Todo mundo sabe que Bolsonaro tem concepções toscas e rudimentares sobre assuntos sensíveis como o homossexualidade, a violência, a esquerda e a liberdade de imprensa. A julgar pelas últimas façanhas do presidente eleito, o Planalto não vai estancar sua verve autoritária.
O capitão tentou impedir que jornalistas entrassem no plenário do Congresso na comemoração aos 30 anos da Constituição Federal, trocou os pés pelas mãos em temas de política externa e anunciou, como um cacique arteiro, o fim do Ministério do Trabalho.
Também deu a luz ao Superministério da Justiça e da Segurança Pública, trazendo para a barra de sua saia o juiz que condenou, prendeu e tirou Lula da corrida eleitoral.
De qualquer forma alçado à condição de herói nacional pelo que fez na Lava Jato, Sérgio Moro, prestes a debutar na política depois de negar sua pretensão em pelo menos sete oportunidades, pode ser um muro de contenção aos disparates do novo governo. Para isso, precisa colocar em prática medidas do livro que empunhava durante o voo que o levou ao Rio de Janeiro para selar a sua indicação ao Ministério da Justiça.
A cartilha “Novas medidas contra a corrupção”, de iniciativa do portal Transparência Internacional e da Fundação Getulio Vargas, contém 70 proposições divididas em 12 blocos. Algumas delas, destacadas abaixo, parecem mais sensíveis à futura atuação do Sérgio Moro como ministro da Justiça. Se conseguir implementá-las apesar do ambiente em que ele próprio, Moro, foi gestado, já teremos algum avanço.
Capa do livro “Novas medidas contra a corrupção”, da Fundação Getúlio Vargas e da Transparência Internacional.
Imagem: Reprodução/FGV
Como é hoje: uma lei de 1965 regulamenta a matéria, mas possui baixíssima eficácia. Prevê, dentre outras sanções, pena de dez dias a seis meses de detenção. É comum que os crimes apurados de acordo com essa lei prescrevam.
O que propõe a cartilha: estabelece a responsabilização de agentes públicos que cometem atos de excesso de poder ou desvio de finalidade. Prevê como possíveis sanções, além da prisão e multa, o dever de indenizar o dano causado pelo crime, a perda do cargo, mandato ou função pública, a inabilitação para o exercício de cargo, mandato ou função pública por prazo de um a cinco anos, e penas restritivas de direito, incluindo a suspensão do exercício do cargo, mandato ou função pública e a proibição de exercer função de natureza policial ou militar em prazo de um a três anos.
Medida 25: Extinção da aposentadoria compulsória como penaComo é hoje: as Leis Orgânicas da Magistratura Nacional e do Ministério Público da União e dos Estados preveem a aposentadoria compulsória como uma das punições aos seus membros por infrações funcionais. Na prática, isso significa que, por exemplo, o juiz ou promotor de Justiça que cometer ato de corrupção pode ser aposentado e continuar recebendo remuneração.
O que propõe a cartilha: elimina a hipótese da aposentadoria compulsória como sanção e confere maior celeridade aos processos que investigam e punem membros do Judiciário e do Ministério Público.
Medida 26: Unificação do regime disciplinar do MPComo é hoje: o Ministério Público foi um dos grandes protagonistas nas operações que, nos últimos anos, trouxeram à tona casos escandalosos de corrupção nacional. Mas há gente que reclama que seus poderes não conhecem barreiras e que precisam ser limitados para que não haja excessos.
O que propõe a cartilha: cria um regime disciplinar para o Ministério Público, prevendo condutas irregulares, sanções cabíveis e regras do processo administrativo disciplinar a ser seguidas.
Medida 29: Transparência na seleção de ministros do STFComo é hoje: de acordo com a Constituição, o Supremo Tribunal Federal possui 11 Ministros, escolhidos entre cidadãos com mais de 35 e menos de 65 anos de idade, de “notável saber jurídico e reputação ilibada”. Depois de sabatinados e aprovados pela maioria absoluta do Senado, eles são nomeados pelo presidente da República.
O que propõe a cartilha: confere maior transparência ao processo de seleção de ministros do STF e impõe uma quarentena prévia, vedando a indicação de ocupantes de determinados cargos para a Suprema Corte, e posterior, proibindo que ministros concorram a cargos eletivos no prazo de quatro anos após saírem do tribunal.
Medida 41: Regulamentação do LobbyComo é hoje: a prática do lobby é uma realidade inegável, mas sua imagem é negativa. No cenário obscuro e malvisto das relações entre governo e iniciativa privada, o lobista é geralmente associado a alguém que se aproxima do Estado para corromper os agentes políticos e agir por baixo dos panos.
O que propõe a cartilha: a regulamentação profissional do lobby para conferir a maior transparência e mecanismos adicionais de controle social. A proposta busca ainda oferecer maior equilíbrio nas interações de diferentes interesses econômicos e sociais com autoridades públicas.
——
Na concepção dos seus idealizadores, as Novas medidas constituem uma política de Estado pautada em abordagem técnica. Ataca em frentes simultâneas e conta com a participação da sociedade civil para fomentar a atividade legislativa anticorrupção. É uma agenda pela qual o país anseia e da qual necessita.
Mas Bolsonaro já dá sinais de que se arrependeu de ter dado carta branca a Moro. Conforme o Valor Econômico, ele se antecipou e já puxou as rédeas do juiz, colocando o General Heleno Pereira, militar da reserva de su confiança, no comando do Gabinete de Segurança Institucional, que agora coordena os serviços de inteligência da Polícia Federal. Além disso, manteve a Controladoria-Geral da União como pasta separada da Justiça.
Sérgio Moro está pisando em ovos. Ele já não está mais no silêncio de seu gabinete, a sós com sua consciência jurídica. Sua metamorfose – de juiz herói da nação a político de um governo de extrema-direita – vai cobrar a conta.
Quando isso acontecer, o superministro precisará mostrar ao Brasil a que veio. Mesmo com a sombra do coronel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra à espreita.
The post Torça para que Moro siga o livro que levou à casa de Bolsonaro appeared first on The Intercept.
Richard Ojeda is running for president. Ojeda, a West Virginia state senator and retired U.S. Army major, lost his congressional bid in the state’s 3rd District on Tuesday, but saw the largest swing of Trump voters toward Democrats in any district around the country — overperforming 2016 by more than 35 points. Still, in a district that Donald Trump carried by 49 points, Ojeda, who rose to prominence because of his support for a teachers strike in West Virginia, lost by 12 points.
Ojeda’s case for his candidacy is straightforward: The Democratic Party has gotten away from its roots, and he has a unique ability to win over a white, black, and brown working-class coalition by arguing from a place of authority that Trump is a populist fraud. He’s launching his campaign with an anti-corruption focus that draws a contrast with Trump’s inability to “drain the swamp.”
His authority — and one of his greatest liabilities — would come, in part, from his own previous support of Trump in the 2016 general election. After backing Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary, Ojeda refused to support Hillary Clinton, seeing her as an embodiment of the party’s drift toward the elite.
“The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party that fights for the working class, and that’s exactly what I do.”“I have been a Democrat ever since I registered to vote, and I’ll stay a Democrat, but that’s because of what the Democratic Party was supposed to be,” he told The Intercept. “The reason why the Democratic Party fell from grace is because they become nothing more than elitist. That was it. Goldman Sachs, that’s who they were. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party that fights for the working class, and that’s exactly what I do. I will stand with unions wholeheartedly, and that’s the problem: the Democratic Party wants to say that, but their actions do not mirror that.”
Ojeda turned on Trump early in his term, concluding that the president’s interest in improving the lives of working people like those Ojeda grew up with in West Virginia, or served with in the military, was fake. Now, he wants to break the spell Trump still holds on half the country.
“We have a person that has come down to areas like Appalachia and has tried…and has convinced these people that he is for them, when in reality the people that he has convinced couldn’t even afford to play one round of golf on his fancy country club,” Ojeda said.
As a state senator, Ojeda led a push to legalize medical marijuana and played a central role in this year’s teacher walkouts that resulted in a rare pay increase for educators. In his congressional race, he ran on a thoroughly pro-labor, progressive platform, despite the partisan lean of the district, framing issues as pitting people against corrupt, out-of-touch elites. He focused heavily on the role of Big Pharma in sparking the opioid epidemic.
His energetic campaign style and pull-no-punches approach made him the focus of national attention during his congressional run. His announcement that he will run for president, which is first being reported by The Intercept, makes him one of the first Democrats to formally declare their intentions for 2020. Moves are being made early this year. As The Intercept reported over the summer, former Obama administration official Julián Castro floated a run as early as last summer, and there are already close to a dozen people considered likely to join him on the trail, including Sanders; Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Jeff Merkley; and former Vice President Joe Biden. A handful of billionaires, including Michael Bloomberg, have also floated the possibility.
Ojeda made his decision to run after surveying the field of potential presidential contenders and concluding that none of them would be able to stand up to Trump in the way that he could and draw the contrast that’s needed. “We’re going to have quite a few lifetime politicians that are going to throw their hat in the ring, but I guarantee you there’s going to be a hell of a lot more of them than there are people like myself — that is, a working-class person that basically can relate to the people on the ground, the people that are actually struggling,” he said. “I’m not trying to throw stones at people that are rich, but once again, we will have a field that will be full of millionaires and, I’m sure, a few billionaires.”
Speculation in Washington has begun to focus on the possibility that the ultimate Democratic nominee for president is not someone currently being discussed as a frontrunner. A recent poll found “none of the above” topped the list of presumed candidates.
Ojeda was backed in his House bid by the People’s House Project, a political action committee run by former congressional candidate and MSNBC host Krystal Ball. She’s supporting his presidential run, but acknowledged in an interview that he’s an unusual candidate for today’s Democratic Party. “I think the biggest challenge for Richard is whether or not people actually want real change. Whether they actually want a nation. Or if they’d prefer to just keep their tribes and their grievances,” she said.
Ojeda said he has never been to Iowa or New Hampshire — the states whose caucus and primary, respectively, formally kick off election season — but plans to make trips to both soon. As he prepares to campaign, Ojeda, who first assumed political office in 2016, will likely have to grapple with multiple immediate objections to his candidacy, even beyond his vote for Trump: political experience, identity, and his ties to coal country among them.
The Democratic Party’s coalition is fueled by women and an increasingly diverse base. When I asked if a white man from West Virginia could understand what was behind the Black Lives Matter movement, he argued that his experience living in and among the working class — which is heavily made up of black and Hispanic people — gives him insight into that struggle. “I can understand it far better than the millionaires and billionaires sitting around the conference tables in Washington, D.C. That’s a fact. Guess what? I’ve worked side by side with those people; I’ve served in the military with the people that lived in those communities,” he said. “I know far more about that life than [elites in Washington] know about that life. So when someone stands up that has a bank account that’s got $50 or $60 million in it, I personally could care less what they have to say about how they’re gonna … how they know what a single parent who is trying to put food on the table feels. Because they don’t.”
His identity, meanwhile, is not so simple. While both his grandparents worked in the West Virginia mines, as is common in the state, one of them immigrated illegally from Mexico to do so. One of his grandparents, after fighting in World World II, died in a mining accident. The Spanish pronunciation of the last name — “O-Hayda” — was tricky for people in the region, and it has evolved to “O-Jeddah.” Ojeda’s father, meanwhile, did not follow the career path into the mines, instead becoming a certified registered nurse anesthetist.
His lack of political experience, he said, should not be mistaken for a lack of organizational leadership experience. While he enlisted in the Army as a private out of high school, he said, he rose through the ranks to oversee a vast operation. “When I started in the military, I started as a private, the lowest rank you could possibly go, but I was also the chief of operations for the 20th Airborne engineers in Iraq, where we were in control of over 7,000 engineers. And every single operation that went on throughout the entire country of Iraq went through my JOC, and I was the chief of operations,” he said. The military helped put Ojeda through college and graduate school, and he now uses his experience overseas to argue against militarism and in favor of a diplomatic approach.
Another objection to his long-shot bid could come from the environmental community, which may worry that his advocacy for coal miners, and his roots in Logan County, West Virginia, would mean that he would push a fossil fuel dependent energy economy. Ojeda said that wouldn’t be the case, but he did note that he sees a limited use for metallurgical coal — which is mined in West Virginia — in the production of steel.
“If we can bail out the banks, there’s no reason we can’t create opportunity for the people who brought light to this country.”“I think it’s time for us to stop lying. Coal, in terms of energy, is gonna be overtaken; [natural] gas can do just as much far cheaper — it’s not gonna come back the way it was,” he said. “In terms of things like coal production, I just want to bring something to be able to replace, to give them an option. The fault lies in the leadership of the past; coal operators never wanted anything to challenge them. The truth is, we’ve got to offer these people options so they can transition to other jobs, and it can’t be minimum wage jobs. … If we can bail out the banks, there’s no reason we can’t create opportunity for the people who brought light to this country.”
His campaign will roll out a climate and environment plank soon, he said, but he wants to launch his campaign with a focus on lobbying and corruption in Washington, which he sees as a major obstacle to progress. To that end, he’s proposing an atypical suite of policy solutions: Members of Congress, he proposes, should be required to donate their net wealth above a certain threshold — Ojeda puts it at a million dollars — to discourage using public office for private gain. In return, retired members of Congress would get a pension of $130,000 a year and be able to earn additional income to reach $250,000. Anything above that would be donated.
“When you get into politics, that’s supposed to be a life of service, but that’s not what it’s been. You know, a person goes into politics, they win a seat in Congress or the Senate, and it’s a $174,000 [salary], but yet two years later, they’re worth $30 million, and that’s one of the problems that we have in society today. That’s how come no one trusts — or has very much respect for — politicians,” he said.
The notion of sacrificing for public service may seem radical, but it’s anything but that for millions of people in the military, said Ojeda. “Our servicemen that are in the military right now, staff sergeants in the United States Army out there in harm’s way, qualify for food stamps, but they truly live a life of selfless service,” he said. “Where I come from, the average family income is $44,000. So to me, this right here is something that everybody can relate to. We’re sick and tired of watching people that say that they’re going to fight for the people and run for office, but in reality they get in there and all they do is increase their wealth and power.”
He plans to pair that with other provocative ideas, such as requiring lobbyists to wear body cameras.
Ojeda, in positioning himself against Trump, is meeting right-wing populism with a left-wing variety. He uses language that is as direct as Trump’s, but unlike the president, he targets the nation’s elites, rather than vilifying vulnerable communities.
“The filthy rich convinced the dirt poor [that] the filthy rich are the ones who care,” he said. “We need someone in Washington, D.C., who’s going to be a voice for these people.”
Ryan Grim is the author of the forthcoming book, We’ve Got People: Resistance and Rebellion, From Jim Crow to Donald Trump. Sign up here to get an email when it is published.
Update: November 12, 2018
A previous headline on this story stated that Richard Ojeda led the West Virginia teachers strike. The headline has been clarified to reflect the fact that he played a key role in the strike but it was led by the state’s public school teachers.
The post Richard Ojeda, West Virginia Lawmaker Who Backed Teachers Strikes, Will Run for President appeared first on The Intercept.
