books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: A universal history of the destruction of books (Book); Exit music (Book); Báez, Fernando; Kureishi, Hanif; Rankin, Ian; Eburne, Jonathan P. (Jonathan Paul); Something to tell you (Book); Surrealism and the art of crime (Book) PDFFREE TEXT
73-74	August 2008 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biography; Carr, David; Lebedoff, David; Waugh, Evelyn; Orwell, George; Bruno, Giordano; Giordano Bruno: philosopher/heretic (Book); Rowland, Ingrid D. (Ingrid Drake); Man in the dark (Book); Auster, Paul; The night of the gun (Book); The same man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in love and war (Book) PDF
81-82	July 2008 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Beijing coma (Book); Biography; Castellanos Moya, Horacio; Thompson, Hunter S.; Oates, Joyce Carol; Jian, Ma; My sister, my love (Book); Outlaw journalist: the life and times of Hunter S. Thompson (Book); Senselessness (Book); McKeen, William PDF
81-82	June 2008 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Thirlwell, Adam; Biography; Needham, Joseph; Rushdie, Salman; Winchester, Simon; The delighted states (Book); The enchantress of Florence (Book); The man who loved China (Book) PDF
79-80	May 2008 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Kertész, Imre; Winterson, Jeanette; Appignanesi, Lisa; Mad, bad, and sad: women and the mind doctors (Book); Demetz, Peter; Prague in danger: the years of German occupation, 1939-45—memories and history, terror and resistance, theater and jazz, film and poetry, politics and war (Book); The pathseeker (Book); The stone gods (Book) PDF
89-90	April 2008 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Weiss, Andrea; Hari, Daoud; Havanas in Camelot: personal essays (Book); In the shadow of the magic mountain: the Erika and Klaus Mann story (Book); Maps and legends: essays on reading and writing along the borderlands (Book); Chabon, Michael; The translator: a tribesman’s memoir of Darfur (Book); Styron, William PDF
83-84	March 2008 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Kazin, Alfred; Alfred Kazin: a biography (Book); Biography; Leslie, Esther; Stape, J.H. (John Henry); Conrad, Joseph; Pictorial works; Cook, Richard M.; The several lives of Joseph Conrad (Book); Benjamin, Walter; Walter Benjamin (Book) PDF
81-82	February 2008 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Schlink, Bernhard; Fanon (Book); Five years of my life: an innocent man in Guantanamo (Book); Homecoming (Book); Wideman, John Edgar; Kurnaz, Murat; Night train to Lisbon (Book); Mercier, Pascal; Banks, Russell; The reserve (Book) PDF
83-84	January 2008 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Manguel, Alberto; Pérez-Reverte, Arturo; Lewis, David Levering; Diary of a bad year (Book); God’s crucible: Islam and the making of Europe, 570-1215 (Book); Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey: a biography (Book); Coetzee, J.M.; The painter of battles (Book) PDF

