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EDITOR LEON WIESELTIER MANAGING EDITOR CELESTE MARCUS PUBLISHER BILL REICHBLUM JOURNAL DESIGN WILLIAM VAN RODEN WEB DESIGN HOT BRAIN Libertes is a publicaton of the Engage Libertes Journal Foundaton, To join the discussion please go a nonpartsan 501(c)(3) organiza- to libertesjournal.com ton based in Washington, D.C. Subscribe devoted to educatng the general To subscribe or any questons public about the history, current about your subscripton, please go tends, and possibilites of cultre to libertesjournal.com and politcs. Te Foundaton seeks to inform today’s cultral ISSN 2692-3904 and politcal leaders, deepen the understanding of citzens, and inspire the next generaton EDITORIAL OFFICES to partcipate in the democratc 1604 New Hampshire Avenue NW process and public service. Washington, DC 20009 FOUNDATION BOARD DIGITAL ALFRED H. MOSES, Chair @READLIBERTIES PETER BASS LIBERTIESJOURNAL.COM BILL REICHBLUM TABLE OF CONTENTS 6 MICHAEL IGNATIEFF 202 JAMES WOLCOTT Liberalim in the Anthropocene Futlitarianim, o To the Yok Steet Stato 24 LAURA KIPNIS 221 ANDREA MARCOLONGO Trangressio, An Eleg Ancient Family Lexico, o Wods and Loeliness 47 DAVID GROSSMAN 237 ELI LAKE Te Human Infinit: Literatre and Peace America in the Wold: Sheltering in Place 57 RAMACHANDRA GUHA 278 SALLY SATEL Te Indian Tragedy Dark Genies, Dark Hoizos: Te Riddle of Addicto 82 THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS 306 MOSHE HALBERTAL Te Peripheralit A Democratc Jeih State, Ho and Why 99 HANNAH SULLIVAN 323 JOSHUA BENNETT “Fro 2020” “Owed to the Tardigrade” “Reparato” 108 MARK LILLA “Trah” On Indifference 330 DAVID THOMSON 126 HELEN VENDLER Te Woder of Terrence Malick Loosed Quotes 348 JULIUS MARGOLIN 140 SEAN WILENTZ Te Doctine of Hate Abolito and American Origin 367 CLARA COLLIER 166 CELESTE MARCUS Plagues Te Sludge 384 SHAWN MCCREESH 184 ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI Te Hatboo Blues Mahler’s Heaven and Mahler’s Earth 401 LEON WIESELTIER 200 LOUISE GLÜCK Steadying “Night Toght” “A Memoy” 418 Cotibutos Fall 2020 Volumne 1,Number 1 SALLY SATEL cameras in tow, to share Portuguese kale soup with the man who still ran the place. Bourdain enjoyed a lot of drugs in the summer of 1972. He had already acquired a “taste for chemicals,” as he put it. The menu included marijuana, Quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, and codeine. When he Dark Genies, moved to the Lower East Side of New York to cook profession- ally in 1980, the young chef, then 24, bought his first bag of heroin on the corner of Bowery and Rivington. Seven years Dark Horizons: later he managed to quit the drug cold turkey, but he spent several more years chasing crack cocaine. “I should have died in my twenties,” Bourdain told a journalist forBiography . By the time of his visit to Provincetown in 2014, a wave The Riddle of painkillers had already washed over parts of Massachusetts and a new tide of heroin was rolling in. Bourdain wanted to see it for himself and traveled northwest to Greenfield, a gutted of Addiction mill town that was a hub of opioid addiction. In a barebones meeting room, he joined a weekly recovery support group. Everyone sat in a circle sharing war stories, and when Bourdain’s turn came he searched for words to describe his attraction to heroin. “It’s like something was missing in me,” 278 In 2014, Anthony Bourdain’s CNN show, Parts Unknown, he said, “whether it was a self-image situation, whether it was 279 travelled to Massachusetts. He visited his old haunts from a character flaw. There was some dark genie inside me that I 1972, when he had spent a high school summer working in a very much hesitate to call a disease that led me to dope.” Provincetown restaurant, the now-shuttered Flagship on the A dark genie: I liked the metaphor. I am a physician, yet I, tip of Cape Cod. “This is where I started washing dishes …where too, am hesitant to call addiction a disease. While I am not the I started having pretensions of culinary grandeur,” Bourdain only skeptic in my field, I am certainly outnumbered by doctors, said in a wistful voiceover. For the swarthy, rail-thin dishwash- addiction professionals, treatment advocates, and researchers er-turned-cook, Provincetown was a “wonderland” bursting who do consider addiction a disease. Some go an extra step, with sexual freedom, drugs, music, and “a joy that only came calling addiction a brain disease. In my view, that is a step too from an absolute certainty that you were invincible.” Forty far, confining addiction to the biological realm when we know years later, he was visiting the old Lobster Pot restaurant, how sprawling a phenomenon it truly is. I was reminded of the Dark Genies, Dark Horizons: The Riddle of Addiction shortcomings