Why, exactly, did Donald Trump not join Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and Justin Trudeau at Saturday’s commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the original Armistice Day? I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone outside the White House does at this point.
What I do know is that one hypothesis that has shown up in many stories about his no-show—that Marine One, the presidential helicopter, “can’t fly” in the rain—doesn’t make sense.
As you’re looking for explanations, you can dismiss this one. Helicopters can fly just fine in the rain, and in conditions way worse than prevailed in Paris on November 10.
First, about helicopters and weather. (What follows is based on my having held an instrument rating as an airplane pilot for the past 20 years, and having worked in the Carter-era White House and occasionally having been aboard the Marine One of that era.)
There is nothing special about the rain-worthiness of the helicopter any president normally uses. In principle, any helicopter can fly in clouds or rain. The complications would be:
Icing: This is one of the big weather-related perils of flying. (The other is thunderstorms.) If (a) an aircraft is inside the clouds, and (b) the temperature is at freezing or below (down to about -15°C or -20°C, when it becomes so cold that the water behaves differently), there's a risk of icing: ice piling up on the wings, control surfaces, etc. This changes the shape of the airfoils, and it essentially makes a plane unable to fly. This was part of the story of the commuter plane that crashed going into Buffalo a few years ago. I did a long illustrated post about what icing looks like, and how it kills, back in 2011. Other posts are here and here.
But this only happens if a plane or helicopter is actually in the clouds (“visible moisture” is one of the requirements), and for a helicopter that, in turn, would mean a ceiling so low that a helicopter could not fly beneath it, clear of the clouds. Or, it could occur if the temperature profile were such that you get “freezing rain”—rain falling through a super-cooled atmospheric layer and being at or below 0°C when it hits, thus instantly freezing on whatever surface it touches.
Extremely low ceiling: If the ground were essentially fog-covered, so the pilot couldn't judge when he was about to touch down, that could be too dangerous to fly in. Think London pea-soup fog, or a bad day in Beijing.
So: Helicopters cannot safely fly inside the clouds when it's below freezing, and they can't safely or prudently land when there is dense fog or other very low-ceiling circumstances. And they cannot fly safely if it's extremely windy and gusty—which can make it dangerous to land.
Otherwise just about any helicopter can fly in rain, bad weather, etc.
From photos of Paris and the commemoration site Saturday, it didn’t appear that the ceiling was so low (or the temperature so cold) that icing would be a real factor. So just now I have dug up the archived “METARS”—the aviation-related weather reports—for Saturday at Orly airport in Paris, the closest reporting station to where Donald Trump was. Here’s the raw data for Saturday’s Orly METARs, at half-hour intervals essentially from dawn to dusk:
|
SA |
10/11/2018 17:30-> |
METAR LFPO 101730Z 20010KT 9999 BKN012 12/10 Q1002 NOSIG= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 17:00-> |
METAR LFPO 101700Z 20011KT 160V220 9999 BKN012 13/11 Q1002 NOSIG= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 16:30-> |
METAR LFPO 101630Z 20010KT 9999 BKN011 13/11 Q1002 NOSIG= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 16:00-> |
METAR LFPO 101600Z 20010KT 9999 BKN011 13/11 Q1002 NOSIG= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 15:30-> |
METAR LFPO 101530Z 23007KT 190V260 9999 BKN010 13/11 Q1001 NOSIG= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 15:00-> |
METAR LFPO 101500Z 20010KT 9999 BKN010 13/11 Q1001 NOSIG= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 14:30-> |
METAR LFPO 101430Z 20010KT 170V230 7000 -RA BKN010 13/11 Q1001 TEMPO 2500 RA BKN006= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 14:00-> |
METAR LFPO 101400Z NIL= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 13:30-> |
METAR LFPO 101330Z 21010KT 170V250 9999 -RA BKN011 12/11 Q1001 TEMPO 2500 RA BKN006= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 13:00-> |
METAR LFPO 101300Z 21009KT 180V250 9999 -RA BKN010 12/11 Q1001 TEMPO 2500 RA BKN006= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 12:30-> |
METAR LFPO 101230Z 25010KT 7000 -RA BKN010 12/11 Q1001 TEMPO 2500 RA BKN006= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 12:00-> |
METAR LFPO 101200Z 19012KT 9999 -RA BKN009 12/11 Q1001 TEMPO 2500 RA BKN006= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 11:30-> |
METAR LFPO 101130Z 20011KT 3000 -RA BR BKN006 OVC013 12/11 Q1001 TEMPO 2500 RA BKN006= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 11:00-> |
METAR LFPO 101100Z 19011KT 2700 -RA BR OVC006 11/11 Q1002 NOSIG= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 10:30-> |
METAR LFPO 101030Z NIL= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 10:00-> |
METAR LFPO 101000Z 18011KT 6000 RA BKN008 11/10 Q1002 NOSIG= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 09:30-> |
METAR LFPO 100930Z 19011KT 7000 RA BKN010 11/10 Q1002 TEMPO 4000 RA BKN009= |
|
SA |
10/11/2018 09:00-> |
METAR LFPO 100900Z 18010KT 9999 -RA BKN010 11/10 Q1002 TEMPO 4000 RA BKN009= |
I am not going to bother to decode this all. (Being able to read METARs is part of ground school in the learning-to-fly process.) But here are the essentials:
On Saturday morning, the weather in Paris was rainy and overcast—bad weather, but not any exceptional aeronautical challenge. The worst conditions during the day in Paris were at noon, when there was an overcast ceiling of 600 feet. (“101100Z 19011KT 2700 -RA BR OVC006”. The -RA means “light rain.” The BR means “mist,” and the mnemonic for remembering it is “Baby Rain.”) As a benchmark: To get an instrument rating, whether in an airplane or a helicopter, you have to show the ability to fly an approach “to minimums,” which (depending on the airport and the approach system) can be as low as 200 to 300 feet. Still, on Saturday morning, a helicopter trip from Paris would probably have meant spending part of the time in the clouds. The temperature in Paris through the morning was 11 to 12 degrees Centigrade, or the low 50s Fahrenheit. That is not very cold. The normal “lapse rate” for air temperature is about 2 degrees Centigrade colder for each thousand feet you go up. In normal circumstances, that would mean that the freezing level was at an elevation of around 6,000 feet. (To spell it out: 12°C at ground level, minus 2 for each thousand feet, means that you reach 0°C around 6,000 feet up.) So at an altitude of 3,000 or 4,000 feet this would not be an icing-peril scenario. It was not very windy. Through the morning the wind was reported at 11 or 12 knots—not enough to worry about.Of course, safety considerations are different when a president is traveling. The pilots and maintenance practices of Marine One are presumably the best that can be found, but the play-it-safe factor when carrying a president has to be larger than for other missions. So who knows whether some aviation official really said: Sorry, this is no-go.
But precisely because of those cautions and complexities, any known-universe past presidential travel plan would have a bad-weather option, or several of those, already lined up. This is the way it has worked in any White House I've been aware of.
Why didn’t an American president go to a once-in-a-lifetime ceremony? Might it have been a still-undisclosed security threat? Something else that Donald Trump had to do?
I don’t know. I do know that whatever the obstacle was, it wasn’t that “helicopters can’t fly in the clouds and rain.”
‘Camp Fire’: “Forest fires might be seen as the particularly horrific edge of a sword that is coming for us all,” writes Robinson Meyer on the two massive wildfires—the Camp and Woolsey fires—that have devastated communities in both the northern and southern parts of California. These conditions suggest the worst is yet to come.
On Veterans Day: President Donald Trump’s Paris visit over the weekend, and what he chose to say and do—or not—on the 100th anniversary of the end to the fighting in World War I, has underscored to European leaders like Emmanuel Macron of France that the U.S. administration’s “America First” message means just that. What else we’re thinking about on Veterans Day: Read our November 2017 series featuring perspectives from veterans on issues from universal health care to women in military service to how PTSD impacts children.
Birthright: What happens when a nation limits birthright citizenship? This Caribbean country offers a lesson on what follows, writes Jonathan M. Katz.
Snapshot
"America is a dream, a vision, a miracle based on one noble idea," Stan Lee wrote in a piece—illustrated in the above panel by Anthony Winn—for The Atlantic's 150th anniversary issue in November 2007. "But an idea, despite its awesome power, can be dangerously vulnerable." See the full piece here. Lee, whose name has become synonymous with the American superhero comic, died Monday at age 95.Evening ReadIn 2000, Florida gave us a recount that ended with the Supreme Court showdown Bush v. Gore. But a more instructive moment to look to as the state begins historic recounts might instead be this 1985 Congressional race in Indiana, writes the historian Julian E. Zelizer:
Arguably, the Bloody Eighth is what led to the eventual GOP takeover of the House, under Newt Gingrich, in 1994. The Bloody Eighth was his trial run, and the 1994 election his proof of concept. Thus even though Democrats won their seat, they lost the long-term narrative.
When pundits look back at the 2000 presidential election, the lesson they tend to draw is that what really matters in a recount is raw power. Who cares that the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision was, by many lights, among the most partisan, least legitimate rulings ever issued? George W. Bush, not Al Gore, became president.
But what’s at stake in this year’s recount is not the presidency—it’s a Senate seat that won’t determine which party controls that chamber, and a governorship that was previously in Republican hands. Of course the result matters, but, as in the fight over the Bloody Eighth, the narrative matters, too. Indeed, how the public perceives the process could influence the 2020 election (and beyond) more than the actual outcome. Which side will claim the mantle of justice? Which will end up looking corrupt?
What Do You Know … About Education?1. In what was effectively the first-ever State of the Union address delivered at the then-provisional U.S. capital of New York City, this president pushed forward the idea of a national university in America.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. This public-schools superintendent and Democratic gubernatorial candidate defeated the two-term Wisconsin governor Scott Walker in last week’s midterm elections, running with a focus on education policy.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. According to a recent national survey, 58 percent of white people with a college degree say that America has gotten better since 1950. But this percentage of white people without a college degree say it’s gotten worse.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: George Washington / Tony Evers / 57
Dear TherapistEvery week, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions in the Dear Therapist column. This week, Evan from Delaware writes in about stressful living in a multigenerational household:
I am 24 years old and have lived at home with my grandparents and mother since I was in college. It was a nice arrangement for many of those years, and the deal has been simple: I get to live at home for basically nothing, and in return I clean, run errands, occasionally cook, and take care of whatever they need. In addition to this, for the past eight months I have been working part-time, and I’m actively seeking full-time work.
However, about seven months ago the arrangement changed rather dramatically. My grandfather had been suffering mildly from Parkinson’s disease and had not had many issues, but one day he fell and ended up in the hospital. This was followed by a short stay at a recovery home, and finally he came back home …
My grandfather has gotten better since then, but much of the same routine continues, with me being at my grandparents’ and mother’s beck and call for everything from the essential to the mundane. Every day I become more and more annoyed by their endless requests and nitpicking. I feel like home is just another job, and it’s hard to open up or connect to someone my own age about it, because no one I know is in the same situation.
Read Lori’s advice, and write to her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
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Written by Madeleine Carlisle (@maddiecarlisle2) and Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey)
Today in 5 LinesMultiple wildfires have engulfed California. The Camp Fire in Northern California is now the deadliest wildfire in modern California history, with 29 confirmed dead. The Woolsey Fire raging in the southern part of the state has forced 265,000 people to evacuate in Ventura and Los Angeles counties.
Mississippi Democratic Senate candidate Mike Espy criticized his opponent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith after a video emerged of her joking about attending a “public hanging.” Espy and Hyde-Smith will enter a runoff on November 27, and if Epsy wins he will be the state’s first black Senator since Reconstruction. Hyde-Smith has not apologized for her comments.
A Florida judged ruled against Senate candidate Rick Scott’s lawsuit alleging voter fraud in Broward County. In Georgia, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams filed a lawsuit on Sunday to block two counties from rejecting absentee ballots with minor mistakes, potentially pushing the election into a run-off.
Arizona’s Senate race has not been called, but Democratic candidate Kyrsten Sinema’s lead over Republican Martha McSally has widened.
Police officers responding to a shooting early Sunday morning in Midlothian, Illinois shot and killed the 26-year-old black security guard, Jemel Roberson, who was on duty at the bar. The Cook County Sheriff’s office has launched an investigation into Roberson’s death.
Today on The AtlanticCalifornia, Ablaze: Three of California’s five largest fires on record have occurred in the last three years. The worst is likely yet to come. (Robinson Meyer)
‘Institutionalized Terror’: What happens when a nation ends birthright citizenship? Jonathan M. Katz looks at a case study of one country that did: The Dominican Republic.
Trump 2020: Despite the the Republican Party’s recent losses in the House, here’s why President Trump has a good shot at being reelected. (David A. Graham)
Shame on Amazon: The company's 14-month performative bidding war for its second headquarters is not only disgraceful, but should be illegal, writes Derek Thompson.
Remembering Matthew: As America struggles to confront bigotry, Matthew Shepard's legacy remains pertinent, writes Megan Garber.
Snapshot
Firefighters battle the Woolsey Fire as it continues to burn in Malibu, California, U.S., on November 11, 2018. (Eric Thayer / Reuters)What We’re ReadingA Lesson in Kansas: Democrat Laura Kelly beat Trump-aligned candidate Kris Kobach in the Kansas gubernatorial race last Tuesday. How Kobachlost could be a playbook for how Democrats can defeat Trumpism. (Jane Mayer, The New Yorker)
The Forgotten Culture War: American conservatives were once staunch opponents of pornography. Now it’s a rapidly growing industry—with few adversaries. (Tim Alberta, Politico)
The Rise of E-Carceration: Michelle Alexander writes that the current trends of criminal justice reform toward dependence on algorithms and electronic monitoring risk building a new system “more dangerous and more difficult to challenge than the one we hope to leave behind.” (The New York Times)
A Star Is Born: Who Is Dan Crenshaw? The Republican Congressman-elect who appeared on SNL over the weekend is a rising star in the Republican Party. (Dan Zak, The Washington Post)
What a Wall Can’t Stop: As the Trump administration pushes for more border wall, the amount of smuggling tunnels running under the U.S.-Mexico border has only increased. (Sarah Troy, High Country News)
VisualizedThink Locally: Republicans still control large swaths of state politics. But Democrats made headway in the midterms. (Emily Badger, Quoctrung Bui, and Adams Pearce, The New York Times)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
Matthew Palmer’s mother, Susan, doesn’t believe in clairvoyance. She can’t reconcile that, however, with the fact that a psychic predicted—with inexplicable accuracy—her husband’s untimely death. It would happen, said the fortune teller, when her son turned 13. At that point, Susan didn’t even have a son.
After Palmer was born, his parents would sometimes joke about the psychic’s prediction. Then, three weeks following Palmer’s 13th birthday, his father died. Susan recounts the eerie story in What the Psychic Saw, Palmer’s short documentary, told entirely through archival home videos and a recorded phone call with his mother.
“I only learned of the impact the psychic’s words had on my mom while making this film,” Palmer told The Atlantic. According to the filmmaker, the shock and trauma of his father’s sudden death left Susan with limited emotional capacity. She couldn’t process the fact that the prediction had come true.