95-96	December 2007 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: A life of Picasso: the triumphant years, 1917-1932 (Book); Bamboo: essays and criticism (Book); Biography; Criticism; Criticism and interpretation; Vendler, Helen Hennessy; Richardson, John; Our secret discipline: Yeats and lyric form (Book); Picasso, Pablo; Greeman, Richard; The unforgiving years (Book); Turning back the clock: hot wars and media populism (Book); Eco, Umberto; Serge, Victor; Yeats, W.B. (William Butler); Boyd, William PDF
81-82	November 2007 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Detective and mystery stories, American; Wilson, Emily R.; Freeman, Judith; Høeg, Peter; Philosophy; Terkel, Studs; The Archer files (Book); The death of Socrates (Book); The long embrace: Raymond Chandler and the woman he loved (Book); The quiet girl (Book); Nolan, Tom; Touch and go: a memoir (Book) PDF
103-104	October 2007 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Weitz, Eric D.; Goldman, Francisco; Wills, Garry; Robb, Graham; Head and heart: American Christianities (Book); The art of political murder: who killed the bishop? (Book); The discovery of France (Book); Weimar Germany: promise and tragedy (Book) PDF
85-86	September 2007 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Broyard, Bliss; Berger, Brian; End games (Book); Fénéon, Félix; Sante, Luc; Berman, Marshall; Dibdin, Michael; New York calling: from blackout to Bloomberg (Book); Novels in three lines (Book); One drop: a true story of family, race, and secrets (Book) PDF
81-82	August 2007 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Von Tunzelmann, Alex; Thubron, Colin; Crossing the Sierra de Gredos (Book); Lessing, Doris May; India after Gandhi: the history of the world’s largest democracy (Book); Indian summer (Book); Handke, Peter; Guha, Ramachandra; Shadow of the Silk Road (Book); The cleft (Book); The last Mughal: the fall of a dynasty: Delhi, 1857 (Book); Dalrymple, William PDF
89-90	July 2007 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Bangkok haunts (Book); Pettitt, Clare; Livingstone, David; Dr. Livingstone, I presume?: missionaries, journalists, explorers, and empire (Book); Grass, Günter; Burke, James Lee; Burdett, John; Smith, Martin Cruz; Peeling the onion (Book); Pictorial works; Stalin’s ghost (Book); The house that George built: with a little help from Irving, Cole, and a crew of about fifty (Book); The tin roof blowdown (Book); Sheed, Wilfrid PDF
81-82	June 2007 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: A crack in the earth: a journey up Israel’s Rift Valley (Book); Weizman, Eyal; Watzman, Haim; Hollow land: Israel’s architecture of occupation (Book); Israel-Arab conflicts; Cypel, Sylvain; Walled: Israeli society at an impasse (Book) PDF
87-88	May 2007 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Kourouma, Ahmadou; Allah is not obliged (Book); Biography; Donne, John; John Donne: the reformed soul (Book); Stubbs, John; Englander, Nathan; Paretsky, Sara; The ministry of special cases (Book); Writing in an age of silence (Book) PDF
89-90	April 2007 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: A political education: coming of age in Paris and New York (Book); Alexis de Tocqueville: a life (Book); Schiffrin, André; Brogan, Hugh; Lerman, Leo; The grand surprise: the journals of Leo Lerman (Book) PDF
81-82	March 2007 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biography; Buda’s wagon: a brief history of the car bomb (Book); Childs, Craig Leland; House of rain: tracking a vanished civilization across the American Southwest (Book); Wilson, Jonathan; Chagall, Marc; Marc Chagall (Book); Davis, Mike; Poor people (Book); Vollmann, William T. PDF
85-86	February 2007 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Hirsi Ali, Ayaan; Alarcón, Daniel; Ghosts of Spain: travels through Spain and its secret past (Book); Tremlett, Giles; Infidel (Book); Lost city radio (Book); Mailer, Norman; The castle in the forest (Book) PDF
81-82	January 2007 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: About Alice (Book); Ehrenreich, Barbara; Trillin, Calvin; McCann, Colum; Dancing in the streets: a history of collective joy (Book); Room for doubt (Book); Lesser, Wendy; Zoli (Book) PDF
85-86	December 2006 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Grayling, A.C.; Biography; Descartes: the life and times of a genius (Book); Davenport, Guy; Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: selected letters (Book); Homes and haunts—France—Arles; Laughlin, James; Gayford, Martin; Gauguin, Paul; Descartes, René; The book of Dave (Book); The yellow house: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and nine turbulent weeks in Arles (Book); Gogh, Vincent van; Bamberger, W.C.; Self, Will PDF
81-82	November 2006 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Humboldt, Alexander von; Biography; Gauss, Carl Friedrich; Janeway, Carol Brown; Kehlmann, Daniel; Fiction; Vidal, Gore; Woolf, Leonard; Leonard Woolf: a biography (Book); Measuring the world (Book); Point to point navigation: a memoir, 1964 to 2006 (Book); Ford, Richard; The lay of the land (Book); Glendinning, Victoria PDF
79-80	October 2006 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Frazier, Charles; Le Carré, John; Powers, Richard; Littell, Robert; The echo maker (Book); The mission song (Book); Thirteen moons (Book); Vicious circle (Book) PDF
85-86	September 2006 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: A woman in Jerusalem (Book); Yehoshua, Abraham B.; Back to Bologna (Book); Biography; Lazarus, Emma; Emma Lazarus (Book); Schor, Esther H.; I feel bad about my neck and other thoughts on being a woman (Book); Mao’s last revolution (Book); Pessl, Marisha; Dibdin, Michael; Schoenhals, Michael; Freudenberger, Nell; Ephron, Nora; Pictorial works; MacFarquhar, Roderick; Special topics in calamity physics (Book); The dissident (Book); Mao, Tse-tung PDF
83-84	August 2006 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Sachs, Aaron (Aaron Jacob); Humboldt, Alexander von; Wilentz, Amy; An episode in the life of a landscape painter (Book); Biography; Aira, César; I feel earthquakes more often than they happen: coming to California in the age of Schwarzenegger (Book); Rugendas, Johann Moritz; Pictorial works; The Humboldt current: nineteenth-century exploration and the roots of American environmentalism (Book) PDF
81-82	July 2006 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biography; Diop, Boubacar Boris; Guène, Faïza; Greeley, Horace; Horace Greeley: champion of American freedom (Book); Kiffe kiffe tomorrow (Book); Murambi, the book of bones (Book); Williams, Robert Chadwell; Greenfield, Robert; Timothy Leary; Timothy Leary: a biography (Book) PDF
85-86	June 2006 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: A woman of uncertain character (Book); Biography; Sigal, Clancy; Galeano, Eduardo H.; Let me finish (Book); Proust, Marcel; Proust at the Majestic: the last days of the author whose book changed Paris (Book); Davenport-Hines, R.P.T. (Richard Peter Treadwell); Angell, Roger; Voices of time: a life in stories (Book) PDF