of medicalizing addiction soon after I arrived producers of pig iron. “For more than a century, the sun over in Ironton, Ohio where, as the only psychiatrist in town, I was Ironton warred for its place in the sky with ashy charcoal asked whether I thought addiction was “really a disease. smoke,” according to the Ironton Tribune. “In its heyday in the mid-nineteenth century there were forty-five [iron] furnaces belching out heat, filth, and prosperity for Lawrence County.” After World War II, Ironton was a thriving producer of iron In September 2018, I set out for Rust Belt Appalachia from castings, molds used mainly by automakers. Other plants Washington, D.C., where I am a scholar at a think tank and pumped out aluminum, chemicals, and fertilizer. The river was, at the time, a part-time psychiatrist at a local methadone front was a forest of smokestacks. High school graduates were clinic. My plan was to spend a year as a doctor-within-borders assured good paying if labor-intensive jobs, and most mothers in Ironton, Ohio, a town of almost eleven thousand people in stayed home with the kids. The middle class was vibrant. an area hit hard by the opioid crisis. Ironton sits at the south- But then the economy began to realign. Two major Ironton ernmost tip of the state, where the Ohio River forks to create a employers, Allied Signal and Alpha Portland Cement, closed tri-state hub that includes Ashland, Kentucky and Huntington, facilities in the late 1960s, beginning a wave of lay-offs and plant West Virginia. Huntington drew national attention in August closings. The 1970s were a time of oil shocks emanating from 2016, when twenty-eight people overdosed on opioids within turmoil in the Middle East. Inflation was high and Japanese and four hours, two of them fatally. German car makers waged fierce competition with American I landed in Ironton, the seat of Lawrence County, by luck. manufacturers. As more Ironton companies downsized and For some time I had hoped to work in a medically underserved then disappeared, the pool of living wage jobs contracted, and area in Appalachia. Although I felt I had a grasp on urban skilled workers moved out to seek work elsewhere. At the same opioid addiction from my many years of work in methadone time, the social fabric began to unravel. Domestic order broke 280 clinics in Washington DC, I was less informed about the rural down, welfare and disability rolls grew, substance use escalated. 281 areas. So I asked a colleague with extensive Ohio connections Most high school kids with a shot at a future pursued it to present my offer of clinical assistance to local leaders. The elsewhere, and the place was left with a population dominated first taker was the director of the Ironton-Lawrence County by older folks and younger addicts. Community Action Organization, or CAO, an agency whose Ironton continues to struggle. Drug use, now virtually roots extend to President Johnson’s War on Poverty. The CAO normalized, is in its third, sometimes fourth, generation. operated several health clinics. Almost everyone is at least one degree of separation away from Ironton has a glorious past. Every grandparent in town someone who has overdosed. Although precise rates of drug remembers hearing first-person accounts of a period, involvement are hard to come by, one quarter to one third is stretching from before the Civil War to the early turn of by far the most common answer I hear when I ask sources for the century, when Ironton was one of the nation’s largest their best estimate of people dealing with a “drug problem of Dark Genies, Dark Horizons: The Riddle of Addiction any kind.” Alluding to the paucity of hope and opportunity, all year. Ann makes it to every one of Jenna’s basketball games. one of my patients told me that “you have to eradicate the Jenna’s mom lives in Missouri and has been on and off heroin want — why people want to use — or you will always have for years. “I love my daughter, but every time she relapsed, she drug problems.” made a decision to do it,” said Ann, matter-of-factly, but not When Pam Monceaux, an employment coordinator in without sympathy. “And each time she got clean she decided town, asked me whether I thought addiction was “really a that too.” disease,” she was thinking about her own daughter. Christal Another colleague, Lisa Wilhelm, formed her opinions Monceaux grew up in New Orleans with her middle-class about addiction based on her experience with patients. Lisa parents and a younger sister, and started using heroin and was a seen-it-all nurse with whom I had worked at the Family cocaine when she was nineteen. Pam blamed the boyfriend. Medical Center located across highway 52 from the Country “Brad sucked her in.

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