“It wasn’t until about a year later, when life became more stable and manageable emotionally, that I reflected on the prediction,” Susan said. “At that point, my reaction was one of awe and discomfort.”
Like his mother, Palmer doesn’t believe that psychics can predict the future. “But the fact that this one did just that still amazes [my mother],” Palmer said. “A few times when she’s told the story, she ends it with some variation of ‘Who knows?’ as if to say that maybe—just maybe—some people know things about the universe that we don’t.”
Stan Lee was just 16 when he got his first job in the comic-book industry; in 1939 he joined Timely Comics, a new pulp division belonging to the publisher Martin Goodman. Born Stanley Lieber, the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants dreamed of writing the “Great American Novel.” He later said he took the nom de plume Stan Lee out of embarrassment: “People had no respect for comic books at all. Most parents didn’t want their children to read [them].” After a nearly 80-year career in comics, Lee died Monday at the age of 95 as the ultimate icon of the industry, the creator of characters like the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the X-Men. His name is essentially synonymous with the American superhero comic, which has become an art form unto itself.
Lee’s initial work saw him keeping the inkwells filled and getting lunch orders. He quickly graduated to proofreading and editing, making his writing debut on a small story in 1941’s Captain America Comics Issue No. 3. Lee worked with legends like Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Bill Everett, and Syd Shores before entering the U.S. Army in 1942. Upon his return, Timely Comics had been renamed Atlas, and superheroes had fallen out of vogue. Lee dutifully worked within the popular genres of the ’50s—romance, Westerns, and sci-fi—but he came close to quitting the industry out of boredom.
But by the late 1950s, the Atlas rival DC Comics had successfully revived some of its heroes past, including the Flash and the Justice League of America. Intrigued, Goodman assigned Lee and Kirby the task of creating their own superhero book, though Lee (who was given to mythmaking) said that his wife played a part in nudging him toward writing a comic he actually wanted to read. Together, Lee and Kirby produced The Fantastic Four, about a team blessed with unique powers, in 1961.
It was a commercial sensation, one that stood out from most comic books because of its tremendous sense of pathos. Superheroes, until then, had been framed as one-dimensional forces of justice, pillars of honor and duty serving a higher cause. The Fantastic Four were prone to bickering, wrestled with romantic drama of their own, and were recognizably flawed people, each with the potential to be remote, hotheaded, or arrogant. Lee and Kirby collaborated on Fantastic Four for 102 issues; the “Galactus trilogy,” spanning issues 48 to 50, is the indisputable pinnacle of the so-called Silver Age of comic books.
[Read: Stan Lee’s definition of the American idea, in comic form]
Lee and Kirby created many vital characters together, including the X-Men, the Hulk, the Avengers, Nick Fury, the Silver Surfer, and Thor; Lee also created Spider-Man and Doctor Strange with the recently departed Steve Ditko, Iron Man with Don Heck and Kirby, Daredevil with Everett, and many more. Lee relied on a writing approach he dubbed “the Marvel method,” where he would create a short story synopsis, the artists would draw the story themselves and create the plot-by-plot details, and then Lee would fill in the dialogue (he was fond of hyperbolic narration, goofy one-liners, and topical references).
That method led to many disputes over the years with Lee’s top collaborators. Certainly visionaries like Kirby and Ditko deserved just as much credit for the characters they created, though Lee was often reticent to grant it. The extent of Lee’s contributions to any particular Marvel Comics issue can be argued over endlessly, but the writer played a huge role in making comic-book storytelling what it is today. He emphasized character as much as action; was fond of serialized, soapy twists; and tried to keep his heroes relevant to the age they lived in, rooting stories in the countercultural movements of the day.
In 1972, Lee stopped writing comics and became Marvel’s publisher. He gradually transitioned into a figurehead role for the company, serving as a mascot of sorts and only occasionally writing issues. Still, his imprimatur remained crucial to Marvel as it continued to evolve with the times. By 2008, when the company made the risky play of launching its own film series with Iron Man, Lee was there to film a cameo role and give a sly wink and nod to the audience.
“I used to be embarrassed because I was just a comic-book writer while other people were building bridges or going on to medical careers,” Lee, who eventually took his pseudonym as his legal name, once said. “And then I began to realize: Entertainment is one of the most important things in people’s lives. Without it, they might go off the deep end. I feel that if you’re able to entertain, you’re doing a good thing. When you’re seeing how happy the fans are—as they [see up-close] the people who tell the stories, who illustrated them, the TV personalities—I realize: It’s a great thing to entertain people.”
Throughout his decades in the industry, that was Lee’s primary impulse: to entertain. Few can claim such a long legacy of sheer joy in their art, and whatever initial embarrassment he felt filling up those inkwells at Timely Comics, it vanished long ago. ’Nuff said.
As Florida begins a statewide recount to determine the outcome of its gubernatorial and U.S. Senate contests, commentators are rehashing the famous Bush v. Gore recount of 2000. That’s the most obvious reference—the same state and even some of the same counties are at issue, after all—but it’s not the only or even the most useful one. Democrats in particular should look to the now-forgotten fight over Indiana’s “Bloody Eighth” Congressional District.
Immediately after President Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory against Walter Mondale in 1984, which also returned to Congress a Democratic majority in the House and a Republican majority in the Senate, a bruising battle unfolded over Indiana’s Eighth Congressional District. The freshman Democrat Frank McCloskey, a 45-year-old first-term Democrat, led the Republican Richard McIntyre, a promising 38-year-old conservative state legislator, by 72 votes after the initial count. But a tabulation error in one county seemed to swing the election to McIntyre, by just 34 votes, at which point the Republican secretary of state, Edward Simcox, certified McIntyre the victor. After a full recount, McIntyre was up by some 400 votes—but many thousands of ballots were not counted for technical reasons.
The tight race was not a total surprise, since, like Florida today, the Bloody Eighth of Indiana, as it was known, was a notoriously competitive swing district.
[Read: Brian Kemp’s lead in Georgia needs an asterisk.]
Democrats responded with intransigence. They said that Simcox had certified the election prematurely, and that “irregularities” put the apparent result in doubt, including allegations that Republicans had unfairly disqualified a sizable number of African American voters in the urban parts of the district. When McIntyre arrived on Capitol Hill on January 3, 1985, Democrats refused to seat him; the House voted 238 to 177, along strict party lines, to keep the seat vacant pending a congressional investigation and a new recount.
Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, the Majority Leader Jim Wright, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Tony Coelho charged one of their own, Representative Leon Panetta, to lead the recount. Under Panetta were two Democrats and just one Republican. Republicans cried foul that the majority was trying to steal the election. Even Minnesota’s Bill Frenzel, a gregarious Republican who was known as a moderate in his disposition and politics, characterized the process as a “rape” of the voters.
Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich, a young renegade elected in 1978, saw an opening to score partisan points. Gingrich was the leader of the Conservative Opportunity Society, a caucus of right-wing Republicans that he created in 1983. One of its goals was to encourage a more aggressive approach to challenging Democrats, who had been in the majority since 1954, than the 62-year old House Minority Leader Robert Michel had been willing to try. COS wanted to break with conventional norms and stretch procedure as far as possible to advance Republican objectives.
The Indiana recount fit nicely into Gingrich’s plans. Gingrich worked to convince reporters that this was a scandal of Watergate-like proportions. Indeed, he told one of his acolytes, Joe Barton of Texas, that the public needed to understand that “this is a constitutional issue! We have to make the press understand that.”
[Read: Stacey Abrams is still waiting for a miracle.]
Guy Vander Jagt, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, was initially reluctant to take Gingrich’s advice. He feared that doing so would blow up any chance of future bipartisan civility. But he quickly caved. Vander Jagt sent out to every Republican in Congress a draft of an op-ed titled “Stealing a Seat.”
Partisan tensions reached a boiling point when Panetta’s task force determined in late April that the seat should go to McCloskey. By a party-line vote of two to one, the committee decided that McCloskey had won by four votes, 116,645 to 116,641. Republicans went ballistic. “I think we ought to go to war,” the Wyoming Republican Dick Cheney declared.
Seeking retribution, Republicans kept their colleagues in session all night after the committee announced the recount outcome and prevented the House from conducting any business for three days. Live on C-SPAN, a relatively new channel created in 1978, Republicans delivered one tirade after another alleging that Democrats were stealing an election.
Nevertheless, on May 1, the House voted 236 to 190 to seat McCloskey, with 10 Democrats joining the unanimous Republican opposition. And by a vote of 229 to 200, the House once again rejected a Republican proposal to hold a new special election to settle the matter at the ballot box.
Republicans weren’t quite finished, though: Theatrically, they stormed out of the chamber before O’Neill could officially seat McCloskey. “Would the gentlemen remain within until I have had an opportunity to administer the oath?” O’Neill asked. “No!” yelled House Minority Leader Robert Michel, usually considered one of the most civil voices on Capitol Hill.
As O’Neill swore McCloskey into office, Republicans stood side by side on the steps leading out of the House chamber to speak with reporters. “This has united the Republican Party as nothing else,” McIntyre told the press. “The American people are not going to forget.” Republicans compared Democrats to “slime” and “thugs.”
Some Democrats were uncomfortable with the outcome, which they considered dubious. The Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank, for example, voted against the committee recommendation. O’Neill, Frank recalled, was “mad at me until I explained myself; then he became furious.”
[Read: The Democrats’ Deep South strategy was a winner after all.]
But most Democrats brushed aside the criticism. In their minds, what mattered most was that they’d held the seat. They didn’t understand that Republicans had succeeded in convincing the public that something was amiss—that, perhaps, the very legitimacy of the Democratic majority was suspect. Nor did they anticipate how the Bloody Eighth would embolden Republicans, convincing many of them that Gingrich’s way of thinking was fundamentally correct. In short: Enough with bipartisanship; it was time for a do-anything approach to taking back control of the House. “It validated Newt’s thesis,” Vin Weber, a COS ally, recalled. “The Democrats are corrupt, they are making us look like fools, and we are idiots to cooperate with them.”
Arguably, the Bloody Eighth is what led to the eventual GOP takeover of the House, under Gingrich, in 1994. The Bloody Eighth was his trial run, and the 1994 election his proof of concept. Thus even though Democrats won their seat, they lost the long-term narrative.
When pundits look back at the 2000 presidential election, the lesson they tend to draw is that what really matters in a recount is raw power. Who cares that the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision was, by many lights, among the most partisan, least legitimate rulings ever issued? George W. Bush, not Al Gore, became president.
But what’s at stake in this year’s recount is not the presidency—it’s a Senate seat that won’t determine which party controls that chamber, and a governorship that was previously in Republican hands. Of course the result matters, but, as in the fight over the Bloody Eighth, the narrative matters, too. Indeed, how the public perceives the process could influence the 2020 election (and beyond) more than the actual outcome. Which side will claim the mantle of justice? Which will end up looking corrupt?
Republicans understand that. President Donald Trump has been tweeting allegations that Democrats are up to no good. “Trying to STEAL two big elections in Florida!” he tweeted. “We are watching closely!” Senator Lindsey Graham joined in to say, “They are trying to steal this election. It’s not going to work.” Rick Scott has filed several lawsuits against county officials. He claims that there is evidence of fraud, even though state officials have found none.
Democrats need to counter GOP talking points with a clear message that they are trying to protect the integrity of the U.S. election system. The fight for a fair recount, they must explain, is a fight to push back against several decades of conservative attempts to restrict the franchise and undermine the legacy of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Every eligible person should be able to vote, and their votes must be counted. Those are bedrock principles for any democracy. Andrew Gillum, the Democratic candidate for governor, already took a step in the right direction by exchanging his election-night concession for a defiant statement: “I am replacing my words of concession with an uncompromised and unapologetic call that we count every single vote.”
Recounts are much more than legal disputes; they are fundamentally political fights. And in politics, story matters.
In October 1998, Reggie Fluty, a police officer responding to a phoned-in tip, came across a limp figure strung up on a fence in a desolate field on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming. There had been, initially, confusion about what Fluty was responding to: The teen boy who had called in the tip had initially assumed, riding his bike across the field, that he’d seen a scarecrow. He had not. The figure was the body of Matthew Shepard, 21 years old and a freshman at the University of Wyoming, who had been tied to the fence by two men he’d met in a bar in Laramie. They had robbed Shepard of the money in his wallet—$20—and then struck him across the head, repeatedly, with the butt of a large Smith & Wesson revolver. (The blows were so severe, a sheriff would later conclude, that Shepard’s injuries, including a fractured skull and a crushed brain stem, were less consistent with a beating than with a high-speed traffic collision.) The men then left Shepard, bloodied and swollen and barely alive, in the biting cold of the prairie night. It would be 18 hours before the bike-riding boy would find him.
The New York Times would later see in Shepard’s body, strung to that fence in the shadow of the snow-dusted Rockies, echoes of the Western custom of nailing dead coyotes to boundary markers—a warning to those who might consider intruding on private property. A message meant to foment fear, and also to make a statement about who belongs in a given space and who, in the assessment of the owners of the barriers, does not.
The state of Wyoming did not, in October 1998, have legislation against hate crimes. Despite everything that has taken place there, and in the country at large, since, it is one of five states that still lack such laws. The men who met and robbed and beat Shepard—who left him to die of his injuries nearly a week later in a hospital room in Colorado—were instead convicted of kidnapping and murder. They are each currently serving multiple life sentences for a killing that was a hate crime in practice if not in legal classification: The men beat Matthew Shepard, who was gay, because he was gay.
Because of that, Shepard, in his death, became an instant symbol: of bigotry, of violence, of hatred that is at once senseless and tragically consequential. His murder made national news those 20 years ago, horrifying a nation that reliably assumes itself to be better than it is. Lingering outrage about the murder inspired Congress to pass legislation against hate crimes: the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act—Byrd, a black man, had been chained to a truck and dragged to his death by white supremacists in July 1998—signed by President Barack Obama in 2009. Her son had always wanted his life to be meaningful, Shepard’s mother, Judy, would later comment; his horrific death brought a tragic fulfillment to that desire.
Twenty years later, Matthew Shepard remains a symbol of the tragic consequences of bigotry. His family, however, is hoping that he’ll live on in the American historical memory as much more than a martyr. To mark the anniversary of his death, Shepard’s family recently donated a collection of his belongings to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which houses an extensive collection of LGBTQ-focused objects and documents. The items are currently not being exhibited in the museum’s public halls but are available to researchers; I was given an introduction to them by Katherine Ott, the museum’s curator for medicine and science, and Franklin Robinson Jr., the archivist at the Smithsonian who manages Shepard’s papers.
The items are familiar, even in their specificity. (“He grew up,” Ott put it, “as a typical young queer kid, finding his way.”) There’s the Superman cape, shiny and red and handmade by Judy Shepard, that Matthew Shepard had once worn as a costume. There’s the pair of his sandals, their soles still covered in a thin layer of mud. There’s the 4-H ribbon from the Wyoming State Fair that Shepard had won, Ott told me, for a cornbread recipe he and his mother had developed together. There’s a fourth-place ribbon for a track event. (Of Shepard’s lack of athletic prowess, Ott put it like this: “His parents said, ‘Fourth place—that means there were four people in the race.’”) There’s the small, plush pair of lips with kiss stitched onto them that Judy Shepard would include in her son’s lunch bag every day.