79-80	May 2006 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Spinoza, Benedictus de; Berlin childhood around 1900 (Book); Betraying Spinoza (Book); Everyman (Book); Roth, Philip; Portraits; Goldstein, Rebecca; Beckett, Samuel; Samuel Beckett: the Grove centenary edition (Book); Benjamin, Walter PDF
83-84	April 2006 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna; Anna of all the Russias: the life of Anna Akhmatova (Book); Biography; Ugresic, Dubravka; White, Edmund; Feinstein, Elaine; My lives: an autobiography (Book); Pictorial works; The ministry of pain (Book) PDF
77-78	March 2006 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: A godly hero: the life of William Jennings Bryan (Book); An Irish history of civilization (Book); Jones, Ann; Death in the Haymarket: a story of Chicago, the first labor movement, and the bombing that divided Gilded Age America (Book); Akenson, Donald H.; Green, James R.; Kabul in winter: life without peace in Afghanistan (Book); Kazin, Michael; Pictorial works; Bryan, William Jennings PDF
83-84	February 2006 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: At Canaan’s edge: America in the King years, 1965-68 (Book); Davis, Kathryn; Philip Freeman; Branch, Taylor; The philosopher and the Druids: a journey among the ancient Celts (Book); The thin place (Book) PDF
81-82	January 2006 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Death’s door: modern dying and the way we grieve (Book); DeLillo, Don; Khoury, Elias; Gate of the sun (Book); Didion, Joan; Atwood, Margaret Eleanor; Gilbert, Sandra M.; The tent (Book); The year of magical thinking (Book) PDF
85-86	December 2005 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biography; Martinson, Deborah; Christianson, Gale E.; Get a life (Book); Isaac Newton (Book); Hellman, Lillian; Lillian Hellman: a life with foxes and scoundrels (Book); Gordimer, Nadine; Pearson, Roger; Newton, Isaac, Sir; Voltaire; Voltaire almighty: a life in pursuit of freedom (Book) PDF
89-90	November 2005 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biography; García Márquez, Gabriel; Babel’, I. (Isaak); Charyn, Jerome; Memories of my melancholy whores (Book); Fox, Paula; Savage shorthand: the life and death of Isaac Babel (Book); The coldest winter: a stringer in liberated Europe (Book) PDF
81-82	October 2005 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: A man without a country (Book); Biography; Kurt Vonnegut; Mark Twain (Book); Watkins, Mel; Powers, Ron; Clemens, Samuel Langhorne; Fetchit, Stepin; Stepin Fetchit: the life and times of Lincoln Perry (Book) PDF
79-80	September 2005 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Bait and switch: the (futile) pursuit of the American dream (Book); Ehrenreich, Barbara; Doctorow, E.L.; Pinsky, Robert; The life of David (Book); The march (Book) PDF
81-82	August 2005 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Here is where we meet (Book); De Madariaga, Isabel; Ivan the terrible (Book); Berger, John; Irving, John; McGhee, Robert; The last imaginary place: a human history of the Arctic world (Book); Until I find you (Book) PDFTEXT
85-86	July 2005 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Blinding light (Book); Kostova, Elizabeth; Empires of the word: a language history of the world (Book); Schwartz, Lynn Sharon; Ostler, Nicholas; Theroux, Paul; Pictorial works; Se-Quo-Yah; The historian (Book); The mysterious flame of Queen Loana (Book); The writing on the wall (Book); Eco, Umberto PDF
81-82	June 2005 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Ekirch, A. Roger; Rothstein, Arnold; At day’s close: night in times past (Book); Craveri, Benedetta; Biography; Mathews, Harry; King of the Jews (Book); My life in CIA: a chronicle of 1973 (Book); Tosches, Nick; The age of conversation (Book) PDF
85-86	May 2005 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: A matter of opinion (Book); Murray, Albert; Biography; Gordon, Lyndall; Wollstonecraft, Mary; The magic keys (Book); Navasky, Victor S.; Vindication: a life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Book) PDF
85-86	April 2005 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biography; Climate of fear: the quest for dignity in a dehumanized world (Book); Hemingway, Ernest; Evening in the palace of reason: Bach meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (Book); Sorrentino, Gilbert; Gaines, James R.; Bach, Johann Sebastian; Dos Passos, John; Frederick II, King of Prussia; Lunar follies (Book); Portraits; Koch, Stephen; The breaking point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the murder of José Robles (Book); Soyinka, Wole PDF
89-90	March 2005 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Malraux, André; Schlink, Bernhard; Biography; Maslowska, Dorota; Lee, Hermione; In literature; Rabb, Jonathan; Malraux: a life (Book); Todd, Olivier; Pictorial works; Rosa: a novel (Book); Luxemburg, Rosa; Self’s punishment (Book); Snow White and Russian Red (Book); Virginia Woolf’s nose (Book) PDF
83-84	February 2005 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biography; Garff, Joakim; Fasman, Jon; Tatar, Maria; Short, Philip; Pictorial works; Pol Pot; Pol Pot: anatomy of a nightmare (Book); Søren Kierkegaard (Book); Secrets beyond the door: the story of Bluebeard and his wives (Book); The geographer’s library (Book) PDF
89-90	January 2005 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biography; Wolf, Christa; Harlan, Elizabeth; Liszt, Franz; Sand, George; George Sand (Book); Historians in trouble (Book); In the flesh (Book); Wiener, Jon; Pictorial works PDF
87-88	December 2004 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biography; Gilead (Book); Parini, Jay; Robinson, Marilynne; Chabon, Michael; One matchless time: a life of William Faulkner (Book); Pictorial works; The final solution: a story of detection (Book); Faulkner, William PDF
83-84	November 2004 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Updike, John; Smith, Martin Cruz; Sherry, Norman; Villages (Book); Wolves eat dogs (Book) PDF
91-92	October 2004 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Book of the Sphinx (Book); Townsend, Camilla; Pocahontas and the Powhatan dilemma (Book); Koven, Seth; Slumming: sexual and social politics in Victorian London (Book); Regier, Willis Goth PDF
85-86	September 2004 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Feinstein, Adam; Biography; Kafka, Franz; Kafka (Book); Murray, Nicholas; Neruda, Pablo; Pablo Neruda: a passion for life (Book); Greenblatt, Stephen; Will in the world: how Shakespeare became Shakespeare (Book); Shakespeare, William PDF
75-76	August 2004 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: An unfinished season (Book); Howard, Maureen; Pamuk, Orhan; Snow (Book); The silver screen (Book); Just, Ward S. PDF
83-84	July 2004 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Circles and lines: the shape of life in early America (Book); Thomas, Hugh; Demos, John; Ross, John; Little Scarlet (Book); Murdered by capitalism: a memoir of 150 years of life and death on the American left (Book); Rivers of gold: the rise of the Spanish Empire from Columbus to Magellan (Book); Mosley, Walter PDF
85-86	June 2004 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: American literature; Lycett, Andrew; Biography; Tóibín, Colm; Thomas, Dylan; Dylan Thomas: a new life (Book); Carrère, Emmanuel; James, Henry; I am alive and you are dead: a journey into the mind of Philip K. Dick (Book); In literature; Dick, Philip K.; The master; a novel (Book) PDF
85-86	May 2004 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biography; Seligman, Craig; Criticism and interpretation; Kudrova, I.V.; Stalin, Joseph; Tsvetaeva, Marina; Kael, Pauline; Pictorial works; Montefiore, Sebag; Sontag & Kael: opposites attract me (Book); Stalin: the court of the red tsar (Book); Sontag, Susan; The death of a poet: the last days of Marina Tsvetaeva (Book) PDF
85-86	April 2004 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biography; Sandbrook, Dominic; McCarthy, Eugene J.; Eugene McCarthy: the rise and fall of postwar American liberalism (Book); Genghis Khan; Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world (Book); Kabaservice, Geoffrey M.; Weatherford, J. McIver; Kingman Brewster; Pictorial works; The guardians: Kingman Brewster, his circle, and the rise of the liberal establishment (Book) PDF
85-86	March 2004 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Avengers of the New World: the story of the Haitian Revolution (Book); Meyerson, Daniel; Napoleon I, Emperor of the French; Slater, Lauren; Dubois, Laurent; Opening Skinner’s box: great psychological experiments of the twentieth century (Book); Pictorial works; The linguist and the emperor: Napoleon and Champollion’s quest to decipher the Rosetta Stone (Book); Toussaint Louverture PDF
73-74	February 2004 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: A civilian occupation: the politics of Israeli architecture (Book); Guillermoprieto, Alma; Cid; Dancing with Cuba: a memoir of the revolution (Book); Weizman, Eyal; Pictorial works; Fletcher, R.A. (Richard A.); Segal, Rafi; The cross and the crescent: Christianity and Islam from Muhammad to the Reformation (Book) PDF
75-76	January 2004 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Absolute friends (Book); After such knowledge: memory, history, and the legacy of the Holocaust (Book); American sucker (Book); Denby, David; Hoffman, Eva; Robb, Graham; Le Carré, John; Strangers: homosexual love in the 19th century (Book) PDF
87-88	December 2003 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Gelb, Arthur; Backstory: inside the business of news (Book); City room (Book); García Márquez, Gabriel; Hess, John E.; Auletta, Ken; Living to tell the tale (Book); My times: a memoir of dissent (Book) PDF
77-78	November 2003 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biography; Seay, Elizabeth; Thomson, Ian; Love (Book); Levi, Primo; Primo Levi (Book); Searching for lost city: on the trail of America’s native languages (Book); Morrison, Toni PDF
75-76	October 2003 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biocosm: the new scientific theory of evolution: intelligent life is the architect of the universe (Book); Sifton, Elisabeth; Hope dies last: keeping the faith in difficult times (Book); Gardner, James N.; Terkel, Studs; The serenity prayer: faith and politics in times of peace and war (Book) PDF
77-78	September 2003 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: A hundred little Hitlers: the death of a black man, the trial of a white racist, and the rise of the neo-Nazi movement in America (Book); Mayor, Adrienne; Garrels, Anne; Langer, Elinor; Greek fire, poison arrows & scorpion bombs: biological and chemical warfare in the ancient world (Book); Didion, Joan; Kingston, Maxine Hong; Naked in Baghdad (Book); The fifth book of peace (Book); Where I was from (Book) PDF
73-74	August 2003 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Autobiography; Waugh, Evelyn; Lee, Jennifer; Marianne in chains: everyday life in the French heartland under the German occupation (Book); Manea, Norman; Paris in mind (Book); Pictorial works; Gildea, Robert; The hooligan’s return: a memoir (Book); Waugh abroad: collected travel writing (Book) PDF
81-82	July 2003 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: A tragic honesty: the life and work of Richard Yates (Book); Bangkok 8 (Book); Franklin, Benjamin; Benjamin Franklin: an American life (Book); Biography; Bailey, Blake; Falk, Dean; Gallup, Gordon G.; Burdett, John; Keenan, Julian Paul; Pendergrast, Mark; Mirror mirror: a history of the human love affair with reflection (Book); Yates, Richard; The face in the mirror: the search for the origins of consciousness (Book); Isaacson, Walter PDF
71-72	June 2003 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: American massacre: the tragedy of Mountain Meadows (Book); Biography; Johnson, Charles Richard; Darwin and the barnacle (Book); Spurling, Hilary; Stott, Rebecca; Denton, Sally; Orwell, Sonia; The girl from the Fiction Department: a portrait of Sonia Orwell (Book); Turning the wheel: essays on Buddhism and writing (Book) PDF
77-78	May 2003 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Bay of souls (Book); West, Rebecca, Dame; Grossman, David; Death as a way of life: Israel ten years after Oslo (Book); Invented Eden: the elusive, disputed history of the Tasaday (Book); Stone, Robert; Hemley, Robin; Survivors in Mexico (Book) PDF
81-82	April 2003 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Cosmopolis (Book); Crabwalk (Book); Dark star safari: overland from Cairo to Cape Town (Book); DeLillo, Don; Grass, Günter; Theroux, Paul PDF
75-76	March 2003 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Chase, Alston; Bizot, François; Harvard and the unabomber: the education of an American terrorist (Book); Oe, Kenzaburo; On the natural history of destruction (Book); Somersault (Book); The gate (Book); Violence; Sebald, Winfried Georg PDF
67-68	February 2003 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Biography; Muybridge, Eadweard; Kalfus, Ken; Pye, Michael; Photographers; Pictorial works; Solnit, Rebecca; River of shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the technological wild west (Book); The commissariat of enlightenment (Book); The pieces from Berlin (Book) PDF
69-70	January 2003 New books/Review New books By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Another day at the front: dispatches from the race war (Book); Reed, Ishmael; Lost in America: a journey with my father (Book); Powers, Richard; Nuland, Sherwin B.; The time of our singing (Book) PDF
88-89	April 1977 Books/Review Crying in the wilderness By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Falconer (Book); Cheever, John PDF
90-98	November 1976 Books/Review Intelligence at an impasse By John Leonard SEE ALSO: Gray, Francine du Plessix; Lovers and tyrants (Book); Adler, Renata; Speedboat (Book) PDF