The Superman cape Shepard wore as a child (Richard W. Strauss / Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History)There’s the thick, gold ring Shepard had bought with the intention that one day he would give it as a gift to his future husband. He’d had it customized. “He was a romantic,” Ott said.
There’s also the collection of documents, housed away from the objects in a specialized archives area: stacks of condolence letters sent from Americans across the country to the Shepards, as the news of their son’s death reverberated across the country. A store-bought sympathy card scrawled with brief notes by members of the University of Wyoming’s football team. The brightly colored paper art—construction and tissue—that Shepard had made as a boy. The pencil-scrawled note from one of Shepard’s grade-school teachers, encouraging him to stay strong in the face of bullying about his small size: “Did you know,” it reads, “the very best things are often in small packages? I think you’re WONDERFUL. Love, Mrs. Babb.”
A sympathy card, signed by members of the University of Wyoming’s football staff, given to Shepard’s family after his death (Joe Hursey / Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History)Something can happen, when a tragic twist turns an ordinary life into an extraordinary one, to the person at the other end of the transformation: The idea of the person can overcome the truth of the person. A life, with all its kindnesses and contradictions and small truths and big ones, can give way to the soaring slights of hagiography. The symbolism—the martyrdom—can overtake everything else. That happened in 1998, as Matthew Shepard the person became Matthew Shepard the icon. His death would go on, in short order, to inspire multiple plays, and a film, and a chorale piece. His murder would become the subject of documentaries. It would become the subject of controversies. Elton John would write a song, “American Triangle,” about the circumstances of the slaughter. The fence where Shepard was left for dead, on that rocky prairie strewn with sagebrush and range grass, was briefly turned into a shrine, a repository for flowers and gifts and notes from people who did not know Matthew Shepard but, in another way, did. The fence would eventually be disassembled and removed, as if the landscape itself were ashamed of what had been allowed to take place on its barren expanse.
The objects in the Matthew Shepard collection, moved from the garage of the Shepard home in Casper, Wyoming, to the protective environs of the nation’s foremost historical museum, resist such acts of erasure. They are insistently present, and meaningfully—painfully—ordinary. They emphasize who Matthew Shepard the person was before he came Matthew Shepard the icon. He loved politics, and hoped one day to become a diplomat with the State Department. A child of Wyoming, he liked to camp and hunt and fish. He loved to act. He was exceptionally kind. He was unusually sensitive. In grade school, he’d dressed as Dolly Parton for three Halloweens in a row. In high school—his father was an oil-safety engineer for Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil company, and his parents were stationed in the Gulf—Shepard attended an American school in Switzerland. While he was abroad, during a trip to Morocco, he’d been attacked and raped. He had just been emerging from the depression that the trauma had triggered, just been rebuilding himself and his life, when he was killed.
Shepard had been struggling. He’d been trying. He’d been hoping that things would get better. His papers, now filed and stored in a temperature-controlled facility that protects history for the future, testify to all that. Seen through the prism of the documents, Robinson, the archivist, put it to me, no longer is Shepard merely an image or an icon or “a symbol for the LGBT community and for hate crimes.” Instead, the objects encourage their viewers to ask, Robinson said, “If he had lived, what could he have accomplished?”
They ask other questions, as well, about the profound contingency of historical memory—the way some people are converted into icons, remembered and celebrated; the way others recede from view. The Shepard collection, evocative in its ordinariness, serves as a reminder that for every Matthew Shepard, enshrined in a museum—and for every James Byrd Jr., and for every Emmett Till, and for every other person whose name has been inscribed, in bold type, into the texts of American history—there are so many more. People who were robbed of their life by those who were fueled by hatred. People who are anonymous in their victimhood and silent in their suffering—people whose life has been made harder and sadder and worse than it might have been because there is a significant portion of people who look out on the American landscape and, gazing at all the rugged beauty, focus on the fences.
On October 26, in an event planned to coincide with the 20th anniversary of his murder, Matthew Shepard was interred at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. His family, in the past, had been reluctant to make such a move, fearing that his resting place might be vandalized by bigots; finally, however, they agreed to it, and Shepard’s cremated remains were placed in the soaring structure’s crypt, near those of Helen Keller and Woodrow Wilson. As part of the interment ceremony, a service celebrating Shepard’s life was held in the cathedral. It featured readings that sought light in times of darkness, and songs that emphasized love as a weapon against hatred. It was profoundly hopeful.
The day after the ceremony, a man driven by anti-Semitism burst into another such service, this one being conducted at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. With three pistols and an AR-15, he slaughtered 11 worshippers and injured seven more. It was the deadliest act of violence against the Jewish community in the nation’s history. It was also one more reminder of how normal hatred remains in a country that prides itself, despite so much evidence to the contrary, on its enlightenment. One more piece of evidence that violence, in America, is another thing that remains ordinary.
Smino isn’t afraid to get a little weird. The North St. Louis–bred rapper twists his voice into dizzyingly distinct harmonies. He delights in the indulgent poetics of slant rhyme. He weaves multiregional R&B into the tapestry of his rap.
The 27-year-old’s newly released sophomore album, NØIR, builds on his years of making funky, soulful music. It’s soothing, inventive, and fun. The video for “L.M.F.,” the album’s first single, begins with a phone conversation between two women. One of them relays the sight of Smino “riding around with a whole monkey on his lap,” then quickly gets to the reason for her call: “That nigga done went and got real Hollywood or whatever, but I did hear he was having a kickback tonight though.”
And so begins the charming conceit of the video: a giant dinner-turned-party, hosted at the rapper’s family home. Smino and his “monkey” (really a lemur) entertain guests with the help of a crew of aunties—and a version of Smino meant to look like his father, complete with gray hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and business-casual attire. The video’s bright yellows, reds, and greens leap off the screen. The scent of doughy dinner rolls and freshly snapped green beans and weed smoke practically wafts through the frame. It’s a delightful vignette, but the appeal of “L.M.F.” extends beyond this bite-size Soul Food. The song’s chorus is impossibly catchy—and captures Smino’s range of influences with remarkable precision:
Said she Rafiki, you a lion, Mufasa
Baby ain’t nothing ’bout me PG, rated X for extraordinary
The Mary got me merry, now I’m singing like Mary Mary
The coupe going stupid, call it Cupid it’s February
That Smino would reference both marijuana and the celebrated gospel duo Mary Mary in the same bar is just one example of the saucy, winking lyricism that characterizes his music. He excels in these moments, capturing the small rebellions of black youth without overstating any incongruence. The line also functions as a nod to his musical roots. Born Christopher Smith Jr., the young Smino began listening to rap largely at a cousin’s house because he wasn’t allowed to do it at home, where his parents insisted on “a bunch of jazz music, a bunch of soul music, so much gospel music,” as he recently told Rolling Stone.
On “Anita,” the second single from his debut album, BLKSWN, the artist offered a groovy dedication to the legendary singer-songwriter Anita Baker (and to all black women). Frequently name-checking his musical forerunners, Smino is both deferential and imaginative. On the track, which the musical juggernaut T-Pain later remixed, Smino’s affections send his voice into ecstatic wails somewhere between R&B and gospel. “Turn up the vala-yume,” he sings, stretching the word into three smooth syllables. “This feel like hallelu-jah.”
Eighteen months later, NØIR brings black love full circle. The album opens with “KOVERT,” which begins with a seductive whisper from Smino’s longtime girlfriend and frequent collaborator, the musician and filmmaker Jean Deaux. “Noir, what a beautiful name. Black, statuesque, you know?” she breathes. “Strong, sweet, that’s what I think when I think of Noir. That’s what I think when I think about you.” It’s a fitting start to an album that spends much of its 58-minute run time exploring the burdens and beauty of black life.
After “KOVERT,” Smino’s vocal zigzags and lyrical twists set the course for the album. The bounces of the Sango-produced “L.M.F.” are immediately followed by “KLINK,” the album’s second single. The song is named for the sound Smino’s many chains make as they clang against one another, and silvery production from the Chicago producer Monte Booker matches this metallic quality. The Windy City has become a second creative home for Smino, and several Chicago artists lend their talents to NØIR. On the booming “KRUSHED ICE,” the G.O.O.D. music signee Valee amps up the St. Louis rapper’s braggadocio. Smino reunites with the singer Ravyn Lenae for “MF GROOVE,” an aptly titled track that contrasts their ethereal voices with funky electronic production from the rapper himself. Like their prior collaboration, BLKSWN’s gorgeous “Glass Flows,” the song is absorbing and confident.
On “Z4L,” a bouncy and infectious track featuring the Chicago rappers Bari and Jay2, Smino employs a cartoonish trick of the tongue. “Neck on vegan, freezing, check my color palette, white like a bunny wabbit,” he raps before adopting a Looney Tunes–ian tone that recalls the antics of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. “You know I keep some carrots, eat a bitch like a sandwich.” The slip into vocal caricature is self-aware and comedic without tipping into blunt parody. Elsewhere, Smino stretches and contorts and relaxes his voice into more colloquial patterns. “PIZANO” finds him rhyming at a frantic pace on its verses, then vibing out on soulful choruses, describing a blunt so big, “it look like Green Goblin.”
The brand (this time its lingerie subsidiary) gets referenced again on the next track, “MERLOT”: “My boo don’t like designer shit / All she want is that Rihanna shit.” Later, Smino names an entire song “FENTY SEX.” The Dreezy-assisted song isn’t a salacious send-up of the famous Bajan singer and beauty mogul (as many men have done). Instead, it’s a sultry ode to an unnamed woman, a hypnotic offering laced with references to tropical fruit and flowery marijuana. It builds on the musical world of the final single from BLKSWN, “Wild Irish Roses,” a languid chronicle of drinking fortified wine and searching for Backwoods tobacco leaves with a lover.
Smino’s unabashed catering to the Fenty Beauty–wearing, natural-hair-having, coconut-oil-drenched demographic is a hallmark of all his creative endeavors. Zero Fatigue, the label he shares with Booker, Lenae, Bari, and Jay2, sells hoodies lined with satin—perfect for those whose textured hair requires protection from the breakage that harsh fabrics like cotton can cause. His visuals are similarly plaited. The NØIR cover depicts Smino sitting on the floor while a woman braids his hair. It’s all very D’Angelo, very Mario, very Maxwell. And it works—because the music does, too. Smino sounds the way Backwoods smell: warm, earthy, full-bodied. NØIR creates its own hazy world.
Where another artist’s catering to black listeners—and black women in particular—might come off as a cynical marketing ploy, Smino’s love of his people has always seemed homegrown. Some of that can be heard in the drawl of his voice, but it’s also in the substance of his words. The artist has long been concerned with the well-being and artistic pursuits of black people. Smino’s hometown pride swelled in the months and years following the police killing of Michael Brown in neighboring Ferguson, a devastating injustice that galvanized the local community and then black people around the country. “Black people only make up 13 percent of the U.S., but I’d rather satisfy that than any other percentile,” he told The Fader in 2017. “If something happens to me, I know who goin’ rally behind me. I’ve seen it.”
Smino’s music avoids sensationalizing the spectacle of hardship, but he doesn’t shy away from naming what haunts him. “It was gruesome / what we grew from,” he sings on NØIR’s “SPINZ,” before repurposing the words. “But we grew some in the end.” It’s a deft rhyme, a poetic reinterpretation. On NØIR, Smino keeps singing us love songs.
John CuneoOne afternoon in the summer of 2013, Anna Todd was in the checkout line at Target when, as most of us do, she pulled out her phone. Then she propped her elbows on her shopping cart and began to type.
Todd was 24 years old and living near Fort Hood, Texas, with her husband, a soldier she had married a month after graduating high school, and their newborn, who suffered daily seizures. While caring for her son and taking online community-college courses, she helped support the family by babysitting for a neighbor and working the beauty counter at Ulta. For fun, she read. Wuthering Heights, Twilight, The Things They Carried. Since the previous fall, she’d also indulged an addiction to One Direction fan fiction—stories featuring the boy band in imagined scenarios. After blazing through all that she could find online and then tiring of waiting for updates from erratic authors (many of them teens juggling writing and school), Todd decided to attempt her own series. She called it After and wrote on her smartphone whenever she could steal a moment—while shopping for groceries, waiting to get her teeth cleaned, riding in friends’ cars. She used a pseudonym (imaginator1D) and hid her alter ego from family and friends. “My husband just thought I had a phone addiction or something,” she has said.
Without pausing to proofread, Todd uploaded a chapter a day to Wattpad, a free site that has earned a reputation as the YouTube of ebooks for its success in giving prose the social-media treatment. (Readers can chat with writers and discuss books with one another by leaving comments alongside the text as they read.) After, generously sprinkled with Pride and Prejudice allusions and oral sex, opens on Tessa Young, an innocent bookworm beginning her first day of college. It follows her torrid, tortured romance with the brooding sophomore Harry Styles—named after the One Direction heartthrob—as he initiates her into heavy drinking, heavy makeup, and heavy petting. (Aside from his accent, After’s Harry bears little resemblance to the British singer.)
By the time Todd wrote Chapter 90—of an eventual 295 chapters—her novel-in-progress had been read more than 1 million times. Multiple literary agents reached out to her, but she dismissed them as “crazy people,” figuring no legitimate professional would seek out One Direction fan fiction. Readers composed sequels starring After’s characters, uploaded video homages to the book, and—finally convincing Todd that she might have something big on her hands—chatted as Tessa and Harry on Twitter role-playing accounts. Seeing that, “I was like, ‘Holy shit,’ ” Todd once recalled. Representatives from Wattpad, which had never had such a blockbuster, contacted Todd and offered to help connect her with publishers. Before she flew to meet with Wattpad’s staff at the start-up’s Toronto headquarters, she overdrafted her bank account to pay for her passport.
Since then, Todd’s After series has been published as four volumes by Simon & Schuster in a six-figure deal, earned a spot on the New York Times best-seller list, been read nearly 1.6 billion times on Wattpad, been translated into more than 35 languages, and been adapted into a feature film, which Todd is co-producing, and which co-stars Selma Blair. (For the print and movie versions of After, Harry Styles has been renamed Hardin Scott.) On a recent book tour through Europe, cheering fans swarmed train stations waiting for Todd to disembark.
Her franchise has also helped establish Wattpad as a hub for young people drawn to its interactive approach to the written word. The site’s 65 million monthly users, who are overwhelmingly female and under 35, spend an average of 30 minutes a day reading authors who range from middle schoolers to Margaret Atwood. Building on its collaboration with Todd, Wattpad has helped hundreds of stories be adapted into books, TV shows, or films through deals with HarperCollins, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Television, and others; the site says it can forecast Gen Z hits and trends with far greater accuracy than industry gatekeepers acting on their gut. (Wattpad predicts that mermaids and cannibals are poised for stardom.) Netflix’s The Kissing Booth, described by an executive at the streaming company as “one of the most-watched movies in the country, and maybe in the world,” began as a Wattpad story written by a 15-year-old.