Six Questions for Eric Janszen on the Economic Collapse

Wall Street, October 2008. Photo by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi.

Angel investor and iTulip.com founder Eric Janszen contributed to this month’s Forum, “How to Save Capitalism: Fundamental fixes for a collapsing system,” and wrote “The Next Bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow’s big crash” in the February 2008 Harper’s. Rafil Kroll-Zaidi interviewed Janszen via email; answers have been edited for length and clarity.

1. Is the Dow still inflated?

It is. My Dow target since 2006 has been around 5,000. Here’s why: The impact on the stock market of the 2003–2007 monetary and fiscal reflation was similar to that of the 1933–1937 reflation–except that this most recent reflation was enhanced by real estate asset-price inflation. Sure, by 1937, the stock market had nominally recovered 80 percent of what it lost between 1929 to 1933. But in real, inflation-adjusted terms, it recovered only 50 percent of what it lost.

Today, all of the pricing power that was temporarily injected into the economy with the credit expansion is running in reverse, with across-the-board debt deflation. Soon the dollar will resume its decline relative to commodities (although not currencies) increasing food and energy inflation pressures in the United States, even as unemployment rises and wages deflate.

2. What can we expect from federal intervention?

The government has been trying to manage the debt deflation for over a year, to no avail. The markets are “pricing in” the structural problems of the banking system and financial markets–problems, as I said, that cannot be addressed with ad-hoc and marginal national policies. The entire global financial and monetary system has to be overhauled. This will require immediate and unprecedented cooperation among governments and institutions. But America lacks the global political leadership needed to drive the process.

Time is short. The financial-markets crisis is now spilling over into the real economy. Soon unemployment and other hardships will limit the ability of governments to sell a global bailout package. This is how the first great era of globalism degenerated into political chaos in the 1930s.

The nationalization of the U.S. banking system is a bold step. The markets are pleased, as has been the pattern for government interventions in years past: when interventions are promised, the markets crash up; when the interventions are not delivered, the markets crash down. When the interventions vastly exceed expectations, as with the agreement among governments in the U.S., the U.K., and Europe to purchase shares in leading banks–nationalization in all but name–the stock markets react with manic enthusiasm.

Certainly short-term risks to investors have declined. The markets correctly understand that a functioning credit system is a prerequisite for a modern economy. But getting the credit system working again is like restarting a heart-attack victim’s heart. The underlying cause still has to be addressed, and that takes years, and other organs may fail while the patient is out.

Photo by Victor Cruz

3. It seems like the whole finance economy was Long-Term Capital Management writ large: basically no one, not even regulators, appreciated just how precarious it all was. How do we create a stable regulatory structure?

The decline in regulation is a symptom of FIRE economy interests (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) taking control of the political machinery to increase profitability. But the profitability of the credit industry was a side effect of interest rates falling (after the Volcker Fed raised them to 20 percent). The incursion of the credit industry into every aspect of American life–college tuition, health care–was the result. But it’s worse than that. Manufacturing was financialized. Take the auto industry–a finance manager at one of the Big Three automakers told me, “We used to be a car company that sold financing on the side. Now we are a bank that makes cars.” Look at GM stock in recent days. It’s gotten hammered worse than during the Great Depression, not only because of a coming loss in production profitability but also because of the loss in profits from credit operations that had become such a large part of their operating profits. The regulators have to start over.

4. There have been warnings about how precarious it is for the $63 trillion credit-derivatives market to be bigger than the “world economy.” What are people talking about when they bring up this figure?

Credit-default swaps (CDSs) have been described as insurance policies taken out between two parties. One party agrees to insure against the default of a bond; the other party agrees either to pay out the insured amount if the default happens during the term of the contract or to keep the premium if it doesn’t. But CDSs are not exactly like insurance policies–you do not have to own the asset in order to take out insurance against it. So the CDS market is like thousands of gamblers taking out hundreds of fire-insurance policies of various terms–say, averaging five years–against hundreds of houses. The total value of the insurance premiums of all of the contacts may be $4 trillion (known as the gross market-replacement value) while the total liability of all of the counterparties may be $63 trillion (notional value) if all of the houses were to burn down. The gigantic notional value of CDS market is often covered by financial journalists with alarm. But the chances that all of the houses are going to burn down in five years is close to zero. The actual liability is somewhere between the gross replacement value of $4 trillion and the notional value of $63 trillion.

If the “statistically correct” thing happens and only one of the several hundred houses burns down in five years, then the total amount that all the counterparties owe together is manageable. But if many of the CDS contract writers are using the same or similar risk models and they happen to be substantially off, then the total cost of the insurance payouts may exceed the insurers’ ability to pay. The insurers will be forced to default on the default insurance.

The risks are: 1) that a few such defaults will lead to others, causing a panic; 2) that in a panic that the CDS market cannot be bailed out by the Fed because the market is based on of thousands of handwritten contracts enforced by novation, the weakest form of contract settlement–which means there is no central clearinghouse where parties can be brought together to work out problems; and 3) that there is a considerable concentration of CDS liabilities among a small number of financial firms. That is why Bear Stearns, for example, was bailed out, and why Lehman should have been bailed out, from the perspective of financial system stability.

5. How much worse will it get, and has anyone been able to beat this market?

It happens like this:

• the dollar, declining;
• import prices, rising;
• goods prices, flat to rising;
• wages, falling;
• asset prices (stocks, bonds, real estate), falling;
• long-term interest rates, low but rising;
• short-term interest rates, low but flat to falling.

The probable outcome will be an inflationary recession or an inflationary depression–a toxic and complex mix of asset-price deflation, wage deflation, and energy-price inflation that will have an impact on food prices.

I don’t think most Americans understand just how much trouble the country is in. We are backing ourselves into a corner. Our debt-laden economy is highly sensitive to increases in long-term interest rates, and those since 2003 have become largely determined by foreign capital inflows from central banks, sovereign wealth funds, and other official (as opposed to private) sources. If a significant geopolitical shift away from financial support of the U.S. takes place–due to, say, military conflict between U.S. creditors, or perhaps due to rising economic and financial crisis at home–the source of those inflows may quickly dry up. One reasonable estimate I read forecasts a 2 percent increase in the ten-year Treasury bond per year that inflows stop and holdings merely remain constant. That will tend to increase mortgage rates and slow the U.S. housing market and economy further.

As the economy contracts, the inexorable logic of the American political economy is to increase protectionist and unilateral measures, as if the United States were still a net creditor as in the late 1970s. If such policies are pursued (which caused the world trade negotiations to collapse earlier this year) the results will be disastrous for America: the current orderly diversification from the dollar may become disorderly.

As to beating the market–members of iTulip.com moved from stocks to cash starting at the end of 2007 and have continued to buy gold since 2001. Some of our members have purchased negative index funds such as SRS and have done well.

6. Who should go to jail?

Many will go to jail, but I’ll wait for the hearings before I offer a judgment.

Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers

Charles Bernstein reads at The New School.

Photo (c) Star Black

From a statement read at an event marking the release of Best American Poetry 2008, held last night at The New School, in New York City. David Lehman is the series editor of Best American Poetry, and Robert Polito is the director of the writing program at The New School.

Chairman Lehman, Secretary Polito, distinguished poets and readers—I regret having to interrupt the celebrations tonight with an important announcement. As you know, the glut of illiquid, insolvent, and troubled poems is clogging the literary arteries of the West. These debt-ridden poems threaten to infect other areas of the literary sector and ultimately to topple our culture industry.

Charles Bernstein’s most recent collection of poetry is Girly Man. His poem “Pompeii” appeared in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine; his essay “Wet verse at The New Yorker” appeared in the November 1989 issue.

Cultural leaders have come together to announce a massive poetry buyout: leveraged and unsecured poems, poetry derivatives, delinquent poems, and subprime poems will be removed from circulation in the biggest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. We believe the plan is a comprehensive approach to relieving the stresses on our literary institutions and markets.

Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance.

Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.

As we know, lax composition practices since the advent of modernism led to irresponsible poets and irresponsible readers. Simply put, too many poets composed works they could not justify. We are seeing the impact on poetry, with a massive loss of confidence on the part of readers. What began as a subprime poetry problem on essentially unregulated poetry websites has spread to other, more stable, literary magazines and presses and contributed to excess poetry inventories that have pushed down the value of responsible poems.

The risks poets have taken have been too great; the aesthetic negligence has been profound. The age of decadence must come to an end with the imposition of oversight and regulation on poetry composition and publishing practices.

We are convinced that once we have removed these troubled and distressed poems from circulation, our cultural sector will stabilize and readers will regain confidence in American literature. We estimate that for the buyout to be successful, we will need to remove from circulation all poems written after 1904.

This will be a fresh start, a new dawn of a new day. Without these illiquid poems threatening to overwhelm readers, we will be able to create a literary culture with a solid aesthetic foundation.

I’m Charles Bernstein, and I approved this message.

Talking with George Michelsen Foy, author of “Bollywood Shuffle”

Foy

George Michelsen Foy’s article “Bollywood Shuffle” appears in the October Harper’s Magazine. Associate Editor Benjamin Austen catches up with Foy now that the issue is on newsstands.

1. “Bollywood Shuffle” chronicles your efforts—as a white Westerner—to land a role in a Bollywood film. With few prospects, you travel to Bombay and begin this quixotic quest. What advice can you give other would-be actors not of Indian ancestry who have caught the movie bug and want to be in a Bollywood film?

I’d say the first thing to do is meet people, which is easier than it sounds. Bollywood is huge as an industry, but at least in the Hindi film segment everybody basically knows everybody else. As my article shows, even pretty big names are accessible. And people generally are friendlier and more willing to help than in Los Angeles. So if you know anyone in any way hooked up to Bollywood, call that person. He (or she) will usually welcome the interest. And once you get to the director/producer level, you’ll find that the movers and shakers are often as anxious to score contacts in Hollywood and the U.S. film industry as you are to get contacts in the Indian version. (Hollywood and the American movie-going public—not to mention the growing Indian population in North America—are the new frontier in Indian film marketing.)

You should also do your homework: see some recent Bollywood films so you know the top directors, actors, and songwriters by name and appearance. Check out websites like Bollywoodworld.com and Masala.com for the latest gossip about who’s planning what film with which talent. If a film looks like it will include topics or locations that might involve Western characters, write down the names of the casting agents, directors, producers. Ask your contacts if they know any of these people.

If you can’t find anyone Bollywood-connected while you’re in the United States, you can always fly to Bombay and stay at a hotel in or near Colaba—the center of the old colonial city, where Westerners, apparently nostalgic for the Raj, tend to group. The Colaba area is full of touts who are on the lookout for whites to act as extras when a shoot calls for them. The best places to meet these agents around the Colaba Causeway (the main drag) seem to be Cafe Leopold, the Regal Cinema, the Salvation Army hostel, and the lobby of the President Hotel. Ask around. Hang out. Buy drinks for the touts. And don’t forget to bring headshots and business cards. Touts, casting agents, and directors will all ask for them.

Another, more expensive option for making your face known is to go to clubs and “lounges,” especially in Juhu Beach and Versova. The bars and clubs of the Holiday Inn (oddly enough) and the JW Marriott at Juhu are big Bollywood hangouts, or were when I was there. The best parties in these areas are usually tied to movie premieres or releases of film soundtracks or albums by Bollywood stars. In Juhu, I’ve run across people like Shahrukh Khan and Abhishek Bachchan—escorted by their crowd and bodyguards. The bars and the nightclub at the Taj, in Colaba, attract the Bollywood jetsetters, but given how expensive the Taj is, I’m not sure the cost/benefit ratio of hanging out there is worth it. Still, after only a short time in Bombay, I started to recognize the faces of directors and producers and their friends at these parties. Even if this doesn’t lead to a part in a film, with luck you can at least get invited to better and better parties.

A sketch from from Foy’s notebook

2. I’m interested to hear more about these Bollywood parties. Were they very different from how we imagine a party in Santa Monica of Hollywood insiders? Do you feel you learned anything about how Bollywood sees itself from these celebrations of itself?

As with Hollywood, Bollywood is full of rumors of its elite being involved in drugs, promiscuous sex, and other decadence. The press that covers the industry is still surprisingly coy about such behavior, yet I sensed that there was truth to at least some of these stories. People I trust told me about parties they had attended where they witnessed the debauchery firsthand. I never got that lucky. The last party I went to looked like it was heading in that direction. It was for a charity I can’t remember, at a club on the harbor at Colaba, right next to a shantytown occupied mainly by the Coli, the tribe of fisherfolk who were the original inhabitants of the Bombay area. There were a bunch of mid-to-upper-level Bollywood people there, as well as many jeunesse dorée–publishing scions and the like.