Todd sees no basis for the idea that young people have soured on books—a favorite complaint among those worried about kids these days. During my recent visit to her trailer on the film set of After, in Atlanta, she told me that an “insane” number of teachers had written to thank her for inspiring a love of reading. After discovering Tessa and Harry’s obsession with authors like Charles Dickens and F. Scott Fitzgerald, their students devoured classic literature. Todd recently lent her star power to several authors who in fan-fiction circles might be seen as underdogs: Her Italian publisher released special-edition translations of Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice, and Wuthering Heights prominently branded with Todd’s After-inspired logo (two interlocking hearts that form an infinity sign). “OMG PRIDE AND PREJUDICE IS LIKE AFTER,” tweeted one reader. “ANNA you are so smart I can’t even.”
Todd grew up in a trailer park in Dayton, Ohio. Her father, whom she describes as a drug addict, was stabbed to death shortly before her first birthday. She was raised by her mother, a caterer and longtime restaurant cook who also struggled with substance abuse, and her stepfather, who worked as a mechanic. Todd aspired to become a teacher or a nurse’s assistant, and remains mystified by her path to best-selling author and movie producer. “I never had any thought behind anything I did in the beginning, to be honest,” she told me.
Wattpad holds special appeal for Todd because it enables writers with backgrounds like hers—writers whose books would otherwise “never see the light of day because their names aren’t known, or they don’t have whatever following, or they don’t have experience in publishing”—to share stories that resonate with readers, regardless of whether those stories charm literary editors in New York. She worked with Simon & Schuster to publish her first book outside the After series, a retelling of Little Women called The Spring Girls. But she argues that publishing houses—“kind of an old machine”—are accelerating their decline by failing to consider a wide range of voices or offer young readers relatable protagonists. “The content that they’re pushing on young people is not what they want to read,” she told me in between takes, from her perch on a black director’s chair. “There’s so much anxiety coming from social media with teenagers that we have to give them characters that are real and that are not always happy; and that have bad parents and not great, supportive parents; and that are not going on these journeys to save the world with a bow.”
Todd understands more acutely than most writers what her readers want. She cultivates intimacy with her followers. (“You guys feel like my family,” she wrote in a Facebook post this September.) She participates in half a dozen Instagram group chats with her most die-hard fans—sneaking them behind-the-scenes footage of the After set—as well as a text-message chain with four readers she has befriended. (All of them, including Todd, got identical After-themed tattoos, and one adopted Todd’s English bulldog, Watty—named for Wattpad—when her hectic travel schedule made a pet unmanageable.) Rather than outlining her books—“it just messes up my entire story”—she prefers to “write socially.” With After, she’d review the comments on her most recent chapter and then tweak the story’s plot: If readers finished the section feeling happy, she’d throw in a twist to make them sad. If they were incensed at Harry, she’d have Tessa misbehave. “I had feedback every day, all day,” Todd said. “I always just felt like a puppet master playing with everybody’s emotions and doing this with the characters.” Wattpad is going even further by analyzing data on its stories—including sentence structure, vocabulary, readers’ comments, and popularity—in an effort to deduce exactly what makes a book succeed. In time, it may try to automate the editing process.
I started Todd’s series shortly before visiting her, and within two days, I was glassy-eyed from binge reading. Her protagonists are impulsive, thin-skinned, and racked with insecurity—just like us and people we know—and Todd, rather than tackling the soaring moral questions of high literature, lets them wallow in the petty but momentous growing pains of early adulthood: being cool, being uncool, drinking, fighting with parents, fumbling through early sexual experimentation. Tessa’s first hand job is both scintillating and extremely awkward: “I don’t know what to do so I just keep touching it, running my fingers up and down,” she admits. “I am too nervous to look at him so I keep my eyes on his growing crotch.” Todd follows Tessa and Harry’s relationship drama in what feels like real time; the blow-by-blow of each text message and fight creates a messy immediacy that heightens the pleasure of hanging out with characters as bumbling as we are.
After’s breed of graphic hyperrealism has largely been purged from young-adult fiction, says Lizzie Skurnick, a writer and editor of YA novels and the author of Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. (Todd more specifically identifies as a “new adult” author, a burgeoning category that emerged from self-published authors’ attempts to bridge the gap between Nancy Drew and Fifty Shades of Grey.) For years, Skurnick says, books for kids and teens were read mostly by kids and teens. But Harry Potter elevated the genre into a family affair, and parental supervision did precisely what it always does to sex. “There has been a sanitization. The YA of my era—of the ’70s and ’80s—was able to be explicit, because no one was looking at it,” Skurnick told me. “Readers hunger for anything they actually experience.” In addition to featuring explicit sex scenes, After deals unflinchingly with other topics that today’s book editors and hovering parents might consider too mature for young audiences—both protagonists’ fathers are alcoholics, and Harry at one point describes witnessing his mother’s rape. Yet, as Todd points out, plenty of readers confront such situations as they exit childhood. “I’m not writing about the 1 percent of people who have this fairy-tale, amazing life,” she has said. “I’m writing about people like me, who maybe had a rough childhood.”
Todd, who has long blond hair and several tattoos dotting her upper body, was simultaneously watching her iPhone and the filming when Douglas Vasquez, the 23-year-old head of her Brazilian fan club, arrived on set. He’d traveled 30 hours to spend less than a day watching the series come to life as a film, and Todd made the producer next to her give up a seat so Vasquez could be at her side. The two studied a monitor as actors ran through what Todd calls “the most devastating scene in the movie”: Tessa bumps into friends in a bar and discovers (stop me if you’ve heard this one) that her boyfriend seduced her only to win a bet. Todd and Vasquez were soon wiping away tears. Todd rubbed his back, then leaned over him and toward a producer to suggest alternate dialogue for the scene.
Throughout the day, Todd demonstrated the uncanny ability to consider the opinions of an amorphous mass of followers as she made decisions. She talked about the actors her readers had “fancast” for the movie in the same breath as the ones selected by the filmmakers. Every other conversation was a reminder—to the on-set photographer, to the costume designer, to producers, to publicists—to snap photos for social media. While stage-managing an impromptu photo shoot with Vasquez and several actors, Todd lectured a publicist on the need to capture as much behind-the-scenes content as possible, so they could tease fans’ interest leading up to the movie’s April launch. At one point, Todd disappeared into a wardrobe trailer to help the costume designer select one of Tessa’s most iconic outfits—a maroon dress she wears to her very first frat party. The designer escorted Todd to a rack of demure dresses, all variations on the color of a grape Jolly Rancher, and produced a lace option that she and the movie’s director loved. Todd vetoed it. “It just kind of looks purple,” she said. “If this isn’t maroon, I’m going to get crucified.”
While Vasquez watched more takes of Tessa getting her heart broken, Todd’s attention drifted to other projects. She emailed with the contractor renovating the home in Los Angeles where she, her husband, and her son now live, and reviewed digital galleys of her forthcoming book, a slow-burn romance between a massage therapist and an Army veteran called The Brightest Stars.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author in possession of a good manuscript must be in want of a publisher. Not Todd: She is posting The Brightest Stars piecemeal on Wattpad—a new chapter had gone live earlier that day—and she was preparing to self-publish the complete paperback in a few weeks. “I just wanted that control back,” she told me. (It helped that her prior book deals were generous enough that she didn’t need an advance, plus she’d sold the foreign rights to The Brightest Stars for seven figures.) In addition to redesigning the cover, Todd had opted to completely rewrite the book after soliciting feedback from her closest fans. She thrilled at making changes by sending a few texts to her editor and graphic designer rather than waiting on the creaky bureaucracy of an old machine. “When I realized that I can invest in my own marketing and do exactly what I think needs to be done—well, then it just feels like: What is the benefit of having a publisher?” Todd said.
When the crew broke for dinner, Todd ate with a fork in one hand and her phone in the other: She’d caught a formatting mistake in the galley, plus she needed to finalize plans to distribute the book at Target, and she wanted to pin down her 13-city international book tour. She had hired a manager at one point, but let him go because “he just wasn’t building me more than I could myself.” I wondered aloud how she had learned to do it all. “The internet,” she replied, then returned her focus to her phone.
This article appears in the December 2018 print edition with the headline “Crowdsourcing the Novel.”
The first car scene in Alfonso Cuarón’s road-trip movie Y Tu Mamá También takes place in Mexico City traffic. The protagonists, two privileged teenagers named Julio and Tenoch, kill time by smoking, farting, and joking about girls. The shot is so tight that the audience can barely see out the window. Suddenly, mid-banter, the boys freeze. The camera skates over the hood of the car. “That day,” the narrator informs viewers, “three demonstrations took place across the city. Nevertheless, the traffic jam was caused by Marcelino Escutia, a migrant bricklayer from Michoacán who was hit by a speeding bus.”
The film never returns to poor Marcelino, but Cuarón uses this technique throughout, puncturing the adventures of his characters with brief, razor-sharp descriptions of their political context. Julio and Tenoch are interested in sex, drugs, and beer; the narrator is interested in the interplay of class and race in contemporary Mexico, especially in the rural communities the duo passes through. The contrast turns Y Tu Mamá También into a political movie without a political plot. Politics become a second lens through which Cuarón views his characters, one that forces moviegoers to consider Julio and Tenoch’s lives not only on a personal level, but also on a national one.
In We All Loved Cowboys, translated by Beth Fowler, the Brazilian writer Carol Bensimon performs a dazzling feat of importation. She takes Cuarón’s story-puncturing technique and uses it, to great effect, in a novel told in the first person. There is no omniscient narrator to interrupt. Cora, the protagonist, unwittingly interrupts herself.
Like Y Tu Mamá También, We All Loved Cowboys takes place on a road trip. Cora, who lives in Paris, is home in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where her stepmother is about to give birth. Cora immediately confesses to the reader that she’s not in Brazil to meet her new half-brother. She’s there to see her ex-girlfriend Julia, who is also an expatriate. She and Cora barely keep in touch, but then Julia calls one day from Montreal, saying that she’s planning to spend a month in Brazil. When Julia adds, “Remember that trip we never took?”—a long-daydreamed drive across their home state of Rio Grande do Sul—Cora decides to go home. This, she thinks, is her chance to get Julia back.
Cora has no evidence that Julia wants to date her again, but that doesn’t matter. She filters the world entirely through her own interests and desires. As the two women drive, it soon becomes clear that traveling within Brazil interests Cora not at all. She looks down on the people she encounters and the places she stays. The road trip’s sole purpose is time with Julia; Rio Grande do Sul is nothing but the background of their imagined love story.
American readers rarely encounter novels that treat South American settings as unglamorously as We All Loved Cowboys. Novels written in English often offer exoticized locations like the ominous paradise in Maile Meloy’s cruise-kidnap story, Do Not Become Alarmed, or the verdant, mysterious Amazon in Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder. In We All Loved Cowboys, the landscape is precisely the opposite. Bensimon is a dry, snappy writer, more interested in a one-line joke than a lush description. Cora, meanwhile, sees nothing to luxuriate in. Her highest compliment, in a former copper-mining village, is: “Contrary to my expectations, the town wasn’t completely deserted.”
[Liesl Schillinger: The hottest trend in American literature isn’t from the U.S.]
Cora might be more inclined to snobbery than most readers. She’s privileged, overconfident, and deeply self-absorbed. Her “strongest convictions [are] about fashion and style, about gender and the rulebook of life.” When she describes the signs, as she puts it, of her bisexuality, she notes not only that she “stopped the car on a dark road and jumped into the back seat with Marina, then with Luciana, then with Amanda,” but that she “wrote feminist phrases on ripped jeans.” She takes Julia’s stylish Montreal haircut as a positive sign for their relationship, and expresses her attraction to Julia by borrowing her jewelry and clothes.
Cora would be an easy target for satire, but Bensimon refuses; her impulse is not to mock Cora, but to understand her. At the same time, she uses Cora’s blind spots, seemingly, to encourage the reader to think more widely and critically about the political realities that Cora herself doesn’t understand.
Take Cora’s shoes. She wears calf-high Dr. Martens, brand new ones “for which I had paid a small fortune in one of the brand’s stores in Paris.” Early in the novel, a gaucho informs her that her boots were meant for a man. Cora, understandably, is annoyed. “It was too much,” she thinks, “to expect their counter-cultural connotation would penetrate someone who, at best, had seen boots like this protecting the feet of the military police as they shot rubber bullets into the tents of the Landless Workers’ Movement. That’s the problem with fashion: You depend on others.”
The Landless Workers’ Movement is one of the biggest left-wing groups in Latin America, fighting for agrarian reform and democratic access to food production. To the gaucho, land issues would be life-defining: Does he work on a large corporate ranch? Does he—could he ever—own land? To Cora, though, the Landless Workers’ Movement is just a reference, maybe a half-remembered newspaper photo. Bensimon complicates the moment beautifully. The gaucho, who speaks in the voice of patriarchy and homophobia, intrudes on Cora’s world. But Cora, too, is an intruder, unmoved by the land and its troubles and flippant about the military police.
[Read: A road trip that doubles as a journey through the painful past]
To Cora, the most upsetting part of the encounter with the gaucho isn’t his gender policing, but the fact that after, she’s not sure “exactly what Julia thought of it all.” Cora never knows what Julia thinks, and Bensimon never gives the reader clues, instead staying in Cora’s head. As the trip progresses, this becomes crucial to the novel’s stakes. Julia quickly demonstrates her sexual interest in Cora, but the extent of her romantic interest remains a mystery.
The more Cora agonizes over her future with Julia, the more Bensimon directs the reader’s attention outside the car. The novel’s political observations become sharper and more frequent, serving as a counterpoint to its protagonist’s narrowing focus. However, these observations never jolt Cora out of character. In a particularly excellent moment, Cora distracts herself from nerves about meeting Julia’s brother by condemning a soya field they drive through en route to his house. Looking at the soy plants makes “Monsanto and monoculture instantly spring to mind. No one with a free spirit would believe in things like Monsanto and monoculture.”
Bensimon walks a fine line here. Even a reader vehemently opposed to industrialized agriculture could laugh at the line, No one with a free spirit would believe in Monsanto. Still, it’s easy to empathize with the aggravating Cora. She’s in a torturous position: in love with a woman who’s glad to have sex with her, but dodging the possibility of more. Cora’s crack about Monsanto reminds the reader that there are far bigger problems in Rio Grande do Sul than unrequited love, but it also serves to spare Cora pain.
In this way, Bensimon rescues We All Loved Cowboys from narrowness. Like Y Tu Mamá También, the novel offers countless opportunities for political curiosity, even though its narrator thinks only of herself. Cora’s asides about the towns she visits are distractions, drawing her attention away from her deepening certainty that she’s about to get her heart broken. At the same time, Cora’s observations remind the reader that Julia isn’t the novel’s only unknown quantity. There’s a wide, complex world outside the car window. Maybe someday Cora will begin to wonder about it. Until then, the reader can wonder for her.
When Mars Petcare launched its first DNA test for dogs, in 2007, you could only get it through a vet. The breed-mix test required a blood draw, and Mars thought vets could help interpret the results for inquiring dog owners. But veterinarians, it turned out, weren’t so keen on newfangled DNA tests then.