The party was open bar, and the club was set up as an archipelago of islands and walkways dotting a shallow, black reflecting pool filled with floating candles and flowers. Hordes of pretty girls and boys sashayed up and down the walkways; they even had a competition for the best-looking model. I ran into several people I knew, including a gorgeous would-be actress who had gone to school in Belgium and spoke good French. The party was moving on to after-hours events, and the Belgian-Indian told me to tag along. But I’d probably had one or two too many drinks, and I found myself thinking about the shantytown next door, and the people sleeping in the streets not fifty yards away, bundled up on the tarmac, with rats patrolling. I know it’s the classic, guilt-ridden reflex of the Westerner (and probably there was some jealousy in there too, stemming from not being young and gorgeous), but I couldn’t help myself. I ended up dragging an Indian friend out the doors and through the shantytown, as if I had the right to make a moral point with him, given the disparity of riches in my own country. He got mad at me, and rightly so.

3. While you were in Bombay, did you get a sense of the lifestyles of Bollywood’s popular actors? I’ve heard a good deal about the many obligations they have to do commercials and other public-relations work. Did you see any of this firsthand?

The closest I got to Bollywood’s top stars was actually at a publicity event for De Beers, the diamond cartel. De Beers had hired Amitabh Bachchan—the most famous male actor in India, something like George Clooney and Paul Newman rolled into one—to promote its wares. I can only guess at what Bachchan earned, on top of the specially engraved “forevermark” diamond that De Beers gave him with great ceremony. It was incredible: more than one hundred photographers and reporters and cameramen all focused on him and anything he touched. So I guess it was worth it for De Beers, whatever they paid. The company had also hired Tom Alter, the top white actor in India, whom I interview in my article, to be the master of ceremonies. The event was at the Taj Land’s End in Bandra, in the northern suburbs, also on the waterfront—right across the road from the Sea Rock, which was bombed by Muslim extremists a few years ago. There was a buffet seventy-five feet long, with Chinese, Indian and Western food, Moët, vodka bottles encased in ice, and an Austrian laser-light show. As pitchmen, both Alter and Bachchan did their jobs like real professionals. Alter intoned the pitiful PR lines as if they were Hamlet. He told me later that he could spend months working on a fantastic film and make less money than he did in one evening playing this kind of gig.

The Sweet Smell of Success: Coiffed and cutthroat, Sarah Palin gives us the story we’ve been looking for

The Republicans have succeeded in pitting VP against P, inverting their ticket to leave McCain, with his cadaverously stiff bearing, and Biden, with his flaxen ducktail and car salesman’s smile, to stand aside and cluck mildly like chaperones while the younger candidates dance. What’s left is a fraught contest for prom queen.

Sarah Palin’s appeal does not inhere in the much-touted message that she’s Just Like You—it’s that she’s better, but not too much better, than you. She’s the popular girl, the barracuda with a pleasing face, who after ignoring you all year suddenly turns around and invites you to help her streamer the gymnasium and mix the punch. You’re floored! And fascinated. Maybe if you mimic how she does her hair (or invest in one of these, and copy her cute accessories), you’ll benefit from the spillover effects of her status. After all, she has filled her cabinet with her high school pals, and sycophants are welcome: be positive, prop her up, let her know how much she rocks. (Take a leaf from the book of Ivy Frye, a non-wonkish aide who wrote Palin this email.) Perhaps she’ll let you use the tanning bed she had installed in the governor’s mansion.

Luckily, Palin isn’t from Beverly Hills (or Beacon Hill). She’s from Alaska, and Alaskans, we are reminded, are familiar folks, only brawnier, earthier, fishier than the rest of us. They enact recognizable American traditions: Palin ably shoots and guts a moose, just as you hunt your humdrum deer (or shuffle around the supermarket). Todd Palin excels in Iron Dog snowmobile racing, the chillier version of NASCAR. She’s got a Fargo accent, only twangier; she’s a hockey—that’s Alaskan for “soccer”—mom. She out-Wild-Wests the ersatz Texan in Bush, confounds the Turner thesis (thereby allaying our end-of-empire frontier anxieties), and in this way inspires a particular kind of awe.

Barack Obama, in contrast, is less kookily endearing than simply foreign, and thus vaguely threatening. Witness Michelle Obama’s strenuous transformation to doting milquetoast; her favorite television show, as she told us recently, is The Brady Bunch. Nobody’s making luau jokes—it’s all about Kenya, Indonesia, and his Pantheresque pastor. As for achievement, Obama’s are so stellar and sure-footed as to inspire feelings of inadequacy. Without the leg-ups most presidential candidates take for granted—being wealthy, being WASPy, being white—and without much of a father, he did everything anyway, steadily bettering himself: Occidental College to Columbia to president of Harvard’s Law Review. His intelligence, his extemporaneous poise, and the sense that he has worked harder than many gifted people—all this conveys a success that’s earned and perfect, inaccessible, somehow intimidating.

Truly popular girls, on the other hand, aren’t perfect; they’d be “uppity” otherwise. Sarah Palin’s kids have problems? So do yours. Per Steve Schmidt’s exquisite double entendre, “life happens,” just like life has happened to you. But look at how she doesn’t let the knocks get her down. Maybe if you adopted some of her confidence, her unshakable (“You can’t blink,” Charlie) outlook, you’d improve your own lot. She gave her Wasilla hairdresser the same advice: stop whining about the beauty industry and “run for something!” You needn’t move to a big city where smug liberals drink $7 hemp-milk lattes, because it’s all about Attitude.

Americans like their success stories to stay local—that way we can identify the winner when she stops by the grocery store in her slightly newer car. We like to see evidence that They’re Just Like Us, fetching their dry-cleaning, pushing strollers of their peculiarly named children. With Obama and Palin, it boils down to basketball. Twenty-five years ago Sarah Palin led her high school team to the state championship by netting a critical free throw in the last moments of the game despite a cinematically broken ankle. As the underdog, Palin embodies wholesome teenage athleticism and sports movie cliché. Obama’s pinnacle basketball moment occurred just a few months ago, when he was visiting troops in Kuwait. Holding court on the court, he was tossed the ball, made a modest disclaimer, and swish—what The New Yorker called “the three-point shot heard round the world.”

The “elitism” with which he is so often charged is not about wealth or education, but about grace. It appears we like our leaders to rise to the occasion, like the limping Palin. Obama, on the other hand, keeps asking us to meet his standard, and perhaps all those elegant layups and lectures on American promise are too much for us to bear. One can only hope he starts smoking again.

David Foster Wallace

Talking with Jeremy Miller, Author of “Tyranny of the Test”

Jeremy Miller is the author of “Tyranny of the Test,” the September cover story. The article, which explains how No Child Left Behind has changed the structure of our schools–and how “teaching the test” takes more away from students than it gives–was based on his years of experience working as a test-prep “coach” for Kaplan, Inc. Associate Editor Benjamin Austen follows up with Jeremy Miller now that the issue is on newsstands.

1. At some point last year, you decided you wanted to write about working for Kaplan in New York City’s public schools. This kind of reporting, in which the participant’s journalistic intentions are not made explicit, is always complicated. But the issues here seemed to be compounded by your background as a full-time classroom teacher and by your desire to succeed at a job that you increasingly saw as problematic. What were some of the difficulties you faced in reporting this story?

I had to focus on doing a good job—which is to say the job of test-prep coach as defined by Kaplan. While in the schools, I conducted no official interviews. The questions I did pose were restricted to the natural queries that emerged during my day as a Kaplan coach.

Teachers at the schools where I worked expressed concern that corporate tutors like me might actually be working as spies for the Board of Education. This topic came up several times during Kaplan’s training sessions, and we were told to take care to avoid being perceived as such—for instance, we were instructed not to take conspicuous notes during teacher observations. We were also expected to dress in a benign, business-casual way—no suits and ties. The idea was to convey through our dress that we were “in it” with the teachers, that we were one of them, and that we weren’t there to report back to the Chancellor’s office. And there I was, writing about my experiences for publication, a kind of spy.

Do I write about a situation that might potentially embarrass a teacher I came to admire? Do I write candidly about a class I saw devolve into near chaos? How much do I reveal about my journalistic intentions to a background source? I agonized over these questions. In the end, I decided to limit myself to material emblematic of the problems facing underserved schools, especially the problems revealed or intensified by my presence as a Kaplan coach. Many of these moments occurred when I was most closely following the rubric of my job, when I was falling back on my training or angling to do the “right” thing as prescribed by Kaplan.

2. In the article you describe the George Washington High School’s alumni “Wall of Fame” and a letter that Henry Kissinger wrote to say he wouldn’t be able to attend his own Hall of Fame induction ceremony. I cut this detail about Kissinger’s letter when I edited the piece, but you were adamant that it be included. Why was it so important?

Of all the small, telling details I encountered in the schools, this one stood out to me. Here’s an American icon, a person who has devoted himself tirelessly to the projection of American power abroad but who has nothing but empty platitudes to offer the students of his alma mater. It seemed to crystallize perfectly the tendency of our leaders to look outward rather than inward. NCLB, which offers top-down, mostly ineffectual remedies for the nation’s ailing schools, is resonant with Kissinger’s letter. Alan Greenspan, another George Washington alum, was invited to participate in the ceremonies and also declined.

3. Is there any merit to the work that testing companies are doing in public schools? Are there conscientious testing companies out there that are using the mandates of NCLB to better serve schools with high-poverty populations?

As a Kaplan coach moving in and out of these underserved schools, I was painfully aware that the money I was being paid could have been spent in other ways. In most schools I visited, the clocks and the drinking fountains rarely worked—they seemed to me like barometers of neglect and decay. Children notice these broken-down things. From this evidence, they devise a reasonable hypothesis: This is what the people in charge think of me.

In a city where nearly half of all teachers leave the profession in five years, it was difficult not to imagine that the money I was being paid could have gone toward addressing this chronic problem. Could this money have been used to hire more teachers, equalizing pay scales between New York City and its affluent suburbs, or to fund intensive recruitment of experienced teachers, or to train much-needed special-education and ESL teachers?

I’m critical of the day-to-day work performed by test-prep companies in public schools. But I hope it is clear that I’m most critical of NCLB, the federal policy that has allowed private companies to perform expensive test prep that rarely addresses the systemic causes of failure in these schools.

4. What should happen with test-prep services in public schools?

If companies like Kaplan take a contract with a school, they should become accountable in a meaningful way for that school’s academic fate. Reporting of pre- and post-prep performance statistics should be mandatory and part of the public record, not locked away in corporate databases and released only when the data can be massaged into an attractive piece of PR. It would mean that schools and prep companies could work constructively in developing “real” customized curricula, designed to meet the needs of individual schools, not of states or districts. It would probably also mean the end of huge profit margins and the $100 per-hour coach.

5. What happened with Kaplan? What are you doing now?

I had worked on and off for Kaplan for nine years—as a private tutor, as a classroom teacher, even as a manager—and when I finally disclosed that I was writing this story, they had to do “research” to determine the length and nature of my tenure. And I still have not formally resigned. They’re a global, multibillion-dollar enterprise, and just as they don’t have a clear understanding of the public schools in which they do their work, they don’t seem to have a clear idea of who is working for them. So leaving the company often involves no more than ceasing to respond to the announcements for new school assignments.

I have moved with my wife to Denver and have taken a job as a biology teacher in a small charter school. The school works with a large population of at-risk students in what seems to be a productive learning environment. I’m excited about the upcoming school year. I’m trying my best to understand how I can use the school’s guiding principles to help students on the academic fringe. I’d almost forgotten how tiring teaching is supposed to be.

OIL!

The New York Times reports today that BP, Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Total—which is to say, five of the six largest oil companies on Earth—“are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq.”

This may be one of the least surprising developments in human history, yet that very predictability may also give some comfort to those of us who would like to believe, against all other evidence, that we live in a rational–albeit unjust–universe.