“We struggled with vets,” says Angela Hughes, the veterinary-genetics research manager at Mars’ Wisdom Health division. “There’s a lot of demand out there, but sometimes the vet is a little more a hindrance than a help.” So in 2009, after a technical change that allowed Mars to extract DNA from saliva instead of from blood, the company switched gears: It sold its Wisdom Panel test directly to customers.
[Read: Should you take a DNA test?]
Since then, the direct-to-dog-owner market has become bigger and more crowded: Embark, DNA My Dog, and Paw Print Genetics are just a few of the other companies eager to ship a cheek swab straight to your door. If the story sounds familiar, it’s because dog-DNA companies are following in the footsteps of 23andMe. The various dog tests offer breed mixes and, in some cases, risk estimates for more than 150 health conditions. And now, to bring it full circle, dog owners are going to vets with DNA reports in hand.
It can be tough for veterinarians to figure out what to do with these DNA results—especially when some test providers are scrupulous and others less so. “It’s a little bit of a perfect storm of a slightly Wild West behavior,” Aimee Llewellyn-Zaidi says. “Who are these genetic-test providers? There’s no standards. There’s no regulations. There’s no independent assessing body.” Llewellyn-Zaidi is the project director for the Harmonization of Genetic Testing for Dogs, a genetic database attempting to bring some order to the world of dog-DNA tests for health. “Veterinarians are rushing to catch up,” she says. “Consumers are just going ahead and using the tests.”
Several dog owners told me their vets were curious when they brought in a DNA report for their dog. When I reached out to the American Veterinary Medical Association, the American Animal Hospital Association, and several state veterinary associations though, most either did not respond or responded to say direct-to-consumer DNA tests weren’t on their radar. Meanwhile, the veterinarians and canine geneticists who did want to talk were largely skeptical.
“Veterinarians, we’re not really educated in clinical genetics, because it’s a brand-new field,” says Lisa Moses, a veterinarian in Boston. Moses was especially concerned about the health-risk information. Doctors can refer human patients to genetic counselors, she points out, but veterinarians don’t have genetic counselors on call for dogs. Moses co-authored a comment in Nature earlier this year, in which she recounted the story of a 13-year-old dog that was losing her ability to walk. Her owners decided to buy a $65 direct-to-consumer test, which showed a mutation linked to a neural disease called degenerative myelopathy (DM). Convinced that she would slowly die of the disease, her owners put her to sleep.
But the mutation for DM is notoriously hard to interpret. Kari Ekenstedt, a professor of anatomy and genetics at Purdue University, calls it the “ever controversial DM mutation.” The problem, she says, is that not having such a mutation is a good sign a dog does not have DM, but having a mutation does not guarantee the dog has the disease. It’s possible the dog Moses wrote about had an entirely treatable spinal disorder and did not need to be put down.
The episode prompted Moses to take a closer look at the pet-DNA industry, and she came away even less certain of how to interpret the results. While the Food and Drug Administration regulates 23andMe, no one is looking at pet-DNA tests. Moses says she had been taking the DNA tests at face value, and she began to wonder if she had caused her patients too much worry by doing so. “I didn’t understand how iffy, how little there was for me to really take stock of these tests,” she said. Carrie Waters, a veterinarian in Dallas, echoed the sentiment. “There’s a number of labs doing it, but I’m not totally convinced there’s the best quality,” she said.
For their part, the leading dog-DNA companies realize a total lack of regulation is bad for their industry’s reputation. “The industry could be tainted by a bad actor or two. We do feel like it’s important to try to self-regulate as best we can,” says Hughes, of Wisdom Health. It’s why Wisdom Health and several other testing companies are collaborators in the Harmonization of Genetic Testing for Dogs project.
At its core, the harmonization project is a database of dog genes that have been linked to different diseases in different breeds. This isn’t as simple as it sounds. Gene names aren’t always standardized; neither are breed names between countries. “We have to make sure we’re even talking about the same dogs,” Llewellyn-Zaidi says, which illustrates the challenge for vets delving into the genetics literature.
Getting breeds right is key because many markers linked to a dog disease are breed specific. (Some companies offer breed-specific DNA tests to account for this.) In many cases, those disease markers will never be found in another breed. But in a few rare cases, they can mean different things for different breeds. For example, says Ekenstedt, Factor VII deficiency is associated with mild bleeding in beagles, in which it was first discovered, but with severe bleeding in Alaskan Klee Kais.
A typical vet isn’t likely to be familiar with the details of hundreds of mutations. And in fact, Ekenstedt admitted that even she, a trained canine geneticist, isn’t. When I asked about a specific trait called alanine-aminotransferase activity, sometimes tested for in dog DNA, she said she wasn’t so familiar with it. “Even an expert like me can’t keep up,” she says. “No regular veterinarian has time to keep up with it. Ultimately, I think we need to have more specialists who are more visible for regular vets to reach out to.”
In some cases, the DNA-test companies have stepped in to fill that void. Hughes told me her team regularly fields questions from customers about their dog’s specific results. Embark also has a veterinary team that proactively reaches out to customers about their results. “We don’t want someone opening an email and being hit by something and not knowing how to interpret it,” says Adam Boyko, one of Embark’s founders.
[Read: Can a simple test match you with your perfect dog?]
One Embark customer, Emily Rose Cunningham, told me that the company reached out about her dog Dora, an American hairless terrier that had a marker linked to enlarged hearts in another breed. Cunningham took Dora to see a dog cardiologist. Her exam came back normal, and Cunningham reported the results back to Embark. Since then, at least one other American hairless terrier has been found with the marker. Cunningham told me she appreciated that Embark was collecting data for further research. “I like that there’s continued research rather than just getting test results and it’s done,” she said.
In convincing tens of thousands of dog owners to buy DNA tests, these companies have also amassed huge genetic data sets—data sets that will be valuable for future dog research. “There’s just not funding in the academic world for those kinds of studies,” says Boyko, who is also a professor at Cornell University’s veterinary school. Wisdom Health and Embark, for example, have both published papers about genetic variants in their customers’ dogs. As these data sets get bigger, they will power more genetic discoveries. In this way, though the direct-to-consumer dog-DNA market has grown quickly, it is still early days for canine genetics.
Today Mars sells 90 percent of DNA tests directly to consumers, but it does still sell some DNA tests through vets, under its Banfield and Royal Canin brands. Marianne Bailey, a vet in Maryland, said her clinic recently started offering one of Mars’ tests. She didn’t like the idea of dog owners bringing in a DNA test they had bought off the internet. “Then I don’t know anything about this test or how they run this test,” she says. But her clinic decided to offer a DNA test—one the staff has chosen and vetted themselves—because dog owners kept asking about DNA tests. The owners’ interest was piqued, of course, by all the direct-to-consumer dog-DNA tests now on the market. Everyone, including veterinarians, is figuring out what it means.
Editor’s Note: Every Monday, Lori Gottlieb answers questions from readers about their problems, big and small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Dear Therapist,
I am 24 years old and have lived at home with my grandparents and mother since I was in college. It was a nice arrangement for many of those years, and the deal has been simple: I get to live at home for basically nothing, and in return I clean, run errands, occasionally cook, and take care of whatever they need. In addition to this, for the past eight months I have been working part-time, and I’m actively seeking full-time work.
However, about seven months ago the arrangement changed rather dramatically. My grandfather had been suffering mildly from Parkinson’s disease and had not had many issues, but one day he fell and ended up in the hospital. This was followed by a short stay at a recovery home, and finally he came back home.
His return was very difficult at first, with my mother and me having to attend to him in 24-hour shifts that included diaper changing and medicine giving. It was frustrating, and my friends and other family didn’t really understand the situation I was in or how I felt about it.
My grandfather has gotten better since then, but much of the same routine continues, with me being at my grandparents’ and mother’s beck and call for everything from the essential to the mundane. Every day I become more and more annoyed by their endless requests and nitpicking. I feel like home is just another job, and it’s hard to open up or connect to someone my own age about it, because no one I know is in the same situation.
Is there any way to change my perspective about these issues or some way I can reach out to others? I’ve basically given up trying to change the situation with my grandparents. I just want to feel better about it at this point.
Evan
Delaware
Dear Evan,
I hear your frustration, and I’m glad you’re taking your own well-being seriously. You say you’re “annoyed,” but I imagine that you might also be feeling overwhelmed, resentful, trapped, and even depressed. You’re right that changing your perspective and reaching out to others can help you feel better, but so can taking the initiative to change your situation, so let’s explore how you can do that.
First, I want to help you think about your circumstances—and how isolating they feel to you—differently. It’s true that not many 24-year-olds are changing their grandparents’ diapers. At the same time, though, you have more in common with your peers than you may realize. Layered on top of the caretaking stress is a challenge that all families with young-adult children contend with in some form: negotiating shifting parent-child roles. And I think this aspect of your struggle has gotten lost in the more emergent crisis of your grandfather’s care.
So let’s look at your current situation and everyone’s role in it. You’ve been living with your mother and grandparents essentially rent-free in exchange for helping with household duties, and until recently the arrangement had been working well. When you were a student, balancing your coursework with your responsibilities at home felt manageable and cut down on expenses, and also offered your mom some support around the house and with her parents. The deal seemed clear.
But then you graduated, and I wonder what everyone thought would happen next. How much had you and your mom and grandparents discussed your post-graduation plans while you were still in school? Was their expectation that you’d start to earn money and begin to support yourself? Was it that you’d live at home and help support them—either financially or practically? What was your expectation? Had you thought about what you wanted to do with your college degree and your interests? Did your grandfather’s fall change any of this? If you haven’t reflected on these questions, a good first step now would be to consider them.
The developmental task of the 20s is to gain a footing as an adult. On the one hand, you’ve already taken on several adult responsibilities—cleaning, doing some cooking, and running household errands, along with caretaking duties that many adults don’t contend with until their own parents need care. In that way, you’re ahead of your peers. But in other ways, your peers may be further along on the transition to adulthood. They may be paying their own bills, living in their own apartments, cooking (and paying for) their own meals (versus occasionally cooking and having one’s meals provided by family). And in order to get to that place, they’ve had to do some problem solving: How do I want to live? What’s important to me? What are my goals? And then: What steps do I need to take to achieve them?
These are the kinds of questions that adults get to ask themselves. They don’t just have to live in the moment—Hey, this is nice, living at home or This sucks, being at my mom’s and grandparents’ beck and call—but they can also look toward and shape their future. I don’t know how long you were planning to live at home and whether you anticipated that at some point, doing so might put a damper on your social or romantic life, place demands on you that would be incompatible with holding down a full-time job, or make you feel out of sync with your peers, who are experiencing both the delicious freedom and the typical growing pains of living on their own. But what strikes me about your letter is that you say you’ve given up trying to change a situation that makes you miserable. So the plan is … suffer indefinitely in an untenable situation?
Here’s where being an adult gets really exciting: You have options. Right now you “feel like home is just another job” because, well, it is another job. It’s a job that pays your rent and puts food on your plate in return for the labor you do for your family. If you don’t like your job, you have choices that don’t entail bitterly enduring the status quo.
One option is to talk to your employer—in this case, your mom—and see if there’s a way to keep your job and its paycheck (the roof over your head) while also allowing for more flexibility and compatibility with the job of being 24—looking for full-time work, having time for more typical 20-something activities outside work that can help you develop important relationships, and so on. In this conversation, you might learn that your employer is “nitpicking” because she—or her parents—feels that her college-educated employee should bring in more revenue or has a bad attitude about a job she feels he’s lucky to have. If, however, you and your employer can’t work out a more mutually agreeable job description, you can also quit your job (move out) as soon as you find full-time employment that can sustain you (or you with some roommates) and provide the independence that many of your peers have.
These negotiations aren’t always easy, even for families in which a single parent isn’t caring for her own parents. All families with adult children face similar dilemmas about where parental and adult-child responsibilities begin and end. But whatever arrangement you and your family work out, identifying your needs, speaking up respectfully, clarifying your goals, assessing your options, and finding a way to improve your situation are all skills that will serve you well at every stage of your adulthood.
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.
This is a story about what happens when you limit birthright citizenship and stir up hate against a certain class of immigrants. It takes place in the Dominican Republic. Like most countries in the Americas, for a century and a half the Caribbean nation’s constitution guaranteed birthright citizenship for anyone born on its soil, with a couple of exceptions: the children of diplomats and short-term travelers. And like most other peoples in the Americas, Dominicans have had a more complicated relationship with immigration than the framers of that constitution might have anticipated.
The Dominican Republic has long been dependent on a steady stream of cheap immigrant labor that cuts its sugar cane, builds its buildings, and staffs the beach resorts that draw in billions of foreign dollars a year. Almost all of that labor comes from the only country close enough, and poor enough, to have people who want to immigrate in large numbers to the Dominican Republic: its Hispaniolan twin, Haiti. Some working-class Dominicans without clear Haitian roots resent poorer neighbors willing to accept lower wages and tough conditions. Many wealthy Dominicans who profit wildly off the cheap labor supply are eager to have strict immigration laws in place, too—not because they want less immigration, but because they want a freer hand. Immigrants in the country illegally have no protection from workplace regulations and can be rounded up, deported, and replaced whenever convenient—including right before payday. (Sound familiar?)
The Dominican Republic also has a long, brutal history of anti-Haitian racism. During his rule from 1930 to 1961, the fascist dictator Rafael Trujillo built a racialized concept of Dominican national identity on the fuzzy idea that the descendants of Spanish slavery on the eastern part of the island had higher levels of European ancestry than, and thus were superior to, the descendants of French slavery on the western part of the island. This rhetoric led to a 1937 rampage in which Dominican soldiers and allied citizens massacred thousands of people who they identified as Haitians. They forcibly separated people who’d long mixed together in vaguely delineated borderlands, consecrating a new national boundary that had been set largely by the occupying U.S. military a few years earlier, but which until then existed mostly on paper.
[Martha S. Jones: The real origins of birthright citizenship]
In the decades that followed, Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic remained largely confined to isolated company towns in the cane fields, known as bateyes. But in the late 20th century, Haitian immigrants and their Dominican-born children left to work in other parts of the Dominican economy. Nationalists, who’d grown up learning Trujillo’s propaganda, began to rethink the law.
Because nationalists tend to be political conservatives, they often feel pressure to pretend that the radical changes they’re making aren’t changes at all. In the 1990s and early 2000s, right-wing Dominican politicians tried to stretch a tiny loophole in birthright citizenship into a chasm big enough to swallow anyone of Haitian descent. Their main strategy was to claim that everyone with Haitian roots was “in transit,” no matter how long they (or even their parents) had lived in the country. Authorities also refused to issue Haitians’ children birth certificates, or ripped up the ones they had. Sympathetic local media helped make synonymous the words ilegal, inmigrante (immigrant), extranjero (foreigner), and haitiano. Even foreign reporters got used to referring to people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic—an estimated 500,000 to 1 million people, or roughly 10 percent of the Dominican population—as “Haitian migrants,” even though that category includes an estimated 171,000 Dominican-born Dominicans with two Haitian parents, and another 81,000 people with one.
Courts did not like this. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that the Dominican government’s treatment of people of Haitian descent violated not only international human-rights law but also the Dominican constitution. Dominican presidents ignored the rulings, and ultimately pulled out of the treaty establishing the court. In 2010, the government called a constitutional convention, in large part to exclude a new group from the birthright-citizenship clause: the children of anyone “residing illegally in Dominican territory.” Given the spotty distribution of birth certificates, faulty census-taking, and lackluster registration efforts in the country’s impoverished areas, this change was bound to create widespread confusion. But the government’s target wasn’t poor people in general. It was people of Haitian descent.
[Garrett Epps: The citizenship clause means what it says]
Even that maneuver was not enough. Under all international or national norms, the new provision could only apply to people born after the new constitution came into force. But Dominican nationalists were more concerned about adults than newborns. Fortunately for them, the new loophole had a loophole: a new “constitutional tribunal”—separate from the existing supreme court—given the “definitive and irrevocable” right to interpret the constitution.
In one of its first acts, the tribunal justices—picked by former President Leonel Fernández and a small group of other leaders—took up the languishing case of a Dominican of Haitian descent named Juliana Deguis Pierre. She had sued when officials in her town refused to give her a national ID card—needed to vote and access social services—because, she said, of her dark skin and Haitian last name. Instead of ruling on whether she had been discriminated against, in 2013 the tribunal declared that Pierre should never have had citizenship in the first place because her parents didn’t have sufficient documentation to prove residency when she was born. Then it went even further, ruling that all those who could not prove that their parents had been legal residents when they were born—going all the way back to 1929, when the “in transit” exception was added to the constitution—were not citizens. Those affected were ordered to register with the government as foreigners by June 17, 2015.
Again, this order was clearly aimed at people of Haitian descent. Hundreds of thousands who had been Dominican citizens all their lives suddenly risked being rendered stateless and eligible for deportation.
It was obvious to human-rights groups, the United Nations, and pretty much anyone watching that the Dominican government was doing an end run around some of the most important principles of the rule of law—namely, that you can’t change the rules and then go around punishing people for having violated them in the past. The tribunal bent over backward to argue that nothing had changed, while taking 147 pages to explain the new situation.
A fundamental fact that sometimes gets missed in discussions about laws and court rulings is that they’re just words on paper. What those words signify to the people they govern is often just as important as what the law actually says. For instance, the original 1865 jus soli, or “place-of-birth,” birthright-citizenship provision in the Dominican Republic—enacted three years before the U.S. emerged from its Civil War with a Fourteenth Amendment and jus soli provision of its own—signaled a vision of the new Dominican state as a place open to just about everyone. As the historian Anne Eller has written, the provision came in a moment of heightened international cooperation when Haitians, who had thrown off French colonialism and slavery more than 60 years earlier, helped Dominicans win their final and lasting independence from Spain.
The 2010 constitution and the tribunal’s subsequent ruling signaled the opposite: that the Dominican Republic should be a place where poorer, blacker, more vulnerable workers—Haitians—were not welcome. And Dominican nationalists were determined to push that message to the hilt. Armed with the ruling now known simply as La Sentencia—literally “the verdict”—the whole country seemingly prepared itself for a mass expulsion. The military readied deportation buses and border-processing centers for the June 2015 registration deadline. Online trolls threatened critics and spread racist invective. Facebook and Twitter were filled with an ultranationalist, anti-Haitian narrative of Dominican history, which erased historic alliances and played up real and imagined abuses. Many pushed their completely unfounded belief that the true intention of Haitian immigrants and their children was to conquer the Dominican Republic and raise Haiti’s flag over the entire island.
[Read: America isn’t the “only country” with birthright citizenship]
Many Dominicans are not bigoted against immigrants. But as the deadline neared, the voices of liberals and moderates were drowned out in a sea of nationalist invective. The government framed the growing criticism of their policies as an “international campaign to discredit the Dominican Republic.” Nationalists simply branded those who disagreed with them as traitors. Emboldened by their government, sensing the moment was at hand, armed nationalists marched through Dominico-Haitian barrios and towns. In February of 2015, a Haitian man was lynched in the center of the country’s second-largest city, Santiago. When television footage of his body left dangling from a tree spread across the country, Santiago police blamed two undocumented Haitian immigrants for the crime. Dominican nationalists held a rally nearby and burned a Haitian flag.
Under pressure from the international community and fearing tourism boycotts, President Danilo Medina caved—somewhat. He proposed a second registration program that would offer a path back to citizenship to some of the people his government had just made stateless. The details were confusing, but that was the point. Hundreds of thousands of people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic now lived in a state of institutionalized terror, enforced by police, the military, and vigilante mobs. Instead of the feared one-day mass expulsions that had drawn so much attention, Dominican authorities took a quieter approach. They deported an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people of Haitian descent—more than a quarter of the Dominico-Haitian population—piecemeal over the next three years, according to Human Rights Watch. Tens of thousands more felt they had no choice but to escape across the border on their own.
In late 2015, I went to the Haitian border to visit makeshift camps that were home to thousands of people who had fled for their lives. Many had never been to Haiti before and didn’t know where to go. They had taken shelter in shacks made of cardboard boxes, tree branches, old clothes, and whatever other scraps they could find. Food was scarce. The shacks frequently burned down. People were forced to get their water from a dirty river. I met a grieving couple whose son had just died from cholera.
[Read: Why tens of thousands of Haitian youth do not officially exist]
Many in the camps told me that they hoped the situation would soon calm down, and that they would be able to return. I doubt many have. According to Human Rights Watch, the Dominican government has only restored citizenship documents to about 19,000 of those denationalized in the five years since La Sentencia. Violence continues to break out between nationalists and people of Haitian descent along the border. Fear runs high. One leader of the Dominican hard right has proposed building a border wall. (No word on who might pay for it.)
Nor are there any clear signs that the purges and intimidation have helped non-Haitian Dominicans. Thanks largely to the fact that Americans and Europeans still flock to the country’s all-inclusive resorts, the Dominican economy is still growing. But that growth has slowed.
On the eve of the feared mass expulsions, to drive home the absurdity and danger, the renowned Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat compared the situation to a wild hypothetical: “It’s as if the United States said, ‘Yes, everybody who has been here since 1930, you have to prove you’re a citizen. You have to go back to the place where you come from to get a birth certificate from there.’”
For some Americans, that was not a joke. It was an aspiration. Breitbart readers roared their approval for the Dominican strategy under an article about the planned expulsions in June 2015. Several weighed in with racist invective about “the black Haitian people.” “Get Some, Dominican Republic!” one commenter wrote. Another felt inspired: “It is past time that we end birthright citizenship here in the US. I wouldn’t be as extreme as the DR was. Ending it retroactively for anyone born after 1929 seems a bit harsh but I would have no problem ending it for anyone born after 1980 … It is time for America to put Americans first.”
The day before the migrant registration deadline in the Dominican Republic, Donald Trump rode the gold escalator into the lobby of his New York office building and declared his candidacy for the White House with a racist tirade against immigrants. Before the summer was over, he announced his intention to end place-based birthright citizenship. As president, Trump has hired several opponents of jus soli birthright citizenship to immigration posts. One of them, Senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Advisor Jon Feere, has praised the “clarity” of the Dominican Republic’s new immigration-limiting constitution.
Before the midterm elections, President Trump declared that he wanted to repeal the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment through an executive order. To anyone even passingly familiar with constitutional law, that seems like nonsense. Automatic place-based birthright citizenship has been a well-established practice for white immigrants since the United States was founded. It was enshrined as a universal right in the Fourteenth Amendment, and has been upheld for people of all races and classes since a Supreme Court decision in 1898. A U.S. president can’t just throw out part of the constitution—as even the outgoing Republican speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, noted.
But as Dominicans have ably shown, the most extreme rhetoric has a way of becoming real. And the consequences of inciting millions of people against vulnerable groups of immigrants are impossible to control. Representative Steve King—a freshly reelected white-supremacist Republican from Iowa who favorably retweets neo-Nazis—regularly introduces bills that are eerily similar to the Dominican law: denying birthright citizenship to anyone without a parent who is a citizen or “lawful permanent resident” of the United States. In late October, King crowed: “I am very happy that my legislation will soon be adopted by the White House as national policy.” And supposedly sober-minded conservatives may be little help. Days after criticizing the president, Ryan tried to walk back his comments, telling Fox News that he agreed the Fourteenth Amendment “should be reviewed.”
The Amazon HQ2 saga had all the hallmarks of the gaudiest reality TV. It was an absurd spectacle, concluding with a plot twist, which revealed a deep and dark truth about the modern world.
Fourteen months ago, Amazon announced a national beauty contest, in which North American cities could apply to win the honor of landing the retailer’s second headquarters. The prize: 50,000 employees and the glory of housing an international tech giant. The cost? Just several billion dollars in tax incentives and a potential face-lift to the host city. Then last week, in a classic late-episode shock, several news outlets reported that Amazon would split its second headquarters between Crystal City, a suburban neighborhood near Washington, D.C., and Long Island City, in Queens, New York.
The rumored announcement has emboldened Amazon’s army of critics. Did the world’s smartest company really need 13 months, and applications from 238 cities, to reach the striking conclusion that it should invest in New York and D.C.? The former is America’s heart of capital, and the latter is America’s literal capital, where Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, already owns a house and a newspaper.
[Annie Lowrey: Amazon was never going to choose Detroit.]
Was this national auction nothing more than a scripted drama to raise the value of the inevitable winning bid? And did the retailer miss an opportunity to revitalize a midwestern city by choosing to enrich the already-rich East Coast?
All good questions. But here’s the big one: Why the hell are U.S. cities spending tens of billions of dollars to steal jobs from one another in the first place?
Every year, American cities and states spend up to $90 billion in tax breaks and cash grants to urge companies to move among states. That’s more than the federal government spends on housing, education, or infrastructure. And since cities and states can’t print money or run steep deficits, these deals take scarce resources from everything local governments would otherwise pay for, such as schools, roads, police, and prisons.
In the past 10 years, Boeing, Nike, Intel, Royal Dutch Shell, Tesla, Nissan, Ford, and General Motors have each received subsidy packages worth more than $1 billion to either move their corporate headquarters within the U.S. or, quite often, to keep their headquarters right where they are. New Jersey and Maryland reportedly offered $7 billion for HQ2, which would be the biggest corporate giveaway in American history.
You might think, Don’t blame the companies. These businesses have a fiduciary obligation to make money, and it’s negligent to leave cash piles on the table while their competitors are raking it in. And you might even think, Don’t blame the local governments. Not bidding on an exciting new project feels akin to unilateral disarmament in a war for talent and business. Sometimes a big new firm can revitalize a downtown area and become a magnet for new firms.
[Read: I delivered packages for Amazon and it was a nightmare.]
But there are three major problems with America’s system of corporate giveaways.
First, they’re redundant. One recent study by Nathan Jensen, then an economist at George Washington University, found that these incentives “have no discernible impact on firm expansion, measured by job creation.” Companies often decide where they want to go and then find ways to get their dream city, or hometown, to pay them to do what they were going to do anyway. For example, Amazon is a multinational company with large media and advertising divisions. The drama of the past 13 months probably wasn’t crucial to its (probable) decision to expand to New York City, the unambiguous capital of media and advertising.
Second, companies don’t always hold up their end of the deal. Consider the saga of Wisconsin and the Chinese manufacturing giant Foxconn. Several years ago, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker lured Foxconn with a subsidy plan totaling more than $3 billion. (For the same amount, you could give every household in Wisconsin about $1,700.) Foxconn said it would build a large manufacturing plant that would create about 13,000 jobs near Racine. Now it seems the company is building a much smaller factory with just one quarter of its initial promised investment, and much of the assembly work may be done by robots. Meanwhile, the expected value of Wisconsin’s subsidy has grown to more than $4 billion. Thus a state with declining wages for many public-school teachers could wind up paying more than $500,000 per net new Foxconn job—about 10 times the average salary of a Wisconsin teacher.
Third, even when the incentives aren’t redundant, and even when companies do hold up their end of the bargain, it’s still ludicrous for Americans to collectively pay tens of billions of dollars for huge corporations to relocate within the United States.
No story illuminates this absurdity more than the so-called Border War, in which the Kansas and Missouri sides of Kansas City have spent zillions of dollars dragging companies back and forth across state lines, within the same metro area. Several years ago, Kansas lured AMC Entertainment with tens of millions of dollars in incentives. Then Missouri responded by stealing Applebee’s headquarters from Kansas with another incentive package. Back and forth they went, until both states had spent half a billion dollars creating no net new jobs but changing the commutes of 10,000 Kansas City workers who got caught up in an interstate duel.
“We need a national truce, both within states and between states,” said Amy Liu, the director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. “There should be no more poaching of private companies with public funds.” But how would the United States ban states and local governments from poaching jobs from one another, or from giving tax dollars to private corporations?
First, Congress could pass a national law banning this sort of corporate bribery. Mark Funkhouser, a former mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, envisions the law as the domestic version of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for Americans to bribe foreign officials.
[Read: The history of Sears predicts nearly everything Amazon is doing.]
It’s not entirely clear whether that would pass constitutional muster. The Supreme Court hasn’t ruled decisively on whether the Commerce Clause gives Washington the authority to ban interstate bidding wars. In the 2006 Supreme Court case DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno, Ohio taxpayers sued the state after it paid the automaker DaimlerChrysler about $280 million in tax exemptions and tax credits. The Sixth Circuit Court sided with the taxpayers, striking down Ohio’s subsidy as a violation of the Commerce Clause. But the Supreme Court avoided a final judgment on the matter by finding unanimously that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the suit.
Second, Congress could make corporate subsidies less valuable by threatening to tax state or local incentives as a special kind of income. “Congress should institute a federal tax of 100 percent” on corporate subsidies, Jack Markell, a former governor of Delaware, wrote in The New York Times. “This would not include investments in public infrastructure, work force development or other investments that can attract employers while also providing a significant long-term benefit to taxpayers.” Taxing subsidies would hopefully force cities to change their economic-development strategies, from importing other states’ companies to building their own—through investing in research universities, building more housing, and welcoming immigrants, since foreign-born Americans have the highest rates of entrepreneurship.
Finally, the federal government could actively discourage the culture of corporate subsidies by yelling, screaming, and penny-pinching. As Meagan Day wrote in Jacobin, “The federal government could withhold funds from governors and mayors who threaten to poach jobs from other states, or who won’t disclose their incentive packages.” Washington tends to look on quietly when cash-strapped states break the bank to welcome glitzy tech firms. But an attitude change at the top could trickle down to the local level. Donald Trump, or another president, could have made a national address after the HQ2 announcement slamming Amazon for soliciting taxpayer funds in a silent auction. He could have called a summit to encourage the nation’s mayors and governors to offer the same tax subsidy for HQ2—zero dollars and zero cents. Even a tweet could suffice: “7 BILLION FOR BEZOS?? Trillion-dollar companies in America don’t need our welfare! Bad!”
But no one is yelling and screaming. Instead, in a starkly divided country, corporate pandering is the last bastion of bipartisanship, an activity enjoyed by both Democrats and Republicans at every level of government. New Jersey and Maryland, both blue states, insisted that Amazon take $7 billion in tax savings just months after congressional Republicans passed a corporate income-tax cut that some analysts project will save Amazon nearly $1 billion over the next decade.
Corporate America is getting all the help it doesn’t need. You and I may not like it. But executives such as Jeff Bezos have no reason to care. They are winning by the rules of a broken game.
With the United States starkly divided and with many Americans asking what kind of nation we are, it seems a good moment to look back to November 1863 in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when Abraham Lincoln tried to answer the same question. Consecrating a Civil War battlefield where thousands of young men and boys had died four months before, he spoke of a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” For most Americans since, and for much of the world, those words have attained the status of scripture. We draw our sense of collective identity from them. They were, however, not strictly true, and Lincoln knew it.
This essay is adapted from The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul From the Revolution to the Civil War, by Andrew Delbanco.Five years earlier, he had been more candid. Speaking in Chicago in the summer of 1858, Lincoln noted that when the republic was founded, “we had slavery among us,” and that “we could not get our Constitution unless we permitted” slavery to persist in those parts of the nation where it was already entrenched. “We could not secure the good we did secure,” he said, “if we grasped for more.” The United States, in other words, could not have been created if the eradication of human bondage had been a condition of its creation. Had Lincoln said at Gettysburg that the nation was conceived not in liberty but in compromise, the phrase would have been less memorable but more accurate.
The hard truth is that the United States was founded in an act of accommodation between two fundamentally different societies. As one Southern-born antislavery activist wrote, it was a “sad satire to call [the] States ‘United,’” because in one-half of the country slavery was basic to its way of life, while in the other it was fading or already gone. The Founding Fathers tried to stitch these two nations together with no idea how long the stitching would hold.
[Ta-Nehisi Coates: Why do so few blacks study the Civil War?]
There were many reasons why this composite nation unraveled in the mid-19th century—but one in particular exposed the idea of the “United” States as a lie. This was the fact that even before the founding, enslaved people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in search of freedom. The Founding Fathers knew the problem firsthand. Many of them were slaveholders themselves, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, whose own slaves periodically ran away. And so, in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which came to be known as the Fugitive Slave Clause, they tried to solve the problem. That clause declared that “no person held to service or labor in one state” could escape from coerced labor by fleeing from a state where slavery was legal to a state where it was illegal.
The constitutional principle was clear, but it proved to be unenforceable. Over the first half of the 19th century, as enslaved men and women ran from slavery to freedom, the federal government remained too weak to do much to stop them. By the second quarter of the century, some of the fugitives—the most famous was Frederick Douglass—were telling their stories with the help of white abolitionist editors in speeches and memoirs that ripped open the screen behind which America tried to conceal the reality that a nation putatively based on the principle of human equality was actually a prison house in which millions of Americans had virtually no rights at all. By awakening Northerners to this fact, and by enraging Southerners who demanded the return of their “absconded” property, they pushed the nation toward confronting the truth that America was really two nations, not one.
Politicians of all parties pretended otherwise. From the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s, hoping to restore “tranquility to the public mind,” the House of Representatives observed what became known as the Gag Rule, which required that any petition demanding action against slavery must be tabled immediately upon receipt without debate. Yet the truth about the divided state of the union could not be squelched. As the nation expanded westward, the border between slave states and free states became longer and more porous, and slaves continued to cross it.
In 1846, with the outbreak of the Mexican War, the final reckoning was set in motion. With strong but not universal support in the South, and against strong but not universal resistance in the North, both halves of the United States joined to wage a war of conquest. By the time the fighting ended two years later, the United States had seized a huge swath of land stretching from Texas to California, nearly equal in size to one-third of our present-day nation. This immense expansion of territory under control of the federal government brought back the old question of compromise between slavery and freedom in a new form and with more urgency than ever. Would slavery be confined to states where it already existed, or would it be allowed to spread into the new territories, which would eventually become states? A growing number of white Northerners insisted on the former. White Southerners almost universally demanded the latter. The fragile political truce that had held the United States together was coming apart.
[Read: The secret history of the Underground Railroad]
In 1850, Congress attempted a last-ditch solution. It struck a bargain, now known as the Compromise of 1850, that belongs to the long history of compromise—beginning with the Constitution itself—by which white Americans advanced their interests at the expense of black Americans. In an intricate balancing act designed to prevent an irreparable rupture between the free states and the slave states, the compromise proposed to keep slavery out of some of the new territories while leaving its future in others to be decided by local referendum.
Congress sealed the deal by passing what became known as the Fugitive Slave Act, which was an effort to put teeth into the toothless clause of the Constitution. The new law empowered a whole class of federal officers (called “commissioners”) to return fugitives without any semblance of due process. It made it a federal crime for any citizen to aid a fugitive in flight from “service.” Meant to be a remedy and salve, it turned out to be the incendiary event that lit the fuse that led to civil war.
The leading intellectual of the North, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called the Fugitive Slave Law a “sheet of lightning at midnight.” To him and many others, it revealed that Americans had been living all along in an unholy “union between two countries, one civilized & Christian & the other barbarous.”
This was a sentiment with which Lincoln himself tacitly agreed. But he refrained from saying so on the grounds that, with time, slavery could be “put in the path of ultimate extinction.” Faced with a choice between denying the constitutional right of slave owners to recover their human property and thereby losing the union, and tolerating slavery to the extent of returning fugitives and thereby saving the union, Lincoln chose the latter. “I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down and returned to their stripes,” he said, “but I bite my lip and keep quiet.”
The quiet did not last. Vile as it was, the Fugitive Slave Law was also, ironically, a gift to antislavery activists because wherever it was enforced, it allowed them to show off human beings dragged back to the hell whence they came—a more potent aid to the cause than any speech or pamphlet. It implicated Northerners in the business of slavery in a way they had never felt before. It made visible the suffering of human beings who had been hitherto invisible. It forced Northerners to choose between coming to their aid in defiance of the law or surrendering them under penalty of the law.
A few chose the former and most chose the latter, as resistance broke out in Northern cities. Blacks and whites organized to break fugitives out of jail. Most important for the fate of the union, mainstream public opinion underwent a radical change. In Massachusetts in 1854, after a fugitive was violently arrested and sent back to his master in Virginia, one New England industrialist whose textile mills wove slave-grown cotton into cloth remarked, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” In North Carolina, one newspaper announced, “Respect and Enforce the Fugitive Slave Law as it stands. If not, we leave you!”
[Read: The confounding truth about Frederick Douglass]
The Fugitive Slave Law turned the nation upside down. Southerners who had once insisted on states’ rights now demanded federal intervention to enforce what they considered their property rights. Northerners who had once derided the South for its theory of “nullification”—John C. Calhoun’s idea that acts of Congress require consent from each individual state before they can take effect within its borders—now became nullifiers themselves. The Fugitive Slave Law clarified just how incompatible North and South had become. It broke the national Democratic Party into Northern and Southern factions. It fractured the Whig Party into “Cotton Whigs” and “Conscience Whigs.” It made the possibility of disunion, once an extremist idea, seem suddenly plausible. One eminent New Englander replied to the Southern secessionist threat with a shrug of disgust: “If the union be in any way dependent on an act so revolting in every regard, then it ought not to exist.”
Most important, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made clear that slavery was not a Southern phenomenon but a national phenomenon. Northerners who had once been able to pretend that slavery had nothing to do with them could no longer evade their complicity.
Considering this history may help put into perspective our contemporary anxiety that America is a hopelessly divided nation facing insoluble problems. In fact, none of the issues of our time—economic inequality, affordability of health care, future of the environment, regulation of immigration—recalcitrant as they may be to bipartisan compromise, compares even remotely to the impasse of the mid-19th century. “Humanity cries out against this vast enormity,” Herman Melville wrote a year before the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, “but not one man knows a prudent remedy.” By “prudent” he meant some way of destroying slavery without destroying the union itself.
Yet the story of the Fugitive Slave Law is also a distant mirror in which we may see a version of ourselves. It alienated many Americans from their country and compelled them to decide how to behave in the face of federal laws and actions that violated their personal convictions. Many white people in the North struggled to find a way, as one antislavery minister put it, “to obey the law while respecting themselves.” Writing with a certain voyeuristic pleasure, Nathaniel Hawthorne described one New England politician oscillating between saying yes and saying no to the Fugitive Slave Law, attempting “first to throw himself upon one side of the gulf, then on the other,” until he “finally tumbled headlong into the bottomless depth between.” In Boston, a U.S. marshal reluctantly obeyed a court order to send a fugitive back to slavery, then raised money to try to buy the same man’s freedom and after the Civil War hired him to work as an employee of the federal government.
Through most of his career, Lincoln himself tried to walk the line between compliance and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law. Repulsed by the Southern demand that “we must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure,” he nevertheless pledged to respect the law. Even after his election as president and well into the Civil War, he continued trying to reconcile his revulsion at slavery with his devotion to the union. Accused from the right of being an antislavery radical, he was reviled from the left for dragging his feet in the struggle against slavery for the sake of the illusory dream that the union could be preserved.
In that sense, Lincoln was the embodiment of America’s long struggle to remake itself as a morally coherent nation. Under his leadership, the Civil War finally resolved the problem of fugitive slaves by destroying the institution from which they had fled. By the time of his death, some 4 million black Americans were no longer at risk of forcible return to their erstwhile masters. They had entered the limbo between the privations of their past and the future promise of American life—a state of suspension in which millions of black Americans still live.
The problem of the 1850s was a political problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.
In Cape Town, the firing of a pair of guns from the city’s Signal Hill has marked the hour of noon every day except Sunday for more than 200 years. In the spring of 1918, the city’s mayor, Sir Harry Hands, turned that timekeeping tradition into a memorial ritual. His eldest son, Reginald, had died of gas poisoning on the Western Front. On May 14, the day Hands heard the news, he merged his private grief with his public responsibilities, instituting a three-minute silence at the marker of the guns to remember the dead of the still-ongoing war. South Africa, a British dominion since 1910, sent more than 200,000 troops to fight with the Allies, and the memorial ritual proved both powerful and popular.
When hostilities ended a few months later, on November 11, 1918, the combatant countries struggled with the enormous logistical, political, and emotional challenge of commemorating the dead. It would take years to carve cemeteries and monuments out of torn-up battlefields and to build memorials in every community to the hundreds of thousands who weren’t coming home. In the capital cities, commemorative objects and rituals would need to do something more: confer meaning on the slaughter and the sacrifice. But celebrating with traditional pageantry and parades struck many as inappropriate, since households across Europe were in mourning.
Caught between victory and loss, Britain ended up with no single, central World War I monument but a series of monuments, rituals, and ceremonies to respond to the war. These evolved in a strikingly ad hoc way, as ministers, religious leaders, poets, journalists, and ordinary citizens weighed in—among them Percy FitzPatrick, a prominent South African author and politician. He wrote to King George V in late October 1919 to describe the Cape Town silence. This easily exportable, appealingly flexible ritual was quickly incorporated into the plans for the memorial ceremony on Armistice Day 1919, which would be an amalgam of spiritual and secular, military and civilian traditions.
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On November 7, the king issued a proclamation calling for “a complete suspension of all our normal activities” for two minutes at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, during which, “in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead.” In the run-up to the ceremony, newspapers printed reminders and editorials explaining how the Silence (as it tended to be labeled in the interwar years) would be marked and what it meant: unity, order, and a commitment to peace. They described it in poetic, near-mystical terms, as a transcendent rite of national identity.
The Two Minutes’ Silence is an “invented tradition,” in the historian Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, its authorship and origins lost in the rapidity and totality of its cultural embrace. It became something that had always been there, that people had always done. Yet it came together haphazardly, the result of creative and contingent decisions. Even the choice of Armistice Day, November 11, as the focal point of national commemoration—not the anniversary of the signing of the peace in July—was a last-minute call. Silence, it seems, had already had a hold on the British imagination: It was precisely the moment the guns fell silent, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, that people wanted to commemorate.
The Silence was timed from the central ceremony at the Cenotaph, another ad hoc memorial that was initially created as a temporary focal point for the July 1919 Peace Day parades. As an open-ended symbol of sacrifice—an empty tomb mounted on a stark geometric base, planted in the middle of traffic in the middle of London—the Cenotaph proved unexpectedly popular, and the government quickly made a permanent stone replica. Beyond the capital, the Silence was announced by church bells, sirens, and even artillery fire, and people stepped out of their homes and workplaces to gather silently together. Its power was felt most strongly in urban centers, where the stoppage of noise—traffic, machinery, conversation—seemed jarring and even uncanny. In later years, the Armistice Day ceremony and the Silence were broadcast by radio and then by television, reaching audiences throughout the empire and then the Commonwealth, affirming a connection between people at all points on Britain’s political and social spectrum.
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The Silence was an ingenious blend of public and private, collectively marked and contained but, within those boundaries, placing no limits on what was remembered, thought, or felt. That very openness made it uncomfortable. There was something almost dangerous about the fact that individuals could take their silence in any direction.
Silence hovers uneasily between spiritual and secular observance, and it is central to various forms of religious observance, notably Quakerism. The prominent historian of war remembrance Jay Winter has suggested that memorial rituals allowed the secular, modern Western world to bring religion “in the back door.” In the United States, the idea that silence might be a stealth form of prayer has been particularly controversial with regard to public schools, and various instances of collective silent “meditation” have been challenged as attempts to smuggle in mandatory prayer under secular cover.
And despite its openness, the Silence clearly had a coercive power. It is no accident that in 1984 George Orwell twisted this moment of national unity into a perverse parallel, the “Two Minutes’ Hate.” He was astute on the way that the enforced collective performance of an emotion, whether respectful remembrance or brute rage, quickly becomes real: “Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary.”
[Read: The forgotten female shell-shock victims of World War I]
Coercion also carries with it the threat of resistance, and from the start, the Silence was worried over as a potential site of protest: What if somebody used the unusual stillness to voice what they really felt? But in Britain, even those with powerful grievances against the government did not, apparently, take the opportunity to violate the moment for political ends. Newspapers occasionally carried scare stories of people disrespecting the ritual, but these usually featured isolated cranks who were shamed into silence by their fellow mourners. Like flag burning, breaking the Silence seems to have been a form of anti-patriotic protest that loomed larger in the public imagination than in reality.
In the century since the end of the war, “moments” of silence, generally shorter than two minutes, have become common markers of loss and respect on all kinds of occasions. Because what matters is the collective experience, and the interruption of expected noise, such moments are especially popular at sporting events. It is in sports, too, that the power of silence has been harnessed for political ends, most recently by players in the NFL kneeling during the playing of the national anthem to protest police brutality and racism. To remain silent during ritual singing, or to shout during ritual silence, is to introduce the shock of refusal that undermines the central fantasy of the silence: that everyone, inside their bowed heads, is thinking the same thing.
At the 100th anniversary of the armistice, silence remains central to World War I memorial commemoration, and it may be the most effective way we have of marking a war that no longer lives vividly in anyone’s memory. It allows a personal, imaginative connection between past and present, long after the names and dates on a monument have lost their raw power. In silence we can contemplate the connection between our own experience and the remoteness of history, and try to bridge that gap, or not. In silence, we can remember anything we want.
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